Ombudsman asks DCA to simmer down after .africa conflict of interest complaint

ICANN’s Ombudsman dismissed a complaint from DotConnectAfrica about alleged conflicts of interest on ICANN’s board of directors, but scolded DCA for its “intemperate” blog posts.
DCA complained in October that two members of the board — Mike Silber and Chris Disspain — have conflicts of interest in relation to the contested .africa gTLD.
DCA has applied for .africa without notable government support, whereas South African registry Uniforum has applied with formal backing from most African governments.
According to DCA’s complaint, as described by Ombudsman Chris LaHatte in a new blog post, Disspain and Silber somehow have conflicts of interest related to this contention set.
Silber is treasurer of ZADNA, the South African domain name authority, which oversees .za policy and ergo Uniforum’s ccTLD business, which is arguably a close connection to the .africa applicant.
Disspain is CEO of auDA, which oversees policy for Australia’s .au ccTLD and therefore has a relationship with AusRegistry, a major back-end provider for new gTLD applicants.
It’s not at all obvious what the alleged conflict of interest related to .africa is in Disspain’s case.
When LaHatte asked DCA executive director Sophia Bekele to explain the precise nature of the conflicts, he did not receive any information beyond identification of these two employment connections, both of which are already fully disclosed by ICANN.
Both men are members of the board’s New gTLD Program Committee, which wields the board’s power over the new gTLD program and is designed to comprise only non-conflicted directors.
LaHatte blogged that he was unable to find any discussion of .africa in any board or committee meeting minutes — because ICANN has not discussed any individual gTLD applications yet — and was therefore unable to find any unfair treatment of DCA.
Dealing with unfair treatment is of course the Ombudsman’s job. LaHatte concluded:

I consider that no disqualifying conflict of interest, or indeed any conflict of interest at all, is present in the actions of both Chris Disspain and Mike Silber. It is likely this complaint has led to increased awareness of the possibilities of conflict of interest, which the Board will carefully consider in terms of the existing policy about conflict, when the issue arises. I consider this should continue to be a matter for consideration in gTLD decision making by the Board.

But the Ombudsman also, it seems, had some concerns about the nature of DCA’s lobbying campaign over the last several months, which has been as vitriolic has it has been scattershot.
As previously noted, some of its allegations against its .africa rival have been baffling.
LaHatte clearly picked up on the tone of the debate also, blogging:

There has been considerable amount of discussion on blogs, Twitter and other sites and in comments on the ICANN website in relation to the new .africa gTLDs applications. Regrettably much of the discussion has been intemperate.
…
An aspect of this application has been the unfortunate tone of much of the debate on various websites blogs and other places. During the course of this investigation I discussed this with Sophia Bekele (at the Toronto meeting) and suggested that perhaps a less aggressive approach would be appropriate. She readily agreed to this.
The discussion and debate continues to be fairly vigorous, but I would suggest to the competing parties for .africa that they should pay attention to the ICANN rules about respectful communication.

As Uniforum has said little, and DCA a lot, I can also assume that the blog posts being referred to are DCA’s.
The company has for several months regularly posted often incomprehensible allegations on its blog, usually in multicolored text with liberal use of italics and bold.
Bekele was also last week rumbled using a fake identity on a mailing list to support DCA’s position.

.africa gTLD applicant caught using fake identity

DotConnectAfrica executive director Sophia Bekele has been rumbled using a fake identity to post to an ICANN mailing list, but says she did so due to “hatred” from other posters.
Members of the AfrICANN list discovered this week that a poster going by the name of “Lerato Ma” had Bekele’s name in her email headers.
Over several months, “Ma” had frequently defended DCA, which is locked in a bitter contention battle over the .africa gTLD.
Bekele told DI that she had been forced to used a pseudonym due to the hostility she’s experienced on the list when posting under her real name.
“The open display of hatred, aggression and personal anonymity [sic] towards my person and DCA is compelling me to post under Lerato Ma,” she said in an email.
“There is nothing to hide, it is just to protect myself from all that aggression,” she added. “It is not an important issues for us.”
AfrICANN is not an official ICANN mailing list, nor does it have any power. It’s hosted by Afrinic, the African IP address registry, and is used to discuss issues related to ICANN in Africa.
Unlike most ICANN mailing lists, which operate under a code of acceptable behavior, it has a fairly rough-and-tumble tone to it. Bekele and DCA are sometimes mocked by name.

Australia leads the charge as governments file 242 new gTLD warnings

Governments of the world have filed 242 warnings on new gTLD applications, more than half of which came from Australia.
Warnings were filed against 145 strings in total, and in most cases governments issued the same warnings against all competing applications in a given contention set.
Australia was responsible for 129 warnings, accounting for most of the 49 warnings received by Donuts.
There are some surprises in there.
Notably, there were no warnings on any of the strings related to sex, sexuality or porn.
Given the amount of effort the GAC put into advising against .xxx, this is a big shock. Either governments have relaxed their attitudes, or none were willing to single themselves out as the anti-porn country.
No government warned on .gay.
The largest single recipient of warnings, with 49, was Donuts, the largest portfolio applicant.
The most-warned application, with 17 warnings, was DotConnectAfrica’s .africa. The company is contesting the gTLD without government support, and African nations objected accordingly.
Nigeria also warned Delta Airlines about its proposed .delta dot-brand,
The string “delta” is a protected ISO 3166 sub-national place name, as Delta is likely to discover when the Geographic Names Panel delivers the results of its evaluation.
Australia objected to .capital on the same grounds.
Top Level Domain Holdings was hit with warnings from Italy and South Africa based on a lack of government support for its geographic applications .roma and .zulu.
Remarkably, Samoa warned the three applications for .website on the grounds that they would be “confusingly similar” to its own ccTLD, .ws, which is marketed as an abbreviation for “website”.
The US warned on all 31 of Radix Registry’s applications, saying that the Directi company inappropriately included an email from the FBI in its bids, suggested an endorsement when none exists.
Australia, among its 129 warnings, appears to have won itself a lot of friends in the intellectual property community.
It’s objected to .fail, .sucks, .gripe and .wtf on the grounds that they have “overly negative connotations” and a lack of “sufficient mechanisms to address the potential for a high level of defensive registrations.”
It also issued warnings to applicants planning gTLDs covering “regulated sectors”, including .accountant, .architect and .attorney, without sufficient safeguards to protect consumers.
Generic strings with single-registrant business models — such as Google’s .app and .blog bids — are also targeted by Australia on competition grounds.
Australia more than any other governments appears to be trying to use its warnings as a way to enter into talks with applicants, with a view to remedial action.
Whether this will be permitted — applicants are essentially banned from making big changes to their applications — is another matter entirely.
The full list of warnings can be found here.

ICANN’s seven-point test for borked new gTLD bids

ICANN has published a set of seven criteria for judging whether new top-level domain applicants should be allowed to change the details of their applications.
The test is designed to enable applicants to correct stupid errors in — or make more substantial changes to — the original applications.
ICANN had received 49 such requests at the last count.
It is believed that at least three applicants — Verisign, DotConnectAfrica and Kerry Logistics — have requested changes to typos in the applied-for string itself.
Others are thought to have asked for permission to correct copy-paste errors, when they’ve applied for multiple gTLDs.
These are the factors ICANN will use to determine whether a change will be allowed:

Explanation – Is a reasonable explanation provided?
Evidence that original submission was in error – Are there indicia to support an assertion that the change merely corrects an error?
Other third parties affected – Does the change affect other third parties materially?
Precedents – Is the change similar to others that have already been approved? Could the change lead others to request similar changes that could affect third parties or result in undesirable effects on the program?
Fairness to applicants – Would allowing the change be construed as fair to the general community? Would disallowing the change be construed as unfair?
Materiality – Would the change affect the evaluation score or require re-evaluation of some or all of the application? Would the change affect string contention or community priority consideration?
Timing – Does the timing interfere with the evaluation process in some way? ICANN reserves the right to require a re-evaluation of the application in the event of a material change. This could involve additional fees or evaluation in a subsequent application round. (AGB §1.2.7.)

It’s not yet clear who makes the decision — whether it’s ICANN staff or its board of directors. I’ve asked ICANN for clarification and will update this post when I find out.
All changes will be published in a public change log and subject to 30 days of public comment, according to ICANN’s announcement this morning.

DotConnectAfrica responds to DI .africa rant

DotConnectAfrica has published a lengthy retort to DI’s recent post about the (probably) contested .africa gTLD, in which I accused DCA of being disconnected from reality.
You can read my original post here and the DCA response here.
According to DCA, DI’s post was “unprofessional, unwarranted, and sub judice to the ICANN evaluation process”, because it pointed out that Uniforum’s competing bid for .africa stands the best chance of being approved by ICANN.
Having read DCA’s response, I stand by what I wrote.
Geographic gTLDs are governed by special rules at ICANN. They need government support. Nobody disputes this.
In the case of .africa, which covers a lot of countries, support or non-objection from 60% of the relevant governments is required. I don’t think anyone is disputing this either.
Uniforum’s application has this March 2012 letter (pdf) from the African Union Commission, which provides the AUC’s explicit, unambiguous, exclusive support to Uniforum.
Uniforum also claims to have individual support from the required 60% of nations, though I have not seen documentary evidence of this.
DotConnectAfrica, on the other hand, has a August 2009 letter from AUC chair Jean Ping, which expresses support for the DCA application.
It is this 2009 letter that DCA is relying upon to pass the geographic support test in the ICANN evaluation process. In its latest blog post, DCA said, addressing DI:

If you state openly in your Blog that our 2009 endorsement that we got from the African Union Commission does not count, then you are obviously playing the same game that was started by our detractors who have been trying all along to deny and invalidate our hard-won endorsement in order to frustrate DCA’s chances of applying for DotAfrica. It is our sacred responsibility to make sure that our early-bird endorsement from the African Union Commission counts.

In response, all I can say is: “Good luck.”
The Uniforum letter of support, which is more recent by almost three years, states that it is “the only formal endorsement provided by the African Union and its member’s states with regard to dotAfrica.”
On the other hand, the DCA letter of support was “categorically” retracted by the African Union in this May 2011 communication.
The only possible interpretation of this, in my mind, is that Uniforum has African Union backing and that DCA does not.
Unless there’s some obscure nuance of African politics that I’ve failed to comprehend, I don’t think there’s a thing DCA can do to change that fact.
It sucks for DCA, but that’s the way it is.
As for DCA’s insinuations that DI’s position has somehow been bought, I’ll just say for the record that no opinion that has ever been expressed on DI has ever been paid for by a third party.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve probably turned down somewhere in the region of $20,000 from various parties who wanted me to give them favorable coverage in exchange for payment.
That’s just not how things work around here.

DotConnectAfrica — disconnected from reality?

DotConnectAfrica’s campaign for .africa (or .dotafrica, depending who you talk to) is getting increasingly weird.
As you may recall, DCA is the Mauritius-based company, headed by the charismatic and telegenic entrepreneur Sophia Bekele, which has been campaigning for a .africa gTLD for the last few years.
It “accidentally” applied for “.dotafrica” — a sign of almost mind-boggling incompetence — instead of the intended “.africa”, but remains confident that ICANN will allow it to change its application to correct the error.
Despite these failings, the firm has put a lot of hard work raising the profile of the .africa gTLD, for which it should be commended. Unfortunately, it’s not going to win.
If anyone is going to get the .africa registry contract, it’s the other applicant: Uniforum, the South African ccTLD registry.
Despite this painful truth, DCA appears to be in denial.
Take this op-ed, published yesterday on CircleID.
In it, somebody from DCA (the piece does not have a byline) states:

DotConnectAfrica remains a strong contender for the DotAfrica string name and actually stands the best chance of being awarded the mandate to operate the .AFRICA gTLD registry

What’s the basis for this confidence?

[DCA] has adhered to, and respected all the guidelines of the new gTLD programme, in addition to accepting ICANN’s oversight of the entire process, unlike UniForum which might be penalized for wrongly attributing the rights of DotAfrica gTLD to the AU [African Union] instead of ICANN in direct contravention of the new gTLD programme guidelines

DCA is essentially saying that ICANN, and not the African Union, should be the body that gets to decide who should run .africa.
That’s true. It’s also complete rubbish.
Nobody, not even DCA, denies that .africa is a “geographic” gTLD application, as defined by the Applicant Guidebook.
You may have noticed that in the current new gTLD round there are no applications that are both “geographic” and contested by multiple applicants. There’s a good reason for that.
According to ICANN’s rules: “If an applicant has applied for a gTLD string that is a geographic name (as defined in this Guidebook), the applicant is required to submit documentation of support for or non-objection to its application from the relevant governments or public authorities.”
Geographic gTLDs only get approved if the government(s) of that geographic region don’t object, in other words.
These letters of support or non-objection are not being published by ICANN, but the public record has quite a bit to say about which governments support which bids.
In the case of .africa, which covers a lot of countries, ICANN requires letters of support or non-objection from 60% of the nations concerned, and no more than one letter of objection from a government.
Uniforum executives told me recently that the company has this 60% support. It also has the explicit, exclusive, unambiguous support of the African Union Commission.
Here’s what the AU has to say on the matter (pdf):

the AU Commission selected UniForum SA (the ZA Central Registry Operator or ZACR), to administer and operate dotAfrica gTLD on behalf of the African community. The endorsement of the ZACR is the only formal endorsement provided by the African Union and its member’s states with regard to dotAfrica.

If DotConnectAfrica wanted to scupper the Uniforum bid, its best bet would be to lobby African governments that are not already supporting Uniforum — such as those that are not members of the AU — in order to secure more than one letter of objection.
That wouldn’t give DCA a chance to win .africa — contested geographic gTLDs do not go to auction — but it would mean Uniforum’s bid would be rejected for want of support.
But DCA is taking a different — and completely inexplicable — approach.
In a June press release, which tried and failed to explain why DCA applied for .dotafrica instead of .africa, the company said:

Uniforum should really be worrying about the more serious problem it has on its hand, to wit: the agreement signed with the AU is with Uniforum SA/ZA Central Registry, but the putative registry operator/applicant for ‘Africa’ is UniForum SA trading as Registry.Africa.
Where is UniForum SA trading as Registry.Africa’s endorsement for ‘Africa’ gTLD? Is it the specious letter of appointment to apply for DotAfrica gTLD, or the purported agreement between the AU and Uniforum SA/ZA Central Registry? DCA Trust will be watching closely to see how UniForum will try to correct these documentation problems to ensure that no illegal acts are committed.

Did you understand that?
DCA is saying that because Uniforum plans to operate .africa under a standard “doing business as” brand of Registry.Africa — something fully disclosed in its gTLD application — its official letter of support from the AU is somehow open to debate.
To make the company look even more out of touch, DCA has recently had an unhealthy focus on the “insidious mass media manipulation” campaign that it reckons Uniforum has been waging against it. Presumably this blog post can be added to that file at DCA HQ.
I’m struggling to recall where I’ve witnessed such nutty PR before.
Oh, wait.

If DCA wants to be taken seriously it’s going to have to explain — in plain, unobfuscated English — one of two things:
1) Which governments support its application (and this letter from 2009 doesn’t count).
2) Why the 60% rule does not apply to its .africa bid.
Until either of those things are clarified, DCA’s messaging is just a confusing mess.

Unbelievably, .africa will be contested

The .africa top-level domain may well be unique — the only geographic gTLD to be contested.
DotConnectAfrica, which has been campaigning for .africa for years, has confirmed that it has applied for the string, despite the fact that another bidder has support of the African Union.
DCA chief Sophia Bekele blogged:

because of the history of the DotAfrica gTLD and our experience during the ‘Yes2DotAfrica’ promotional campaign, we anticipate a prolonged process

The AU in February announced that it was providing its support to a .africa application from UniForum, the South African ccTLD registry.
DCA had previously secured what appeared to be a letter of support from an AU official, but it has since been withdrawn.
According to ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook, if you want to run a geographic gTLD representing multiple countries, you need the express support or non-objection of 60% of those countries.
I’m pretty certain DCA doesn’t have this support, but the AU’s membership does include more than 60% of the nations in Africa.
Is DCA applying in order to get a pay-off from the Uniforum bid? It’s possible, but without the required government support its negotiating position appears to be pretty weak.
Expect objections.

Sedari working on .africa gTLD bid

Sedari has been contracted to support the controversial African Union-backed .africa top-level domain application.
The new gTLD specialist will supply UniForum with its usual suite of financial, technical and policy support services, Sedari said today.
South Africa-based UniForum was given approval for its .africa bid by the AU last week, raising questions over a longstanding rival application by DotConnectAfrica.
UniForum is already responsible for South Africa’s .za country-code top-level domain.

UniForum selected for .africa gTLD app

UniForum, the South African .za domain name registry operator, has reportedly been selected to run the proposed .africa generic top-level domain.
The African Union announced the appointment today, following a December tender, according to a report on MyBroadband.co.za.
In a sane world, the deal would sound the death-knell for DotConnectAfrica’s long-running campaign to run .africa, but DCA recently has been making noises about applying with or without AU support.
The ICANN Applicant Guidebook is pretty clear when it comes to .africa – it’s a protected geographic term that will require the support of 60% of the affected nations to be approved.
It’s less clear whether AU backing can proxy for individual letters of support from all of those nations, but it’s certainly better than no government support at all.
However, if DCA can get two African governments to object to the AU-backed bid, it might stand a chance at getting a piece of the .africa action.
DCA had a letter of support from the AU dated August 2009, but it was retracted last year. The company has spent the last several months alleging cronyism as a result.
UniForum doesn’t have the best technical reputation in the world. It has managed the .za registry since 1995 but it only switched to an automated, EPP-based shared registry system last year.
Before August 2011, .co.za registrations apparently had to be carried out via email. Let’s hope its new EPP system is up to ICANN’s exacting standards for new gTLDs.

First ICANN CEO candidate revealed

Former ICANN director Njeri Rionge has emerged as a possible candidate for the soon-to-be-vacated CEO’s job.
Rionge is a Kenyan national, described last year by Forbes.com as “one of Kenya’s most successful and revered serial entrepreneurs”.
She founded Wananchi Online, a successful ISP in East Africa, and the business consultancy Ignite Consulting.
Her candidature was revealed in an open letter posted today by Sophia Bekele, CEO of DotConnectAfrica, a likely applicant for the .africa generic top-level domain.
DCA and Rionge have severed ties due to her new CEO aspirations, according to Bekele:

At the end of 2011, Ms. Njeri Rionge had expressed to DCA Executive Director, a direct interest in competing for the soon to be vacant ICANN CEO position, and for this reason, was kindly requested by DCA to submit her resignation from the DCA Strategic Advisory Board for ethical/conflict of interest reasons.
This was done after due internal consultations with concerned parties. Accordingly, Njeri Rionge is no longer involved in DCA and DCA Registry Ltd either as a Board Member or shareholder and will not represent neither would she be affiliated with DCA in any capacity, now or in the near future.

Rionge served on the ICANN board of directors as a Nominating Committee appointee for two terms between 2003 and 2008.
While there’s a ban on current directors applying for the CEO position, I don’t believe there’s any such prohibition on former directors.
ICANN is currently interviewing would-be replacements for Rod Beckstrom, who intends to leave the organization in July after a three-year term.
No other candidates have been revealed to date.
The only other name being circulated in the rumor mill is Lesley Cowley, CEO of .uk registry Nominet and current chair of ICANN’s ccNSO, but I’ve no idea if she’s even interested.