Some interesting sponsors for next week’s ICANN conference.
Next week the domain name world will converge on Brussels for ICANN meeting number 38. It costs a lot of money to organize these ICANN meetings and the organization often comes under fire for this. To help defray the cost it offers various sponsorships.
There are a couple interesting sponsors for the upcoming meeting, most notably ICM Registry. As you might recall, ICM Registry is embroiled in a dispute with ICANN and is awaiting a decision by ICANN’s board on if it can move forward with offering the .xxx domain name. Some decision should be made next week.
Another sponsor is dotPro, which recently inked a renewal with ICANN to run the .pro registry. It also got a nice reduction in the amount it has to pay ICANN for each registration or renewal. That fee reduction is apparently funneled into sponsoring ICANN events.
Other sponsors include companies trying to shape the new TLD debate, such as .Irish, .Quebec, .Africa, and several incumbent registries.
You are not suppose to watch how sausage is made.
Icann’s motto should be
“do as I say, not as I do.”
ICANN was only created to run Market Trials.
They are called Proof-of-Concept. Read the
Registry contracts.
One goal was to prove new TLDs could be
added. In the 1990s some people claimed
that was not possible. They did not want
competition.
A second goal was to develop interest.
There is a chicken and egg problem with
TLDs. People can now see how much interest
there is for the Chicken .COOP vs New .EGG.
Another goal was to buy time for the new
DNS to be developed. That continues. You
can observe the marketshare of DNSMASQ in
$50 edge devices. DNSMASQ2 will be released
soon.
With the new DNS the selection of TLDs is Automated (Untouched by Humans). The number of slots has been expanded from 2048 to 4096.
http://www.icann.org/en/comments-mail/icann-current/msg00342.html