I have met many of the lawyers on the "other side" (e.g. at MGM, Disney, etc), and yes, they also have plenty of legal smarts. But EFF has an amazing pool of talent that, were they on the other side, would be the envy of many huge law firms. (I'm an attorney myself so I'm not just looking at this with an uneducated eye.)
You are right in that these cases are expensive and that EFF's purse is rather smaller than those of the media companies. From my observation the difference between EFF and the big firms/media companies is how much legal grunt work they can handle - the critical moments of brillance of the great lawyers at EFF (and also at the media companies - they are not all monsters) are relatively few and far between when measured against the droll masses of the pleadings, discovery, fact checking, and all of the minutae that makes much of law expensive (and often boring.) Yes, the big firms have an advantage when it comes to the the dross of the law, but in my observation, that advantage is gone when it comes to the core aspects of framing a case and finding and articulating the core issues and rationales for the judge.
1. The word "stakeholder" is a euphemism for "special interests". If one looks carefully how it is used both in the WSIS and ICANN, the word "stakeholder" tends to encompass selected groups, most often groups who make money from the internet, and never includes individual users of the net.
In other words, under both the WSIS and ICANN rubric, individual users of the internet are not "stakeholders" and thus have neither right nor ability under WSIS or ICANN to express their interests, much less have an ability to vote on how those interests and concerns are handled.
2. Much of the discussion in WSIS (and ICANN) is like a fight over a toy steering wheel in an automobile. ICANN and WSIS wrongly equate regulation of the business of selling domain names with control of the internet.
In other words, they are arguing over something that is so divorced from technical reality of the net that the outcome, whatever it may be, will provide no assurance that the internet retains its ability to move packets from source IP address to destination IP address with dispatch and reasonable (but neither perfect nor guaranteed) reliability. The outcome will almost certainly be only about the handling of business practices in the business of selling domain names.
Do not expect WSIS or ICANN to comprehend that the real goal of internet governance is the preservation of the end-to-end principle for the benefit of internet users.
DNS does a whole lot more than provide paths to web pages. And web pages these days are a whole lot more than basic html.
So I suspect that policing.mobi would be really hard to do. But it's their top level domain and they get to succeed or fail on their own merits.
And I never understood why they didn't do this under a subdomain of an existing top level domain - there's absolutely no technical reason why.mobi is necessary to accompish what they want to do.
The really stinky part about this is that ICANN has permitted so few to have top level domains that none of the rest of us who might want to try to run (and profit from) a top level domain have the opportunity to do so.
The prices for.com names may go up significantly - 7% per year.
And ICANN's slice goes up to 50cents per name per year.
All of this adds up to increased taxation on those who acquire domain name, i.e. you and me. Yet we are unrepresented in ICANN's decision-making processes. Can you say "taxation without representation"?
And if you really think about it, what is the actual cost to provide a service in which the yearly cost is that of *not* removing an entry for a database and in which the resources consumed are a few hundred bytes of disk space?
One EULA turned me into an employee!
on
End User License Gems
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I came across one particularly egregious EULA that (besides not actually licensing anything) said that it made me an employee of the vendor and that I waived several of my rights as an employee that are granted to me under Federal laws such as COBRA and ERISA.
Some employers are unwittingly doing this to their employees when they hire certain outside HR services companies.
You are right that much of the net does not need to be governed. But there are some things for which it is useful that there be one cohesive system.
Take for example the allocation of IP addresses - for routing to work well the allocation of IP addresses ought to follow some rules.
ICANN doesn't stay within the lines of those kinds of technical areas that could use a bit of control; instead it mostly ignores those and goes on into the more sexy area of business and economic policy - like regulating the way that domain names are sold, and by whom.
I proposed to the WSIS/WGIG that they follow the Louis Sullivan rule of "form follows function" - that we should first figure out precisely what aspects of the net need to be governed and then design specific little bodies to manage/govern those issues and nothing else. (We need to do a little review of 18th century thinking to re-learn how one constructs such bodies so that they tend to stay on topic.)
The basic idea that the OVC promotes is that of a computer-assisted voting station (or stations, to accomodate different kinds of voters who have physical impairments) that produces a paper ballot that *is* the official ballot and that can be read by both humans and computers.
This goes one step beyond verified voting. Verified voting has paper records that serve as audit trails but that are not themselves the official ballots. The OVC system goes one step further and makes the paper that the voter sees and approves the actual ballot.
There are a lot of complexities in voting systems; the OVC system avoids many of these difficulties because it is really a conservative application of computers to traditional methods.
In addition, the OVC system, because it produces a paper ballot, can have many different kinds of voting stations to accomodate the different physical needs of different voters.
The OVC wants voting software to be, at a minimum, open to inspection and testing by anyone.
Personally, I can conceive of some people who might come up with clever user interface mechanisms to help voters deal with ballots - and I personally don't think that those mechanism need to be part of the open voting systems. However, the core aspects of creating, handling, and counting ballots should not be wrapped in inpenetrable proprietary shrouds - every voter must know for a fact that his/her vote has been correctly recorded and correctly counted.
By-the-way - full disclosure time - I'm on the Board of Directors of the OVC.
Many patents make claims that could be mechanised in software or in something more tangible. If patents avoid saying "this can be done only in software" than I don't see how the new GPL could be written to distinguish "bad" patents from "good" patents.
But GPL version X is, to my mind, going to have a hard time taking off. Any piece of software already covered by an existing GPL version can not move to a new license unless the consent is obtained from each and every contributor (or the code from non-consenting contributors is removed.)
The two internet toasters (1988) by Romkey and Hackett evolved during the next couple of years. In on direction a network controlled LEGO robot was used to insert and withdraw the toast.
In the other direction an entire SNMP controlled trail layout was created by Peter de Vris of FTP Software.
These were all seen, working, at the Interop shows of the late 1980's and early 1990s.
You say that "fragmentation of DNS would be an absolutely horrible thing". Perhaps so, perhaps not - so think that having the right to chose is more important than an unbroken name space.
In any even the real question is not fragmented vs unfragmented but rather whether we will have a regulatory body (ICANN and the US Dept of Commerce) impose one catholic naming system or whether we will allow people to pick and chose.
I agree that it is very inconvenient for the internet to have DNS name spaces that are inconconsistent - notice I do not say that there has to be one root for this consistency to exist.
And if we really believe in individual choice, then we ought to allow people to chose fragmented name spaces, realize their mistake, and return to the name space that provides the degree of consistency that they want.
In other words, we don't need regulatory coercion to act like the inquisition against DNS inconsistencies - instead the rational choices of users (and their providers) ought to keep the degree of inconsistency within reasonable limits.
ICANN is no more the "official" authority over DNS than Coke is the "official" cola of the world. The US Dept of Commerce has no authority to designate ICANN (or IANA, a job that ICANN does under contract) as an "official" this or "official" that over the DNS or IP address space.
Any one can honor any DNS system they chose to select - that's part of the end-to-end principle of the net. Most of us English speakers vote with our feet for those name services that provide our familiar DNS name space. But those who don't speak English are beginning to vote with their feet to set up systems that are not so oriented towards English or subject to ICANN's pro-trademark, highly taxed regime, and highly privacy unfriendly regime.
The money that goes to Verisign for every domain name for every year is more of a price floor than a price cap. ICANN has gifted unto Verisign for many years an amount of $6 per name per year without any regard to the actual cost to Verisign of providing the registry service or any inducement to reduce those costs.
This has had the effect of sucking litterally hundreds of millions of dollars per year out of the pockets of domain name customers. Thank you ICANN.
I voted against that contract (I was ICANN's board of directors until ICANN eliminated publicly elected directors) because it was a rip-off of domain name customers who were forced to pay this ICANN-imposed tax.
Now ICANN has reduced the total sum of that tax by a bit, although ICANN has snuck in a $0.75 per name per year tax that goes directly to ICANN. Yet as far as I can tell there is no mechanism to induce Verisign to actually reduce its portion in 2007 (or before) - so it seems that we have yet another gift to Verisign to be paid for out of the pockets of internet users.
One of ICANN's first acts after it came into existance was to arbitrarily require that domain name contracts be of 1 to 10 years in increments of one full year. That decision, a decision made with no public input whatsoever, makes it impossible for people to protect themselves against arbitrary price manipulations by registries in the future.
If one were to actually look at the cost of providing domain name registratin services it becomes apparent that there is a fixed chunk - the cost of running a robust set of name servers and a back-end system to handle registrations - and a variable part. When amortized over millions of names, as we have in.net and.com, that fixed part is only a few cents per name per year.
In other words, if ICANN required the monopoly registries to base their prices on the actual cost of providing services, the registry price could drop substantially below the values that ICANN has established. And, given that the cost of renewals is a large part of the variable costs, allowing customers to lock in for long periods would further reduce the price to the customer.
The bottom line is this: ICANN acts as a meeting place for those who sell domain name products and the intellectual property industry. Those groups gather and decide (conspire?) to set prices, product specifications, rules (e.g. the privacy-busting "whois" and the trademark-friendly UDRP), and other aspects of the domain name business. Those groups also decide who may and who may not enter the domain name industry and under what terms. In other words, it is a combination in restraint of trade. Whether that combination violates US or other laws against restraint of commerce is an open question that deserves to be squarely asked and clearly answered.
We did a couple of SNMP controlled toasters back in 1988. (A lot of folks think they are apocryphal but I can assure you that they were real and made real toast. I've got photos somewhere.)
In one of the episodes of Ruby (the Gallactic Gumshoe) she's in a room with appliances that talk about what they are doing.
ICANN's job is to do "technical coordination" in order to promote the "stability" of the internet.
One has to have a really crazed imagination or warped sense of humor to believe that ICANN's criteria for selecting new Top Level Domains has anything whatsoever to do with technology or the ability of the net to deliver packets or respond quickly and accurately to DNS queries.
ICANN has become little more than a mouthpiece for certain well healed industrial segments; the public interest, as well as the public itself, has been ejected from ICANN's policymaking and policies.
ICANN is fighting to keep its job from going to the ITU. ICANN's arguments are pretty weak when one considers that ICANN is not doing the job that it was constructed to do but is instead simply the willing handmaiden of small, short-sighted, self-interested groups.
Part of Gilmore's complaint is that there are no visible regulations or laws that compel the presentation of identification papers. In other words, not only is the law not clear, it is not clear that there is a law at all.
ICANN's SSAC came up with the right answer with respect to Verisign's "Sitefinder" but they did so using a method that contains the seeds of an even greater danger to the net: unprincipled and subjective condemnation of change on the net.
Precept Software (acquired by Cisco) filed a trademark application for "IP/TV" in October 1995. It was granted and, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office, its status is "LIVE".
So, according to the USPTO, IP/TV is a trademark of Cisco Systems, not Microsoft.
ICANN can no longer revoke Verisign's franchise - way back in 2001 (I think) ICANN's "attorney" went out privately arranged a new contract in which Verisign would get.com in perpetuity in exchange for giving up.org (which they have done). ICANN's DNS policy body said that this is a bad thing, but ICANN's board, ever in thrall to that attorney, adopted that contract (I voted against.)
In order for Versign to lose its rights to.com under that contract it would have to do some things much, much, much more awful than what it has done. (The contract itself sets out those conditions, and they were designed to make it hard to take.com away from Verisign.)
This whole mess is the result of stupid-think on the part of ICANN and an ICANN's utterly slavish adherence to "advice" from some very poor advisors. The US Dept of Commerce has contributed to the mess by steadfastly refusing to clarify whether there is any legal basis for its role in these affairs.
The US Dept of Commerce has never articulated any clear source of authority for its role in these internet matters.
Under the US system, agencies like the DoC don't have any "native" powers but rather obtain them only by explicit delegations by statutes and by executive orders (that themselves often need to go back to statutes or the native Article II powers.)
The General Accounting Office (a branch of the US Congress) investigated the DoC's powers *twice* and found them wanting. And there have been some significant legal articles also making this point.
In other words, ICANN is on very shakey ground if it tries to claim that its power derives from the US Dept of Commerce.
The DoC's role over Verisign comes from a Cooperative Agreement that was to have expired six years ago but which has been extended and amendended and extended and amended at least 25 times. It is now so warped that between ICANN and the DoC, Verisign has a what amounts to a perpetual lock on.com (thanks to the attorney who formed ICANN and who has perhaps reaped more personal financial gain out of this entire mess than any other individual.) Under the ICANN contracts (which the DoC buys into) Verisign's lock is nearly unbreakable unless Verisign does somethign criminal or equally bad.
The barcode is "obfuscated" so that poll workers would have a hard time reading it by eye.
Each voting place would be equipped with machines - machines that are open source based (in fact you could write your own and put it inside a PDA with a bar code reader) - that will read back what the bar code says.
In case of a recount if anyone asserts that the bar codes do not reflect the voter's choice, then there the human readible text (including the voter's choices) on the printed ballot is available.
We are currently developing a prototype version of free voting software to run on very inexpensive PC hardware. OVC voting systems will accommodate different languages and scoring methods, as well as voters with special needs. The prototype software development effort is housed at SourceForge.net.
The other part of the story is that the software produces a paper ballot that can be read by both the voters and by machine.
The ballot-producing machine itself can be touch screen - or something else for use by physically impaired voters.
The system is a) inexpensive, b) voter verifiable, c) adaptable to the needs of voters with physical impairments and d) open source.
I've been using the ORSC root zone and its servers for several years. I have not noticed any outages or problems - oops, yes there was a problem once - it was when ICANN decided to create a.biz of its own even though there was one already running.
Slashdot Mirror
I have met many of the lawyers on the "other side" (e.g. at MGM, Disney, etc), and yes, they also have plenty of legal smarts. But EFF has an amazing pool of talent that, were they on the other side, would be the envy of many huge law firms. (I'm an attorney myself so I'm not just looking at this with an uneducated eye.)
You are right in that these cases are expensive and that EFF's purse is rather smaller than those of the media companies. From my observation the difference between EFF and the big firms/media companies is how much legal grunt work they can handle - the critical moments of brillance of the great lawyers at EFF (and also at the media companies - they are not all monsters) are relatively few and far between when measured against the droll masses of the pleadings, discovery, fact checking, and all of the minutae that makes much of law expensive (and often boring.) Yes, the big firms have an advantage when it comes to the the dross of the law, but in my observation, that advantage is gone when it comes to the core aspects of framing a case and finding and articulating the core issues and rationales for the judge.
I've worked with EFF's legal folks and they are very, very good.
And when we went to court, we won.
1. The word "stakeholder" is a euphemism for "special interests". If one looks carefully how it is used both in the WSIS and ICANN, the word "stakeholder" tends to encompass selected groups, most often groups who make money from the internet, and never includes individual users of the net.
In other words, under both the WSIS and ICANN rubric, individual users of the internet are not "stakeholders" and thus have neither right nor ability under WSIS or ICANN to express their interests, much less have an ability to vote on how those interests and concerns are handled.
2. Much of the discussion in WSIS (and ICANN) is like a fight over a toy steering wheel in an automobile. ICANN and WSIS wrongly equate regulation of the business of selling domain names with control of the internet.
In other words, they are arguing over something that is so divorced from technical reality of the net that the outcome, whatever it may be, will provide no assurance that the internet retains its ability to move packets from source IP address to destination IP address with dispatch and reasonable (but neither perfect nor guaranteed) reliability. The outcome will almost certainly be only about the handling of business practices in the business of selling domain names.
Do not expect WSIS or ICANN to comprehend that the real goal of internet governance is the preservation of the end-to-end principle for the benefit of internet users.
DNS does a whole lot more than provide paths to web pages. And web pages these days are a whole lot more than basic html.
.mobi would be really hard to do. But it's their top level domain and they get to succeed or fail on their own merits.
.mobi is necessary to accompish what they want to do.
So I suspect that policing
And I never understood why they didn't do this under a subdomain of an existing top level domain - there's absolutely no technical reason why
The really stinky part about this is that ICANN has permitted so few to have top level domains that none of the rest of us who might want to try to run (and profit from) a top level domain have the opportunity to do so.
The prices for .com names may go up significantly - 7% per year.
.ewe Business Model - or - It's Just .Ewe and Me, .Kid(s) (http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000159.ht ml)
And ICANN's slice goes up to 50cents per name per year.
All of this adds up to increased taxation on those who acquire domain name, i.e. you and me. Yet we are unrepresented in ICANN's decision-making processes. Can you say "taxation without representation"?
And if you really think about it, what is the actual cost to provide a service in which the yearly cost is that of *not* removing an entry for a database and in which the resources consumed are a few hundred bytes of disk space?
I've suggested a new domain name selling model - The
I came across one particularly egregious EULA that (besides not actually licensing anything) said that it made me an employee of the vendor and that I waived several of my rights as an employee that are granted to me under Federal laws such as COBRA and ERISA.
Some employers are unwittingly doing this to their employees when they hire certain outside HR services companies.
You are right that much of the net does not need to be governed. But there are some things for which it is useful that there be one cohesive system.
Take for example the allocation of IP addresses - for routing to work well the allocation of IP addresses ought to follow some rules.
ICANN doesn't stay within the lines of those kinds of technical areas that could use a bit of control; instead it mostly ignores those and goes on into the more sexy area of business and economic policy - like regulating the way that domain names are sold, and by whom.
I proposed to the WSIS/WGIG that they follow the Louis Sullivan rule of "form follows function" - that we should first figure out precisely what aspects of the net need to be governed and then design specific little bodies to manage/govern those issues and nothing else. (We need to do a little review of 18th century thinking to re-learn how one constructs such bodies so that they tend to stay on topic.)
I've written many notes on this stuff on my blog at http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog/
For years? Not to brag, but we had IP/TV® running in 1995. We got it up to DVD quality sometime in the 1997/98 time frame.
We used IP multicast so we didn't end up burying the net with one-stream of packets per receiver.
As for the trademark - anybody who uses "IPTV" to label their product is taking a risk.
IP/TV is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems.
(I know this because I was one of the primary authors of the product by that name.)
If you are looking for the Open Voting Consortium website, it may be found at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
The basic idea that the OVC promotes is that of a computer-assisted voting station (or stations, to accomodate different kinds of voters who have physical impairments) that produces a paper ballot that *is* the official ballot and that can be read by both humans and computers.
This goes one step beyond verified voting. Verified voting has paper records that serve as audit trails but that are not themselves the official ballots. The OVC system goes one step further and makes the paper that the voter sees and approves the actual ballot.
There are a lot of complexities in voting systems; the OVC system avoids many of these difficulties because it is really a conservative application of computers to traditional methods.
In addition, the OVC system, because it produces a paper ballot, can have many different kinds of voting stations to accomodate the different physical needs of different voters.
The OVC wants voting software to be, at a minimum, open to inspection and testing by anyone.
Personally, I can conceive of some people who might come up with clever user interface mechanisms to help voters deal with ballots - and I personally don't think that those mechanism need to be part of the open voting systems. However, the core aspects of creating, handling, and counting ballots should not be wrapped in inpenetrable proprietary shrouds - every voter must know for a fact that his/her vote has been correctly recorded and correctly counted.
By-the-way - full disclosure time - I'm on the Board of Directors of the OVC.
Many patents make claims that could be mechanised in software or in something more tangible. If patents avoid saying "this can be done only in software" than I don't see how the new GPL could be written to distinguish "bad" patents from "good" patents.
But GPL version X is, to my mind, going to have a hard time taking off. Any piece of software already covered by an existing GPL version can not move to a new license unless the consent is obtained from each and every contributor (or the code from non-consenting contributors is removed.)
The two internet toasters (1988) by Romkey and Hackett evolved during the next couple of years. In on direction a network controlled LEGO robot was used to insert and withdraw the toast.
In the other direction an entire SNMP controlled trail layout was created by Peter de Vris of FTP Software.
These were all seen, working, at the Interop shows of the late 1980's and early 1990s.
You say that "fragmentation of DNS would be an absolutely horrible thing". Perhaps so, perhaps not - so think that having the right to chose is more important than an unbroken name space.
In any even the real question is not fragmented vs unfragmented but rather whether we will have a regulatory body (ICANN and the US Dept of Commerce) impose one catholic naming system or whether we will allow people to pick and chose.
I agree that it is very inconvenient for the internet to have DNS name spaces that are inconconsistent - notice I do not say that there has to be one root for this consistency to exist.
And if we really believe in individual choice, then we ought to allow people to chose fragmented name spaces, realize their mistake, and return to the name space that provides the degree of consistency that they want.
In other words, we don't need regulatory coercion to act like the inquisition against DNS inconsistencies - instead the rational choices of users (and their providers) ought to keep the degree of inconsistency within reasonable limits.
ICANN is no more the "official" authority over DNS than Coke is the "official" cola of the world. The US Dept of Commerce has no authority to designate ICANN (or IANA, a job that ICANN does under contract) as an "official" this or "official" that over the DNS or IP address space.
Any one can honor any DNS system they chose to select - that's part of the end-to-end principle of the net. Most of us English speakers vote with our feet for those name services that provide our familiar DNS name space. But those who don't speak English are beginning to vote with their feet to set up systems that are not so oriented towards English or subject to ICANN's pro-trademark, highly taxed regime, and highly privacy unfriendly regime.
The money that goes to Verisign for every domain name for every year is more of a price floor than a price cap. ICANN has gifted unto Verisign for many years an amount of $6 per name per year without any regard to the actual cost to Verisign of providing the registry service or any inducement to reduce those costs.
.net and .com, that fixed part is only a few cents per name per year.
This has had the effect of sucking litterally hundreds of millions of dollars per year out of the pockets of domain name customers. Thank you ICANN.
I voted against that contract (I was ICANN's board of directors until ICANN eliminated publicly elected directors) because it was a rip-off of domain name customers who were forced to pay this ICANN-imposed tax.
Now ICANN has reduced the total sum of that tax by a bit, although ICANN has snuck in a $0.75 per name per year tax that goes directly to ICANN. Yet as far as I can tell there is no mechanism to induce Verisign to actually reduce its portion in 2007 (or before) - so it seems that we have yet another gift to Verisign to be paid for out of the pockets of internet users.
One of ICANN's first acts after it came into existance was to arbitrarily require that domain name contracts be of 1 to 10 years in increments of one full year. That decision, a decision made with no public input whatsoever, makes it impossible for people to protect themselves against arbitrary price manipulations by registries in the future.
If one were to actually look at the cost of providing domain name registratin services it becomes apparent that there is a fixed chunk - the cost of running a robust set of name servers and a back-end system to handle registrations - and a variable part. When amortized over millions of names, as we have in
In other words, if ICANN required the monopoly registries to base their prices on the actual cost of providing services, the registry price could drop substantially below the values that ICANN has established. And, given that the cost of renewals is a large part of the variable costs, allowing customers to lock in for long periods would further reduce the price to the customer.
The bottom line is this: ICANN acts as a meeting place for those who sell domain name products and the intellectual property industry. Those groups gather and decide (conspire?) to set prices, product specifications, rules (e.g. the privacy-busting "whois" and the trademark-friendly UDRP), and other aspects of the domain name business. Those groups also decide who may and who may not enter the domain name industry and under what terms. In other words, it is a combination in restraint of trade. Whether that combination violates US or other laws against restraint of commerce is an open question that deserves to be squarely asked and clearly answered.
We did a couple of SNMP controlled toasters back in 1988. (A lot of folks think they are apocryphal but I can assure you that they were real and made real toast. I've got photos somewhere.)
In one of the episodes of Ruby (the Gallactic Gumshoe) she's in a room with appliances that talk about what they are doing.
ICANN's job is to do "technical coordination" in order to promote the "stability" of the internet.
One has to have a really crazed imagination or warped sense of humor to believe that ICANN's criteria for selecting new Top Level Domains has anything whatsoever to do with technology or the ability of the net to deliver packets or respond quickly and accurately to DNS queries.
ICANN has become little more than a mouthpiece for certain well healed industrial segments; the public interest, as well as the public itself, has been ejected from ICANN's policymaking and policies.
ICANN is fighting to keep its job from going to the ITU. ICANN's arguments are pretty weak when one considers that ICANN is not doing the job that it was constructed to do but is instead simply the willing handmaiden of small, short-sighted, self-interested groups.
Part of Gilmore's complaint is that there are no visible regulations or laws that compel the presentation of identification papers. In other words, not only is the law not clear, it is not clear that there is a law at all.
m l
By-the-way, I did a blog entry on this situation
http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000116.ht
ICANN's SSAC came up with the right answer with respect to Verisign's "Sitefinder" but they did so using a method that contains the seeds of an even greater danger to the net: unprincipled and subjective condemnation of change on the net.
m l
See my note on this at http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000108.ht
Precept Software (acquired by Cisco) filed a trademark application for "IP/TV" in October 1995. It was granted and, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office, its status is "LIVE".
So, according to the USPTO, IP/TV is a trademark of Cisco Systems, not Microsoft.
ICANN can no longer revoke Verisign's franchise - way back in 2001 (I think) ICANN's "attorney" went out privately arranged a new contract in which Verisign would get .com in perpetuity in exchange for giving up .org (which they have done). ICANN's DNS policy body said that this is a bad thing, but ICANN's board, ever in thrall to that attorney, adopted that contract (I voted against.)
.com under that contract it would have to do some things much, much, much more awful than what it has done. (The contract itself sets out those conditions, and they were designed to make it hard to take .com away from Verisign.)
In order for Versign to lose its rights to
This whole mess is the result of stupid-think on the part of ICANN and an ICANN's utterly slavish adherence to "advice" from some very poor advisors. The US Dept of Commerce has contributed to the mess by steadfastly refusing to clarify whether there is any legal basis for its role in these affairs.
The US Dept of Commerce has never articulated any clear source of authority for its role in these internet matters.
.com (thanks to the attorney who formed ICANN and who has perhaps reaped more personal financial gain out of this entire mess than any other individual.) Under the ICANN contracts (which the DoC buys into) Verisign's lock is nearly unbreakable unless Verisign does somethign criminal or equally bad.
Under the US system, agencies like the DoC don't have any "native" powers but rather obtain them only by explicit delegations by statutes and by executive orders (that themselves often need to go back to statutes or the native Article II powers.)
The General Accounting Office (a branch of the US Congress) investigated the DoC's powers *twice* and found them wanting. And there have been some significant legal articles also making this point.
In other words, ICANN is on very shakey ground if it tries to claim that its power derives from the US Dept of Commerce.
The DoC's role over Verisign comes from a Cooperative Agreement that was to have expired six years ago but which has been extended and amendended and extended and amended at least 25 times. It is now so warped that between ICANN and the DoC, Verisign has a what amounts to a perpetual lock on
The barcode is "obfuscated" so that poll workers would have a hard time reading it by eye.
Each voting place would be equipped with machines - machines that are open source based (in fact you could write your own and put it inside a PDA with a bar code reader) - that will read back what the bar code says.
In case of a recount if anyone asserts that the bar codes do not reflect the voter's choice, then there the human readible text (including the voter's choices) on the printed ballot is available.
The first line says most of the story:
The other part of the story is that the software produces a paper ballot that can be read by both the voters and by machine.
The ballot-producing machine itself can be touch screen - or something else for use by physically impaired voters.
The system is a) inexpensive, b) voter verifiable, c) adaptable to the needs of voters with physical impairments and d) open source.
I've been using the ORSC root zone and its servers for several years. I have not noticed any outages or problems - oops, yes there was a problem once - it was when ICANN decided to create a .biz of its own even though there was one already running.