Java Free Software Movement Gathers Momentum

Computergram International, Oct 5, 1998

@@@ICANN DRAFT RELEASED, BOARD MEMBERS NAMED

The draft plan for the new non-profit corporation to run the domain name system was finally released late Friday and with it came the initial board of directors, which can be seen at the bottom of this story. The plan for the corporation, known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, was drawn up mainly by the director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Jon Postel and Joe Sims, a lawyer with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, DC.

The articles of incorporation for ICANN seems identical to the fifth IANA draft, issued September 28 (09/29/98). The National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) within the Department of Commerce told us it has also received at least two other plans, one from the Boston Working Group (BWG) and one from an individual, Ronda Heuben, which it promises to put on the NTIA web site. A ten day comment period is expected to start today, Monday October 5, though there was no confirmation of that late Friday. The BWG proposal is a re-working of the fifth IANA draft, but Heuben's is her own work. The fourth proposal was a joint effort from IANA and Network Solutions Inc (NSI), but NSI was controversially dropped from the next version for reasons that have yet to be explained, but seem to involve a lack of time on NSI's part (09/18/98). It is busy negotiating with the government about handing over the control of the .com, .net, .org and .edu registry to ICANN (09/30/98).

The board members will have been approached by Postel and Sims and they represent a geographical spread across North and Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Whether or not they represent a similarly diverse spread in terms of opinions and background is a matter of opinion, and there are sure to be a lot of those flying around in the internet community in the next few days. The icann.org domain name was still registered to NSI at press time and the web site still under construction, but should have changed by today.

The nine members of the interim, board, who having agreed to serve for one year will not be eligible to serve on the full board for two years after the end of their term. The full list in alphabetical order is as follows: Geraldine Capdeboscq, executive VP strategy, technology and partnerships, at Bull SA; George Conrades, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners and the former CEO of BBN Corp, and GTE executive VP and president GTE Internetworking after BBN was acquired by GTE in July last year; Gregory Crew, chairman of the Australian Communications Industry Forum Ltd, former CEO of Mercury Communications Ltd and chairman of the Australian Information Technology Engineering Centre Ltd; Esther Dyson, chairman, EDventure Holdings, a venture capital firm and board member of organizations such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Santa Fe Institute the Institute for East-West Studies and Truste; Frank Fitzsimmons, senior VP global marketing at Dun & Bradstreet Corp; Hans Kraaijenbrink, chairman of the executive board of ETNO (Association of European Public Telecommunications Network Operators) and manager, European policy and regulation for Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV, the state-owned Dutch telco; Jun Marai, professor, faculty of environmental information, KEIO University in Japan, general chairperson of the WIDE project (an internet research consortium), president of Japan Network Information Centre (JPNIC) registry and a member of the board of trustees of the Internet Society; Dr Eugenio Triana, internet management consultant, former deputy director general of the European Commission's DG XIII unit, responsible for the Commission's relations with information and communications technology user interests space and satellite development policy; Linda Wilson, president of Harvard's Radcliffe College, former VP research at the University of Michigan, and charter member of the National Academy of Sciences' Government-University-Industry Research roundtable.

@@@ONDISPLAY UNVEILS CENTERSTAGE EC CONTENT AGGREGATOR

Capitalizing on the growing number of comparative shopping sites and other portal innovations, OnDisplay Inc will announce at this week's Fall Internet World show in New York a combination of two of its products that can integrate data from multiple disparate sources and integrate them on to a website with a single look and feel. The CenterStage E-Commerce 3.0 is a combination of the company's previously announced ECat and EContent middleware tools. The former is a catalog loading and synchronization tool and the latter a content aggregation tool. OnDisplay VP marketing Darrell Trimble, recently moved over from Neuron Data, says this is no screen scraping technology or aggregation base on the location of the content, rather, through pattern matching and parsing by example, CenterStage can grab material based on the content.

This week the company will also announce partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, Open Market, Vignette, Trade'ex and others, whereby CenterStage will support those company's catalog tools. Trimble says some of the partnerships are also OEM agreements, but he couldn't say which ones. There are apparently four other partners signed but not announced yet, and in terms of the major portals, Yahoo, Excite and so on, there is "activity," but again, no announcements just yet.