At a press conference held Friday, ICANN's staff
emphasized that its board of directors has the authority to overrule the staff's
recommendations and choose whatever domains it prefers. The
report was created by five ICANN staff members and eight outside
advisors."We followed the board's instructions in reviewing these
proposals, but they have the ultimate authority to take action on this," says
ICANN president Mike Roberts.
ICANN's board is expected to choose between
4 and 12 new top-level domains next week, with
names under these domains becoming available in the second
quarter of 2001.
ICANN observers criticized the report for failing to clarify the
technical and financial criteria used to whittle down the proposals.
"ICANN
does not give a standard to which technical applications should rise,
yet they are shooting certain applications down for being without technical
merit," says Mikki Barry, president of the Domain Name Rights Coalition.
"ICANN
is supposed to be focusing on the technical issues of the Internet,
not reviewing business models," Barry adds.
In early October, ICANN received 44
valid proposals from companies and consortia seeking to become registries of
new top-level domains (see "Take Your Pick of Domain Registrars"). Each proposal
was accompanied by a $50,000 application fee. Many of
the proposals offered multiple top-level domains, resulting
in a pool of 191 options from which ICANN can choose.
ICANN's staff reviewed the
technical, business, and financial strengths of the proposals,
and the results of that review were posted on its Web site
early Friday morning.
ICANN narrowed the 14 proposals to 7 finalists, all proposing
.web and .biz. The two strongest proposals appear to be from Afilias,
a consortium of 19 domain name registrars, including VeriSign's
Network Solutions subsidiary and KDD Internet Solutions, a
Japanese telecommunications company that has teamed
with Network Solutions. Network Solutions
long held a monopoly for domain name registrations (see
"NSI Faces Domain Name 'Hoarding' Suit") and currently is the
sole registry for names in the .com, .net, and .org domains and the top registrar
for names in these domains.
This came from PCWORLD.com 11/13/200
The reporters
do NOT know the truth yet about the BIASED SUMMARY REPORTS. They do know about NSI
as you can see! PLEASE everyone send info to reporters!!!!!! They need to know this
week! Thank you
Steve Arnold