ICANN to “stand up” to Russia at the ITU

ICANN is a non-political organization, but it cannot tolerate the platform of the Russian standing to be the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union.

CEO Göran Marby took a fairly bellicose tone in denouncing the platform at two sessions of ICANN 75 in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, warning that the election of Russian nominee Rashid Ismailov could not only destroy ICANN’s multistakeholder model but also internet interoperability in general.

Russia is pushing a position under which the powers of organizations such as ICANN, the Regional Internet Registries and standards-setting groups would be consumed by the ITU and managed in an multilateral, rather than multistakeholder, fashion.

Marby was asked a question about the election, due to take place at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest starting next week, during an open-mic Q&A with the community yesterday.

“We are not campaigning against, but we are reflecting on the fact that one of the candidates does not like what you do here, your ability to walk up to the microphone and ask that question. You can’t do that in the UN setting,” he said.

“There’s a really really big risk that we will lose that ability for you,” he said, adding that he is concerned “that people around the world might not be able to connect to one single interoperable internet”.

“We are strictly neutral when it comes to who becomes the Secretary General,” he said. “We vividly oppose one of the platforms, that the Russian potential Secretary General stands for.”

“We are not a political organization, but we stand up one time… when we see proposals that would disconnect people from the internet or actually make it impossible for you to be here and make policies, that is when we go out and react. That’s the only time,” he said.

During remarks earlier in the day at the ICANN 75 opening ceremony, Marby addressed the same topic in slightly more evocative terms.

“What we do is like fighting for peace. You don’t fight for peace when war has broken out, you fight for peace before. We have to continue to work for the multistakeholder model now before it’s challenged too much,” he said.

Was this a deliberate allusion to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Marby and/or his speechwriter can’t have been blind to the connotations.

Ismailov’s opponent in the election is Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American with a much more acceptable policy platform.

ICANN earlier in the year published a paper (pdf) analyzing Russia’s stance on global internet policy. Marby’s remarks this week echo a warning he gave a year ago at ICANN 72.

In an explicit response to the opening ceremony remarks, on Tuesday Russia’s representative on the Governmental Advisory Committee offered a passionate defense of the Russian candidate, telling the GAC and ICANN’s board that his platform is about the “harmonization of ICT”.

He said that the role of the ITU secretary general is a neutral one, and not representative of any particular state.

During the same session Ukraine pleaded for more support, specifically in the form of satellite internet terminals, following ICANN’s donation of $1 million to support infrastructure projects in the war zone.

A million people are without internet access, he said, and rebuilding fiber networks destroyed by Russian missiles will take months because the fields are often mined.

Surprise new chair for ICANN announced

The King is dead, long live the Queen!

(Too soon?)

ICANN announced today that Tripti Sinha will be taking over as chair of the organization’s board of directors this Thursday, with Maarten Botterman taking an unexpectedly early bath.

The news was delivered by Botterman this morning during the opening ceremony of ICANN 75, being held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this week. He added that Danko Jevtovic will take over from Leon Sanchez as vice-chair.

No reason for the decision, which appears to have been made at a board meeting yesterday, was given.

While Botterman’s second term on the board ends this week, he was only recently reselected by the Nominating Committee for a third and final three-year term, a term he appears to be intent on serving as a regular director.

Sinha becomes ICANN’s seventh chair since its inception, and the third (after Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker) to come very much from a technology rather than legal or policy-making background.

She’s currently CTO at the University of Maryland, where among other things she oversees the university’s operation of D-root, one of the internet’s 13 DNS root servers.

On the ICANN board, she already sits on five committees and chairs the Board Governance Committee.

She was born in India, but seems to have lived in the US for most of her adult life. It’s not clear whether she’s in the North America or Asia-Pacific column for purposes of geographic diversity under ICANN bylaws.

Jevtovic comes from the ccTLD world in Serbia, first with Yugoslavia’s .yu and then with Serbia’s current .rs domain.

Sinha’s new role comes with a salary bump from $45,000 to $75,000 and, one presumes, much more stress.

Both Sinha and Jevtovic are NomCom appointees with two years left on their second terms.

Last-minute bombshell in Nominet election — it may be ILLEGAL

Nominet’s current non-executive director election may be illegal, according to a legal opinion commissioned by one of the candidates.

Candidate Jim Davies, along with fellow former director Angus Hanton, say barrister Iain Mitchell KC has said that elements of Nominet’s voting practices are “clearly unlawful”, and they’ve asked Nominet to scrap them.

If Nominet accepts the opinion, it could mean the election — which is going on right now — could become a one-member-one-vote affair rather than the current system where you get more votes based on how many .uk domains you manage.

Davies and the other signatories to a letter sent to Nominet believe the company’s extremely complex “weighted voting” system is illegal under the UK’s Companies Act. They write:

This is a very serious issue for Nominet, particularly as there is an AGM and Board Election happening soon. Based on counsel’s opinion, we believe the only lawful way to conduct that meeting (and future meetings) would be one member, one vote.

Should Nominet agree and change the system, it would mean that big registrars such as GoDaddy and Tucows would get the same number of votes — one — as individual Nominet members.

This would most likely advantage IP lawyer Davies and fellow candidate Kieren McCarthy, who is a reporter rather than a registrar, at the expense of third candidate Volker Greimann, who works for Key-Systems, the large registrar owned by CentralNic.

Davies, in echoes of the PublicBenefit.uk campaign that led to a boardroom bloodbath last year, has set up a web site at WeightedVoting.uk to encourage fellow members to read the opinion and sign the letter.

While confidence in the company has arguably improved under its new leadership, member hackles were raised recently with the admission that Nominet had spunked millions of dollars on a failed attempt to enter the security market.

Voting in the NED elections began on Monday and runs until the end of the month. The results will be announced October 5, the day before Nominet’s AGM.

UPDATE: A Nominet spokesperson reached out with the following statement:

We acknowledge the receipt of a legal opinion commissioned by one of our members. We believe that our long-standing election process and voting rights are lawful and are being applied in accordance with our founding documents. We believe they have served and continue to serve both Nominet and its members well. Therefore, the election and voting will continue as planned. We will consult with our legal advisers prior to responding to our member.

ICANN finished year $24 million ahead but loses $29 million on the markets

ICANN came out of fiscal 2022 $24 million ahead of its budget due to lower travel expenses and greater domain sales than expected, but blew $29 million on poor investments, according to financial results published today.

The Org ended June having received $150 million, mostly from registries and registrars, which was $5 million more than it had budgeted for.

Fixed, variable and transaction-based fees accounted for most of the difference. Registrars sold more domains than ICANN predicted, and fewer registries and registrars cancelled their contracts.

Verisign of course was the biggest contributor, accounting for over a third of revenue — $49 million for .com/.net fees alone. On the registrar side, GoDaddy contributed over $11.2 million.

GoDaddy’s contribution is actually a little higher than all the 131 participating ccTLDs’ voluntary donations combined, which came in at $11 million.

Expenses were $125 million, against a budget of $143 million. That was mostly due to the fact that two of its three meetings were held entirely online, so ICANN didn’t have to pay its staff and volunteers’ travel expenses.

It spent $3 million on meetings in the year, against a $10 million budget.

When the budget was passed in May 2021, ICANN had expected all three meetings to take place in person, with international travel “unrestricted” despite the pandemic.

Expenses were also affected by a lower-than-expected headcount. Average headcount was down by three on FY21 at 389, compared to the 405 predicted by the budget.

Despite the over-performance at the operating level, ICANN’s balance sheet actually declined compared to a year earlier.

It had funds under management of $505.5 million compared to $520 million, having lost $29 million due to “investment declines in the Reserve Fund due to volatility in the financial markets”. Its portfolio is still $9 million ahead compared to five years ago, however.

Whois Disclosure System to cost up to $3.3 million, run for one year

ICANN has published its game plan for rolling out a Whois Disclosure System ahead of next week’s ICANN 75 public meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

The Org reckons the system will take nine months to build and will cost up to $3.3 million to develop and run for two years, although it might wind up getting shut down after just one year.

The Whois Disclosure System, previously known as SSAD Light, is a mechanism whereby anyone with an ICANN account — probably mainly IP lawyers in practice — can request unredacted private Whois data from registrars.

The system is to be built using retooled software from the current Centralized Zone Data Service, which acts as a hub for researchers who want to request zone files from gTLD registry operators.

ICANN’s design paper (pdf), which contains many mock-ups of the likely user interface, describes the new system like this:

Just as in CZDS, a requestor navigates to the WHOIS Disclosure System web page, logs into their ICANN Account, and is presented with a user experience much like the current CZDS. In this experience, requestors can see pending and past requests as well as metadata (timestamps, status, etc.) associated with those requests. For a requestor’s pending requests, they can see all the information related to that request.

Requests filed with the system will be routed to the relevant registrar via the Naming Services Portal, whereupon the registrar can choose how to deal with it. The system doesn’t change the fact that registrars have this discretion.

But the system will be voluntary for not only the requesters — who can still contact the registrar directly if they wish — but also the registrars. One can imagine smaller and frequently abused registrars won’t want the hassle.

The cost of this system will be $2.7 million in staffing costs, with $90,000 in external licensing costs and another $500,000 in contingency costs. Because ICANN has not budgeted for this, it will come from the Supplemental Fund for Implementation of Community Recommendations, which I believe currently has about $20 million in it.

This is far and away cheaper than the full-fat SSAD originally proposed by the GNSO, which ICANN in January estimated could cost up to $27 million to build over five years.

While cheaper, there are still substantial questions remaining about whether it will be popularly used, and whether it will be useful in getting private Whois data into the hands of the people who say they need it.

ICANN is saying that the Whois Disclosure System will run for one year “at which point the data sets collected will be analyzed and presented for further discussion between the GNSO Council and Board”.

The design paper will be discussed at multiple ICANN 75 sessions, starting this weekend.

New ICANN contracts chart the death throes of Whois

Whois is on its death bed, and new versions of ICANN’s standard contracts put a timeline to its demise.

The Org has posted proposed updates to its Registrar Accreditation Agreement and Registry Agreement, and most of the changes focus on the industry-wide transition from the Whois standard to the newer Registration Data Access Protocol.

We’re only talking about a change in the technical spec and terminology here. There’ll still be query services you can use to look up the owner of a domain and get a bunch of redactions in response. People will probably still even refer to it as “Whois”.

But when the new RAA goes into effect, likely next year, registrars and registries will have roughly 18 months to make the transition from Whois to RDAP.

Following the contract’s effective date there’ll be an “RDAP Ramp-up Period” during which registrars will not be bound by RDAP service-level agreements. That runs for 180 days.

After the end of that phase, registrars will only have to keep their Whois functioning for another 360 days, until the “WHOIS Services Sunset Date”. After that, they’ll be free to turn Whois off or keep it running (still regulated by ICANN) as they please.

ICANN’s CEO and the chair of the Registrars Stakeholder Group will be able to delay this sunset date if necessary.

Most registrars already run an RDAP server, following an order from ICANN in 2019. IANA publishes a list of the service URLs. One registrar has already lost its accreditation in part because it did not deploy one.

There’ll be implementation work for some registrars, particularly smaller ones, to come into compliance with the new RAA, no doubt.

There’ll also be changes needed for third-party software and services that leverage Whois in some way, such as in the security field or even basic query services. Anyone not keeping track of ICANN rules could be in for a sharp shock in a couple of years.

The contracted parties have been negotiating these changes behind closed doors for almost three years. It’s been almost a decade since the last RAA was agreed.

The contracts are open for public comment until October 24.

ICANN throws out prostitution complaint

ICANN has rejected a complaint from a man about a web site apparently offering prostitution services.

As I reported last month, the American had filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN’s board of directors after his complaints to Compliance about Namecheap were rejected.

He’s unhappy that US-based Namecheap won’t take down the domain adultsearch.com, which operates as a marketplace for sex workers, many of whom are offering services that may well be illegal in most parts of the US.

But ICANN’s Board Governance Committee rejected the complaint (pdf) for lack of standing.

While the ruling is procedural, rather than substantive, the BGC does spend quite a lot of time tying itself in knots to show that while the complainant may well believe prostitution is harmful to society in general, he failed to state how he, specifically, had been harmed.

The decision also directly references the part of the request the requester has specifically asked to be redacted (but was not).

Ducos a shoo-in for GNSO Council chair

The next chair of ICANN’s GNSO Council will be GoDaddy’s Sebastien Ducos.

Ducos, who manages TLD clients for GoDaddy Registry, will stand unopposed for the role after the GNSO’s Non-Contracted Parties House decided not to field a candidate.

The election, which seems a formality, will take place at the end of ICANN 75, the Org’s Annual General Meeting, in Kuala Lumpur and Zoom next month.

Australian Ducos has been a vice-chair of the Council since the last AGM.

He will replace Philippe Fouquart, an employee of Orange from the NCPH, after his second one-year term ends.

There hasn’t been a contested election for Council chair since 2018.

It’s hustings season at Nominet

Hustings are very much in vogue in the UK right now. Two Conservative politicians have been clouding our airwaves, bickering over who should lead the country, for weeks, and now two candidates to join the board of .uk registry Nominet are following suit.

The London Domain Name Summit, a two-day, free-to-attend domainer conference in London next week, will host a debate between local lads Jim Davies and Kieren McCarthy, two of the three candidates for an opening non-executive director spot on Nominet’s board.

CentralNic lawyer Volker Greimann, the third candidate, who is based in Germany, will not be in attendance.

The debate between reporter McCarthy and IP lawyer Davies will take place next Tuesday at 1600 local time (1500 UTC) and will apparently be live-streamed for people not able to attend in person.

McCarthy, who according to Twitter chatter is a paid-up exhibitor, also gets a solo speaking spot on Monday at 1830 local time. Nominet, not an exhibitor, is hosting an event the same day.

All three candidates are standing for election at a time when Nominet has recently come under new leadership after several years of scandal that cumulated last year in a member coup.

The latest controversy emerged last month when it came out that Nominet blew about $23.5 million on an abortive attempt to get into the security market in the US, something the candidates all hope to address.

According to Nominet, all three candidates have their candidacy statements published in the members area of the web site. Davies and McCarthy have also published commentary on their respective blogs.

Voting opens September 12.

ICANN rushes mystery directors onto board in apparent bylaws breach

ICANN is hurrying two new directors onto its board despite that fact that hardly anybody, apparently including the people who this week gave them the nod, seemed to know who they are.

The Org also seems to have technically breached its bylaws with the timing of the move, which also sees chair Maarten Botterman appointed for another three-year term.

Earlier this week the Empowered Community Administration, which has broad powers to hire and fire directors, submitted ICANN-drafted letters formally approving this year’s Nominating Committee picks — Botterman, Christopher Chapman and Sajidur Rahman.

But I’m told that the ECA, like the rest of us, were not given any information by ICANN about the two newcomers beyond their names and the geographic regions they hail from. They were basically waved onto the board blind, it seems.

Photographs subsequently published on the NomCom web site confirm the two directors’ identities. They’re the former head of the Australian Communications and Media Authority Chris Chapman, and Indonesian venture capitalist Sajid Rahman of MyAsiaVC.

Judging by the ICANN bylaws, approval by the ECA — which comprises one person from each of the ASO, the ccNSO, the GNSO, the ALAC and the GAC — is pretty much just a rubber-stamp. All the due diligence is done by NomCom and the Org.

But the appointments appear to amount to a technical bylaws breach on timing grounds, coming about a month late. The bylaws state:

At least two months before the commencement of each annual meeting, the Nominating Committee shall give the EC Administration (with a copy to the Decisional Participants and Secretary) written notice of its nomination of Directors for seats with terms beginning at the conclusion of the annual meeting, and the EC Administration shall promptly provide the Secretary (with a copy to the Decisional Participants) with written notice of the designation of those Directors.

This year’s AGM will be held in Kuala Lumpur from September 17, with the new directors taking their seats at its conclusion on September 22. So NomCom seems to have missed its “at least two months before” deadline by a month. ECA approval came August 15.

This year’s AGM is a little earlier than usual, which may help explain the problem. They’re usually held in October or November, and there hasn’t been one held in September since 2001.

NomCom also missed the two-month window in 2020, by an even bigger margin, for entirely understandable pandemic-related reasons. It announced its selections just a couple of weeks before the AGM.