Hi Vint, Carl Malamud has quite a lot to say about integrity at http://not.invisible.net/signals/bin/000270.shtml I'd say that engineering without integrity is a bit flawed wouldn't you? Here is an excerpt from Carl's URL sited above. While a total lack of technical due diligence is not unheard of in such procurements, it was also a surprise to see the paper trail taken at face value in two other areas: 1. When reading a report, it's always nice to know a bit about the authors. We're not really familiar with the Gartner Group or the MIS managers who prepared the technical evaluations, so we prepared a little "getting to know you" presentation. While we've never been a Gartner client, we were surprised that Gartner did not disclose that it has had significant business relationships with NeuStar, VeriSign, and Register.Com. 2. "A demonstrated ability" was shown by many supplicants based on prior experience in the business. We looked around, but it appears that none of the reports that document actual performance results of the established players are on-line. ICANN's YOUR organization Vint. Are you going to vote for the cronyism as documented above? Your actions in leading ICANN are creating quite a capstone for your career. I continue to be surprised that you are willing to be judged by your seminal role in the creation and leadership of ICANN. Once again Froomkin has it right: http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=927 Old Internet Thinking RIP Posted by michael on Friday, August 30 @ 11:13:13 MDT Contributed by michael Carl Malamud, one of the sponsors of the IMS proposal for .org, has posted his response to ICANN's tentative decision to give .org to an as yet non-existent body to be created somehow or other by its good friends at ISOC. The essay demonstrates why IMS's hopes, and the rest of us probably, are doomed. See, the problem is that Malamud's entire essay is consumed with irrelevant Old Internet considerations like running code, technical merit, and whether it makes sense to evaluate a program without ever looking at it. This IETF-style approach to the problem of finding reasonable solutions to problems has no place in the Brave New Internet of today where expensive consulting firms decide that proposals produced by expensive consulting firms have the most merit, where merit is defined as producing familiar-looking paper. Only a dinosaur would have failed to notice that "the ICANN .ORG review mechanism literally restates the ICANN new open gTLD contract award order.". Only an ostrich would fail to see that ICANN has learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the gTLD rollout debacle. Recall that mere factual errors were no reason to upset the gTLD allocations. Read Malamud's essay. Don't miss the Grrrrrreat slides. Weep or gnash your teeth. There's not much else you can do now that the ICANN Board is preparing to undermine just about every form of outside accountability that might be brought to bear on it. {snip} -- ======================================================== The COOK Report on Internet, 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) cook@cookreport.com Subscription info & prices at http://cookreport.com/subscriptions.shtml Summary of content for 10 years at http://cookreport.com/past_issues.shtml Here Comes Asset Based Telecom A 178 page - Aug Oct issue available at http://cookreport.com/11.05-6.shtml ========================================================