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Although Sebastien Bachollet's report was scheduled for release this month (3 days left), he has announced to the Registrars today that the draft report will not now be published until the middle or end of January.
Further time will be needed before a final report is submitted.
His Evaluation team consists of Summit Strategies Intl. (Miriam Sapiro); Solucom (Michel Briche); with Sebastien Bachollet supervising.
Linked to the news that the ICANN Board believes the next TLDs should be postponed for resourcing reasons, this delay in the Evaluation Process simply adds to the case presented for inertia.
The key question now is: how detailed will the report be? Will it be so 'high-level' that the detail will be glossed over? Will people be able to submit statements to Sebastien in a due process? Will there be an interface?
At the Registrars' meeting today, Paul Twomey also stressed the importance he attaches to staffing - "these things should not be rushed," he said. "International searches are important".
Did he apply this scrutiny to the selection of the Evaluation team? Who else submitted applications for the contract?
Although Paul Twomey spoke quite incisively, and impressed me with his sharpness and presentation, he came across as a man under considerable pressure - faced with inadequate resources (and particularly staffing resources) to handle the urgent tasks which ICANN faces.
Consequently he talked about prioritising. It seems as if the Board does not regard the expansion of TLDs a first priority.
The postponement of TLDs... the domination of the market by Verisign... the surprise announcement that .name seems to be changing itself from a restricted domain to "another .com" selling generic domains and abandoning its limitation to personal names (obviously for financial reasons)...
This all smacks of an unravelling situation. I'm convinced that much of the problem boils down to ICANN's finances - whatever the reason, the world is being kept waiting for NewTLDs because ICANN can't keep up.
Richard Henderson
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