So who is funding the CFIT and why?

Every delegate at the last week's ICANN conference in Vancouver was handed a free bag with an enormous sponsorship logo for an organisation called CFIT.

CFIT also featured in ICANN delegates' lives every morning when they picked up the free newspaper left outside their hotel room. It came wrapped in a CFIT plastic bag. Inside was a press release from CFIT telling them what happened yesterday. Well, from CFIT's perspective. The organisation also had a big stand next to the main conference room at the Westin Hotel, where it handed out a variety of free CFIT-branded goodies.

But what was strange was that no-one had ever heard of CFIT before. Hardly surprising since it didn't exist until a fortnight ago.

Nonetheless in that very short time, it has managed to make quite an impact. Not least because it is suing the very organisation it has named itself after. CFIT stands for Coalition for ICANN Transparency.

Fit to fight

And it is ICANN - the internet's overseeing organisation - that recently had to fight a temporary injunction order against it by CFIT in a Californian court. ICANN beat the injunction, but the legal fight is only delayed. CFIT has been creating trouble elsewhere for ICANN. It has formally complained to the European Commission, causing it to open an investigation file on ICANN.

And it has also filed a request under the US Freedom of Information Act, asking for all correspondence sent between the US Department of Justice, Department of Commerce, ICANN and top internet company VeriSign over the retendering of the contracts for the dotcom and dotnet registries.

So who is behind this extremely effective - and expensive - lobbying campaign and why are they doing it?

The answer is not immediately obvious. CFIT may stand for Coalition for ICANN Transparency, but when it comes to transparency, CFIT is itself somewhat lacking - sparking one ICANN Board member to register www.cfitt.info - the Coalition for ICANN Transparency Transparency.

CFIT is trying to represent itself as a wide lobbying body with the average Net user's interests at heart, but in reality it is the creation of multi-millionaire Rob Hall - Canada's most prolific and significant internet user.

Hall started one of Canada's first ISPs, founded the Canadian Internet Regulatory Authority (CIRA) and now heads a company that boasts over a quarter of a million Canadian customers and millions of pounds of turnover every year.

CFIT accepts PayPal donations on its site and lists several companies as its main sponsors, but the PayPal trickles, if there are any, are irrelevant. All the companies supporting the "coalition" are owned by the same parent company - Momentous.ca.