Asking about .iq at ICANN Rome

Thu Mar 11 03:38:07 UTC 2004

Oki all,

Apropos of plaintive discussion by gTLD registries about repurposed
ccTLDs such as .{bz,cc,md,pw,tv}, I asked Paul Twomey during the 1st
open mic hour about the current status of .iq.

The net of the response was "we know less than you do" and a longish
and booring statement that got read the next morning to punish all
and sundry, which hasn't made it into the meeting minutes.

Later, during the 2nd open mic hour when the subject of ICANN staff
and NS change requests (secondary followed by primary, effecting
covert redelegation) came up, I asked whether staff had any data to
share on communications of any kind concerning .iq.

Recall: The .iq sponsor and operator are in a Federal pen in Texas
and are awfully quiet. See http://nic-iq.nic-naa.net for what little
I know about .iq.

The net of the response was "we have gotten above double-digit
inquiries from various parties concerning the .iq space", and no
corroborating details beyond this assertion will be available.

Life being the random thing that it is, I ran into a Haliburton
contractor in Rome, who knew that RTI got the Iraq schools deal,
so most of whatever could go into the .k12.iq zone, easily 1k of
site entries, is already on file somewhere inside www.rti.org.

Life being even further random, the dns-free mobile infrastructure
of Iraq is now being advertized in the broadcast media in Rome.

Folks interested in this please drop me a note. 

Folks interested in ICANN'T should note that with WLS, the base
registry price for a domain name just went from $6/yr to $30/yr, 
with the usual caveats that it really is just $6/yr unless one,
or someone, wants the additional $24/yr WLS subscription value.

The current crop of alternatives to ICANN now includes:

The ITU: http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/forum/intgov04/

The UN: http://www.unicttaskforce.org/sixthmeeting/

and Weinstein, Neuman, and Farber have something cooking on the
general failure of packetized life that is nominally relevant:
http://www.pfir.org/meltdown/

That's my 0.02 € for this evening. This list actually was
mentioned by name at ICANN.

Forward as appropriate, or inappropriate.

Eric