.nz news & views

	Tuesday, 25 October 2005

parliament.nz details in .nz newsletter Office of the DNC has updated the .nz October newsletter with the actual links. The two documents of interest are: Revised parliament.nz application Revised moderation policy Both of these are interesting reading but raised some interesting questions to me. The first is that if I was a policital party in parliament I would nto activly use any domain name in this 2LD. It reduceds the 'brand' of the party and also puts it in the whim of the moderator if it will exist in the future, ie, after an election. The second is this part of the moderation document: Names will need to be chosen which avoid confusion with other organisation. Three or four letter names will normally be used only to represent departments or other central or local government bodies where the abbreviation is widely recognised by the general public (e.g. OOC, PS) OOC and PS are widely recognised by the general public? Really? Maybe if the general public works in the parliament buildings... certainly these terms would have a very low awareness in the general public. 2:13:20 PM      Like to comment? []

.nz newsletter and the missing PDF links DNC has issued the October .nz newsletter. The main information in this is the parliament.nz recommendation and the supporting material. The PDF newsletter claims to link to them but the documents are not linked in the newsletter. I have alerted the DNC office and they are looking into it. 12:24:53 PM      Like to comment? []

	Thursday, 20 October 2005

Wonders of Google I am amazed at Google. I posted a link to the blogware test site on here and Google has already indexed it and several searches have already been made that resulted in visits to the test site. I wonder what they were looking for, other than semi random comments on Radio to Blogware site conversion. 3:52:11 PM      Like to comment? []

Interview with Debbie Monahan (DNC) This is the first of a number of interviews I am doing with people involved with .nz. The lucky person I picked first is Debbie (Deborah to her friends) Monahan, the .nz Domain Name Commissioner. After reading it you have any feedback, questions or suggestions drop me a line. Email interview with Debbie Monahan Domain Name Commissioner (DNC) of the .nz ccTLD. 2:09:34 PM      Like to comment? []

	Friday, 14 October 2005

.govt.nz vs parliament.nz? I agree that Parliament 'legally' is separate (and equal) to 'government' but I think 99% of the population does not really realise this and in fact care. I have not yet seen all the material that NZOC was presented about the parliament.nz application and perhaps this was addressed. Many things are simplified for ease of the many at the expense of the few and I thinkt his should have been one of them. I think we have now reached the 'tipping point' for 2LD applications in NZ. Anyone for parlemont.nz? :-) 9:22:10 AM      Like to comment? []

NZOC recommends parliament.nz be approved I fired off some emails about the NZOC meeting and in the end got one back from Frank March, NZOC Chair (I guess I should have emailed him first :-) In response to my 'what occurred for parliament.nz' request Frank sent a detailed update which I have placed online but the lead sentence is the key one: NZOC agreed to recommmend to Council at its next meeting on 28 October that .parliament.nz be established as a moderated second level domain. I understand several trees were used to outline the application, supporting material and the background for the new members on NZOC (Andy Linton and Chris Streatfield). 9:10:39 AM      Like to comment? []

	Thursday, 13 October 2005

Twomey quoted in The Guardian The Guardian has a story on titled EU says internet could fall apart. Thanks to Bret Faustt I was alerted to a quote from Paul Twomey, ICANN CEO. It is: "We expect to evolve, we expect to keep changing. We are concerned about stability [of the internet] and we think it's best to evolve existing institutions. Our present corporate structure is a matter of history, not of any particular design." Bret outlines some of the recent changes to ICANN in his post but I would like to point out that ICANN was created in the manner it was to get 'the nod' from the USA government. Others were also trying to 'win the prize' but ICANN got it, partly based on the corporate structure and that Jon Postel was going to be the CTO. But hey, if you repeat a lie often enough its becomes fact right? 11:42:05 AM      Like to comment? []

parliament.nz? On Monday the NZOC had a meeting and one of the items on the agenda was the parliament.nz 2LD application. I heard that this meeting had a member that came as an observer. I would have liked to go but had prior commitments. I am tracking down who this person is and see if I can find out what occurred at the meeting. Reading from the minutes from the previous meetings I expect that parliament.nz was approved (or at least not rejected). 11:34:32 AM      Like to comment? []

	Tuesday, 11 October 2005

The Economist and Karl Auerbach Bret Fausett has links to a story in The Economist regarding ICANN and the UN. As it is subscriber only he posted the story for all to read. I guess lawyers in the US don't have to worry about copyright! :-) Bret also links to Karl Auerbach's followup which he titled "Clueless Editorial". I actually read Karls followup before reading The Economist article. Karl is one of the three former At Large directors elected onto the ICANN board and is by far the most well known. He also has sued ICANN, and won, about access to company documents as a director. 2:46:12 PM      Like to comment? []

	Monday, 10 October 2005

Oh really? Hello! It has been requested that the following address:      my deleted address email should be added to the communism community mailing list. You have been successfully subscribed to our mail list. 1:22:01 PM      Like to comment? []

IDG has a story about the bankdlrect.co.nz phish. It has a screen shot of the phishing 'error' and some quotes from the DNC, DiscountDomains and ASB but other than not much new. It does however have a curious error. The story claims that the name is still registered. This is clearly incorrect and it was deleted by the registrar the day the phish was discovered. It is in the PendingDelete status which ALL names are in after they are cancelled or lapse due to non payment. 8:58:31 AM      Like to comment? []

	Sunday, 9 October 2005

Kieren McCarthy has an article called Breaking America's grip on the net on The Guardian. The best summary of this story is: After troubled negotiations in Geneva, the US may be forced to relinquish control of the internet to a coalition of governments. Things are happening faster than I expected. 10:02:41 PM      Like to comment? []

	Friday, 7 October 2005

ICANN Wellington update I was wondering what is happening with the ICANN Wellington meeting and first went to www.icann.org.nz and *WHAM* I hit my head on the invisible wall. I am like 'hmm' and think right away that password protecting a document without a stated reason breaches InternetNZ policy (I helped draft the policy :-). I think ok, what about the InternetNZ website and go to www.internetnz.net.nz/icann which is not very much use. I guess with the the Executive Director and the Research Officer being away on a junket not much is going to happen anyway. 2:19:27 PM      Like to comment? []

	Thursday, 6 October 2005

ICANN, UN and who is the most democratic A great deal of discussion is occurring around the future of ICANN and the possible involvement of the UN. The ‘USA give it up!’ faction has two main issues from what I have read: 1, Control of the Root 2, Cyberspace governance Read the entire posting. 10:25:08 AM      Like to comment? []

	Wednesday, 5 October 2005

Declan McCullagh has an opinion story called Power grab could split the Net. Interesting read. I think the Balkanization would never happen. I also think that as he is American he is overly harsh on his thinking of the UN. I mean most of the issue in Somalia were due to the Americans! 7:18:02 PM      Like to comment? []

	Tuesday, 4 October 2005

Preping blog for moving I am preparing the blog for moving in a couple of weeks. If anyone finds broken links just send me a message as it means my global search and replace to move to relative urls made some mistakes. More prep time now is less line by line edits post move! I will test move a large sample of the site in the next few days to see what issues occur that I did not think of. If you are really interested check out sheath.info/blog and sheath.info/radio/index.html 9:38:35 PM      Like to comment? []

	Monday, 3 October 2005

Guess machine names other than www dont work on the intraweb Because jobs.domainname.com is such a hard concept we have .jobs. The funny thing is even their own press release they use a .com name and also the wrong domain name. The have listed employeemedia.com and not employmedia.com. 4:19:48 PM      Like to comment? []

EU saying one thing and doing another? Internetnews.com has an interesting angle on the USA vs the World issue. They have a quote from Bret Fausett: But it wasn't a particularly risky move for the EU to make, he said, because they are secure in the knowledge the U.S. is adamant about not giving control to the U.N. Many of the member nations within the EU, he said, still support the U.S. role for Internet governance. That is an interesting approach. Is EU playing both sides of the field? 3:28:48 PM      Like to comment? []

Milton Mueller on The Failure of Internet Unilateralism Milton Mueller has written an article on ICANNWatch called The Failure of Internet Unilateralism. Milton is well versed in ICANN and domain name issues. The story is timely and makes some comments on the inconsistent approach of the USA governments position. I think the current policy approach is naive and will only lead to a path of greater confrontation. It is time for the USA to state what is minimum requirements for it to allow greater involvement of other national states. You can only fight the tide so long with a bucket and spade. 2:13:51 PM      Like to comment? []

	Sunday, 2 October 2005

Expired name for auction, only one previous owner! If you want to bid on bankdlrect.co.nz you only have 2 months to do so! 3:50:25 PM      Like to comment? []

ICANN: Open and transparent? This is the first of the many comments I will make on ICANN. Heck, ICANN might be better than what is coming in the (near) future but who can tell? Take a read of some of the background of the hiring of the new CEO Paul Twomey. Interesting reading eh? 3:31:11 PM      Like to comment? []

USA stands alone, lost last major ally. The story from the International Herald Tribune (which is a very good online source of news BTW) about USA vs The Rest of the World called EU and U.S. clash over control of Net got me thinking. I can not see ICANN having the same reporting structure in the following years. In fact I am prepared to bet money on it. ICANN may exist but not with the basic contracts with American government departments. The USA can not win this fight, at best they can stage a rear guard that will last years, but not win. ICANN has provided most of the ammunition to its 'foes', alas the rest of the ammunition is most governments finally waking up to their lack of control/influence in 'Internet Governance'. Maybe ICANN will form an arm of the ITU. Maybe UN will have a reporting group over ICANN (or what it morphs into). Whatever it will be will not be a private company with a couple of wimpy contracts with the USA government. Lets start working on making it the best it can be knowing that the rules set now will last a long time and will be near impossible to change once implemented. 2:08:34 PM      Like to comment? []

	Saturday, 1 October 2005

USA 1 Rest of the World 0 US Government has yet again stated in public they are not going to move control of 'the root'. The part I find the most interesting is this: "We've been very, very clear throughout the process that there are certain things we can agree to and certain things we can't agree to," Gross told reporters at U.N. offices in Geneva. "It's not a negotiating issue. This is a matter of national policy." National policy of course USA thinks it is more important than the rest of the world combined. I would not mind so much if They freaking actually enforced their contract(s) with ICANN. 1:37:20 PM      Like to comment? []