African Union can’t register .africa domain

File this one under “ironic”. Also file it under “Maarten Botterman might be the worst pen-pal in history.”

It turns out that the African Union has been unable to register its domain of choice in the .africa gTLD — for which AU support was a crucial and divisive deal-breaker — because of rules insisted upon by governments.

The AU Commission’s vice chair, Kwesi Quartey, has asked ICANN to release the string “au” from the list that all contracted registries have to agree to reserve because they match the names or acronyms of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).

The AU is an IGO, so its string is protected from being registered by anyone, including itself.

Quartey wrote, in a letter (pdf) to ICANN chair Botterman:

Unfortunately inclusion of the AU label within the IGO List had the unintended consequence of preventing any third party, including the African Union, from registering the acronym as a domain name (au.africa), yet there is an urgent need to change the African Union digital identifier on the internet from au.int to the .africa domain name.

“Urgent need”, you say? That’s ICANN’s specialty!

Botterman immediately sprang into action and sent his urgent reply (pdf), waiting just 21 short months from Quartey’s July 2020 urgent request to urgently pass the buck to the Governmental Advisory Committee.

Only the GAC can ask for a protected acronym to be removed from the list, he wrote. ICANN Org and board have their hands tied.

Also, removing “au” from the list will release it in all gTLDs, potentially allowing it to be registered by third parties in hundreds of other zones, so watch out for that, Botterman noted.

An additional wrinkle not noted in the letter, which may help or hinder the AU, is that Australia also has rights to the same string under an entirely different new gTLD program reserved list, because it matches the Aussie ccTLD.

You’ll recall that .africa was a contested gTLD in which AU support was the deciding factor.

The AU had originally offered to support a bid from DotConnectAfrica, but after the new gTLD program got underway it withdrew that support and conducted a registry tender that was won by ZA Central Registry, which now runs .africa.

DCA has been pursuing ICANN about this in arbitration and the courts ever since.

DotConnectAfrica slammed for two-faced strategy as it loses .africa appeal

Unsuccessful gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica has been handed what may prove to be the final nail in the coffin for its failed .africa bid.

A California appeals court has upheld ICANN’s lower-court victory over DCA in its entirety, ruling that the .africa applicant had a two-faced legal strategy that saw it first argue that it did not have a right to sue, but then suing anyway.

After having its .africa application rejected by ICANN due to lack of African government support in 2012, the following year DCA filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN.

One of its key arguments in that case was that it, along with every other new gTLD applicant, had been forced to sign a legal waiver, preventing them from taking ICANN to court.

When it was handed a partial victory in the IRP, sufficient to embarrass ICANN but not enough to have .africa reassigned, DCA was one of a few parties who ignored the legal waiver and sued anyway, in 2016.

Now, the California appeals court has confirmed a lower court ruling that this violated the rule of “judicial estoppel”, which prevents a party switching between two diametrically opposing arguments to suit their strategy at any given time.

“DotConnect took two contrary positions. It told the arbitrators on the Independent Review Panel it could not sue in court. DotConnect then sued in court,” the three judges wrote.

They added that the “text of that litigation waiver was unequivocal, unconditional, and unlimited.”

The ruling describes the .africa case in pretty much the same way as I have for the last decade — DCA didn’t have government support when it applied for the gTLD and ICANN was well within its rights to throw out the application under the program’s rules.

ICANN was handed a thoroughly comprehensive victory, in other words, and awarded costs.

Is this the end of the .africa case? Given DCA boss Sophia Bekele’s apparent fondness for the sunk cost fallacy, who knows?

While all these legal shenanigans have been ongoing, .africa has been delegated to and launched by ZA Central Registry, which had the support of the African Union following an RFP that DCA refused to participate in.

There are about 30,000 .africa domains under management today, which is not terrible for a new gTLD.

The 30-page appeals court ruling (pdf) was made September 20 and ICANN published it this week.

Another new gTLD applicant lawyers up on ICANN

Another rejected new gTLD applicant has filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN, claiming the org failed to follow proper procedures on fairness and transparency.

And I think it’s got a pretty good chance of winning.

A Bahrain company called GCCXI has filed the IRP, eight years after its application for .gcc was thrown out by ICANN on the vague advice of its Governmental Advisory Community.

.gcc is for Gulf Cooperation Council, the short-hand English name for the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, a proto-union of six states on the east coast of the Arabian peninsula.

The applicant’s problem is that it’s not affiliated with, nor supported by, the GCC or its member states.

The GAC, in its controversial Beijing communique of April 2013 objected to GCCXI’s application in the same breath and under the same power as it objected to DotConnectAfrica’s .africa bid.

Back then, the GAC was much more secretive than it is today, and did not have to provide a rationale for its advice. Its powers to object to gTLD applications pretty much amounted to a veto.

ICANN dutifully followed the GAC’s advice, throwing out the .gcc application later that year.

The applicant has evidently been trying to get ICANN to change its mind, using the Request for Reconsideration and then Cooperative Engagement Processes, since early 2014. That CEP concluded in May, and GCCXI filed for IRP in June.

Why did the CEP — a form of arbitration designed to avoid expensive IRP complaints and lawsuits — take so long and ultimately fail?

Don’t look to the IRP complaint published by ICANN (pdf) for answers — it’s redacted the whole ruddy lot, a few pages of text, without explanation.

That’s ironic given that a lack of transparency is one of GCCXI’s beefs against the org, along with an alleged failure to follow its bylaws on neutrality and fairness.

ICANN has ignored all of its carefully developed and documented policies, and instead has kowtowed to unspecified government concerns — devising a secret process to kill Claimant’s investment and opportunity, and completely disregarding the public interest in delegating the TLD for use.

The continued fight for a gTLD it surely has no hope of ever operating is a ballsy move by the applicant.

It’s roughly equivalent to some random European company applying to run .eu to represent the geographic region of EU member states without the consent of the EU institutions themselves and then complaining when it’s told to take a walk.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it will lose the IRP. In fact, I think it has a pretty good chance of winning.

GCCXI does not deserve to prove it should be given .gcc, it only needs to show that ICANN broke its own bylaws.

DotConnectAfrica, which was rejected by the GAC and then ICANN for pretty much the same unsubstantiated reasons — the GAC “veto” — won its IRP in 2015, with the panel finding that ICANN accepted the GAC’s unexplained advice without even rudimentary due diligence, violating its commitment to fairness.

It was particularly embarrassing for the GAC, whose then-chair admitted that the committee deliberately kept its advice vague and open to interpretation

While .africa is not exactly the same as .gcc (the former is officially a geographic string, the latter is not), GCCXI had DCA had their applications rejected based on the exact same piece of GAC advice.

It’s also similar to Amazon’s IRP fight for .amazon, which it won. That bid was also kicked out as a result of ICANN’s adoption of opaque GAC advice from the Beijing communique.

You’ve got to think GCCXI has a decent shot at a victory here, though if recent IRPs and general ICANN foot-dragging on accountability are any guide we won’t know for a couple years.

ICANN made over $500k in secret lawyer payments over [REDACTED] legal dispute

ICANN has approved a payout of over half a million dollars to outside lawyers for work on a legal dispute it does not want you to know about.

The board of directors a week ago approved the disbursement of a “[Redacted – Privileged & Confidential]” sum to undisclosed parties in relation to “extensive activity in [Redacted – Privileged & Confidential]”.

Under ICANN policy, the fact that board approval was required means that the amount being paid is at least $500,000. The redacted resolution also authorizes additional payments up to $499,999.

ICANN isn’t providing any hints about what the payments concern, other than that it’s a legal dispute of some kind. The resolution states:

When required, ICANN must engage outside legal counsel to help prepare for and defend against all types of disputes that are brought against ICANN. When those disputes become highly contentious they often require significant involvement during a certain time period by outside counsel and that significant amount of time also results in significant fees and related expenses.

The words “related expenses” may be telling. We may not just be talking about lawyers’ fees here.

ICANN also does not state when the expenses were incurred, other than to note that the org’s budget for fiscal 2020, which ended June 30, “contemplated” the need for such payments.

So we’re talking about a legal issue that ICANN was aware of before May 2019, when the FY20 budget was approved, possibly as far back as December 2018, when earlier versions of that budget were published.

Known legal disputes that were active back then and have seen activity in the last few months include the Afilias Independent Review Process complaint about the .web auction and DotConnectAfrica’s court appeal over its .africa loss.

But both of those cases are matters of public record. ICANN even regularly publishes legal documentation on both. They’re not secret.

The only cases I’m aware of that ICANN has actively tried to keep secret involve allegations of sexual discrimination and harassment made against at least one former senior staffer. One such lawsuit was filed late February 2019.

But the hundreds of thousands doled out by ICANN last week could be related to just about anything.

ICANN’s bylaws give the board a broad brush when it comes to redacting information from published resolutions:

any actions relating to personnel or employment matters, legal matters (to the extent the Board determines it is necessary or appropriate to protect the interests of ICANN), matters that ICANN is prohibited by law or contract from disclosing publicly, and other matters that the Board determines, by a three-quarters (3/4) vote of Directors present at the meeting and voting, are not appropriate for public distribution

Usually, when ICANN redacts information, it’s related to personnel matters such as management bonuses.

Whatever it was ICANN just spent your money on, ICANN ain’t saying.

Does ICANN have a race problem?

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, pretty much every corporation and institution in the US, and many elsewhere, have felt the need to make statements or enact changes in order to show how non-racist they are, and it seems ICANN is now no exception.

The org issued a statement from CEO Göran Marby late last week in which he denounced racism and said ICANN was committed to establishing a set of “guiding principles” to govern “diversity and inclusion”.

I found the statement rather odd. Does ICANN have a racism problem that needs addressing?

I don’t think it does. At least, I’ve never even heard so much as a rumor about such behavior, never mind a confirmed case.

I’ve been scratching my head to think of any examples of ICANN being accused of racism, and the only one I can come up with is a minor controversy 10 years ago when an early draft of the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook banned “terrorism”.

Some Muslim community members complained that the word could be perceived as “racist” and it was eventually removed.

Around the same time, a handful of community members (as well as yours truly) were accused by the head of unsuccessful .africa applicant DotConnectAfrica of being part of a racist conspiracy against the company, but to the best of my recollection we never invited ICANN staff to our meetings.

But that’s basically it.

ICANN already has diversity baked into its power hierarchies. Members of the board of directors and other committees have to be geographically diverse, which will usually lead to racial diversity, for example.

A great many of its senior leaders have been (at least under some definitions) “people of color”. There doesn’t appear to be a glass ceiling.

It’s also got its Expected Standards of Behavior, a system of codified politeness used in community interactions, which explicitly forbids racial discrimination.

The broader community is global, has no ethnic majority, and is self-selecting. Anyone with the means can show up to a public meeting, dial into a remote meeting, or join a working group, regardless of race or origin.

Statistics show that whenever an ICANN meeting is held in Africa or Asia, the largest groupings of participants are African or Asian.

Of course, maybe with such diversity comes problems. There are words that are considered offensive in some parts of the world that are perfectly acceptable in others, for example, but I’ve never heard of any instances of this kind of culture clash.

But is there actual racism going on at ICANN HQ? Marby’s post says:

We will open a facilitated dialogue to support our employees, to ensure that racial bias and discrimination, or bias of any kind, have no place in our workforce. We need to be comfortable having uncomfortable conversations so that we can address the unconscious and conscious ways in which systemic racism is perpetuated. We need to listen more to Black people and people of color to learn about how these issues impact them each and every day. And we need to continue to take meaningful actions to address inequality.

That suggests that either ICANN is aware of some sort of systemic racial bias among its staff, or that it wants to hunt it down and snuff it out before it becomes a bigger issue.

Or they could just be empty words designed to pay lip service to this stuff.

Sorry, you still can’t sue ICANN, two-faced .africa bidder told

Failed .africa gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica appears to have lost its lawsuit against ICANN.
A California judge has said he will throw out the portions of DCA’s suit that had not already been thrown out two years ago, on the grounds that DCA was talking out of both sides of its mouth.
DCA applied for .africa in 2012 but lost out to rival applicant ZA Central Registry because ZACR had the backing of African governments and DCA did not.
It filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN in 2013 and won in 2015, with the IRP panel finding that ICANN broke its own bylaws by paying undue deference to Governmental Advisory Committee advice.
It also emerged that ICANN had ghost-written letter of government support on behalf of the African Union, which looked very dodgy.
DCA then sued ICANN in 2016 on 11 counts ranging from fraud to breach of contract to negligence.
The Los Angeles Superior Court decided in 2017 that five of those charges were covered by the “covenant not to sue”, a broad waiver that all new gTLD applicants had to sign up to.
But the remaining six, relating to ICANN’s alleged fraud, were allowed to go ahead.
ICANN relied in its defense on a principle called “judicial estoppel”, where a judge is allowed to throw out a plaintiff’s arguments if it can be shown that it had previously relied on diametrically opposed arguments to win an earlier case.
The judge has now found that estoppel applies here, because DCA fought and won the IRP in part by repeatedly claiming that it was not allowed to sue in a proper court.
It had made this argument on at least seven occasions during the IRP, Judge Robert Broadbelt found. He wrote in his August 22 ruling (pdf):

DCA’s successfully taking the first position in the IRP proceeding and gaining significant advantages in that proceeding as a result thereof, and then taking the second position that its totally inconsistent in this lawsuit, presents egregious circumstances that would result in a miscarriage of justice if the court does not apply the doctrine of judicial estoppel to bar DCA from taking the second position in this lawsuit. The court therefore exercises its discretion to find in favor of ICANN, and against DCA, on ICANN’s affirmative defense of judicial estoppel and to bar DCA from bringing or maintaining its claims against ICANN alleged in the [First Amended Complaint] in this lawsuit.

In other words, ICANN’s won.
The case is not yet over, however. DCA still has an opportunity to object to the ruling, and there’s a hearing scheduled for December.

“Just give up!” ICANN tells its most stubborn new gTLD applicant

ICANN has urged the company that wants to run .internet as new gTLD to just give up and go away.
The India-based company, Nameshop, actually applied for .idn — to stand for “internationalized domain name” — back in the 2012 application round.
It failed the Geographic Names Review portion of the application process because IDN is the International Standards Organization’s 3166-1 three-letter code for Indonesia, and those were all banned.
While one might question the logic of applying for a Latin-script string to represent IDNs, overlooking the ISO banned list was not an incredibly stupid move.
Even a company with Google’s brainpower resources overlooked this paragraph of the Applicant Guidebook and applied for three 3166-1 restricted strings: .and, .are and .est.
But rather than withdraw its .idn bid, like Google did with its failed applications, Nameshop decided to ask ICANN to change its applied-for string to .internet.
There was a small amount of precedent for this. ICANN had permitted a few applicants to correct typos in their applied-for strings, enabling DotConnectAfrica for example to correct its nutty application for “.dotafrica” to its intended “.africa”.
But swapping out .idn for .internet was obviously not a simple correction but rather looked a complete upgrade of its addressable market. Nobody else had applied for .internet, and Nameshop was well aware of this, so Nameshop’s bid would have been a shoo-in.
To allow the change would have opened the floodgates for every applicant that found itself in a tricky contention set to completely change their desired strings to something cheaper or more achievable.
But Nameshop principal Sivasubramanian Muthusamy did not take no for an answer. He’s been nagging ICANN to change its mind ever since.
There’s a lengthy, rather slick timeline of his lobbying efforts published on the Nameshop web site.
He filed a Request for Reconsideration back in 2013, which was swiftly rejected by the ICANN board of directors.
In July 2017, he wrote to ICANN to complain that Nameshop’s string change request should be treated the same as any other:

It seems that if ICANN can allow string changes from a relatively undesirable name to a more desireable name based on misspelling, then ICANN should allow a change from a desireable name in three characters(IDN) to longer name in eight characters (Internet) based on confusion with geographical names

Meetings with ICANN staff, the Ombudsman, the Governmental Advisory Committee and others to discuss his predicament several times over the last several years have proved fruitless.
Finally, today ICANN has published a letter (pdf) it sent to Muthusamy on Friday, urging him to ditch his Quixotic quest and get his money back. Christine Willett, VP of gTLD operations, wrote:

Given we are unable to take further action on Nameshop’s application, we encourage you to withdraw the application for a full refund of Nameshop’s application fee.

I doubt this is the first time ICANN has urged Nameshop to take its money and run, but it seems ICANN is now finally sick of talking about the issue.
Willett added that ICANN staff and directors “politely decline” his request for further in-person meetings to discuss the application, and encouraged him to apply for his desired string in the next application round, whenever that may be.

ICANN blocks .islam after government veto

After six years, ICANN has finally killed off the applications for the new gTLDs .islam and .halal, due to objections from several governments.
It has also rejected the application for .persiangulf from the same applicant.
The decisions were made by the ICANN board of directors last Wednesday. The resolutions were published Friday night.
The board said: “it is apparent that the vast majority of the Muslim community (more than 1.6 billion members) object to the applications for .HALAL and .ISLAM.”
This actually means that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the 57-nation treaty group with a combined 1.6 billion nominal Muslim citizens, objected to the applications.
Several governments with large Muslim populations — including the UAE, Malaysia, Turkey, India and Iran — had also individually told ICANN on the record that they were not happy.
The view from these governments seemed to be that if there’s going to be a .islam, it should be run under the umbrella of a group such as the OIC, rather than some random tuppenny ha’penny gTLD registry.
In Christianity, the comparable gTLD .catholic is run by an affiliate of the world’s oldest pedophile ring, while .bible is being run as a propaganda tool by a group of sexually repressed, homophobic American evangelicals.
The ICANN board said its decision to reject .islam and .halal was in tune with its “core values” to protect the “public interest”.
The decision was based “on its consideration of and commitment to ICANN’s Mission and core values set forth in the Bylaws, including ensuring that this decision is in the best interest of the Internet community and that it respects the concerns raised by the majority of the community most impacted by the proposed .HALAL and .ISLAM gTLDs”.
It’s been avoiding making this decision since at least December 2013.
But it has now voted that the two applications “should not proceed”. It does not appear to have banned organizations from applying for the strings in subsequent application rounds.
The applicant for .islam and .halal was Turkey-based Asia Green IT System. It applications have been “on-hold” since the GAC issued non-consensus advice against them back in April 2013.
The OIC filed Community Objections against both gTLDs with the International Chamber of Commerce, but failed on both counts.
Having failed to see any progress, in December 2015, AGIT filed an Independent Review Process appeal against its treatment by ICANN, and won.
The November 2017 IRP decision held that the “on-hold” status was a “new policy”, unilaterally put in place by ICANN Org, that unfairly condemned AGIT’s applications to indefinite limbo.
The panel ordered ICANN to make its damn mind up one way or the other and pay about $270,000 in costs.
While rejecting the applications may not seem unreasonable, it’s an important example of a minority group of governments getting an essential veto over a gTLD.
Under the rules of the 2012 application round, consensus GAC advice against an application is enough to kill it stone dead.
But the GAC had merely said (pdf):

The GAC recognizes that Religious terms are sensitive issues. Some GAC members have raised sensitivities on the applications that relate to Islamic terms, specifically .islam and .halal. The GAC members concerned have noted that the applications for .islam and .halal lack community involvement and support. It is the view of these GAC members that these applications should not proceed.

That’s non-consensus advice, which is expected to initiate bilateral engagement with ICANN’s board before a decision is made.
In the case of .persiangulf, also applied for by AGIT and also now rejected, the GAC didn’t even give non-consensus advice.
In fact, in its July 2013 Durban communique (pdf) is explicitly stated it “does not object to them proceeding”.
This appears to have been a not atypical GAC screw-up. The minutes of the Durban meeting, published months later, showed that the Gulf Cooperation Council states had in fact objected — there’s a bit of a dispute in that part of the world about whether it’s the “Persian Gulf” or “Arabian Gulf” — so the GAC would have been within its rights to publish non-consensus advice.
This all came out when the GCC filed its own IRP against ICANN, which it won.
The IRP panel in that case ordered ICANN to outright reject .persiangulf. Two years later, it now has.
While the three gTLDs in question are now going into “Will Not Proceed” status, that may not be the end of the story. One “Will Not Proceed” applicant, DotConnectAfrica, has taken ICANN to court in the US over its .africa application.

After slow launch, .africa looks to add hundreds of resellers

ZA Central Registry is opening up .africa and its South African city gTLDs to potentially hundreds of new registrars via a new proxy program.
The company today announced that its new registrar AF Proxy Services has received ICANN accreditation, which should open up .africa, .joburg, .capetown and .durban to its existing .za channel.
ZACR is the ccTLD registry for South Africa and as such it already has almost 500 partners accredited to sell .za names. But most of these resellers are not also ICANN accredited, so they cannot sell gTLD domains.
The AF Proxy service is intended to give these existing resellers the ability to sell ZACR’s four gTLDs without having to seek out an ICANN accreditation themselves.
“Effectively, all users of the AF Proxy service become resellers of the Proxy Registrar which is an elegant technical solution aimed at boosting new gTLD domain name registrations,” ZACR CEO Lucky Masilela said in a press release.
While reseller networks are of course a staple of the industry and registries acting as retail registrars is fairly common nowadays, this new ZACR business model is unusual.
According to ZACR’s web site, it has 489 accredited .za registrars active today, with 52 more in testing and a whopping 792 more in the application process.
Depending on uptake of the proxy service, that could bring the number of potential .africa resellers to over 1,300.
And they’re probably needed.
The .africa gTLD went into general availability in July — after five years of expensive legal and quasi-legal challenges from rival applicant DotConnectAfrica — but has so far managed to put just 8,600 names in its zone file.
That’s no doubt disappointing for TLD serving a population of 1.2 billion and which had been expected to see substantial domain investor activity from overseas, particularly China.

Blah blah ICANN blah .africa blah delegated blah blah…

Today blah blah ZA Central Registry blah blah .africa blah delegated blah.
ICANN blah blah root blah. Blah blah ZACR blah nic.africa.
Blah blah five years blah blah contention blah lawsuit blah blah DotConnectAfrica blah. Blah blah Bekele blah IRP blah.
ICANN blah blah Governmental Advisory Committee blah blah blah African Union blah blah blah.
Blah blah Geographic Names Panel blah blah controversy blah blah blah blah lawsuit blah blah blah leg to stand on.

Registry Africa celebrates delegation of .africa#ForAfricansByAfricans #WeAreLive pic.twitter.com/UXZX6yKSPV

— dotAfrica (@africandomain) February 15, 2017

Blah racist blah blah conspiracy blah blah blah… nutty. Blah.
Blah reporting blah damned blah story blah forever blah blah bored blah blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah.