I'm sure it's not intentional but this article would have been just as accurate if it had just said:

"TM lobby still holding up creation of new top level domains as it has been since 1996".

Make no mistake those aren't just "stakeholders" showing up at these meetings opposing the long overdue expansion of the DNS, they're part of a 14 year old nearly Billion dollar lobbying effort to prevent the creation of new top level domains.

Marilyn Cade does not, as the article suggest, for "for ICANN". The only reason she works "with" ICANN is that she is AT&T's intellectual property protection hit man in the domain arena and she has been since 1995.

I met Marilyn on the flight from Berlin to Paris in the 1990s while attending pretty much the same event and pretty much hearing the same things: "we need to study this". We talked about new cats we'd both recently obtained. I like Marilyn, and she and I will always have Paris, but she's just doing her job even if she isn't too obvious about it. That's her job too. To keep looking for new TLD weapons off mass desctruction and to convice writers like you that they're out there. They're not, of course as this remnant of Bush era policies starts to gag as it repeats like a raw onion.

And keep in mind that AT&T has spent more money lobbying the US Government than any other company by the governments own statistics, and that the Government agency that controls ICANN, the Department of Commerce, is the 4th most lobbied agency of the US Government.

The real stakeholders - the regular users of the net, hundreds of millions of them, can't afford to fly to such flu hotspots as New York on Monday, London on Wednesday, and Hong Kong on the 24th, trying to keep up with the meat-space roadshow all under the retense of fostering online communication and collaboration in a scheme you're swear Monty Python made up.

While this same-every-time group of lawyers and lobbyists fly around the world in a first class traveling road show (paid partially by your domain tax dollars) to stifle innovation it's not clear to me the press even recognizes the difference between what ICANN calls a "stakeholder" and what the US government calls a "lobbyist" who are required to registered and disclose - ah but this is not the government per se it's a private government contractor in a monopolistic regulatory regime - and coincidentally, or not, such rules of disclosure do not apply.

And I'm sure it's just coincidence that 15 years after the first new top level domain went live we're stll waiting for the US government to "bless" it while the trademark lobby want to "study the problem some more".

Newsflash: this is not a study that ever ends.

Perhaps you also missed the part where Hearst Media asked for a list of names that would be reserved in any new TLD. Never mind Hearst has been decided against in court as trying to seek greater rights in cyberspace than they're allowed under trademark law (Hearst Media, owners of the "Esquire" magazine/mark tried to take away a lawyers BBS "esqwire" and failed) it was lucky that John Berryhill was there, who happened to have won of these now classic cases of trademark rights holders abuse to the domain system to remind them "hey, you lost in court, you don't get a second chance here".

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.