Cruz says Chehade is in China’s pocket

Terrifying US presidential candidate Ted Cruz has told outgoing ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade to recuse himself from crucial decisions, claiming Chehade is conflicted.
Republican Cruz yesterday said that Chehade can’t be trusted to make decisions related to the IANA transition because he’s already signed up to a Chinese internet governance committee.
Chehade said in December that he’s become co-chair of an advisory committee of the World Internet Conference.
Also known as the Wuzhen Summit, it’s a China-led talking shop that has been criticized for pushing China’s agenda of limiting free speech and promoting governmental control over the internet.
Cruz quizzed Chehade about his involvement in a letter earlier this month, basically fishing for evidence that Chehade was in some way conflicted.
In response (pdf), Chehade said he wasn’t being paid for the committee role, but that his travel expenses would probably be picked up.
Aha! Cruz seized on that admission, writing yesterday:

Travel compensation from the Chinese government can be a form of personal conflict of interest, which could impair Chehade’s ability to act impartially and in the best interest of the [US] government when performing under the [IANA] contract. As such, Chehade should recuse himself from all ICANN decisions that could impact the Chinese government, which include all negotiations and discussions pertaining to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition.

Chehade, who says he only joined the committee in order to promote the notion of multi-stakeholder internet governance, makes $900,000 a year at ICANN in salary and bonuses.
With pay so criminally low, it’s easy to see how he could be tempted to subvert his principles for any foreign government who offered him a free business-class flight and a few nights in a swanky Beijing hotel.
He has kids to feed and clothe, after all.
Cruz, on the other hand, has raised a mere $54 million in campaign contributions over the last five years, and not a single dollar of that will influence his political positions in any way whatsoever.

3 Comments Tagged: iana, ICANN, ted cruz, transition

Van Couvering ousted from M+M, replaced by PR guy with channel focus

Antony Van Couvering has been fired as CEO of Minds + Machines and replaced by someone who was until very recently the company’s agency PR guy.
Neither Van Couvering, the company, nor incoming CEO Toby Hall, have disclosed the reason for his ouster.
But I suspect the “differences and disagreements” that Van Couvering alluded to in his CircleID piece this morning may refer to M+M’s go-to-market strategy.
Hall told DI this morning that his focus as the company’s new leader is going to be on the registrar channel.
“It’s all about engaging with the outside world and recognizing we’re a business-to-business play,” Hall said. “It’s a fundamental shift in perspective.”
The strategy “has to be stacked in a way that makes our business partners make revenue”, he said.
“We’re not a consumer registrar,” he said.
M+M is a vertically integrated domain name company, acting as both registry and registrar.
Registrar sources tell us that Van Couvering wasn’t keen on working with third-party retailers, preferring to focus on its in-house registrar.
It seems that’s going to change under Hall.
M+M said in a press release (jarringly, emailed to reporters this morning as usual by Hall himself):

Mr Van Couvering was removed from office with immediate effect by means of a unanimous resolution of directors passed at a meeting of directors held on 19 February 2016.
The Group is currently making the transition from asset gatherer to monetisation of its leading portfolio of top-level domains; the Board believes a change of leadership will assist in this process.

Hall was appointed chief marketing officer last month.
Since the early 1990s, he’s been head of the London-based PR slash investor relations outfit GTH Communications, which focuses on small-cap businesses. M+M was a GTH client almost since it was founded, Hall said.
He said he’s going to be stepping back from GTH to focus on M+M.
Van Couvering founded Minds + Machines in 2008. It was soon acquired by the company that would be known as Top Level Domain Holdings, which later changed its name to Minds + Machines.
TLDH founder Fred Krueger got canned by the M+M board last year too.
Today, Van Couvering wrote:

It’s a story told a thousand times: founder of a company ousted by investors. It’s a story so common you can find it any day of the week as a minor headline in a tech blog. Not much of a story at all really, until it happened to me…
It sucked.

6 Comments Tagged: m+m, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs

dotgay has a third crack at .gay appeal

dotgay LLC has filed another appeal with ICANN, hoping to get its community-based .gay application back in the race.
It submitted a third Request for Reconsideration (pdf) this week, arguing on a technicality that its bid should have another Community Priority Evaluation.
The company has already lost two CPEs based on the Economist Intelligence Unit CPE panel’s belief that its definition of “gay” is too broad because it includes straight people.
It’s also lost two RfRs, which are adjudicated by ICANN’s Board Governance Committee.
The newest RfR addresses not the core “not gay enough” issue, but a procedural error at the EIU it believes it has identified.
According to the filing, dotgay is in possession of emails from an EIU employee who was responsible for verifying some of the dozens of support letters it had received from dotgay’s backers (generally equal rights campaign groups).
The company argues, citing the BGC’s own words, that this employee was not one of the official CPE “evaluators”, which means the EIU broke its own rules of procedure:

considering the fact that the CPE Process Document – which is considered by the BGC to be “consistent with” and “strictly adheres to the Guidebook’s criteria and requirements”, it is clear that the verification of the letters should have been performed by an independent evaluator… and not by someone “responsible for communicating with the authors of support and opposition letters regarding verification in the ordinary course of his work for the EIU”.

It wants the CPE to be conducted again, saying “it is obvious that the outcome of a process is often, if not always, determined by the fact whether the correct process has been followed”.
It’s difficult to see how the outcome of a third CPE, should one be undertaken, could be any different to the first two. Who verifies the support letters doesn’t seem to speak to the reason dotgay hasn’t scored enough points on its other two attempts.
But the alternative for the company is an expensive auction with the other .gay applicants.
Another CPE would at least buy it time to pile more political pressure on ICANN and the EIU.

10 Comments Tagged: .gay, bgc, community, cpe, dotgay, ICANN, new gTLDs

Rape ban results in just one .uk takedown, but piracy suspensions soar

Nominet’s controversial policy of suspending domain names that appear to condone rape resulted in one .uk domain being taken down last year.
That’s according to a summary of take-downs published by Nominet yesterday.
The report (pdf) reveals that 3,889 .uk names were taken down in the 12 months to October 31, 2015.
That’s up on the the 948 domains suspended in the six months to October 31, 2014.
The vast majority — 3,610 — were as a result of complaints from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. In the October 2014 period, that unit was responsible for 839 suspensions.
Unlike these types of suspensions, which deal with the allegedly illegal content of web sites, the “offensive names” ban deals purely with the words in the domain names.
Nominet’s systems automatically flagged 2,407 names as potentially in breach of the policy — most likely because they contained the string “rape” or similar — in the 12 months.
But only one of those was judged, upon human perusal, in breach.
In the previous 12 months period, 11 domains were suspended based on this policy, but nine of those had been registered prior to the implementation of the policy early in 2014.
The policy, which bans domains that “promote or incite serious sexual violence”, was put in place following an independent review by Lord Macdonald.
He was recruited for advice due to government pressure following a couple of lazy anti-porn articles, both based on questionable research by a single anti-porn campaigner, in the right-wing press.
Assuming it takes a Nominet employee five minutes to manually review a .uk domain for breach, it seems the company is paying for 200 person-hours per year, or 25 working days, to take down one or two domain names that probably wouldn’t have caused any actual harm anyway.
Great policy.

Comment Tagged: .uk, censorship, copyright, nominet, piracy, rape, suspension

DCA fails .africa evaluation

DotConnectAfrice application for the .africa gTLD has, as expected, failed its ICANN evaluation for want of government support.
The official decision (pdf) was handed down overnight.
According to the Extended Evaluation panel, DCA’s “required documentation of support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria”.
In other words, DCA did not have a shred of support for its controversial application.
For gTLDs representing multinational regions, support or non-objection is required from 60% of the governments in that region.
In addition, there cannot be more than one objection from a government in that region.
Not only did DCA not have any support, it also had over a dozen governmental objections.
The company had relied on support letters from the African Union Commission and the UN Economic Commission for Africa, both of which have been retracted.
The AU and most African governments support rival, successful applicant ZACR.
ZACR signed its .africa registry contract with ICANN in March 2014, but its bid has been kept in limbo while DCA has exploited ICANN appeals processes to delay delegation.
Most recently, DCA sued ICANN, despite signing away its right to sue when it applied.
DCA was originally rejected due to Governmental Advisory Committee advice, before it had completed evaluation.
But the company won an Independent Review Process ruling stating that ICANN erred by accepting the advice with no explanation, compelling ICANN to put the DCA application back into evaluation.
After a six-month review, the Geographic Names Panel has now concluded that, duh, nobody supports DCA’s bid.
ICANN has now changed the status of DCA’s application from “Not Approved” to “Will Not Proceed”.
Oddly, and possibly incorrectly, this status cites the GAC advice as the reason for the failure, rather than the fact that DCA failed its evaluation.
Per ICANN practice, no application is truly dead until the applicant withdraws.

4 Comments Tagged: africa, dca, dotconnectafrica, evaluation, geographic, ICANN, new gTLDs

.cloud passes 20,000 names on day one

The newly launched gTLD .cloud passed 20,000 domains under management one day after entering general availability.
About 25 hours after the 1500 UTC launch yesterday, 20,347 domains had been registered, according to head of registry operations Francesco Cetraro.
He said 17,991 of those names were registered in GA.
The gTLD is priced around the $20 to $25 mark at the popular registrars I checked.
Over 20,000 names is a pretty decent start, putting the the Aruba-owned TLD within the top 100 new gTLDs by volume.
Volume-wise, it’s already in the same ball-park as the likes of .global, .sexy and .uno, which have each been around for well over a year.
Including dot-brands, there are now close to 900 new gTLDs, only about half of which have more than 100 names.

7 Comments Tagged: .cloud, aruba, ga, new gTLDs

.top adds a quarter million names in a day

The new gTLD .top set a new record for one-day growth, adding almost a quarter million domains on Monday.
The February 16 .top zone file shows 1,343,665 domains, up 238,616 on the day, according to DI stats.
That’s the majority of the 287,950-name growth the whole new gTLD universe experienced that day.
It’s the second example of a single TLD growing by six figures in a day, following .xyz’s 131,000-name growth on February 6.
It seems that the majority of the names were registered via West.cn, a Chinese registrar that sells the names for CNY 4 ($0.60).
It seems we’re looking at a buying spree by a limited number of Chinese investors.
.top is run by Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology and marketed primarily in Chinese.
It’s currently the second largest new gTLD by zone size, after .xyz.

3 Comments Tagged: .top, Jiangsu Bangning, new gTLDs

$33 million .org contract up for grabs

Public Interest Registry, operator of .org, has put its back-end registry services contract up for grabs.
The deal could be worth around $33 million a year, judging by its current relationship with incumbent back-end Afilias.
PIR said in a statement today:

The organisation desires to contract with a qualified back-end registry services provider that shares a similar reputation and holds itself to the highest operational and ethical standards. The selected back-end registry service provider should be a “valued business partner” – an organisation that combines outstanding qualifications in service delivery with the ability to engage Public Interest Registry in a business relationship that seeks strategic and innovative approaches to enhance the capability and efficiency of service delivery.

The contract was actually supposed to end in January, according to the Internet Society resolution that approved it back in 2010.
According to PIR’s most recent available tax return (pdf), Afilias was paid $33.2 million in 2014.
It was paid $31 million in 2013 when its total revenue for the year we know to be $77 million. So it’s a pretty big deal for Afilias.
The payments are mainly, but not exclusively, for domain name registry services, according to PIR’s tax returns.
Afilias also operates a few additional services related to PIR’s expansion in the non-governmental organization market, such as a database of NGOs used for validation purposes.
But if we over-simplify things, a roughly $33 million annual payout for a 10-million-domain zone works to something in the ballpark of $3 per name per year.
Given some of the numbers I’ve heard thrown around over the last few years, I expect there are a few back-end providers out there that would be more than happy to offer a cheaper deal.
It will be the first time Afilias has had to fight for the .org contract since 2010, thought PIR has done a couple of analyses over the last few years to make sure it’s getting a fair deal in line with market prices.
Since 2010 the number of back-end registry providers has exploded due to the advent of the new gTLD program, so there will be more competition for the .org contract.
That said, none of the new providers are yet proven at the scale of .org, which has over 10.6 million names at the last count.
PIR expects to award the contract before December 2016.
Interested vendors have until March 5 to express their interest on this web site.

1 Comment Tagged: .org, afilias, isoc, pir

Rightside moves into China too

Rightside has become the latest gTLD registry to open up in China.
The company said today it has created a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise, basically a local subsidiary, in the country.
This is the same beachhead in China taken by Minds + Machines and Famous Four Media recently.
Draconian Chinese government regulations on domain registries and registrars require formal accreditation before domain names can be used by Chinese citizens.
Opening up a local office or working with a local proxy appear to be requirements to obtain this accreditation.
Rightside points out that 45% of new gTLD domain names — 5.4 million — are registered in China. Its own portfolio has seen 90,000 of these.

2 Comments Tagged: china, new gTLDs, rightside

First registrar “breached” UDRP lock rule

ICANN has charged a registrar with failing to abide by “cyberflight” rules for the first time.
Visesh Infotecnics did not lock down e-campaigner.com within two days of it being hit by a UDRP a couple of weeks ago, ICANN said in a compliance notice (pdf) on Thursday.
Visesh is based in India and does business as Signdomains.com. It has roughly 5,000 gTLD domains under management.
The transfer lock rule became ICANN consensus policy binding on all registrars last July, following four years of policy and implementation work.
It’s designed to prevent cybersquatters switching registrars when a UDRP lands in their inbox, a practice known as cyberflight.
The registrant of e-campaigner.com did not in fact change registrars, judging by Whois records.
The UDRP appears to have been filed in late January by a currently undisclosed entity. Signdomains put the domain on client-hold status February 8, according to Whois records.
This is the first time ICANN has publicly accused a registrar of failing to abide by the policy.
ICANN also says that the registrar does not display Whois data in the correct format on its web site, and that it owes some accreditation fees.
It has until March 3 to rectify these alleged breaches.

Comment Tagged: compliance, cyberflight, ICANN, signdomains, udrp