Rejected former director threatens to sue Nominet

The person Nominet barred from standing in its non-executive director election this year says he was unfairly excluded and intends to sue.

Lawyer Jim Davies, who was a Nominet director over a decade ago and stood unsuccessfully last year, said on his blog that he has asked Nominet to suspend the election, slated for September.

“If they refuse, I will apply to court for an injunction,” he wrote.

Davies was one of five people nominated for the NED seat this year. Incumbent Phil Buckingham eventually pulled out of the race, and Nominet said Davies, who the company did not initially name, was denied candidacy for not completing a mandatory security screening, carried out by third-party consultant Reed, by the deadline.

“I have asked Nominet and Reed for disclosure of specific documents as a matter of urgency, in anticipation of making an application to court to obtain a declaration that I am a valid candidate in the 2023 NED election,” Davies wrote.

Nominet’s head of comms Will Guyatt has told members that there was a June 30 deadline to submit information for the screening, which he said Davies missed. He said Davies was reminded of the deadline June 28.

In a lengthy timeline, Davies says that he completed the screening application process June 28, and carried on talking to Reed about the screening as late as July 11, when he was told the screening had not found anything “adverse” to his candidacy.

Part of the problem seems to be that Reed wanted him to submit client invoices as part of the screening, and some of Davies’ clients don’t trust Nominet enough to reveal their relationship with him.

Guyatt told Nominet members that the board had agreed unanimously to exclude Davies’ bid on July 19 to be fair to all candidates.

It’s the second time in the last year that Davies has tried to get a Nominet election called off.

Last year, when he was a candidate, he started his WeightedVoting.uk campaign, which seeks to demonstrate that Nominet’s current voting system illegally breaks the company’s own rules. That election went ahead and was won by Kieren McMcarthy.

Davies was briefly a director of Nominet until 2009 when he quit during a lawsuit filed against him over his domain industry client base.

April 2026 is the date for the next new gTLD round

ICANN has given itself an April 2026 target for accepting the next round of new gTLD applications.

Board chair Tripti Sinha wrote yesterday that ICANN expects the next Applicant Guidebook — the Book of Mormon for the program — to be completed in May 2025 “which enables the application round to open in Q2 2026 (with the goal of April 2026)”.

She noted, as if it needed note, that there could be delays.

Back in May, ICANN had indicated May 2026 as the likely date. That was in a fairly obscure Inside Baseball document. The newly revealed date is an official ICANN announcement.

Other key dates come in the fourth quarter 2025, when ICANN will start accepting applications for its Applicant Support Program and registry service provider pre-evaluation program.

Sinha said the board last week approved an Implementation Plan that lays out the work — and costs — for the next three years.

ICANN expects the program to cost it $70 million between Q2 2023 and Q2 2026. It’s assuming it gets roughly 2,000 applications, in with its experience in 2012. It will hire 29 new staff.

Doria leaving ICANN board a loss for new gTLD program

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has announced its 2023 selections for many of the Org’s leadership positions, and the big shocker is that director Avri Doria is not among the picks.

NomCom said it has reappointed lawyer Sarah Deutsch for a third three-year term, but Doria’s seat is being taken by Catherine Adeya, a Kenyan tech policy expert who describes herself as a “Senior Digital Transformation & Governance Specialist”.

Adeya holds various directorships and was director of research at the World Wide Web Foundation for a couple of years until layoffs in late 2022, according to her socials.

While Adeya seems incredibly well-qualified for the role, I can’t help but lament the loss of Doria’s institutional expertise. She, along with fellow ICANN lifer Becky Burr, have recently been doing a pretty good job working with the GNSO to help oil the wheels of implementation and get the new gTLD program up and running again.

The NomCom picks mean that the number of voting Africans on the 20-person board doubles from one to two and the number of North Americans is reduced by one. The gender mix of course remains the same, with six out of the 16 voting seats filled by women.

There’s been a lot of talk this year, particularly from chair Tripti Sinha, about a goal to achieve “gender parity” in ICANN’s leadership positions, and NomCom’s 2023 appointments certainly seem to reflect that.

Despite as few as 27% of the 155 applicants ticking the female box on the application form, versus 59% male, only two of the nine open positions were filled by men.

Two of the nine hail from Asia-Pacific, with three from Africa, two from North America, and one each from Europe and Latin America.

ICANN’s bylaws require at least one director from each of the five geographic regions and the board every year encourages NomCom to keep gender and geographical diversity in mind when making their picks.

All the NomCom picks take their seats at the end of ICANN’s public meeting this October.

Three candidates stand for Nominet board

Nominet has revealed the three candidates who will stand for election for a non-executive directorship on its board this year.

The candidates are Thomas Rickert, David Thornton and Steve Wright.

German lawyer Rickert is a familiar face in ICANN policy-making circles, currently as a representative of the ISPs constituency on the GNSO Council. He’s head of domains policy at German trade group eco.

Domain investor Thornton, has been on the Nomninet board as a NED before. He stood for reelection in 2021 but received less than 6% of the first-round votes and was beaten by Simon Blackler and Ashley La Bolle.

Wright is COO of hosting company Redcentric, which he joined earlier this year after it acquired his own hosting firm, according to his socials.

Their candidate statements are hidden behind a Nominet membership paywall.

Nominet said two other candidates were nominated but one pulled out — presumably incumbent Phil Buckingham, who has left for personal reasons — and other other failed to provide enough information for Nominet’s security screening.

“As Nominet is entrusted with managing critical internet infrastructure, these checks are important and all directors who join the company are asked to complete them,” the company said.

Candidates do not have to be members, but they do have to be nominated by two members to be eligible. The ballot, in which members get a number of votes dependent on how many domains they manage, will be held in September.

Next round of gTLDs could come much sooner than expected

ICANN’s next new gTLDs application round may be closer than we thought, after a policy working group dramatically reduced the timetable for completing its work.

The Internationalized Domain Names Expedited Policy Development Process team has managed to shave a whopping 13 months off its schedule, potentially leading to a similar period being shaved off the runway to the next application window.

The IDNs EPDP had expected to deliver its final deliverables — policy recommendations on how IDNs are handled in gTLD applications — in November 2025, meaning the earliest they could be adopted by the ICANN board would be March 2026.

Because the IDNs policy is seen as a critical gating factor to the next round commencing, the date ICANN penciled in for the next application window was May 2026.

But now the IDNs EPDP group has revised its deadline down to October 2024, member Donna Austin told the GNSO Council last Thursday. This could mean the board could approve its work in early 2025.

The new target means that IDNs are no longer the biggest delaying factor on the critical path to the next window — that honor now falls on the “closed generics” problem, which a “small team” of the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee have been working on in private all year.

The latest thinking on closed generics is that another EPDP would be formed with an estimated run-time of 96 weeks (22 months) — a mid-2025 end date, in other words.

But there are even question marks over that optimal timeline now, following a less than supportive informal public comment period that closed last week. The closed generics small team has apparently taken a week off to ask itself some fundamental questions.

One possibility that has been suggested to speed things up is to take closed generics out of the critical path by retaining the current de facto ban for the next round.

If that were to happen, we could be looking at an application window in 2025.

But nobody ever won money betting on ICANN hitting deadlines, so take this speculation with a pinch of salt big enough to give an elephant hypertension.

Government to regulate UK-related domain names

The UK government is to trigger a law that would allow it to take control of .uk, .wales, .cymru, .scot and .london if their registries get thoroughly abused and they fail to do anything about it.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said today it is to activate (or “commence”) the parts of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 that give it the power to appoint a new manager for any “UK-related” TLDs.

DSIT would only be able to exercise these powers if the registry in question had let DNS abuse or cybersquatting run amok and failed to follow government orders to fix it. I don’t believe any of the affected registries are currently in such a state.

The government has now launched a consultation, running until the end of August, to get industry and public feedback on its definitions of abuse and what it called “unfair domain use”, meaning cybersquatting.

Nominet, which runs .uk, .wales and .cymru, said in a statement:

The proposed prescribed requirements are consistent with Nominet’s current voluntary procedures, which Government has made clear it believes Nominet operates in a perfectly satisfactory manner. As the Government has had a reserve power to “step in” ever since the DEA was introduced, the purpose of the new provisions is to give Government a formal mechanism to do so, should it ever be required. Our understanding is that Government is enacting these provisions now to ensure the UK meets international best practice on governance of country code top-level domains in line with key global trading partners and future global trading commitments.

Based on my first read, I expect registries and registrars will think it looks generally pretty palatable. It seems DSIT has followed ICANN and the industry’s lead in terms of what qualifies as abuse, and Nominet said in a statement tonight that all three affected registries have been meeting with DSIT to craft the consultation.

Domain investors may take issue with the precise wording of the cybersquatting definition, however.

The definitions of abuse cover the industry standard five bases: malware, phishing, botnets, pharming and spam (insofar as it facilitates any of the other four) and cybersquatting is defined thus:

the pre-emptive, bad faith registration of trade marks as domain names by third parties who do not possess rights in such names. This includes ‘typosquatting’, when an end user takes advantage of common misspellings made by Internet users who are looking for a particular site or a particular provider of goods or services, in order to obtain some benefit.

Domainers will notice the document talks about “bad faith registration”, whereas UDRP talks about bad faith “registration and use”, which is sometimes an important edge-case distinction in cybersquatting disputes. Nominet’s DRS uses bad faith registration “or” use.

Where the consultation gets vague, and the potential for debate arises, is when it talks in general, high-level terms about how dispute resolution procedures should be designed.

Failure to deal with child sexual abuse material, as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in an affected TLD could also result in the government appointing a new registry.

The four gTLDs affected by the legislation all are considered geographic under ICANN rules and had to secure local government support when they applied for their strings. ICANN has a contractual right to terminate them if that government says so.

After the consultation is complete, DSIT intends to make its definitions law through secondary legislation.

This post was updated shortly after publication to add Nominet comments.

ICANN Ombudsman quits

Herb Waye has quit as ICANN’s independent Ombudsman, according to ICANN.

His last day will be September 30 and ICANN is already looking for his replacement, the Org said in a statement.

While the announcement includes a glowing quote from board chair Tripti Sinha it does not contain a quote from Waye and no reason was given for his departure.

Waye has been in the Ombudsman’s office for 16 years, the last seven as the Ombudsman itself.

The Ombudsman is a structurally independent office that deals with issues of fairness within the ICANN community. It’s one way community members can complain about each other and ICANN itself.

Most the work is handled confidentially, so it’s difficult to say exactly what it is the Ombudsman does for their money, but the last few years’ Ombudsman annual reports show the office typically receives a couple hundred complaints a year, maybe a couple dozen of which are actually within its jurisdiction.

Complaints cover issues such as abusive discourse, harassment, and contractual compliance.

Some of the most visible Ombudsman work has related to sexual harassment complaints at ICANN public meetings. Some female community members have stated that they would feel uncomfortable reporting sexual harassment to a male Ombudsman.

I’d be very surprised if the next Ombudsman is not a woman.

ICANN actually CHANGES Verisign’s .net contract after public comments

ICANN has decided to make a change to the upcoming new version of Verisign’s .net registry agreement in response to public comments, but it’s not the change most commenters wanted.

In the near-unprecedented nod to the public comment process, the Org says it’s agreed with Verisign to change two instances of upper-case “S” in the term “Security and Stability” to lower case.

That’s it.

Some commenters had wrung their hands over the fact that the .net contract includes upper-case “Security and Stability” as defined terms, in contrast to the lower-case “security and stability” found in other gTLD contracts.

Based on a strict reading, this could in some circumstances give Verisign an excuse to avoid implementing ICANN Consensus Policies, commenters including the Business Constituency and Intellectual Property Constituency noted,

It appears that this was an oversight by ICANN and Verisign rather that some kind of nefarious plot. In its public comments analysis and summary (pdf), ICANN writes:

We acknowledge however that the capitalization of the “s” could in theory potentially lead to different interpretations of the applicability of certain future Consensus Policies under Section 3.1(b)(iv)(1) for the .NET RA.

Because in this instance it was not the intent of ICANN org nor Verisign to limit in this manner the applicability of Consensus Policy topics for which uniform or coordinated resolution is reasonably necessary to facilitate the interoperability, security and/or stability of the Internet or DNS, ICANN org and Verisign have mutually agreed to update Section 3.1(b)(iv)(1) of the .NET RA to the lower case “s.”

So there we have it: a rare instance of a public comment period accomplishing something and a confirmed victory for accountability and transparency!

Most of the comments had focused on Verisign’s ability to raise prices and a clause that some domainers thought would allow censorial government regimes to seize domains, but ICANN said that’s all fine.

The looooong road to urgently hiring ICANN’s next CEO

ICANN expects to appoint its next CEO about a year from now, up to 18 months after Göran Marby quit, despite impressing on job-hunters the need to act with speed or risk ICANN’s very existence.

After about 16 “listening sessions” with pretty much every part of the ICANN community over the last three months, the board of directors has approved a 10-page job description for the role.

The document pretty much prays for the Second Coming, at one point calling for a “servant leader” — an oxymoron arguably originating with the words of Jesus H Christ Himself and recently echoed by King Charles III during his coronation.

The new boss will have to be a global visionary with reams of experience managing large, big-budget technical organizations; an impeccably ethical open book; an international diplomat; a compassionate, empathetic nerd; a consensus-building polyglot; a disinterested ICANN insider.

The job description acknowledges that “few, if any” candidates will tick all the boxes, but it’s still setting itself a pretty high bar.

The fact that it takes half a year to write a job ad for a role that’s already been held by nine people over the last quarter century is baffling enough, but the recruitment process itself hasn’t even started yet.

ICANN now says it will put out a request for proposals for executive recruitment companies to manage the hiring process. It doesn’t expect to start interviewing candidates until the start of next year.

The actual appointment should come in the second quarter 2024, ICANN says. Whether the next chief will be available to start immediately is of course unknowable. In the meantime, interim CEO Sally Costerton will carry on filling the role.

You might expect the hiring process to get faster as ICANN gets older, better-resourced and more experienced, but it’s actually months slower than on the last few occasions a new CEO has been sought.

It was 10 months between Rod Beckstrom announcing he was quitting in 2011 and Fadi Chehadé being named heir apparent. After he announced he was out in 2015, it was nine months before Marby was crowned.

We’re now looking at potentially twice as long a runway between CEOs, and a job description that unironically calls for leadership amidst a “rapidly evolving” governance space, addressing the “the need to ‘get things done'” and ICANN’s need to “act with urgency” to manage emerging technological threats that could Balkanize the namespace and threaten ICANN’s very raison d’etre.

Rwanda picked for ICANN meeting

ICANN is inviting its community to Kigali, Rwanda, for its ICANN 80 public meeting.

The shorter “Policy Forum” meeting, the same format as the one that took place in Washington DC this month, will start from June 10 next year at the Kigali Convention Centre, ICANN’s board decided last week.

It’s the first time ICANN has visited Africa since before the Covid-19 pandemic and the first time Rwanda will have hosted a meeting.

ICANN has hosted meetings in Africa on 12 occasions over the last 25 years, in seven countries — Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.

ICANN’s practice is to rotate meetings through each of its five geographic regions, but it rarely happens in a strict order and obviously the pandemic shook up scheduling.

Rwanda and questions about its safety and human rights record have been in the news here in the UK for the last couple of years due to the British government’s plan to deport illegal migrants there.

But the UK and US authorities class Rwanda as safe, as long as you stay away from contested border regions. Visas appear to be free upon arrival for all travelers, regardless of origin.