July 31, 2003

Listening to the hearings - Part II, Nancy Victory's statement

Nancy Victory is speaking now...

She is mentioning ICANN's charge to its president made in Montreal in June as if it were likely to solve the TLD logjam. Being one who was there, I can attest that the underlying message from the Board to ICANN's president was more of a desire to move forward only on the Stuart Lynn concept of a very few "sponsored" TLDs, each undergoing microscopic scrutiny of their business plans, rather than a wholescale revision of the TLD allocation mechanism.

Questions are now occurring from the Senators:

Burns is asking whether if the renewal were to be today, would NTIA renew? The answer is non-commital and places emphasis on ICANN's annual report.

Several questions about why a country would enter into a cctld agreement with ICANN. A: Victory is making a lot of comments, the one that rings with me is that the net was running just fine so the cc's aren't necessarily thinking that entering into an agreement is needed. She is also emphasising the GAC, but without reflecting on the fact that the growth of the GAC transforms ICANN more and more into the shape of an international, intergovernmental organization.

She's done already - They are moving this hearing along quickly.

Posted by karl at July 31, 2003 12:06 PM