ICANN Reaffirms .org Appointment

Despite vocal criticism and numerous delays, the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Monday re-affirmed its nomination of the
Internet Society (ISOC) for management of the .org registry.

The final report now goes to the ICANN board of directors, who will sign
off on the decision or select another of its choosing Oct. 8. The 10
losing bidders in the .org process and the Internet community have until
then to submit comments to ICANN.

It’s the next-to-last-chapter in the ongoing saga over who takes management
of the third-largest domain extension on the Internet when a contract with
current .org operator VeriSign ends Dec. 31.

Since the beginning of the bidding process, the self-imposed timeline set
by ICANN has been pushed back — six times, to be exact. At one point,
some in the industry became concerned that too many
delays
might affect .org, since VeriSign is technically free to shut
off the service at midnight on Jan. 1, 2003, and some of the bidders would
need to set up the registry.

The delays only made losing the nomination bid harder when the results were
announced Aug. 20. Critics charged the results were inconsistent and
skewed; in addition, the winner was an old hand at
ICANN
, since ISOC has current and former senior members on the ICANN
board of directors.

ICANN staffers reiterated their confidence in ISOC, saying in their final
report that while the criticism was noted, and that “although the comments
contained much useful insight and, indeed, pointed out some errors in the
original evaluations, none of these errors was sufficiently material to
change the ultimate conclusion.”

While ISOC officials didn’t exactly call the criticism sour grapes, they
came close, and maintained they were more than
qualified
to take over the .org domain extension.

In the event ICANN’s board of directors rule out ISOC as their choice,
staffers proposed two alternates who also scored high marks from registry
proposal evaluators. NeuStar should take second preference if ICANN
directors overlook the staff’s recommendation, and GNR as another.

Individuals who wish to comment on ISOC’s nomination to the ICANN board of
directors are encouraged to send an e-mail to org-eval@icann.org by Oct. 1. All
e-mails will be publicly posted.

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