Emerald Group Publishing has informed us that Milton Mueller's paper, IP addressing: the next frontier of internet governance debate has been selected as a Highly Commended Winner at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2007.
I just returned from ICANN’s “gala dinner,” lavish affairs that have become an institutionalized part of its meetings. My perspective on this was best encapsulated by a remark made by John Berryhill, a domain name lawyer, at the Marrakesh, Morocco meeting. As we finished a huge meal and moved on to see dozens of Berber horsemen shooting rifles, setting off fireworks and rustling camels he deadpanned, “Yeah. This is the proper way to run a computer addressing system.”
I am at the Lisbon, Portugal meeting of ICANN. There are about 900 registrants and maybe 400 at the plenary sessions at any one time. A number of interesting things are happening here, although in general this is a calm and relatively routine meeting. Judging from the growing amount of swag you get with registration, ICANN looks prosperous and confident. Items of note include: growing pressures to find an acceptable compromise on Whois policy reforms; a surprise
appearance from the Secretary-General of the ITU on Friday; and an announcement this morning from ICANN CEO Paul Twomey that a final decision on the .xxx TLD will be made this week.
Just when you thought the .xxx affair couldn’t get any worse, it does. I’m beginning to think that ICANN’s approach to TLD approval was cooked up by a demented sergeant from Abu Ghraib.
On March 13, the ICANN board is set to vote – again – on whether they can approve ICM’s Registry’s application to operate a domain reserved for adult online content: .xxx. This will be the third or fourth time this has happened. I have lost count. The same thing keeps happening again and again. ICANN tells ICM registry, the company applying for the domain, something is wrong with its application and something more needs to be done to get approval. ICM registry dutifully goes off and does what was asked. And then ICANN thinks of something else that is wrong, something else it has to do. It’s Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football, on a global scale and costing millions of dollars in money and time.
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School