The group of organizations and companies behind next week’s meeting that hopes to lay out a framework for a non-profit corporation to manage the internet domain name system has a new name, adding to the alphabet soup that pervades internet politics. What was known as the Global Incorporation Workshop (GIAW) now wants to be known as the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP), which is slightly less vague than the previous moniker, but may still be difficult to understand for those not conversant with the US political process. The reason for the name change seems to be largely cosmetic, but the addition of the Internet Society as a supporter is not. The ISOC, which backed a previous effort to expend the domain name system, has not seen eye to eye with many of the organizations behind the IFWP, but says it is trying to work with anybody who has a legitimate interest in moving forward the process, says ISOC’s executive director Martin Burack. The new name also helps reiterate that the meeting next week in Reston, Virginia is only the first of three planned, with the following two in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, respectively, though the exact dates and locations have not been set yet. ISOC’s exact role is not clear – Burack couldn’t say whether it would be a sponsor or merely a supporter – but ISOC president and CEO Don Heath will certainly be attending, although he will not arrive back in the US until the first day of the workshop, July 1. As of the end of the day in New York yesterday, the agenda for the meeting was still not up on the new website, and some in the community have criticized this as another example of the lack of openness of this meeting. And as we’ve come to expect, nobody was returning calls at the IFWP yesterday. ISOC’s Burack says it is also inviting all those participating to attend its similar meeting, which is to be tacked on to the end of its annual INet gathering. INet 98, which is in Geneva this year, was scheduled to end July 24, but an afternoon session will now start that day and roll over to the Saturday, in an attempt to forge a framework for the new non-profit corporation. Another interesting participant in the IFWP is the Internet Alliance. We must admit last week’s name change (yes, another one) by the Interactive Services Association to the Internet Alliance passed us by. But we do recall America Online Inc founder and CEO Steve Case getting up on stage at Harvard University late last month and calling for the formation of an internet alliance (note lack of capitals). When asked if it was the same thing as what Case was calling for, the new Internet Alliance’s executive director Jeff Richards said, our board thinks it is. Confused, we asked Richards to clarify, which he did by adding that he considers both alliances to be the same thing, but there are different paths to get there, and he believes it will become clearer in the next 60-90 days. We certainly hope so. It should perhaps be noted that the ISA’s chairman is none other than AOL’s director for law and global public policy and associate general counsel, Bill Burrington. There were only 17 organizations listed as officially supporting the IFWP and a steering committee comprising a subset of those 17. As of Wednesday evening, that committee included Association of Interactive Media (AIM); Canadian Association of Internet Service Providers (CAIP); Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX); Computer Services and Software Association (CSSA) EuroISPA; ISP/C; Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). http://www.ifwp.org