Here is a Washington Post article on a request by domain name registries Verisign, Nominet and DeNic, approaching DoC to reign in ICANN.  One of the things that’s bugging Verisign these days is that ICANN is commenting on how much Verisign intends to charge for its Wait List Service (I’m now on the Transfer Task Force of the Names Council of ICANN  which means that I get email about this stuff).

Everyhing about ICANN and the domain name industry depresses me so I will leave the commentary to Icann.blog et. al.  I will only cite the funniest (and most cynical) paragraph from the report released today from the task force for evaluating new TLDs, discussing the public comments:

Although the responses on the ICANN Forum were traditionally spirited and frank, almost all were off-topic insofar as their authors were intent on conducting their own evaluation of ICANN, of the new gTLD registry operators and registrars, and of the start-up processes, and did not comment on the Interim Report itself. Nevertheless, they did serve to reflect the general areas of concern associated with new gTLDs that were at least of interest to those segments of the community that participate in the ICANN on-line forums. There were three on-topic comments on the Interim Report itself. The Task Force carefully considered these comments, but for various reasons either did not accept the comment, or believe the essence of the comment was also incorporated elsewhere in the Report.

Paraphrase: There’s no love for ICANN, the registries, and the registrars; no one in the public can follow instructions on a simple request for comments; if they do say something relevant, it’s nothing we don’t already know.