When we started this project, we had three related goals: reforming ICANN, documenting its activities, and explaining why ICANN was a really lousy model for anyone to follow.

The intervening years have demonstrated three things: that ICANN does not want to change, that the blogging world has caught on to the need to document what ICANN does, and that no one in his right mind would use ICANN as a model for anything.

UPDATE: Yes, it's a joke.

Two out of three (plus one bonus point) ain't bad, so we've decided to declare victory and get on with our lives. The website will remain live for historical research, but your editors will no longer be creating new content for it.

It was fun. See you around.

Sorry to hear about it, on this day when I had such Happy News [kirikos.com] of my own.

What is the current story bumping even The War out of top spot? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Try sars.[com/net/org/info/biz]. Helpful? No (and warning, com/net are redirects with multiple popups). While at time of writing a google search [google.com] on sars is not of much more help, google's algorithms are sufficiently clued to correct this over time as the term becomes more relevant and generates more traffic (and google does not assign any weight whatsoever to what the URL happens to claim). The prominent google news link is much more helpful, showing that not all of the article is false.

Note also that sars.ca (I'm Canadian) is relevant to that topic, another sign that at least some ccTLDs are generally more logically used than the drek filling those under ICANN's more direct and inept control, and through the principle of survival of the fittest, is leading to increased use by both registrants and users of ccTLDs, and thus one of the few counterbalances to ICANN.

The carpal tunnel inducing severeacuterespiratorysyndrome.[com/net/org/info/b iz] also produces some hits (and popups) but is similarily useless, whereas a google search on that term is, not surprisingly, much more relevant [google.com].

As for Carstrucksfordchevymercedeslincoln.com doing well in search engines, that is so 20th century. Most major search engines, including Google and Yahoo, have never parsed URLs for relevance, and of those few who did, they gave it up long ago as it was rarely of use to end-users, normally leading to For Sale or Pr0n sites.

That such myths persist about the mystical power of domain names to make mucho money shows that there's a fool born every minute of every day, not just April First. -g