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Price of Whois lookups could rise as ICANN delays reform work

Kevin Murphy, September 28, 2021, 15:33:00 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN has delayed the conclusion of work on Whois reform, potentially increasing the cost of requesting domain registration data in future.

Back in March, its board of directors gave the Org six months to complete the Operational Design Phase of the so-called SSAD, or System for Standardized Access and Disclosure, but that deadline passed this week.

It appears that ICANN is not even close to concluding its ODP work. No new deadline has been announced, but ICANN intends to talk to the community at ICANN 72 next month.

SSAD is a proposal created by the community and approved — not without controversy — by the GNSO Council. It would essentially create a centralized clearinghouse for law enforcement and intellectual property interests to request private registrant data from registries and registrars.

The ODP is a new process, never before used, whereby ICANN clarifies the community’s intentions and attempts to translate policy recommendations into a roadmap that is feasible and cost-effective to implement.

It seems this process suffered some teething troubles, which are partially responsible for the delays.

But it also appears that ICANN is having a hard time finding potential service provider partners capable of building and operating SSAD all by themselves, raising the prospect of a more complex and expensive piecemeal solution.

It had 17 responses to a recent RFI, but no respondent said it could cover all the bases.

The key sticking point, described by some as a “chicken and egg” problem, is figuring out how many people are likely to use SSAD and how often. If the system is too expensive or fails to deliver results, it will be used less. If it works like a charm and is cost-effective, query volumes would go up.

So ICANN is challenged to gaze into its crystal ball and find a sweet spot, balancing cost, functionality and usage, if SSAD is to be a success. So far, its estimates for usage range from 25,000 users making 100,000 requests a year to 3 million users making 12 million requests.

That’s how far away from concluding its work ICANN is.

Confounding matters, the longer ICANN drags its feet on the ODP phase, the more expensive SSAD is likely to be for the end users who will ultimately wind up paying for it.

In a webinar last week, CEO Göran Marby said that the SSAD project is meant to recover its own costs. Whatever ICANN is spending on the ODP right now is expected to be recouped from access fees when SSAD goes live.

“This should not cost ICANN Org anything,” he said. “The costs should be carried by the user.”

ICANN is working on the assumption that SSAD will eventually happen, but if the ODP decides not to implement SSAD, ICANN will have to eat the costs, he indicated.

When the ICANN board approved this ODP, it did not specify how much money was being allocated to the project.

A second and separate ODP, looking at the next round of new gTLDs, was earlier this month given $9 million to conduct an anticipated 10-month project.

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