Following a ruling in its favour by ICANN's Independent Review Panel (IRP), would-be .XXX operator ICM Registry is pushing ICANN to honour the 2007 contract which should have allowed it to run .XXX for the last 3 years.

ICM Chairman Stuart Lawley has written to ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate Thrush. "I sincerely hope you share (…) the view expressed by so many (…) that the completion of the first ever Independent Review Process following the issuance of the Panel’s recent ruling is a defining moment for ICANN," writes Lawley.

Lawley told me recently that he expects his legal fees alone to exceed USD 6 million. But ICM is not asking ICANN reimburse these or even make reparations for the loss of revenue ICM has undoubtedly suffered from not being able to launch .XXX in 2007. What ICM is asking for, however, is that it be considered a part of the 2004 application round and not be amalgamated into the new gTLD program. "Nothing in the declaration would justify a decision to reconsider the ICM application in connection with the upcoming new gTLD round," Lawley argues. "Nor is there any principled reason to apply new rules or requirements to a proposal that was already determined to comply with the rules and procedures governing the 2004 sTLD round."

Lawley will be making the trip to Nairobi next week for ICANN's 37th international meeting, where he is hoping to meet with Dengate Thrush and ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom and to see the ICANN Board revisit the .XXX issue.

China is fast becoming the benchmark for strange and exotic ways of managing a national namespace.

The latest rumour to come out of the country suggest that authorities will require an in-person meeting with any prospective website operator behind a .CN domain name to green-light it.

The applicant would be required to show some kind of ID to ensure that the authorities can act against him should his website be used to display illicit content at any time.

Since last December, China has embarked on a fight against undesirable web content such as pornography. It started by closing off the very liberal .CN (used to be that anyone, from any country, could register) and limiting access to Chinese companies only.

The next step was excluding those foreign registrars that had been active on .CN ever since the Chinese government reached out to them in 2003 when .CN was first opened. As if blocking companies that had invested to add .CN to their registration systems and offer them to their customers wasn't enough, China then decided that any new .CN registration request would have to be made with heavy supporting documentation, thereby ending any hope for a relatively simple and cheap registration chain.

Problems for non-Chinese registrants and registrars alike have been compounded by the tendency for new rules to be announced only a few hours before coming into effect, giving all very little time to adapt.

Should this new requirement for website operators to meet with Chinese authorities in person be confirmed, it will be just one more example of this apparent lack of regard for .CN users and registrars worldwide.

The ICANN Board met yesterday and reconfirmed its commitment to the 37th international ICANN meeting in the Kenyan capital Nairobi from March 7 to 12.

Security concerns expressed by some participants in recent weeks combined with a recent terrorist alert on the convention center where the meeting is to be held have contributed to many of the usual attendees deciding not to come.

That includes whole groups, such as the GNSO's intellectual property constituency (IPC) or the gTLD registries. The IPC and the registries are even planning alternative meetings in "safer" locations such as New York during the Nairobi meeting week. Sensibly, the Board has said that no funding would be available from ICANN for such meetings.

ICANN staff and the Board have been working in recent weeks to gauge the true extent of any security threat and ensure that if the meeting did go ahead, it would do so in relative safety. Various reports, both from governments, people onsite and recent visitors to Nairobi, show that the terrorist threat is actually not very credible and that the level of security on the street is no worse than at many other major cities. Touch wood… I hope no-one finds out otherwise in a couple of weeks!

The Expression Of Interest (EOI) model was up for consideration at the ICANN Board's February 4th meeting, but ended up being pushed back until Nairobi.

ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee was amongst those calling for more time before any decision be taken on the EOI.

The proposed EOI model would make it compulsory for those wishing to apply for a new gTLD in the first round (currently expected to open in 2011). An EOI fee of USD 55,000 would be applied, and deducted from the USD 185,000 applicants would be required to pay in the first round.

During its February 4th meeting, the Board committed to an EOI decision at its next meeting, to be held in Nairobi in March.

Afilias, the registry for .INFO and several other TLDs, has just announced its purchase of mTLD, the registry for .MOBI.

Afilias was already running the back-end registry service for .MOBI, which today boasts nearly one million registered names.

Afilias say they will continue to run .MOBI as a separate entity.

Read the Afilias announcement here.

"Let's twist again…" Whenever I hear about China's management of its namespace these days, I can't help but thinking about that old song.

China just doesn't seem to know whether it's coming or going anymore. First it barred foreign registrants in a surprise December 2009 move, and now it's decided to allow them back in.

But not like before, noooo Sir! Before the December rule change, .CN was open to all, private individuals and companies alike, and had no registration rules beyond the first-come, first served system which meant that the only possible case where a .CN could not be registered is if it had already been registered by someone else.

Since then, .CN has become a bureaucrat's dream and a registrant's nightmare. Individuals are barred. Companies must have a local office and register through that office. Those are the new rules as from today (Feb 10, 2010). Before, foreign companies simply could not register, even if they had a local office, despite what some registrars told their customers as they tried to twist and bend the rules.

So it looks like a lot of people are doing the twist around China these days. Would-be .CN registrants will now have to dance with the Chinese registry's draconian registration rules which include obligations to return documents within a (very short) time limit.

The best advice for prospective registrants at this stage: work with an accredited .CN registrar that not only knows the rules but is also able to assist you to work through the complexities of a registration request on a daily basis, until the name is actually confirmed.

Chanced upon a little beauty of an article about how the US invented and paid for the Internet and should therefore keep controlling it forever.

Now I realise that the author's views aren't shared by everyone in the States. The site on which the article is being run is obviously slightly Republican friendly to say the least, and the article's "foreigners are going to take our Internet away from us" diatribe is obviously more political than anything else. Still, I can't help but be worried when the article's author, Bradley A. Blakeman, is an ex American President's deputy assistant and now teaches politics at a major US university.

With credentials like that, some people might actually believe untruths like "the Internet was invented by America". That's sad, because while there's no doubt Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are the Net's fathers, what about its uncles? People like Frenchman Louis Pouzin, who is credited by both Cerf and Kahn as having laid the foundations for the Internet's cornerstone: the TCP/IP protocol.

And let's not forget that without Brit Tim Berners-Lee, I wouldn't have even been able to read Blakeman's fascinating piece of propaganda on a formatted webpage. At CERN (a European research institute located in Switzerland), Berners-Lee invented the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and the Hypertext Markpup Language (html), two crucial parts of the true multimedia experience that is today's Internet.

Most sane, rational people realise that great enterprises like the Internet aren't built by a single person or nation. That would be like crediting all research and scientific progress made on AIDS to France because Luc Montagnier discovered HIV about 5 seconds before American Robert Gallo did.

But Blakeman doesn't seem to share the view that the Internet belongs to everyone. He argues that the Obama administration has "surrendered the Internet to foreign powers", that there is "no better country to protect the Internet than the United States" because he says "We invented it, and we paid for the research and implementation that made it possible. We are the freest most tolerant nation on earth..."

As I said, I'm worried. It's clear that the ICANN community still has its work cut out to ensure a truly global oversight of the Internet, if it has to fight such narrow minded views from the nation that still technically controls the Internet today.

Read the article here.