Never Too Early for Good Questions

[Sam Lanfranco]

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.

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.

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.

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.

  * 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.

  * 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.

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.

Sam L.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20180128/78b288f2/attachment.htm>