CircleID

The ICANN Meetings are in full flow here in sunny Luxembourg. The venue is immense and located a cab, bus, or shuttle ride from the various hotels.

So far, the big topics are the .Net finalization (focusing on the readjustment of the pricing verbiage), the USDOC root announcement, the shell registrar accreditations used in the batch pool for the purposes of getting dropped names, and the practice of registrars exploiting the 5 day add grace period to register in excess of 50000 names to watch how much web traffic they have, and returning the ones that do not at no cost.

The wwTLD and ccNSO have been great, as have the Registrar constituency and the GAC meetings that allow public participation.

In the Registrar Constituency meetings, the registrars are raising concern over the pricing limits changes. Registrars are expressing a great deal of alacrity over the revised resulting contract, which evaporated the language holding the price at a fixed, low cost.

I'd suspect that the assumption would be that it creates a flexible position for VeriSign to increase registry fees. The concerns are that this sets precedent for when 2007 arrives and .COM is up for renewal.

I'm certain that there are many more lively sessions ahead.

Faye Howard and Eurid have been doing a fantastic job of moving forward the momentum on the Dot EU top level domain, and this is a great location to discuss this, being that we are here in Europe.

There has been significant effort behind the introduction of the new TLD, and doing so whilst accommodating registered trademarks and other significant intellectual property rights of trademark holders who take advantage of them.

Price Waterhouse Coopers has presented rules and guidelines on the new registrations during the Sunrise period(s), prior to the landrush of registrations.

The registration of names in a manner that appears to be abusing the rules puts you in potential risk, not only as a registrant, but as a registrar accreditation.

.EU is something that I have written about here on CircleID previously, and I am glad to see that momentum has gathered in the process, and it is interesting to see how the Sunrise Periods will play out in the months ahead.

Ray King, the former CEO of SnapNames, has been talking with participants and garnering support and participation in a Wiki about ICANN that participants can update and review.

Tonight is the Soccer Game, where people take their teams out to compete against each other in rounds of 'football'.

The hospitality of the people here in Luxembourg has been immense, and they are very friendly and patient of my horrific brutalization of the French language.

I had the opportunity to share the flight here from Amsterdam with Ali Farshchian or CircleID, and they are here at the ICANN meetings in the exhibitor's hall with Leading Edge (co-hosts for the upcoming ICANN Meeting in Vancouver, Canada this Winter).

For those CircleID readers and contributors who are in attendance, I would encourage you to stop by and meet Ali. He was a participant and speaker at the Domain Roundtable this past May.

More meetings ahead, and we hope to see more progress moving forward.

By Jothan Frakes, Domain Name Industry Consultant. Visit the blog maintained by Jothan Frakes here.

Related topics: DNS, ICANN, Top-Level Domains