The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) is inviting its members and conference attendees to the annual ICA dinner during the NamesCon Global conference in Austin, Texas. The dinner will be hosted at MAX’s Wine Dive on Wednesday, January 29th at 7:30pm (Central), following the NamesCon opening reception. The event is being co-hosted with Braden Pollock, who previously hosted a large NamesCon dinner that merged with the annual ICA event.
The dinner is a good opportunity to meet and to socialize with ICA leadership and members in a relaxed setting and to enjoy a good meal. I and other members of the domain industry have joined together through the ICA to address challenges facing the industry. From my perspective, some of the more pressing issues domain investors are facing at this time include the removal of price caps on legacy domain extensions, potential changes to UDRP and dispute policies, and ICANN oversight (or lack thereof). There are always new issues arising and I appreciate that the ICA is advocating on behalf of domain investors.
The cost to attend the dinner is $100. This is a subsidized price as much of the cost has been offset thanks to sponsorships by Above.com and Dynadot. People who join the ICA from now until NamesCon will be able to attend the dinner at no cost courtesy of a donation to the ICA by Russ Goodwin, a long-time ICA Member and domain investor. ICA members also benefit from half-off discounted registrations for NamesCon.
The winner of the 2020 Lonnie Borck Memorial Award will be announced during the ICA dinner. The Award recognizes a member of the industry for his or her extraordinary contributions to the domain name community. The winner was selected by the ICA’s members and its Board after an open nomination process. The Award will officially be presented to the winner the following afternoon at a ceremony at NamesCon.
There has never been a more important time to be a member of the ICA. While there are groups and entities that may share some of the objectives of domain investors, the ICA is the only organization that advocates entirely on behalf of the interests of domain investors. One of the most tangible wins for the ICA in the recent past was to delegitimize the “renewed in bad faith” UDRP argument. This has likely saved many high value domain names from being taken via the UDRP process.
If you are planning to attend NamesCon, I think you should put the ICA dinner on your calendar. Ticket are available now via EventBrite.
The recently posted NC2020 Agenda is currently missing the originally announced opening reception – it’s also missing the Saturday social – opening reception is normally 20:00-23:00 – so for any attendees not planning on the ICA dinner [ on at the same time ] can network at the reception 🙂
Before anyone attends, this article by Zak Muscovitch should be considered “required reading”:
“Verisign’s Attempt to Increase its Fees Still Unjustified Despite Diversionary Tactic”
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20181112_verisigns_attempt_to_increase_fees_unjustified_despite/
(And though it shouldn’t need saying – it should also be read and contemplated in light of the current .org catastrophe and every other legacy TLD.)