Trump nominee open to retaking ICANN oversight role

The incoming head of the US Department of Commerce has indicated that it is unlikely he’ll try to reestablish the US government’s unique oversight of ICANN, at least in the short term.
But at his confirmation hearing in Congress yesterday, Trump nominee for secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross said he’d be open to ideas about how the US could increase its power over ICANN.
He was responding to a question from Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who made halting the IANA transition one of his key concerns last year.
Cruz, framing the question in such a way as to suggest ICANN is now in the hands of an intergovernmental consortium (which it is not) asked Ross whether he was committed to preventing censorious regimes using ICANN to hinder Americans’ freedom of speech.

Ross replied:

As such a big market and really as the inventors of the Internet, I’m a little surprised that we seem to be essentially voiceless in the governance of that activity. That strikes me as an intellectually incorrect solution. But I’m not aware of what it is that we actually can do right now to deal with that. If it exists, if some realistic alternative comes up, I’d be very interested.

His response also mischaracterizes the power balance post-transition.
The US is not “essentially voiceless”. Rather, it has the same voice as every other government as a member of the Governmental Advisory Committee.
Its role is arguably still a lot more powerful than other nations, given that ICANN is now bylaws-bound to remain headquartered in California and under US jurisdiction.
As head of Commerce, Ross will have authority over the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the agency most directly responsible for dealing with ICANN and domain name issues in general.
NTIA itself will to the best of my knowledge still be headed by assistant secretary Larry Strickling, who handled the IANA transition from the US government side. (UPDATE: this may not be correct)
Ross, 79, is a billionaire investor who made most of his estimated $2.5 billion fortune restructuring bankrupt companies in the coal and steel industries.

ICANN retires Affirmation of Commitments with US gov

ICANN has terminated its last formal oversight link with the US government.
Late last week, ICANN chair Steve Crocker and Larry Strickling, assistant secretary at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration mutually agreed to retire the seven-year-old Affirmation of Commitments.
The AoC, negotiated during the tail end of Paul Twomey’s leadership of ICANN and signed by successor Rod Beckstrom, laid out ICANN’s responsibilities to the US government and, to a lesser extent, vice versa.
It included, for example, ICANN’s commitments to openness and transparency, its promise to remain headquartered in California, and its agreement to ongoing reviews of the impact of its actions.
Ongoing projects such as the Competition and Consumer Trust Review originate in the AoC.
The rationale for concluding the deal now is that most of significant provisions of the AoC have been grandfathered into ICANN’s revised bylaws and other foundational documents following the IANA transition, which concluded in October.
Reviews such as the CCT and the lock on its California HQ are now in the bylaws and elsewhere, ICANN said in a blog post.
It’s worth mentioning that the US gets a new administration led by Donald Trump in a little over a week, so it probably made sense to get the AoC out of the way now, lest the new president do something insane with it.
The letters from Crocker and Strickling terminating the deal can be read together here (pdf).

ICANN’s top DC lobbyist gets consumer safeguards role

ICANN has named veteran staffer Jamie Hedlund as its new senior VP for contractual compliance and consumer safeguards.
It’s a new executive team role, created by the departure of chief contract compliance officer Allen Grogan. Grogan announced his intention to leave ICANN last May, and has been working there part-time since August.
The “consumer safeguards” part of the job description is new.
ICANN first said it planned to hire such a person in late 2014, but the position was never filled, despite frequent poking by anti-spam activists.
Now it appears that the two roles — compliance and consumer safeguards — have been combined.
This makes sense, give that ICANN has no power to safeguard consumers other than the enforcement of its contracts with registries and registrars.
From the outside, it does not immediately strike me as an obvious move for Hedlund.
While his job title has changed regularly during his six or so years at ICANN, he’s mainly known as the organization’s only in-house Washington DC government lobbyist.
He played a key role in the recent IANA transition, which saw the US government sever its formal oversight ties with ICANN.
His bio shows no obvious experience in consumer protection roles.
His replacement in the government relations role is arguably just as surprising — Duncan Burns, a veteran PR man who will keep his current job title of senior VP of global communications.
The appointments seem to indicate that lobbying the US government is not as critical to ICANN in the post-transition world, and that institutional experience in the rarefied world of ICANN is a key qualifier for senior positions.

.africa could go live after court refuses injunction

DotConnectAfrica’s attempt to have ICANN legally blocked from delegating the .africa gTLD to rival applicant ZACR has been denied.
The ruling by a Los Angeles court, following a December 22 hearing, means ICANN could put .africa in the root, under ZACR’s control, even before the case comes to trial.
A court document (pdf) states:

The plaintiff is seeking to enjoin defendant Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from issuing the .Africa generic top level domain (gTLD) until this case has been resolved…
The plaintiff’s motion for the imposition of a Preliminary Injunction is denied, based on the reasoning expressed in the oral and written arguments of defense counsel.

ICANN was just days away from delegating .africa last April when it was hit by a shock preliminary injunction by a California judge who later admitted he hadn’t fully understood the case.
My understanding is that the latest ruling means ICANN may no longer be subject to that injunction, but ICANN was off for the Christmas holidays last week and unable to comment.
“Sanity prevails and dotAfrica is now one (big) step closer to becoming a reality!” ZACR executive director Neil Dundas wrote on Facebook. He declined to comment further.
Even if ICANN no longer has its hands tied legally, it may decide to wait until the trial is over before delegating .africa anyway.
But its lawyers had argued that there was no need for an injunction, saying that .africa could be re-delegated to DCA should ICANN lose at trial.
DCA case centers on its claims that ICANN treated it unfairly, breaking the terms of the Applicant Guidebook, by awarding .africa to ZACR.
ZACR has support from African governments, as required by the Guidebook, whereas DCA does not.
But DCA argues that a long-since revoked support letter from the African Union should still count, based on the well-known principle of jurisprudence the playground “no take-backs”.
The parties are due to return to court January 23 to agree upon dates for the trial.

After Zika threat passes, ICANN confirms return to Puerto Rico

ICANN will hold its first public meeting of 2018 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which was originally supposed to the venue for this October’s meeting.
ICANN moved ICANN 57 from San Juan to Hyderabad, India in May, at the height of the scare about the Zika virus.
Zika is spread by mosquitoes and sex and can cause horrible birth defects. An epidemic, beginning in 2015, saw thousands affected in the Americas and South-East Asia.
Puerto Rico was one of the affected regions. At the time of the ICANN postponement, numerous government travel warnings were in effect.
The World Health Organization announced last month that the epidemic is over.
It was always understood that Puerto Rico had been merely postponed rather than permanently canceled, and ICANN’s board of directors this week resolved to hold the March 2018 meeting — ICANN 61 — there.

Survey says most Whois records “accurate”

Ninety-seven percent of Whois records contain working email addresses and/or phone numbers, according to the results of an ongoing ICANN survey.
The organization yesterday published the second of its now-biannual WHOIS Accuracy Reporting System reports, a weighty document stuffed with facts and figures about the reliability of Whois records.
It found, not for the first time, that the vast majority of Whois records are not overtly fake.
Email addresses and phone numbers found there almost always work, the survey found, and postal addresses for the most part appear to be real postal addresses.
The survey used a sample of 12,000 domains over 664 gTLDs. It tested for two types of accuracy: “syntactical” and “operability”.
Syntactical testing just checks, for example, whether the email address has an @ symbol in it and whether phone numbers have the correct number of digits.
Operability testing goes further, actually phoning and emailing the Whois contacts to see if the calls connect and emails don’t bounce back.
For postal addresses, the survey uses third-party software to see whether the address actually exists. No letters are sent.
The latest survey found that 97% of Whois records contain at least one working phone number or email address, “which implies that nearly all records contain information that can be used to establish immediate contact.”
If you’re being more strict about how accurate you want your records, the number plummets dramatically.
Only 65% of records had operable phone, email and postal contact info in each of the registrant, administrative and technical contact fields.
Regionally, fully accurate Whois was up to 77% in North America but as low as 49.5% in Africa.
So it’s not great news if Whois accuracy is your bugbear.
Also, the survey does not purport to verify that the owners of the contact information are in fact the true registrants, only that the information is not missing, fake or terminally out-of-date.
A Whois record containing somebody else’s address and phone number and a throwaway webmail address would be considered “accurate” for the survey’s purposes.
The 54-page survey can be found over here.

ICANN picks Madrid for next gTLD industry meeting

ICANN’s Global Domains Division has invited the domain industry to Madrid for next year’s GDD Industry Summit.
The meeting will be held at the drably named NH Collection Madrid Eurobuilding hotel from May 8 to 11 2017.
The timing may be fortuitous for intercontinental travelers — it ends just a couple of days before the Domaining Europe event starts in Berlin, which is just a short flight away.
ICANN summits are intersessional meetings dedicated to particular constituencies within the ICANN community. The GDD Industry Summit caters to registries, registrars and others in the business of selling gTLD domains.
They’re less formal that ICANN’s regular public meetings, designed to enable engagement between participants and between participants and ICANN staff.
The 2016 meeting was held in Amsterdam this June, attracting about 400 attendees.
ICANN’s formal public meetings next year are slated for Copenhagen (March), Johannesburg (June) and Abu Dhabi (October).

ICANN 57 brings in thousands of noobs

ICANN 57 set new records in terms of attendance, with a large majority of participants total newbies who’d never been to an ICANN meeting before.
The meeting, held in Hyderabad, India last month, had 3,182 attendees, and first-timers outnumbered veterans over two-to-one.
The previous record was 3,115 total participants, set at ICANN 50 in London two years ago.
Over two thirds of participants — 2,180 people or 68% of the total — were noobs, according to ICANN statistics released last night (pdf).
That compares to 344 newcomers at the abbreviated June meeting in Helsinki.
The massive turnout in November appears to be due to huge local interest.
Over 72% of attendees — 2,306 people — were from the Asia-Pacific region. ICANN does not break down attendance by nationality, but I suspect the large majority will have been Indian.
Only 200 people from Asia-Pac showed up in Helsinki.
Of the Asia-Pacific participants in Hyderabad, 2,056 were first-time attendees.
For context, there were hundreds more first-time Asia-Pac participants in Hyderabad than there were total attendees at the Helsinki meeting, when 1,436 people showed up.
There were also slightly more Asia-Pac attendees at ICANN 57 than total attendees at ICANN 55 in Marrakech this March.
The significant local interest appears to have tilted the gender balance in favor of men, who represented 74% of the total. Women were 20%. The remainder did not disclose their sex.
That compares to 61% and 32% in Helsinki.
UPDATE: This story was updated with better gender mix data a few hours after publication.

Who are the five new ICANN directors?

Almost a quarter of ICANN’s board of directors were replaced at the organization’s annual general meeting in Hyderabad last week.
Five of the 21-strong board are fresh faces, though many will be familiar to regular ICANN and industry watchers.
They hail from five different countries in four of ICANN’s five regions. One is female.
They replace Bruce Tonkin, Erika Mann, Suzanne Woolf, Kuo-Wei Wu and Bruno Lanvin, each of whom have served terms between three and nine years.
The newcomers all get initial, renewable, three-year terms.
Here’s some abbreviated bios of the newly appointed directors.
Maarten Botterman
Appointed by the Nominating Committee, Botterman is an internet governance consultant with strong historic ties to the registry industry.
From the Netherlands, he was chairman of .org manager Public Interest Registry for eight years until July 2016 and served as its interim CEO for several months in 2010.
Prior to that, he held advisory roles in the Dutch and European Union governments.
Becky Burr
American Burr replaces term-limited Bruce Tonkin as the GNSO contracted parties representative to the board. Since 2012 she’s been chief privacy officer of Neustar. Before that, she was a lawyer in private practice.
There are very few people more intimately familiar with ICANN. In the late 1990s, while working at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, she was a key player in ICANN’s creation.
Khaled Koubaa
Koubaa, a Tunisian, is founder of the Arab World Internet Institute, a non-profit dedicated to improving internet knowledge in the Arab region, and until recently head of Middle-East and North Africa public policy at Google.
He was selected by the NomCom. He is also a former member of NomCom, having sat on it during its 2008/9 session. He’s also been a volunteer adviser to PIR in the past.
Akinori Maemura
Hailing from Japan, Maemura works for IP address registry JPNIC. He was selected for the ICANN board by the Address Supporting Organization.
Until recently, he was chair of the executive council of APNIC, which is responsible for distributing IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region.
Kaveh Ranjbar
Iranian-born, Netherlands-based Ranjbar is chief information officer of RIPE NCC, the European IP address authority.
He was appointed to the ICANN board by the Root Server System Advisory Committee.

Nominet suspends over 8,000 “criminal” domains as IP complaints double

Police claims of intellectual property infringement led to the number of .uk domains suspended doubling in 2016, according to Nominet.
Statistics released today show that the .uk registry suspended 8,049 domains in the 12 months to October 31, compared to 3,889 in the year-ago period.
It’s an almost tenfold increase on 2014, when just 948 domains were taken down.
Nominet suspends domains when law enforcement agencies tell it the domains are being used in crime. No court order is required and Nominet rarely refuses a request.
Registrants can have the suspension lifted if they can show to law enforcement that the allegedly criminal behavior has stopped.
The vast majority of the complaints in 2016 again came from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, which asked for and got 7,617 names suspended.
Just 13 suspensions were reversed, Nominet said. Most of these were due to sites selling so-called “legal highs” being slow to respond to a change in the law.
The controversial ban on “rape” domains resulted in just one suspension among the 2,407 domains automatically flagged for containing rapey substrings.
Nominet published the following infographic with more stats: