Single-letter .com case back in court

The domainer trying to get his hands on all the remaining single-character .com and .net domain names has re-filed his lawsuit against ICANN.

Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com (dba First Place Internet) has filed an amended complaint in a California court, after the judge threw out his initial complaint in March. He alleges deceptive trade practices and breach of contract, among other things.

His claim is that he has sole rights to all unregistered single-character .com and .net domains, such as 1.com and a.net, because he’s registered the matching domains in Verisign’s internationalized domain name transliterations, such as the Hebrew קום. or the Korean/Hangul .닷컴.

He paid Verisign, via registrar CSC Global, $25,285 for 1.닷넷 back in 2017 and reckons he was also buying the exclusive rights to 1.com and 1.net. The same arguments applies to the dozens of other ASCII.IDN domains he registered, according to the complaint.

The argument rests almost entirely on a letter (pdf) from Verisign to ICANN in 2013, in which the registry sets out some of its plans for its IDN gTLDs.

The letter is imprecisely worded, to the point where if you squint a bit, drop some acid, and hit your head against the wall a few times, you might be persuaded that Verisign is saying it would be willing to sell the rights to 1.com for 25 grand.

The complaint says this letter is “ICANN policy”, and the rest of its arguments are pretty much based on that incorrect premise.

ICANN has already filed a demurrer, asking the court to throw out the complaint again, largely on the grounds that the letter is not “policy” and ICANN doesn’t have a contract with any of the plaintiffs that it could be accused of breaching anyway.

The latest filings can be found here.

ICANN to slash costs as Verisign’s magic money tree dries up

ICANN is looking for $8 million of cost savings, $3 million more than it expected a quarter ago, amid gloomy predictions about the domain industry’s likely performance this year.

The Org last week told community members that it’s having to revise its expected revenue down by $3 million to $145 million after it became clear domain sales won’t be as good as previously thought. The new budget is due to be approved by the board this coming weekend.

“ICANN faces an inflation of its costs and also happens to face a lack of inflation of its funding,” CFO Xavier Calvez said on one of two conference calls explaining the changes.

ICANN’s bean counters are now predicting a 4% decline in transaction fees from legacy gTLDs — a line item mostly comprising .com — for ICANN’s fiscal 2025, which begins this July. Back in December, when the first draft of the budget was published, the prediction was for 0% growth.

The grim numbers match Verisign’s own growth story for the rest of the calendar year. Company bosses last week predicted .com/.net to grow at between 0.25% and negative 1.75%, a downwards revision on its guidance in February.

Talking to Verisign and other registries and registrars and looking at the monthly transaction data they file is the main way ICANN formulates its budget predictions.

“We gauged very strong expectations of a contraction in domain name registrations,” ICANN programs director Mukesh Chulani said.

Meanwhile, ICANN estimates transaction fees for new gTLDs will increase 7% in FY25, obviously from a much lower base then legacy, compared to the December estimate of 2% growth.

ICANN was already expecting its funding to miss its spending requirements by $5 million, but that figure is now $8 million. But rather than run ops at a loss, ICANN has instead put this number on a line labelled “Cost Savings Initiatives” in order to present a balanced bottom line.

Where these cost savings might come from doesn’t seem to have been figured out yet, and there’s some community worry that services might be affected by cuts.

There was some talk of finding efficiencies in the travel budget or with contractors, but those budgets are $13 million and $24 million respectively, so any cuts there could be swingeing.

By far the largest expenditure line item is staff, which costs $90 million. But there’s been no change to the expected number of ICANN full-timers in the budget, so layoffs don’t seem to be on the cards just yet.

Community revolts over ICANN’s auction proceeds power grab

Parts of the ICANN community have revolted over ICANN’s move to make it easier to turn off the mechanisms used to appeal its decisions.

Both registries and registrars, along with their usual opponents in the business and intellectual property communities, have told the Org that a proposal to change its foundational bylaws are overly broad and creates new powers to diminish ICANN’s accountability.

Meanwhile, the Intellectual Property Constituency seems to have escalated its beef with ICANN related to the proposals, entering into a Cooperative Engagement Process with ICANN. CEP is usually, but not always, a precursor to an expensive, quasi-judicial Independent Review Process case.

The row relates to the Grant Program, which launched a month ago and will see ICANN hand out $217 million it gained from auctioning registry contracts during the 2012 new gTLD program application round.

The rules of the program were developed by the Cross-Community Working Group on New gTLD Auction Proceeds.

The CCWG was afraid that ICANN might wind up frittering away most of the money on legal fees unless unsuccessful grant applicants, and third parties, were banned from appealing grant decisions they didn’t like. So its Recommendation 7 proposed a bylaws amendment that would prevent the Independent Review Process and Request for Reconsideration process from being used with reference to the Grant Program.

What ICANN came up with instead is a bylaws amendment that could be applied not only to the Grant Program, but also potentially to any future activities.

Specifically, ICANN’s proposed amendment gives future CCWGs, assuming they have sufficient community representation, the ability to recommend exceptions to the accountability mechanisms, which ICANN could then accept without having the amend the bylaws every time.

But almost every constituency that has filed an opinion on the proposals so far thinks ICANN has gone too far.

The IPC said says ICANN’s proposal is “unacceptably broad and exceeds what is necessary to give effect to Recommendation 7” adding:

The IPC is also concerned that making such a broad Bylaws amendment could have the consequence of normalizing the idea of removing access to accountability mechanisms, rather than this being an exceptional event. This is not something that should be encouraged.

The Registries Stakeholder Group said the proposal “creates an alternative path for amending the Bylaws that contradicts the existing amendment processes”

“The Accountability Mechanisms are foundational to ICANN’s legitimacy. Access to Accountability Mechanisms should be prevented only in rare circumstances with the clear support of the Empowered Community,” it added.

The Registrar Stakeholder Group concurred, writing:

Robust Accountability Mechanisms are a lynchpin of ICANN’s broader accountability structure. They should only be disallowed, if ever, in very specific circumstances, and as a result of the full bylaw amendment process. The proposed bylaws amendment vests CCWGs with the power to disallow Accountability Mechanisms which we believe is inappropriate.

Several commenters pointed out that CCWGs are less formal ICANN policy-making structure, with fewer checks and balances than regular Policy Development Processes.

The only dissenting view came from the At-Large Advisory Committee, which said it “strongly supports” ICANN’s proposed amendment, writing:

Although any limitation in accountability is potentially onerous, the ALAC is comfortable that the three conditions proposed in the amendment only allow such limitations in situations where a more specific Bylaw limitation would also be approved by the Empowered Community.

In a related development, the IPC has taken the highly unusual move of entering CEP with ICANN, suggesting it is on the IRP path.

The IPC had filed a Request for Reconsideration late last year, at a time when it appeared that ICANN had outright rejected Recommendation 7 (having previously approved it), but ICANN’s board threw it out mostly on the grounds that the IPC could not show it had been harmed, which the IPC found curious.

If the IPC were to go to IRP, it would be unprecedented. The mechanism has only ever been used by companies defending their commercial interests, never by one of ICANN’s own community groups on a matter of principle.

ICANN publishes its Woke Manifesto. Here’s my hot take

ICANN’s antics rarely surprise me after close to a quarter-century of coverage, but today it’s published what I can only describe as its “Woke Manifesto” and while reading through it this afternoon I pretty much peeled my uvula raw and ragged, alternating as I did between howls of outrage and uncontrollable fits of incredulous laughter.

On the latest step of its descent into solipsistic pomposity, Org has released its Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit, an interactive web page and associated documents and survey templates designed to help the ICANN community’s various constituencies become more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

“It is designed to empower our community groups in assessing, measuring, and promoting diversity within and across their membership,” ICANN wrote in its introduction, attributed to outgoing policy VP David Olive.

A laudable goal in theory, but in practice what ICANN has come up with is often hilarious, poorly sourced, badly edited, baffling, hypocritical, self-contradictory, and condescending to both the people it wants to include and the people it perceives are already over-included. In parts, sadly, it’s borderline misandrist and maybe a little bit accidentally racist.

The Manifesto is the result of ICANN’s work to implement the recommendations of the Final Report (pdf) of the Cross Community Working Group on Accountability, the most-recent phase of one of ICANN’s interminable navel-gazing exercises.

Recommendation 1.6 of that report states:

ICANN staff should provide support and tools for the SO/AC/Groups to assist them in assessing their diversity in an appropriate manner. ICANN should also identify staff or community resources that can assist SO/ACs or other components of the community with diversity-related activities and strategies.

Or does it? If we believe the new Manifesto, Rec 1.6 actually states:

ICANN staff should provide support and tools for the SO/AC/groups to assist them in assessing their diversity in an appropriate manner. ICANN should also identify staff or community resources that can assist SO/ACs or other components of the community with diversity-related activities and strategies.D&I requires equity to succeed.

The emphasis in that second pull-quote is mine. The lack of a space after the period before the last sentence is ICANN’s error.

It looks like at some point, possibly quite recently, ICANN has sneaked in the reference to “equity”.

If you’re triggered by the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) abbreviation, best look away now. The Manifesto contains all the other zeitgeisty buzz-words you probably also hate.

Microaggressions? Check. Privilege? Check. Identity? Check. Intersectionality? Check. Unconscious bias? Check. Psychological safety? Check.

An easily overlooked footnote seems to explain why “equity” has made its way into the document:

In this toolkit we refer to “diversity” and “inclusion,” but “equity” is also a significant concept to understand. Equity refers to fairness and justice, recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must therefore make adjustments to imbalances; for example promoting the inclusion of people from marginalized/underrepresented populations. It is distinguished from equality, which means providing the same to all.

I take no position on whether this is a good or bad way to tackle inequality of outcome, if it exists, at ICANN, but let’s be honest, this is just another way of describing what has been known as “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action” in other contexts.

But while affirmative action usually refers to issues of race in North America, such as in the ongoing debate about university admission policies, ICANN’s Manifesto is notable for containing no direct references to skin color whatsoever.

ICANN’s “7 key elements of diversity”, which come from the CCWG-Accountability’s report, are: geographical/regional representation, language, gender, age, physical disability, diverse skills, and stakeholder group or constituency.

Let’s look at what the Manifesto says about some of these identity categories. Yes, I’m going there.

“You were so worried you came from Iran”

Possibly the most egregiously condescending and baffling part of the Manifesto is “Ideas for indivdual action” (pdf) (the misspelling of “individual” is in the original, in the title, on the cover page), which offers suggested language to avoid offending people on the basis of gender, age, disability, or geography.

I’ve no idea to whom this document is addressed (I infer it’s able-bodied, Anglophone men), but it seems ICANN thinks it has a problem with people referring to East Asian community members as “Orientals”. Because apparently it’s the 1950s. In the same breath, it suggests that “whitelist” — a term commonly used in the security industry to refer to lists of explicitly permitted domains — is as offensive as “Chinaman”.

It’s worth noting that the word has been used repeatedly by ICANN itself, including quite recently. Under October 2023 terms, you can’t even apply to be an accredited registrar without agreeing to “whitelist” ICANN’s domains.

In a glorious example of accidental misogyny, the document (six years in the making) later says that people should avoid using forms of address such as “Mrs” or “Ms” because: “This language implies that having a disability is not an ordinary aspect of being human”.

The document is all over the place on issues of gender, on some pages directly contradicting ICANN’s own current practices and on others internally contradicting itself.

At one point, it says “there is no need to mention gender, i.e. saying ‘a female lawyer’ diminishes the professional status of that person”. This from the organization that put out this press release celebrating its two “female leaders”, last year.

At another point, it says we should use “Ombudsperson” instead of “Ombudsman”, while ICANN itself recently made the switch to “Ombuds” instead.

The document is also confused about whether biological reality exists. It tells us that we should accept that “that we are all biased by virtue of our biology” and a couple pages later admonishes against terms such as “biologically male” because “These terms imply that gender is a biological and binary fact that can only be changed through surgery — if at all”.

The most jaw-dropping gender-related moment comes when the document attempts to explain the concept of “privilege” and offers some suggestions as to how those who possess it may overcome it to increase the inclusiveness of their communities.

I swear I’m not making this quote up:

If you have male privilege: Hold back, and allow female community members to speak before you do. If they do speak and are not acknowledged, call this out and give credit for their input.

ICANN wants to make “Ladies first” official doctrine? Perhaps it is the 1950s.

While I don’t doubt there are some women in the ICANN community who would whoop with delight at the chance of automatically getting first dibs at the mic, I know there are many others who will find the suggestion that men should give them special treatment, and subsequently pat them on the head for their contributions, deeply offensive.

“I hear you’re a racist now, Father”

It’s not just gender and age where the Manifesto seems to trip over its own desire to virtue signal without thinking through whether what it’s actually saying is internally consistent.

We’re told to avoid “Asking people of a different appearance where they are from” and a few pages later to “Show an interest in other people’s cultures and backgrounds, ask questions with sincere and respectful curiosity”.

How, ICANN, how?! How can I show an interest in this new friend’s culture if I’m not allowed to ask him where he’s from? Am I only supposed to show an interest in his culture if he shares my “appearance”. Can I only talk to people of the same race? Is that what you want, ICANN?!

We’re talking largely about ICANN meetings here, remember. People from over 100 countries on every continent flock into a drab, windowless conference center three times a year. It’s the most natural thing in the world, unwinding at an after-hours cocktail reception, to ask somebody where they’re from.

If, in the hotel bar after eight hours of patiently not interrupting anybody you think you might not fully intersect with, somebody asks you “Where are you from?”, regardless of whether you share common visual characteristics, chances are it’s because your lanyard has flipped over and they’re asking the name of your employer in order to quickly triage business opportunities.

Speaking as somebody who was an immigrant in the US for the best part of a decade, I know it can be irritating after the hundredth time you’re asked your nationality, but I never found it to be, as ICANN would have us believe, an “aggression”, micro or otherwise.

“I’m Disabled!”

The document defines a microaggression as “the everyday messages we send to other people through our language and behavior that cause them to feel devalued, slighted, discouraged or excluded”. We’re told: “What makes microaggressions offensive isn’t the exact words or actions but, instead, the underlying meaning that reveals bias”.

The first example ICANN gives of a microaggression?

A weak handshake with insincere smile.

I find this hugely offensive on a personal level.

My lived experience is as an effete Englishman with a congenitally pathetic handshake, also suffering from the effects of decades of underfunded NHS dentistry and still recovering from an ischemic stroke that rendered my hand-shaking hand about as strong as a sloth’s yawn.

There’s nothing I find more macroaggressive at an ICANN meeting — apart from perhaps a French woman I barely know attempting to kiss me on the cheek — than an American with a $5,000 suit and teeth the color of a Grand Wizard’s hood trying to tear my arm off at the hip when he or she moves to greet me.

But apparently, under ICANN’s rules, the combination of my disability and nationality makes me the bigot. Thanks ICANN, I’m going to feel really psychologically safe at my next meeting.

“What exactly does IT stand for?”

On a professional level, what really boils my piss is this directive, which appears under a section entitled “Use respectful language”:

Avoid jargon: Minimize your use of jargon, shorthand and acronyms that may not be understood by newcomers or people with different experience and skillsets

I totally agree, of course. It’s long since past the point that even some ICANN community veterans often have no clue what ICANN is talking about without a quick google or reference to a glossary.

So why in the Jiminy Cricket is ICANN introducing this package of Orwellian social guidance with the sentence “I am thrilled to announce the launch of ICANN’s Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit, a pivotal resource to support the implementation of the Work Stream 2 (WS2) recommendations.”

Work Stream 2? Work Stream 2 of what? The blog post doesn’t say, and you have to get several clicks deep into the Manifesto itself before you’ll find a reference to, or link to, the CCWG report.

Who is this aimed at? Insiders. Nobody else could possibly understand this stuff.

ICANN content policing power grab may be dead

A move by ICANN to grant itself more formal “content policing” powers may be dead, after the community was split on the issue and governments failed to back the move.

The Governmental Advisory Committee yesterday sent comments essentially opposing, for now at least, the idea of ICANN reforming its bylaws to give it more powers over internet content, making it very unlikely that ICANN would be able to get such amendments approved by its community overseers.

The comments came a few days after ICANN extended the deadline for responses to a December 2023 consultation on whether applicants in the next new gTLD round should be able to sign up to so-called Registry Voluntary Commitments that regulate content in their zones.

RVCs would be an appendix to ICANN Registry Agreements which would commit a registry to, for example, ban certain types of registrant or certain types of content from domains in their gTLDs.

They’re basically a rebadged version of the Public Interest Commitments found in RAs from the 2012 round, in which the likes of .sucks agreed to ban cyberbullying and .music agreed to ban piracy.

But they’ve got ICANN’s board and lawyers worried, because the Org’s bylaws specifically ban it from restricting or regulating internet content. They’re worried that the RVCs might not be enforceable and that ICANN may wind up in litigation as a result.

ICANN has therefore proposed a framework (pdf) in which RVCs would be enforced by ICANN only after an agreed-upon third-party auditor or monitor found that a registry was out of compliance.

The board sent out several pages of questions to all of its Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees in December, asking among other things whether the bylaws needed to be amended to clarify ICANN’s role, but the responses were split along traditional lines.

Registries and registrars were aligned: there’s no need for a bylaws change, because ICANN should not allow RVCs that regulate content into its contracts at all.

“ICANN should maintain its existing bylaws which exclude content from its mission, and allowing any changes to this could be a slippery slope opening ICANN to becoming a broader ‘content police’,” the Registrars Stakeholder Group said in its response, giving this amusing example:

An example of a content restriction is provided in the proposed implementation framework for .backyardchickens (e.g. no rooster-related content). Restricting rooster-related content would require a significant amount of policing, and could even prohibit valuable content that would benefit such a TLD. For example, a backyard hen farmer might want to promote the pedigree lineage of the roosters that helped sire the hens, show pictures of the roosters that were the fathers, etc. All of this could in theory be prohibited,but would also require review and subjective analysis. This would be a very slippery slope for ICANN, and a substantial departure from its mission. Restricting rooster content would then put ICANN in the place of enforcing laws that prohibit backyard roosters, rather than relying upon the competent government authorities charged with overseeing residential animal husbandry.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group was more strident in its tone, even raising the possibility of legal action if ICANN went down the content policing route, saying “the best way for the Board to address content-related PICs and RVCs is to make it clear that it will reject them categorically.” It added:

The prohibition on content regulation in ICANN’s mission is extremely important and very clear. Mission limitations were a critical part of the accountability reforms that were required before ICANN would be released from US government control in 2016… NCSG will mount a legal challenge to any attempt to dilute this part of the mission.

The opposing view was held by the Business Constituency, the Intellectual Property Constituency, and the At-Large Advisory Committee, which is tasked with representing the interests of ordinary internet users.

They all said that ICANN should be able to allow content-related RVCs in registry contracts, but the IPC and BC said that no bylaws amendment is needed because the bylaws already have a carve-out that enables the Org to enforce PICs in its agreements. The ALAC said a bylaws amendment is needed.

“There is a distinction between ICANN regulating, i.e imposing ‘rules and restrictions on’ services and content, versus the registry operator voluntarily proposing and submitting to such rules and restrictions,” the IPC wrote.

“There is also a distinction between ICANN directly enforcing such rules and restrictions on third parties, i.e. registrants, versus ICANN holding a registry operator to compliance with the specifics of a contractual commitment,” it added.

The last community group to submit a response, fashionably late, was the GAC, which filed its response yesterday having reviewed all the other responses submitted so far. The GAC arguably has the loudest voice at ICANN, but its comments were probably the least committed.

The GAC said that ICANN should only go ahead with a bylaws amendment if it has community backing, but that the community currently lacks consensus. It said, “at this stage there are not sufficient elements to justify commencing a fundamental bylaws amendment to explicitly enable the enforcement of content-related restrictions”.

However, the GAC still thinks that RVCs “will continue to serve as tools for addressing GAC concerns pertaining to new gTLD applications during the next round” and that it wants them to be enforceable by ICANN, with consequences for registries found in breach.

The GAC said that it “will continue to explore options to address this important question”.

This all means that ICANN is a long way from getting the community support it would need to push through a bylaws amendment related to content policing. That’s considered one of the “Fundamental Bylaws” and can only be changed with substantial community support.

Such amendments require the backing of the Empowered Community. That’s the entity created in 2016 to oversee ICANN after it severed ties with the US government. It comprises individuals from five groups — the GAC, the GNSO, the ccNSO, the ALAC and the Address Supporting Organization.

For a fundamental bylaws amendment to get over the line, at least three of these groups must approve it and no more than one must object.

With the GNSO, given its divisions, almost certainly unable to gather enough affirmative votes, the GAC seemingly on the fence, and the ASO and ccNSO recusing themselves so far, only the ALAC looks like a clear-cut yes vote on a possible future bylaws amendment.

Perhaps that’s why ICANN chair Tripti Sinha has written to the ASO and ccNSO in the last few days to ask them whether they’d like to think again about ducking out of the consultation, giving them an extra two weeks to submit comments after the original March 31 deadline.

The ccNSO handles policy for country-code domains and the ASO for IP addresses. Both have previously told ICANN that gTLD policy is none of their business, but Sinha has urged them both to chip in anyway, because “the ICANN Bylaws govern us all”.

PIR’s Diaz to leave domain industry

Public Interest Registry is losing its long-serving policy veep Paul Diaz, who will leave the company and domain industry later this year.

Currently VP of industry affairs, Diaz has been with the .org registry for 12 years, and had 12 years at Network Solutions before that.

A quarter-century in the domain industry should be enough for anyone, and PIR said in a blog post that Diaz “will be retiring from the industry” when he leaves PIR in July.

With his policy role, Diaz has held leadership positions in various ICANN committees, stakeholder groups and working groups over the years.

Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment

ICANN’s two-year experiment in helping connect Whois users with registrars has grown its pool of participating registrars over the last few months, but it has lost a couple of not-insignificant companies along the way.

The Registration Data Request Service launched in November, promising to provide a hub for people to request the private data in Whois records, which is usually redacted. Monthly usage reports, first published in January, showed 72 registrars had joined the scheme at launch.

That number was up to 77, covering about 55% of all registered gTLD domain names, at the end of February, the latest report shows. Seven more registrars have signed up and two have dropped out.

The newbies include WordPress creator Automattic, which has 1.1 million names, PublicDomainRegistry, which has 4.4 million, Register.it, which has 666,000, and Turkiye’s METUnic, which has 235,000.

The two registrars quitting the project, apparently in January, are Combell (formerly Register.eu), which has 1.3 million domains, and Hong Kong’s Kouming.com, which has 57,000.

The latest data shows that RDRS returns a “registrar not supported” error 32.7% of the time.

The running total of requesters was up by 607 to 2937 in February, ICANN’s data shows. They filed 246 requests in the month for an RDRS total of 754 so far. Intellectual property owners were the main users, followed by law enforcement and security researchers.

There were 64 approved requests — where the registrar handed over the Whois data — to make a to-date total of 133. On 50 occasions requests were turned down because the registrar decided it could not turn over the data due to privacy law. These stats break down to 20% approval and 70% denial.

It took an average of 6.92 days to approve a given request — a steep incline from the 3.89 days in January — and 2.92 to deny one.

The full report, containing much more data, can be read as a PDF here.

ICANN opens $217 million Grant Program

Ten million bucks of ICANN’s money is up for grabs, starting today.

The Org has opened the application window for the first stage of its Grant Program, which it hopes to eventually see hand out over the $217 million that it raised auctioning off contested gTLDs during the 2012 new gTLD program application round.

In this first phase, up to $10 million will be distributed, in tranches of between $50,000 and $500,000, to projects that align in some way with ICANN’s technical and internet governance missions.

Only registered non-profits are allowed to apply.

The application window is open until May 24, and ICANN expects its board of directors to make its final decision in December, before grant contracts are signed early next year.

Successful applicants are expected to begin their funded projects, which should last no more than two years, within 60 days of receiving the money, so presumably the cash will start actually making a difference about a year from now.

In a blog post, ICANN CEO Sally Costeron urged readers to spread word of the program on social media, specifically naming Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WeChat, which appears to be a platform used primarily in China.

With ICANN occupying a rarefied, occasionally incestuous corner of the internet, there’s obviously a risk of the perception that the money will be doled out primarily to community insiders, but the rules ban anyone who was involved in crafting the program’s rules from participating.

The rules also ban applicants from using ICANN’s accountability mechanisms, such as the Independent Review Process, to challenge adverse grant decisions, and ICANN wants to change its bylaws to also ban third-party non-applicants from using IRP to appeal decisions they don’t like.

Details on the Grant Program can be found here.

Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)

ICANN is set to loosen up its restrictions on single-character gTLDs in the 2026 application round, according to draft Applicant Guidebook language.

But the exemption to the usual rule applies only to gTLDs written in one script — Han, which is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Applied-for Latin-script strings must be three characters and over (because two-letter strings are reserved for ccTLDs) and internationalized domain names in other, non-Han scripts have a minimum of two characters.

The exemption for Han is being put in place because it’s an ideographic script, where a single character can have a meaning that other, alphabetic scripts would require an entire string to express. Google tells me the Chinese for “water” is 水, for example.

The 2012 gTLD application round did not feature the Han carve-out, and no IDN gTLDs currently in the DNS have fewer than two characters.

The draft rules governing IDNs are expected to be part of the next batch of AGB components that ICANN releases for public comment. The comment period on the first batch ended this week with no particularly controversial issues emerging.

GoDaddy’s next .xxx contract may not be a done deal

ICANN has published what could be the next version of GoDaddy’s .xxx registry contract, and is framing it as very much open to challenge.

The proposed Registry Agreement would scrap the “sponsored” designation from .xxx, substantially reduce GoDaddy’s ICANN fees, and implement the strictest child-protection measures of any gTLD, as well as make ICANN Compliance’s job a lot easier by standardizing terms on the new gTLD program’s Base RA.

But, as eager as ICANN usually is to shift legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs to the Base RA, this time it’s published the contract for public comment as if it’s something GoDaddy is unilaterally proposing.

It’s “ICM’s proposal”, according to ICANN’s public comment announcement, referring to GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry, and “ICM has requested to use the Base Registry Agreement form, as well as to remove the sponsorship designation of the .XXX TLD”.

This is not the language ICANN usually uses when it publishes RA renewals for public comment. Normally, the proposed contracts are presented as the result of bilateral negotiations. In this case, ICANN and ICM have been in renewal discussions for at least three years, but the contract is being presented as something GoDaddy alone has asked for.

The new RA would remove almost all references to sponsorship and to IFFOR, the pretty much toothless “sponsor” organization ICM created to get its .xxx application over the line under the rules of the Sponsored TLD application round that kicked off back in 2003.

Instead, it loads a bunch of Public Interest Commitments, aimed at replicating some of the safeguards IFFOR oversight was supposed to provide, into the Base RA.

GoDaddy would have to ban and proactively seek out and report child sexual abuse material. It would also prohibit practices that suggest the presence of CSAM, such as the inclusion of certain unspecified keywords in .xxx domains or in the corresponding web site’s content or meta-content.

(ICANN notes that these PICs may become unenforceable, depending on the outcome of current discussions about its ability to enforce content-related terms of its contracts).

GoDaddy and IFFOR have both submitted letters arguing that sponsorship is no longer required. The existence of sister gTLDs .adult, .sex, and .porn as unsponsored gTLDs, also in the GoDaddy Registry stable, proves the extra oversight is not needed, they say. Registrants polled do not object to the changes, they say.

GoDaddy’s cost structure would also change under the new deal. Not only would it save $100,000 a year by cutting off IFFOR, but it would also inherit the Base RA’s 50,000-domain threshold for paying ICANN transaction fees.

This likely means it won’t pay the $0.25 transaction fee for a while — .xxx was at about 47,500 domains under management and shrinking at the last count. It hasn’t reported DUM over 50,000 since January 2023.

While the renewal terms may seem pragmatic and not especially unreasonable, they’ve already received at least one public objection.

Consultant Michael Palage, who was on the ICANN board for the first three years of .xxx’s agonizing eight-year path to approval, took to the mic at the ICANN 79 Public Forum earlier this month to urge the board to reject GoDaddy’s request.

Palage said there have been “material violations of the Registry Agreement” that he planned to inform ICANN Compliance about. He added that approving the new deal would set a bad precedent for all the other “community” registries ICANN has contracts with.

The situation has some things in common with the controversy over the proposed acquisition of Public Internet Registry and .org a few years ago, in that the proposal entails ignoring promises made by a registry two decades ago.

Whether .xxx will attract the same level of outrage is debatable — this deal doesn’t involve nearly as many domains and does not talk to the price registrants pay — but it could attract noise from those who believe ICANN should not throw out its principles for the sake of a quieter life.

One place we might look for comment is the Governmental Advisory Committee, which was the biggest reason .xxx took so long to get approved in the first place.

But the timing of the comment period opening is interesting, coming a week after ICANN 79 closed. It will end April 29, about six weeks before the full GAC next meets en masse, at ICANN 80.

It’s not impossible that the new contract could be approved and signed before the governments get a chance to publicly haul ICANN’s board over the coals.