Unfortunately ICANN's own response, even in interviews after the letter
from NTIA was issued, is that closed meetings are good. What they are
discussing in closed meetings is beyond me -- if it isn't personel matters
of contract negotiations, it shouldn't be closed. And ICANN's oft-ignored
organic documents say so.
<<Interruption, let me say that one of our members will now jump in and
say that the part of ICANN's by-laws that say that ICANN shall "to the
maximum extent" possible hold its meetings in the open means something
entirely different, indeed entirely the opposite of the plain words.>>>
The part about NTIA taking back and rebidding -- NSF/NTIA shot itself in
the head on that one about 20 months ago when they made it very clear in a
legally significant document that the whois/contact database is merely an
internal, administrative datase of NSI. That puts the whois/contact
database out of NTIA's grasp, thus leaving any re-bidder in the lurch of
trying to proceed without a contact database.
There's enough grist for a big, and long-duration legal fight over that
database.
(As an aside -- I don't know how many of you are watching the NANOG
mailing list, but there is a lot of foaming on it right now about how NSI
seems to be messing up on updates and even basic record stability in the
TLDs it administers.)
--karl--
-
This message was sent via the IDNO-DISCUSS mailing list. To unsubscribe,
send a message containing the line "unsubscribe idno-discuss" to
majordomo@idno.org. For more information, see http://www.idno.org/