ICANN's selection committee is meeting in Frankfurt Amsterdam this weekend to choose new Board members, GNSO Council representatives, and interim ALAC members. It's not really correct to call the group a "nominating committee" as ICANN does, since no membership ever gets to vote to accept or reject their "nominees." That said, the secretive process has produced some good selections in the past, along with some not-so-good.

In other news from the void, ICANN has finally released the London School of Economics GNSO Review: report and annexes. Unfortunately, it's only in PDFs that pdftohtml can't successfully convert to text (strange font or something else?) -- so commenting on the report will be more difficult than it should be. [update: poor mechanical OCR here]

I haven't gotten past the opening "Recommendations," but there, I'm encouraged by the report's criticism of ICANN Constituencies -- the artificial interest groups of ICANN participation, in which "intellectual property interests" is of equivalent voice to "non-commercial users." It also makes useful suggestions toward better information dissemination and fixed term-limits for GNSO Councilors. (The GNSO, for those not fluent in ICANNese, is the Generic Names Supporting Organization, the body that's supposed to make policy (by "bottom-up consensus") for top-level domain names.)