ICANN lists the ways the new gTLD program sucked

ICANN has published an analysis of the many ways in which the first round of the new gTLD program wasted everyone’s time and money.
The 200-page “New gTLD Program Implementation Review” is essentially a long list of ways the program could have been better, along with dozens of recommendations for possible future changes.
It’s for the most part a fairly dry read, and it is probably not as comprehensive as it could be, but it will be required reading for anyone working on policy concerning, or thinking of applying during, the second application round.
It concludes, for example, that maybe there should be a right to appeal inconsistent objection rulings.
It ponders aloud whether the Community Priority Evaluation should be scrapped or revised.
It wonders whether dot-brands, or other categories of gTLD, should get their own version of the standard Registry Agreement.
There’s also some discussion about the possibility of making the evaluation stage more efficient by grouping applications by applicant or back-end service provider, which would streamline the process but complicate the prioritization queues.
I count 48 “lessons learned” in the document, but as a concise summary covering over three years of the program, it’s necessarily somewhat light on detail.
On my first read, a few omissions jumped out at me.
There’s no discussion at all of the cybersquatting component of the background screening process, for example. Nor is there any mention of Geographic Name Review shortcomings highlighted by the recent .africa Independent Review Process case.
Also, in my view the document goes way too easy on the Governmental Advisory Committee.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure almost everyone who reads it will notice something lacking.
That’s why it’s now open for public comment.
The document is expected to be used as part of the review leading into the second application round, which somehow seems more distant with each passing day.

US gov: we can’t support ICANN accountability plan

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration has waded into the ICANN accountability debate, possibly muddying the waters in the process.
In a blog post last night, NTIA head Larry Strickling said that community proposals for enhancing accountability were not yet detailed enough, and had not reached the desired level of consensus, for the NTIA to support them.
He urged everyone involved to simplify the proposals and to work on areas where there is still confusion or disagreement.
The comments were directed at the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing Accountability (CCWG), a diverse volunteer committee that has been tasked with coming up with ways to improve ICANN accountability after the US government severs formal oversight of the IANA functions.
That group spent a year coming up with a set of draft proposals, outlining measures such as stronger, harder-to-change bylaws and improvements to the Independent Review Process.
But the main organizational change it proposed is where the most conflict has emerged.
CCWG thinks the best way to give the community a way to enforce accountability is to change ICANN into a membership organization, a certain type of legal entity under California law.
It would have a Sole Member, a legal entity peopled by members of each part of the community, which would have to right to take ICANN to court to enforce its bylaws.
The ICANN board doesn’t dig this idea one bit. Its outside attorneys at Jones Day have counseled against such a move as untested, overly complex and potentially subject to capture.
On a recent three-hour teleconference, the board proposed the Sole Member model be replaced by a “Multistakeholder Enforcement Mechanism”.
The MEM would create a binding arbitration process — enforceable in California court — through which ICANN’s supporting organizations and advisory committees could gang up to challenge decisions that they believe go against ICANN’s Fundamental Bylaws.
Since this bombshell, a key question facing the CCWG has been: is the board’s view being informed primarily by its lawyers, or has Strickling been quietly raising NTIA concerns about the proposal via back-channels?
If it’s the former, the CCWG and its own outside counsel could robustly argue the community’s corner.
If it’s the latter, it’s pretty much back to the drawing board — because if the NTIA doesn’t like the plan, it won’t be approved.
Unfortunately, Strickling’s latest blog post avoids giving any straight answers, saying “it is not our role to substitute our judgment for that of the community”.
But his choice of language may suggest a degree of support for the board’s position.

As I stated in Argentina in June, provide us a plan that is as simple as possible but still meets our conditions and the community’s needs. Every day you take now to simplify the plan, resolve questions, and provide details will shorten the length of time it will take to implement the plan and increase the likelihood that the plan will preserve the security and stability of the Internet. Putting in the extra effort now to develop the best possible consensus plan should enhance the likelihood that the transition will be completed on a timely schedule.

The emphasis on “simplicity” could be read as coded support for the board, which has repeatedly said that it thinks the Sole Member model may be too complicated for the NTIA to swallow.
Both the board and Strickling’s latest post refer back to a speech he made in Buenos Aires in June, in which he said:

If a plan is too complex, it increases the likelihood there will be issues that emerge later. Unnecessary complexity increases the possibility that the community will be unable to identify and mitigate all the consequences of the plan. And a complex plan almost certainly will take longer to implement.

Strickling certainly knows that the board has been citing these comments in its objection to the Sole Member model, so the fact that he chose to repeat them may be indicative of which way he is leaning. Or maybe it isn’t.
Either way, I think it’s going to be tough for the CCWG to easily dismiss the board’s concerns.
CCWG members are currently on planes heading to ICANN headquarters in Los Angeles for a two-day face-to-face meeting at which the chairs “expect that a large portion of our time… will be reserved to answering the tough questions”.
Many believe that unless this meeting is extraordinarily successful, it’s going to be tough for an IANA transition proposal to be approved by the NTIA under the current US administration.

ICANN just gave a company a new gTLD for free

The Tor Project Inc, a Massachusetts non-profit software maker, just got a new gTLD reserved for its own exclusive use, by ICANN, for free.
Tor did this without engaging in the ICANN new gTLD program, paying any ICANN application fees, or following any of the rules in the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
It basically circumvented the entire ICANN process, and it only took six months from asking.
Neat trick, right?
Tor develops the software that creates the Tor “anonymity network” used by people who wish to obfuscate their internet usage (legal or otherwise) by routing their traffic via a series of proxies or relays.
The free software, which plugs into browsers, uses meaningless, hashed “.onion” domains because the routing method is known as “onion routing”.
IANA, an ICANN department, last night placed .onion on its list of Special Use Domains, meaning it cannot be delegated to the DNS.
If anyone were to apply for it today — assuming that were possible — they’d be out of luck. It seems .onion now has the same protected status as .example and .localhost.
The reservation was made at the instruction of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which published a new Internet Draft reserving the .onion gTLD for use with Tor.
An Internet Draft is a “work in progress” standards track document with a six-month shelf life, not yet a finalized Request For Comments (RFC).
This one was written by engineers from Tor and Facebook.
The Internet Engineering Steering Group, the IETF’s coordinating body, approved the draft last week.
Of the 13 IESG members who voted on the document, the first draft of which was published six months ago, five voted “Yes”, seven offered “No Objection” and only one abstained.
The abstainer, Barry Leiba, standards guru at Huawei Technologies, wrote:

I believe the IETF shouldn’t be involved with registering special-use TLDs for things that were used outside of IETF protocols, and should not be wading into territory that belongs to ICANN. I know there are a bunch of other such TLDs that people/organizations would have us snag for them, and I very much want to avoid doing a batch of others.
That said, I well understand the deployed code involved and the importance of keeping things working in this case, and I don’t want to stand in the way. So I’m standing aside with an “Abstain” ballot.

The logic behind the reservation is that if ICANN were to delegate .onion to somebody else (for example, The Onion) there would be a risk that the improved privacy offered by Tor would be compromised.
Voting in favor of the draft, Cisco engineer Alissa Cooper wrote:

Registering this name seems warranted in light of the potential security impact. We need to make our processes work for the Internet, not vice versa.

Another affirmative vote came from Oracle engineer Ben Campbell. He wrote:

This one took some soul searching. But I think the arguments have been made, and that on the whole this registration does more good than harm.

A number of IESG members suggested that the IETF should revisit and possibly amend the RFC in which it originally granted itself the power to reserve gTLDs.
That’s RFC6761, entitled “Special-Use Domain Names”, which dates to February 2013.
RFC6761 lays out a seven-point test that a string must pass before it can be considered “special use” and thereby reserved.
The tests cover whether humans, applications and various types of DNS software are expected to handle the string differently to a regular TLD.
The RFC also notes:

The IETF has responsibility for specifying how the DNS protocol works, and ICANN is responsible for allocating the names made possible by that DNS protocol… Reservation of a Special-Use Domain Name is not a mechanism for circumventing normal domain name registration processes.

I think reasonable people could disagree on whether that’s what has just happened in the case of .onion.
Indeed, there was some discussion on the IETF’s “dnsop” working group mailing list about whether Tor was “squatting” .onion, and whether it was appropriate to reserve its chosen TLD string.
I wonder what kind of precedent this could set.
The Tor Project Inc is a Massachusetts non-profit company. It’s primarily funded by US government grants, according to its 2013 financial statements, the most recent available. It doesn’t sell .onion domains — they’re auto-generated by the software.
Part of the argument in favor of allowing the new Internet Draft is that .onion substantially pre-dates the creation of RFC6761 — it’s not an attempt to game the RFC.
Why wouldn’t that same argument apply to, for example, alternate root operator Name.Space, which has been offering hundreds of pseudo-gTLDs since 1996?
Name.Space could argue that its strings pre-date .onion by eight years, and that the security of its registrants and users could be compromised if ICANN were to delegate them to the DNS.
What about NameCoin, another alternate root provider? It also pre-dates RFC6761 and, like Tor, uses browser software to work around the DNS.
I don’t know enough about the IETF’s processes, to be honest, to say whether it would be forced to apply its .onion logic to these other namespaces. But it’s an interesting question.
And as somebody who has spent the last five years immersed in the minutiae of the rules ICANN has created to govern the allocation of words, it’s jarring to see those rules circumnavigated so completely.

Who wants ICANN’s $60m gTLD windfall?

ICANN has opened a formal public comment period to move forward discussions on how it should spend the almost $60 million it has so far received in new gTLD auction proceeds.
It’s not yet looking for concrete suggestions on how to spend the money — this is a pre-consultation consultation — it’s only looking for comments on the principles that should be considered when discussions take place.
ICANN has so far raised $58.8 million from “last resort” new gTLD auctions. With 27 contention sets remaining, that number could go up if one or more applicants refuse to participate in private auctions.
The GNSO Council has been moving to create a Cross-Community Working Group to discuss how the money should be spent, but clashed briefly with the ICANN board, which has said it will make the ultimate decision, earlier this year.
The new paper (get it here) basically asks questions along the lines of: who should decide where the money goes? How should conflicts of interest be handled? How much third-party expert opinion should be solicited? How much say should the board have? How much outreach should there be?
Underpinning it all is the implicit problem that the longer, more detailed and more convoluted the process, the less money there will be to actually distribute at the end.
Knowing the ICANN community’s propensity for convolution, I wouldn’t be surprised if it managed to spunk the whole lot on expert advice, working group travel, lawsuits and coffee.
(Okay, I would actually be surprised, but you get my point).
The paper also includes links to about 20 spending suggestions that have been made in various public fora over the last couple of years.
Some ideas include: giving it back to the applicants, funding open source DNS software, reducing the new gTLD application fee, marketing new gTLDs to registrants, and donating it to charity.
It does not appear to be true that ICANN slipped in one of its own management’s suggestions in an attempt to funnel off new gTLD money into the unpopular NetMundial initiative, as has been alleged elsewhere today. The NetMundial suggestion referred to in the paper actually came from Danny Aerts of Swedish ccTLD manager IIS.

Anger as ICANN’s member flops before board

ICANN’s board of directors came to blows with its key accountability working group this week, over proposals that would give ICANN the community the right to sue ICANN the organization.
An extraordinary three-hour teleconference between the board and the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing Accountability (CCWG) Wednesday night came across like some kind of weird, Orwellian, passive-aggressive piece of emotional domestic abuse.
The CCWG, a group of volunteers coming from all parts of the ICANN community, has created a set of proposals for improving ICANN’s accountability to the community as part of its transition process away from US government oversight.
The idea is to create sufficient accountability mechanisms so that if in future the entire ICANN board grows goatee beards and turns Eeevil, the community will still be able to hold them to their bylaws commitments.
The CCWG, following the advice of an independent law firm, decided that the best way to do this was to turn ICANN into a membership organization with a “Sole Member”.
This member would be a legal entity run by community members that would have the right under California law to sue ICANN if it ever failed to live up to its bylaws.
For example, if ICANN refused to implement the decisions of an Independent Review Panel, the member could seek to have the ruling enforced by a court.
This is just one of many proposals made by the CCWG currently open for public comment.
Highly unusually for a public comment period, the ICANN board is going to be a commenter in this case. While its comments have not been published yet, it has taken advice from its lawyers at Jones Day that may give an indication of how it is leaning.
Wednesday night’s call was designed to give the board the chance to bring its initial thinking to the CCWG.
Instead, it wound up being almost entirely about the proposed membership model and the board’s statements that while it supported the CCWG’s proposals 100% it also wanted them fundamentally rewritten.
The board wants the idea of a Sole Member model thrown out and replaced with a new arbitration process that would be legally enforceable in California courts.
So, instead of a legal-entity “member” suing ICANN, some as-yet unidentified community entity would take ICANN to arbitration. The decision of the arbitration panel could then be enforced by the courts if ICANN failed to abide by it.
When CCWG members asked who, in the absence of a legal entity, would take ICANN to arbitration and then sue it, the board had no answer. Instead, directors said the CCWG’s legal advisers should talk to Jones Day to hammer out the “technical” details.
Some members claimed that it would be “impossible” to give the community legal standing to sue ICANN without a membership model. Others said that the board’s 11th hour suggested rewrites would make it “impossible” to hit the deadline for a final proposal by the Dublin meeting next month.
At least a third of the 2-hour 47-minute call was wasted as the CCWG struggled to understand the doublespeak the board had brought into the discussion.
Directors continually insisted that they “completely supported” CCWG’s proposals on enforcement “without reservation”, while simultaneously saying the Sole Member model should be thrown out.
Half way through the call, CCWG co-chair Thomas Rickert reflected exasperation among members: “There is obviously difficulty to understand by many on this call how you fully support what we are doing while proposing something which appears like a complete rewrite.”
Shortly thereafter, Chehade responded:

Why don’t we just agree that we are agreeing with you that the community must be able to get enforcement in California courts, that we will ensure that they have the standing to do it without question. And if we are all in agreement that we are in agreement with each other let’s then let the technical people go solve this. If they call come back and tell us that frankly that advice was flawed, then let’s deal with it then in good faith. But that’s what we’re sharing with you.

Directors said that the proposed member model might have unintended consequences, and that the US government may not approve a proposal that overly complicates ICANN’s legal structure.
An hour later, the CCWG was still scratching its head, nerves were beginning to wear, and the tone was getting increasingly testy as the CCWG repeatedly asked the board to explain how it could express support and simultaneously propose an alternative solution.
“There is absolutely no new proposal,” Chehade said, eventually. “We are embracing your proposal and the objectives of the community. Please hear me on this. There is no new proposal.”
He said:

Take your work and break it down: board removal, standing reconsideration, enhancing – getting the IRP back on the track we set, you know, fundamental bylaw, binding arbitration or mechanisms of enforceability. All of the things you have come up with, we are accepting. So when your reaction to our two last hours is that we’re refusing to add any accountability, I don’t know how you come to that frankly…
you yourself in the proposal say that this proposal is not finished, it needs a lot of work. So what we’re saying to you is let’s take this proposal which is not finished and let’s figure out ways to make it real, and real in the next few weeks so we can move forward…
The only area where we are telling you we would like to propose a different mechanism to achieve the same goal is the enforceability.

The whole three hours reminded me of a nightmare-scenario interview where the interviewee has been media-trained up the wazoo and refuses to sway from a set of vaguely scripted talking points.
But which proposal is the right one for ICANN?
Beats me. What does seem quite clear to me is that the board and CCWG are at odds now, despite what ICANN says, and that the expected delivery of a final accountability proposal by Dublin is in serious doubt.
Following the call, ICANN chair Steve Crocker posted a blog post that sought to clarify the board’s position, characterizing it as agreement in principle but disagreement on implementation. He wrote:

We have suggestions on how these [CCWG proposals] could be operationalized. With regards to the mechanisms for community enforceability, where the current proposal still warrants much detail that may not be achievable we have a suggestion on how to deliver on it in a stable way, as increased enforceability must not open up questions of, for example, capture or diminishing of checks and balances.

The Wednesday meeting’s audio, transcript and other notes can all be found here.

More dirty tricks questions raised in .africa saga

DotConnectAfrica leaned on a former employee and used suspected astroturf in an unsuccessful attempt to have the Kenyan government support its .africa bid, newly published documents reveal.
Evidence to the .africa Independent Review Process case published for the first time by ICANN Monday night shows how DCA CEO Sophia Bekele attempted to secure Kenyan backing via a former chair of its own advisory board, who had gone on to be an adviser for Kenya on the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee.
Emails suggest that this adviser tried to support DCA, against the wishes of his superiors in the Kenyan government, while they were distracted by a contested presidential election result.
They also show that Bekele on at least two occasions sent “news” stories published on web sites she has links to to another senior Kenyan official.
The full story is not yet on the public record — ICANN is still refusing to un-redact anything that the GAC has deemed confidential, including discussions on the GAC mailing list — but some interesting questions have nevertheless emerged.
Kenya divided
Three sets of emails were published.
One was between Bekele and a newly appointed Kenyan GAC adviser, Sammy Buruchara, dating to the ICANN meeting in Beijing, April 2013.
That was the meeting at which the GAC decided, by consensus, to issue advice to the effect that DCA’s .africa application should be trashed.
If Kenya, or any other single government, had disagreed with that proposed GAC advice, it would not be “consensus” advice and would therefore be substantially weakened when the ICANN board came to consider it.
Until his GAC appointment, Buruchara had been chair of DCA’s Strategic Leadership Advisory Board. DCA press released his move in March 2013.
It’s significant that Buruchara was not Kenya’s GAC voting “representative” — that was Michael Katundu — rather merely an “adviser”.
When Bekele (pictured here with Buruchara, March 7, 2013) was cross-examined during the IRP hearings in May this year, she was asked:

Q. Are you and he friends?
A. No.

Emails show that Buruchara had forwarded the proposed text of the GAC advice to Bekele, who then suggested three paragraphs of text saying the advice was “inappropriate” because the African Union Commission, as backer of the rival ZACR .africa bid, was a GAC member.
That email was dated April 10 — the Wednesday of the Beijing meeting — as the GAC was preparing its communique for submission to the ICANN board the following day.
It’s not clear from the emails published so far what, if anything, Buruchara did in response.
However, the next day, April 11, it seems his Kenyan government superiors were on his case. Buruchara told Bekele:

The matter has been escalated to our Government in Kenya with false information that I am contradicting the AUC.
I have responded accordingly.
Due to the sensitivity of this matter, I wish to leave it at the level of my previous post to the GAC until the matter settles.
Currently I am expecting a call from the President any time.

Expecting a call from the president was a big deal — Uhuru Kenyatta had been inaugurated just two days earlier following a month-long “hanging chads”-style legal challenge to his March 9 presidential election victory.
Buruchara elaborated in a subsequent email:

Someone from AUC called Ndemo and made a lot of noise to the effect that I have contradicted the Heads of State agreement in Abuja, which is obviously lies.
So Ndemo is beside himself with madness owing to the current transition process.
Anyhow I will try and manage the situation as I have not anywhere contradicted AUC’s position.

The “transition” he refers to is Kenyatta’s transition into government, not the ICANN/IANA transition.
“Ndemo” was actually Bitange Ndemo, then the Kenyan permanent secretary for information and communications, somebody Bekele had been simultaneously lobbying for Kenyan government support.
Buruchara was not in Beijing. The actual GAC rep, Katundu, went along with the GAC consensus against DCA.
In fact, Kenya had already issued a GAC Early Warning (pdf) against DCA, so it was significant that Buruchara was expressing support for the company.
In a second email thread, dated July 8, 2013, Buruchara seems to acknowledge that he aided DCA in some way but suggests that was only possible because of political instability in Kenya:

I am glad to note that DCA application passed all the stages except the GNP [Geographic Names Panel].
As you know I stuck my neck out for DCA inspite of lack of Govt support by Ndemo.
Going forward, I would certainly be ready to support DCA so long as the Kenya Govt is behind me as I do not think I will have the same chances as I had last time which was because the govt was in transition

In these July emails, which came less than a week after DCA’s application was rejected by the ICANN board, Bekele encourages Buruchara to file a challenge on behalf of Kenya, and to try to recruit other friendly governments to its cause.
Nothing ever came of that.
Buruchara’s alleged actions were one of the controversial points argued over in the DCA Independent Review Process case.
Many pages of the relevant evidence and argument related to Buruchara’s actions (or lack thereof) are still redacted by ICANN as “GAC Confidential”, so we don’t have all the facts.
However, the IRP proceedings revealed that Buruchara had emailed the GAC mailing list just before Beijing kicked off with reference to .africa.
According to DCA, Buruchara “explained that Kenya supported the AUC’s application for .AFRICA but did not think it was appropriate for the AUC to utilize the GAC to eliminate competition”.
Complicating matters further, there was a third Kenyan GAC “representative” in the mix, Alice Munyua.
She had been the Kenyan GAC rep, but according to DCA had left the position prior to Beijing. She was also involved in the ZACR application and the AUC .africa project.
The record shows that she spoke strongly against DCA’s application, as Kenyan GAC rep, during a meeting between the ICANN board and GAC in Beijing, April 9.
Buruchara, according to DCA, had told the GAC mailing list that Munyua was no longer a GAC rep and that the Kenyan government did not agree with her position. He was then evidently talked out of his position by other GAC members.
It’s not clear from the record whether Munyua was an authorized Kenyan GAC rep in Beijing or not. Archive.org shows her listed on the GAC’s member list in January 2013 but not May 2013.
It’s all very confusing, in other words.
What we seem to have in Beijing, at the least, is a Kenyan GAC delegation deeply divided and the possibility that one or more delegates tried to capitalize on political distractions back home.
With a partial record, it’s difficult to tell for sure.
.africa belongs to America
What’s more clear from the emails published by ICANN this week is that despite her claims to represent the African people, Bekele on at least two occasions told Kenyan officials that African governments had no right to .africa.
In one email to Ndemo, Bekele asserts that the US, rather than African governments, “owns” .africa. She wrote:

we do not believe that it is the place of African Presidents to give AU any sort of mandate for custodianship over a .africa resource that is owned by ICANN or US… the AU cannot do an RFP that is parallel to the ICANN process to appoint a registry on behalf of Africa as if they “own the resource”, which belongs to ICANN

This is in tune with Bekele’s repeated outreach to the US Congress to intervene in the .africa controversy.
While DCA is based in Mauritius, Bekele has stated in interviews that she’s lived in California for the better part of two decades.
More astroturf?
The newly published emails also show Bekele unsuccessfully lobbying Ndemo for Kenyan government support, in part by sending him links to purportedly independent domain “news” blogs that are widely believed to be under her own control.
In February 2013, Bekele sent Ndemo links to articles published on domainnewsafrica.com and domainingafrica.com.
These two domains were originally registered by Bekele, at her California business address, on November 21, 2011.
The Whois details for both domains disappeared behind Go Daddy’s privacy service on May 12, 2012, records archived by DomainTools show.
Both web sites take strongly pro-DCA views in matters relating to .africa and ICANN. Neither covers African domain name news except to the extent it relates to DCA or .africa.
Given that Bekele has a admitted history of using bogus identities to fake support for DCA, it’s my view that the sites are nothing more than astroturf/sock-puppetry.
domainingafrica.com is the site that accused me of being part of a racial conspiracy.
It’s worrying that this site was also being used to lobby government officials.
It’s perhaps fitting that Bekele’s email signature, in the newly unredacted emails, is “Nobody believes the official spokesman… but everybody trusts an unidentified source.”
All documents in the IRP case of DCA v ICANN, many still significantly redacted, can be found here.

.food could be heading for limbo after closed generic applicant wins auction

The future of the .food gTLD is up in the air after single-registrant applicant Lifestyle Domain Holdings won its contention set.
The applicant, a subsidiary of Scripps Networks, is the sole remaining .food applicant after withdrawals from Donuts and Dot Food LLC.
It’s also a recalcitrant “closed generic” applicant, which continues to insist it has the right to exclude all third-party registrants from the .food namespace.
The company seems to have won .food at auction, even though ICANN recently slapped a ban on closed generics in the current application round.
Scripps will not be able to launch .food any time soon, unless it changes its planned registration policies.
The company may have essentially just paid to have .food placed on hold until the next new gTLD round.
Scripps runs a cable TV station in the US called Food Network, which it says is famous. It also runs Food.com, which it describes as “the third largest food site on the web”.
The current version of its application states:

Applicant intends to function in such a way that all domain name registrations in the TLD shall be registered to and maintained by Applicant and Applicant will not sell, distribute or transfer control of domain name registrations to any party that is not an Affiliate of Applicant

When ICANN asked applicants if they would like to revise their closed generic applications to allow third-party registrants, due to adverse Governmental Advisory Committee advice, Scripps was one of half a dozen applicants to decline.
Audaciously, the company told ICANN that an open registration policy for .food would hurt its brand:

To open the top level domain means that anyone could register a domain for a small annual amount of money and exploit, confuse and infringe upon the brand equity and goodwill of the famous FOOD, FOOD NETWORK and FOOD.COM brands established by Scripps with more than twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

Yes, Scripps thinks that when people think of “food”, they automatically think of the “third largest food web site” or a cable TV network that gets a 0.21% audience share in the UK.
A nonsense position, in other words.
So will Scripps get to run .food as a closed dot-brand? Probably not.
In June, ICANN ruled that the remaining closed generics applications (.food, .hotels, .grocery, .dvr, .data, and .phone) had the choice of either withdrawing, dropping their exclusivity plans, or carrying their applications over to the next gTLD application round.
Having just paid its competing applicants to go away, one assumes that Scripps’ withdrawal is off the cards.

ICANN finally publishes THAT .africa letter, makes me look like an idiot

ICANN has finally published the letter it controversially drafted for the African Union Commission in order to help it express support for ZA Central Registry’s .africa bid.
Having now read the draft letter for the first time, on balance I’d have to say my previous opinions on its contents were more wrong than right.
The letter was central to claims by rival .africa applicant DotConnectAfrica that ICANN treated ZACR preferentially during the evaluation of both applications.
It was drafted by ICANN staffer Trang Nguyen around June 25, 2013, and sent to ZACR.
It was then edited by ZACR and the AUC, signed by the AUC, and returned to ICANN, whereupon it was forwarded to the new gTLD’s program’s Geographic Names Panel at InterConnect Communications.
The GNP took the letter as an official endorsement of ZACR’s bid, enabling it to pass the Geographic Names Review and proceed to the next stage of the program.
Having seen (and published) the signed AUC letter, I opined here in July that it looked like it had been mostly been written by ZACR and/or the AUC.
I no longer believe that.
It’s now proven that the AUC redraft goes far beyond the “minor edits” that have been claimed by DCA and others — for starters, it’s 40% longer — but a lot of the text that I believed to be ZACR’s work turns out in fact to have come from ICANN.
I’ve put the two letters into a single document (pdf), so you can do a side-by-side comparison if you wish.
There’s still no question that ZACR had African government support for its bid and DCA did not. The dispute centers entirely on whether InterConnect had received expressions of support in the correct format.
An Independent Review Process panel declined to issue an opinion on whether ICANN did anything wrong by drafting the letter, though it is mentioned in its final declaration.
ICANN itself says that it did nothing wrong by drafting the letter, and had DCA had any governmental support it would have done exactly the same thing for it.
The draft letter was among hundreds of pages of documents published last night by ICANN following a Documentary Information Disclosure Process request filed by DI a little over a month ago.

ICANN will post more uncensored .africa info

ICANN has committed to post more unredacted documents from its Independent Review Process case with DotConnectAfrica, following a request from DI.
The organization told DI today that it will publish the documents on its web site by August 31, in response to our July 27 Documentary Information Disclosure Request.
I’d asked ICANN to publish, unredacted, the entire declaration of the IRP panel, along with all equally unredacted exhibits and hearing transcripts.
Aware that ICANN enjoys invoking its “Defined Conditions for Non-Disclosure” in order to stop material being released sometimes, I added “that the public interest and transparency benefits to ICANN of disclosing this information far outweigh any benefit that could be accrued by invoking the Defined Conditions for Non-Disclosure”.
In response, ICANN said today (pdf) that it evaluates the public interest when processing DIDP requests, adding:

we have determined that to the extent additional information warrants disclosure and can be released without further consultation with third parties ICANN will publish that unredacted information no later than 31 August 2015. We will send you an email notification upon that publication. To the extent that disclosure of some information designated as confidential by third parties may be warranted and requires further consultation with third parties, or consultation with other third parties not previously consulted, ICANN has already initiated that consultation process. ICANN will publish such further unredacted information promptly upon, and to the extent that we receive, authorization from the relevant parties to release the information, and will send you an email notification upon that publication.

Since the DIDP was filed, ICANN has published over 700 pages of redacted transcripts from two in-person IRP hearings that took place in May.
Today, it also published a letter from DCA’s competing .africa applicant, ZA Central Registry, comprising an ultimately unsuccessful request for a couple of seats at the hearing.
What has not yet been published are the IRP exhibits showing exactly what ICANN did to oil the gears for ZACR’s application.
Due to Kieren McCarthy’s articles at The Register and ICANN’s subsequent admissions, we know that ICANN staff drafted a letter that the African Union Commission could use to express its support for ZACR in the correct format.
However, the IRP exhibits that would give clarity into what exactly ICANN sent and why remain redacted.
Communications between ICANN and InterConnect, which ran the Geographic Names Panel, and references to the Kenyan government’s did-they-didn’t-they support for DCA also remain redacted.

US gives ICANN an extra year to complete transition

US government oversight of ICANN and the domain name system will end a year later than originally expected.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration said last night that it has extended ICANN’s IANA contract until September 30, 2016, giving the community and others more time to complete and review the transition proposals.
NTIA assistant secretary Larry Strickling wrote that “it has become increasingly apparent over the last few months that the community needs time to complete its work, have the plan reviewed by the U.S. Government and then implement it if it is approved.”
Simultaneously, NTIA has finally published a proposal — written by ICANN and Verisign — for how management of the DNS root will move away from hands-on US involvement.
The extension of the IANA contract from its September 30, 2015 end date was not unexpected. The current contract allows for such extensions.
As we recently reported, outgoing ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade had guessed a mid-2016 finalization of the transition.
Regardless, expect op-eds in the coming days to claim this as some kind of political victory against the Obama administration.
Part of the reason for the extension, beyond the fact that the ICANN community hasn’t finished its work yet, is legislation proposed in the US.
The inappropriately named DOTCOM Act, passed by the House but frozen for political reasons in the Senate by Tea Party presidential hopeful Sen Ted Cruz, would give Congress 30 legislative days (which could equal months of real time) to review the IANA transition proposals.
There are basically three prongs to the transition, each with very long names.
The “Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the Global Multistakeholder Community” is the first.
That was created by the multistakeholder IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) and deals with how the IANA contract will be managed after the US government goes away.
The second prong comes from the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability, which deals with how ICANN itself can improve its accountability to the internet community without the Damoclean sword of US intervention hanging over it.
The CCWG’s latest draft report would strengthen the ICANN board against capture by, for example, making certain bylaws harder to amend and giving the community the right to fire directors.
Both of these proposals are currently open for public comment here.
The third prong, which only appears to have been published this week, deals with the nuts and bolts of how changes to the DNS root zone are made.
The current system is a tripartite arrangement between IANA, NTIA and Verisign.
When a TLD operator needs a change to the DNS root — for example adding a name server for its TLD — the request is submitted to and processed by IANA, sent to NTIA for authorization, then actually implemented on the primary root server by Verisign.
Under the new proposal (pdf) to phase the NTIA out of this arrangement, the NTIA’s “authorization” role would be temporarily complemented by a parallel “authentication” role.
The proposal is not written in the clearest English, even by ICANN standards, but it seems that the current Root Zone Management System would be duplicated in its entirety and every change request would have to be processed by both systems.
The output of both would be compared for discrepancies before Verisign actually made the changes to the root.
It seems that this model is only being proposed as a temporary measure, almost like a proof of concept to demonstrate that the NTIA’s current authorization role isn’t actually required and won’t be replaced in this brave new world.