Iran rep reported to ICANN Ombudsman, again

Iran’s Governmental Advisory Committee representative has found himself reported to ICANN’s Ombudsman for alleged bad behavior for the second time in just a few months.

Outspoken GACer Kavouss Arasteh was referred to Ombudsman Herb Waye by consultant John Laprise, according to posts on mailing lists and social media.

Both men serve on an ICANN volunteer working group that is looking at matters related to the jurisdiction in which ICANN operates.

The group’s discussions have recently become extremely fractious, largely due to a series of combative emails and teleconference interventions from Arasteh.

Laprise eventually said on the list that Arasteh was being a “bad actor”, adding that “his tone, manner, and insinuations are detrimental and indeed hostile to the process.”

He later said on Facebook that he had reported the matter to the Ombudsman.

The spat centered on an August 1 teleconference in which members of the so-called WS2-Jurisdiction working group heard a briefing from ICANN lawyers on the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees international trade sanctions in the US.

As well as enforcing sanctions against countries including Iran, OFAC maintains a list of people and organizations, many of them Iranian, that American companies are forbidden from doing business with.

It impacts ICANN because the organization in its normal course of business is often obliged to deal with ccTLD registries in sanctioned nations, for which it needs to apply for OFAC licenses.

Arasteh initially complained multiple times that the meeting had been rescheduled for August 1 — apparently with his initial consent — which is a national holiday in his home nation of Switzerland.

He also fought for ICANN lawyers to be asked to provide, at very short notice, a written briefing paper on OFAC, answering the group’s questions, prior to the teleconference taking place.

On neither issue did he receive support from fellow volunteers, something for which he seemed to blame group chair Greg Shatan, an intellectual property lawyer.

Arasteh’s criticisms of an increasingly weary Shatan sometimes seemed to border on conspiracy theory. All other working group members who publicly expressed an opinion said Shatan was doing a fine job herding this particular set of cats.

During the teleconference itself, Arasteh ate up the first five or six minutes of allotted time with a rambling, barely comprehensible complaint about the format of the meeting, compelling Shatan to eventually ask for his mic to be cut off.

In emails over the next 48 hours, the GAC rep continued his tirade against what he perceives as Shatan’s bias against him and called again for ICANN legal to provide a formal set of written answers to questions.

Some fellow group members believe Arasteh’s defensive and confrontational approach is merely a clash of cultures between his usual style of government diplomacy and the staid, tediously polite style of ICANN working group interactions.

Others are less charitable.

Still, the question of whether the latest WG friction has infringed any of ICANN’s “Expected Standards of Behavior” now appears to be in the hands of the Ombudsman.

Arasteh was also reported to Waye back in May, when he accused the chairs of a different ICANN working group of trying to exclude governmental voices from new gTLD policy-making by scheduling teleconferences at times he found inconvenient.

Waye subsequently reported that the complaint had been resolved between the parties.

In June, he said he was proactively monitoring a third working group mailing list after receiving allegations of harassment. That was unrelated to Iran.

Halloran made ICANN’s first chief data protection officer

ICANN lifer Dan Halloran has added the title of chief data protection officer to his business card.

The long-serving deputy general counsel was named ICANN’s first CDPO on Friday, continuing to report to his current boss, general counsel John Jeffrey.

Privacy is currently the hottest topic in the ICANN community, with considerable debate about how contracted parties might be able to reconcile their ICANN obligations with forthcoming European data protection legislation.

But Halloran’s new role only covers the protection of personal data that ICANN itself handles; it does not appear to give him powers in relation to ongoing discussions about how registries and registrars comply with data privacy regulations.

He will be tasked with overseeing privacy frameworks for data handling and conducting occasional reviews, ICANN said.

ICANN has on occasion messed up when it comes to privacy, such as when it accidentally published the home addresses of new gTLD applicants in 2012, or when it made sensitive applicant financial data openly searchable on its applicant portal.

Halloran joined ICANN over 17 years ago and before his deputy GC position served as chief registrar liaison.

EFF recommends against new gTLDs

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recommended that domain registrants concerned about intellectual property “bullies” steer clear of new gTLDs.

The view is expressed in a new EFF report today that is particularly critical of policies in place at new gTLD portfolio registries Donuts and Radix.

The report (pdf) also expresses strong support for .onion, the pseudo-TLD available only to users of the Tor browser and routing network, which the EFF is a long-term supporter of.

The report makes TLD recommendations for “security against trademark bullies”, “security against identity theft and marketing”, “security against overseas speech regulators” and “security against copyright bullies”.

It notes that no one TLD is “best” on all counts, so presents a table explaining which TLD registries — a broad mix of the most popular gTLD and ccTLD registries — have which relevant policies.

For those afraid of trademark “bullies”, the EFF recommends against 2012-round new gTLDs on the basis that they all have the Uniform Rapid Suspension service. It singles out Donuts for special concern due to its Domain Protected Marks List, which adds an extra layer of protection for trademark owners.

On copyright, the report singles out Donuts and Radix for their respective “trusted notifier” schemes, which give the movie and music industries a hotline to report large-scale piracy web sites.

These are both well-known EFF positions that the organization has expressed in previous publications.

On the other two issues, the report recommends examining ccTLDs for those which don’t have to kowtow to local government speech regulations or publicly accessible Whois policies.

In each of the four areas of concern, the report suggests taking a look at .onion, while acknowledging that the pseudo-gTLD would be a poor choice if you actually want people to be able to easily access your web site.

While the opinions expressed in the report may not be surprising, the research that has gone into comparing the policies of 40-odd TLD registries covering hundreds of TLDs appears on the face of it to be solid and possibly the report’s biggest draw.

You can read it here (pdf).

Crocker: no date on next new gTLD round

ICANN will NOT set a date for the next round of new gTLD applications, despite recent pleas from registry operators.

That’s according to a letter (pdf) from ICANN chair Steve Crocker to the Registries Stakeholder Group published today.

The RySG had asked (pdf) last month for ICANN’s leadership to set a fourth-quarter 2018 deadline for the next application window.

It said that that drawing a line in the sand would allow potential applicants to plan and would prevent current policy-development processes from being abused to delay the next round.

But Crocker says in his letter that it is up to the ICANN community, not its board of directors, to determine if and when a new round should commence. He wrote:

Once the community completes its work, the Board will consider the community’s recommendations to introduce additional new gTLDs. Without the final findings and recommendations from the review and PDP, the Board won’t be able to determine what needs to be done prior to the opening of another application process…

The Registry Stakeholder Group’s letter suggests that by setting a date for the opening of another application process, the Board will provide the community with a target date to work toward. Although the Board setting a date would achieve this, doing so might contravene the multi-stakeholder process that allows for the community to have the necessary discussions to arrive at consensus, and to determine the timing of their own work

It seems this is an instance in which the board does not like the idea of setting policy in a top-down manner.

Crocker said the two remaining gating factors for a next round are the consumer choice and competition review of the first round, which is ongoing, and the GNSO’s New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Policy Development Process (PDP).

The PDP has now been going on for 18 months and yet discussions remain at a very early stage, with hardly any preliminary recommendations being agreed upon.

There’s not even agreement on foundational issues such as whether to carry on dividing the program into discreet application rounds or to start a first-come, first-served process.

The RySG had suggested in its letter that the next window could open after certain threshold issues had been resolved but before all policy work was complete, and that at the very least ICANN staff should get to work on a new version of the Applicant Guidebook while the PDP is still ongoing.

But Crocker again responded that the staff cannot get to work on implementation until the board has considered the community’s final recommendations.

ICANN’s most recent estimates for the opening of the next round would see applications accepted in 2020, eight years after the last round.

Attendance dips for ICANN in Johannesburg

The number of people showing up for ICANN’s latest meeting was down compared to previous meetings, just-released statistics show.

The organization reported today that there were 1,353 attendees at the ICANN 59 meeting in Johannesburg last month, down from 1,436 at the comparable Helsinki meeting a year ago.

It was also down from the 2,089 people attending the Copenhagen meeting in March, but that’s to be expected due to the mid-year meeting having a shorter schedule more tightly focused on policy work.

It also seems to be typical for meetings in Africa to get lower attendance than meetings elsewhere in the world, given the relatively low participation at last year’s Marrakech meeting.

But attendance from the local region spiked again. There were 498 Africans there, 36% of the total. By comparison, just 5% of Copenhagen attendees were African.

This tilted the gender balance towards males, with declared female participation down to 31% from 33% in Copenhagen and 32% in Helsinki.

The number of people attending their first ICANN meeting was 33% of the total. That’s much higher than the 20% reported for Copenhagen. About two thirds of the noobs were from Africa.

These numbers are among the thousands of statistics released in the ICANN 59 roundup today, which for the first time included some eye-opening facts about food and drink consumption at the venue, reproduced here.

If these numbers are correct, there was one waiter or member of service staff for every 2.7 meeting attendees, which strikes me as a weirdly balanced ratio.