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<p>With the Intersessional about to start in Santa Monica, and ICANN
in Puerto Rico fast on its heels, this may not be the best time to
put this question on the table, but for some questions, asking is
never too early. <br>
</p>
<p>As an economist, in my other work I have been tacking the
developments (and the speculative idiocy and “questionable
practices”) in blockchain technology and crypto/digital coin/token
markets. I will say nothing here about coin/token mania, that is
outside ICANN’s remit. I will invest a word or two about
blockchain as a distributed ledger platform. <br>
</p>
<p>ICANN and its contracts with registrar/registries are resident in
the “big data” corner of the Internet ecosystem. But, as far as I
can tell ICANN is one of the few such organizations that does not
have an in house group (or “skunkworks”) looking at what
technology platforms such as blockchain mean for what ICANN does
and how it does it. <br>
</p>
<p>At the platform level of development blockchain is about at
Blockchain 1.0, with dozens of very smart brains working on
Blockchain 2.0 and beyond. There are two reasons why ICANN should
be looking at what is going on here.</p>
<ul>
<li>The first is the very high likelihood of the development of
“smart contracts”, a digital contract process that is likely to
service the relationships between ICANN, registrars, registries,
and domain name holders, all of which involve domain names as
digital objects.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The second is the potential for the use of Blockchain (or a
similar digital platform) for the transfer of domain name
ownership without the use of Registrars. On this front I would
not be surprised if existing Registrars are following
developments and exploring avenues forward to advance and
preserve their business within their remits.</li>
</ul>
<p>That is all I have to say on this here, other than I do find it
odd that given the remit of ICANN, involving the wholesale
creation of digital objects (domain names) that are bought and
sold, ICANN seems to be paying zero attention to the technology
frontier that is most likely to disrupt how this area will work in
the future.</p>
<p>Sam L.</p>
<br>
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