CircleID

ICANN's expansion of top-level domain program faced a second hearing today (see last week's Senate Committee hearing here), this time by the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. During the hearing critics once again warned that ICANN's January roll-out of the program is not adequately developed and it should be delayed. "I don't think this is ready for prime time," said Representative Anna Eshoo, D-Calif.

Kurt Pritz, ICANN's senior VP, a witness at today's hearing, showed no indication of ICANN's willingness to delay the launch and recently wrote this in a blog post: "A long and careful deliberative process produced this program. World-class experts on intellectual property, economics and Internet security developed solutions and those solutions were reviewed by the Internet community and vetted by governments."

Information about today's hearing can be found here.

Updates:  UPDATED Dec 22, 2011 2:30 AM PDT
ICANN Defiant Despite Calls to Delay Domain-Name Program NationalJournal, Dec.15.2011
ANA Applauds Strong Letter from FTC to ICANN Citing Major Concerns About Top-level Domain Expansion Program ANA, Dec.19.2011
FTC tells global Internet body to cut back domain name plan Nextgov, Dec.19.2011
Critics stage last-ditch effort to derail domain name expansion plan Computerworld, Dec.20.2011
New gTLD industry pleads with senators DomainIncite, Dec.22.2011

Related topics: Cybersquatting, DNS, Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Top-Level Domains