“Just give up!” ICANN tells its most stubborn new gTLD applicant

ICANN has urged the company that wants to run .internet as new gTLD to just give up and go away.
The India-based company, Nameshop, actually applied for .idn — to stand for “internationalized domain name” — back in the 2012 application round.
It failed the Geographic Names Review portion of the application process because IDN is the International Standards Organization’s 3166-1 three-letter code for Indonesia, and those were all banned.
While one might question the logic of applying for a Latin-script string to represent IDNs, overlooking the ISO banned list was not an incredibly stupid move.
Even a company with Google’s brainpower resources overlooked this paragraph of the Applicant Guidebook and applied for three 3166-1 restricted strings: .and, .are and .est.
But rather than withdraw its .idn bid, like Google did with its failed applications, Nameshop decided to ask ICANN to change its applied-for string to .internet.
There was a small amount of precedent for this. ICANN had permitted a few applicants to correct typos in their applied-for strings, enabling DotConnectAfrica for example to correct its nutty application for “.dotafrica” to its intended “.africa”.
But swapping out .idn for .internet was obviously not a simple correction but rather looked a complete upgrade of its addressable market. Nobody else had applied for .internet, and Nameshop was well aware of this, so Nameshop’s bid would have been a shoo-in.
To allow the change would have opened the floodgates for every applicant that found itself in a tricky contention set to completely change their desired strings to something cheaper or more achievable.
But Nameshop principal Sivasubramanian Muthusamy did not take no for an answer. He’s been nagging ICANN to change its mind ever since.
There’s a lengthy, rather slick timeline of his lobbying efforts published on the Nameshop web site.
He filed a Request for Reconsideration back in 2013, which was swiftly rejected by the ICANN board of directors.
In July 2017, he wrote to ICANN to complain that Nameshop’s string change request should be treated the same as any other:

It seems that if ICANN can allow string changes from a relatively undesirable name to a more desireable name based on misspelling, then ICANN should allow a change from a desireable name in three characters(IDN) to longer name in eight characters (Internet) based on confusion with geographical names

Meetings with ICANN staff, the Ombudsman, the Governmental Advisory Committee and others to discuss his predicament several times over the last several years have proved fruitless.
Finally, today ICANN has published a letter (pdf) it sent to Muthusamy on Friday, urging him to ditch his Quixotic quest and get his money back. Christine Willett, VP of gTLD operations, wrote:

Given we are unable to take further action on Nameshop’s application, we encourage you to withdraw the application for a full refund of Nameshop’s application fee.

I doubt this is the first time ICANN has urged Nameshop to take its money and run, but it seems ICANN is now finally sick of talking about the issue.
Willett added that ICANN staff and directors “politely decline” his request for further in-person meetings to discuss the application, and encouraged him to apply for his desired string in the next application round, whenever that may be.

ICANN plays tough over Amazon dot-brands

ICANN has given Amazon and the governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization less than a month to sort out their long-running dispute over the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors voted on Sunday to give ACTO and the e-commerce leviathan until April 7 to get their shit together or risk not getting what they want.
But both parties are going to have to come to an agreement without ICANN’s help, with the board noting that it “does not think that any further facilitation efforts by ICANN org will be fruitful”.
Attempts by ICANN to meet with ACTO over the last several months have been agreed to and then cancelled by ACTO on at least two separate occasions.
The eight ACTO governments think the string “Amazon” more rightfully belongs to them, due to it being the English name for the rain forest region they share.
Amazon the company has promised to safeguard culturally sensitive terms in .amazon, to assist with future efforts to secure .amazonas or similar for the Amazonian peoples, and to donate services and devices to the nations concerned.
Now, the two parties are going to have to bilaterally decide whether this deal is enough, whether it should be sweetened or rejected outright.
If they can’t come to a deal by ICANN’s deadline (which could be extended if Amazon and ACTO both ask for more time), ICANN will base its decision on whether to approve .amazon based on how Amazon unilaterally proposes to address ACTO’s concerns.
While a rejection of the .amazon application is still on the table, my read is that this is a bigger win for Amazon than it is for ACTO.

Updated: More .amazon delay as governments cancel talks

The future of Amazon’s bid for .amazon has been cast into more doubt after South American governments cancelled talks with ICANN.
The new secretary general of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, Alexandra Moreira, wrote to ICANN CEO Göran Marby February 13 to call off a meeting that had been planned to take place in Brasilia, February 19.
She blamed unspecified “unavoidable circumstances” for the cancellation, but insisted it was unrelated to the .amazon issue.
“It is necessary to clarify that the above mentioned circumstances have no connection whatsoever with neither the substance nor the agenda of the postponed meeting,” she wrote.
I believe the cancellation is related to the ongoing political instability in ACTO member Venezuela, which has recently spilled onto its borders with fellow members Brazil and Colombia.
Moreira reiterated that ACTO remains committed to talks to get the .amazon impasse resolved.
The cancellation of the February 19 meeting causes timing issues for ICANN’s board of directors, which has promised to vote on the .amazon applications at its meetings in Kobe, Japan, at ICANN 64, which kicks off in less than two weeks.
Brazilian Governmental Advisory Committee representative Achilles Zaluar has meanwhile reached out to Marby to request a delay of this decision until ICANN 65, which takes place in June.
Eight-nation ACTO is unhappy with Amazon’s encroachment onto what it sees as its geographic name rights, even though the Amazon region is typically known as Amazonia locally.
Amazon has offered to protect culturally sensitive terms at the second level and to support future efforts to secure a .amazonia TLD.
But its latest offers have still not been formally presented to and discussed with ACTO.
This post was updated an hour after publication to provide additional context to the cancellation.

After ICANN knockback, Amazon countries agree to .amazon talks

Talks that could lead to Amazon finally getting its long-sought .amazon gTLD are back on, after a dispute between ICANN and eight South American governments.
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization last week invited ICANN CEO Goran Marby to meet ACTO members in Brasilia, any day next week.
It’s not clear whether Amazon representatives have also been invited.
The outreach came despite, or possibly because of, ICANN’s recent rejection of an ACTO demand that the .amazon gTLD applications be returned to their old “Will Not Proceed” status.
In rejecting ACTO’s Request for Reconsideration, ICANN’s board of directors had stressed that putting .amazon back in the evaluation stream was necessary in order to negotiate contractual concessions that would benefit ACTO.
Amazon is said to have agreed to some Public Interest Commitments that ACTO would be able to enforce via ICANN’s PIC Dispute Resolution Process.
The e-commerce giant is also known to have offered ACTO cultural safeguards and financial sweeteners.
ACTO’s decision to return to the negotiating table may have been made politically less uncomfortable due to a recent change in its leadership.
Secretary-general Jacqueline Mendoza, who had held the pen on a series of hard-line letters to Marby, was in January replaced by Bolivian politician Alexandra Moreira after her three-year term naturally came to an end.
ICANN’s board has said it will look at .amazon again at its meetings in Kobe, Japan, in March.

ICANN puts deadline on .amazon talks

ICANN’s board of directors has voted to put a March deadline on talks over the future of the .amazon gTLD.
Late last week, the board formally resolved to “make a decision” on .amazon at ICANN 64, which runs in Kobe, Japan from March 9 to March 14.
It would only do so if Amazon the e-commerce giant and the eight governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization fail to come to a “mutually agreed solution” on their differences before then.
CEO Goran Marby is instructed to facilitate these talks.
Here are the relevant resolved clauses from the resolution:

Resolved (2019.01.16.03), the Board hereby reiterates that Resolution 2018.10.25.18 was taken with the clear intention to grant the President and CEO the authority to progress the facilitation process between the ACTO member states and the Amazon corporation with the goal of helping the involved parties reach a mutually agreed solution, but in the event they are unable to do so, the Board will make a decision at ICANN 64 on the next steps regarding the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains.
Resolved (2019.01.16.04), the Board encourages a high level of communication between the President and CEO and the relevant stakeholders, including the representatives of the Amazonian countries and the Amazon corporation, between now and ICANN 64, and directs the President and CEO to provide the Board with updates on the facilitation process in anticipation of revisiting the status of the .AMAZON applications at its meeting at ICANN64.

The vote came following ACTO’s demand that ICANN reverse its decision to take .amazon, and Chinese and Japanese translations, off their “Will Not Proceed” status, which heavily implied they will ultimately end up in the root.
ACTO, which claims its members have a greater right to the string due to its geographical and cultural significance, says it has not yet agreed to Amazon’s peace offering, which includes safeguards, financial support for future gTLD applications, and free Kindles.
The ICANN board has now formally rejected the demand — so .amazon is still officially on the path to delegation — but has published mountains of clarification explaining that ACTO misinterpreted what the status change implied.
The board now says that the status change was necessary in order for ICANN to negotiate the inclusion of Public Interest Commitments — PICs, which would give ACTO the right to challenge Amazon if it breaches any of its cultural safeguards — in the .amazon contracts.
With ACTO’s Request for Reconsideration now dealt with, the ball moves into ACTO’s court.
Will ACTO come back to the negotiating table, or will it retain the hard line it has been adopting for the last few months? We’ll find out before long.

.amazon domain isn’t a slam dunk after all

Amazon’s application for the .amazon dot-brand may not be as secure as it was thought, following an ICANN decision over the Christmas period.
Directors threw out a South American government demand for it to un-approve the .amazon bid, but clarified that ICANN has not yet made a “final decision” to allow the gTLD to go live.
The Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee formally rejected (pdf) a Request for Reconsideration filed by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which is made up of the governments of the eight countries near that big foresty, rivery, basiny thing, on December 21.
ACTO had asked the board to overturn its October resolution that took .amazon off its longstanding “Will Not Proceed” (ie, rejected) status and put it back on the path to delegation.
Secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza last month blasted ICANN for multiple “untrue, misleading, unfortunate and biased statements”, in connection with ACTO’s purported acquiescence to the .amazon bid.
Refusing ACTO’s request, the BAMC stated that ACTO had misinterpreted the resolution, and that ICANN did not intend to delegate .amazon until Amazon the company and ACTO had sat down to talk about how they can amicably share the name.
The October resolution “could have been clearer”, the BAMC said, adding:

the Resolution was passed with the intention that further discussions among the parties take place before the Board takes a final decision on the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains. The language of the Resolution itself does not approve delegation of .AMAZON or support any particular solution. Rather, the Resolution simply “directs the President and CEO, or his designee(s), to remove the ‘Will Not Proceed’ status and resume processing of the .AMAZON applications.”

There are pages and pages of this kind of clarification. The committee clearly wants to help to smooth over relations between ICANN and the governments.
On the face of it, there’s a slight whiff of ret-conny spin about the BAMC recommendations.
There’s some ambiguity in the public record about what the ICANN board actually voted for in October.
Shortly before the ICANN board voted to resume processing .amazon, CEO Goran Marby stated, in front of an audience at ICANN 63 in Barcelona, both that a decision to delegate was being made and that ACTO was still at the table:

what we in practice has done is, through facilitation process, constructed a shared delegation of .AMAZON where the company has or will provide commitments to the ACTO countries how the .AMAZON will be used in the future. And the decision today is to delegate it, forward it to me to finalize those discussions between the company and those countries.
And I’m also formally saying yes to the invitation to go to Brazil from the ACTO countries to their — finish off the last round of discussions.

While the new clarifications seem to suggest that ACTO still has some power to keep .amazon out of the root, the BAMC decision also suggests that the full board could go ahead and approve .amazon at the ICANN 64 meeting in Japan this March, with or without governmental cooperation, saying:

the BAMC recommends that the Board reiterates that the Resolution was taken with the clear intention to grant the President and CEO the authority to progress the facilitation process between the ACTO member states and the Amazon corporation with the goal of helping the involved parties reach a mutually agreed solution, but in the event they are unable to do so the Board will make a decision on the next steps at ICANN 64 regarding the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains. The BAMC encourages a high level of communication between the President and CEO and the relevant stakeholders, including the representatives of the Amazonian countries and the Amazon corporation, between now and ICANN 64.

If you’ve not been following the story, ACTO has concerns about .amazon due to its similarity to the name of the rain-forest region.
Amazon the company has promised to encode cultural safeguards in its ICANN contract and offered to donate a bunch of free stuff to the countries to sweeten the deal
The current Amazon offer has not been published.
The BAMC recommendation will now be considered by the full ICANN board, which is usually just a formality.

Governments blast ICANN over Amazon gTLDs

ICANN seems to have found itself in the center of a diplomatic crisis, after eight South American governments strongly denied they approve of Amazon being given the .amazon gTLD.

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, along with the government of Brazil, blasted ICANN CEO Goran Marby for multiple alleged “untrue, misleading, unfortunate and biased statements”, in a December 7 letter  (pdf) published yesterday.

ACTO claims that ICANN was “premature” and “ill-informed” when its board of directors un-rejected Amazon’s gTLD applications in an October resolution.

In bruising terms, the letter goes on to criticize Marby for failing to set up promised talks between ACTO and Amazon and then characterizing “informal” conversations with Brazil’s Governmental Advisory Committee rep as if they represented ACTO’s collective view.

It’s just about as harsh a critique of ICANN management by governments I’ve read.

Amazon, the retailer, has been trying to get .amazon, along with transliterations in Chinese and Japanese scripts, since 2012.

Its applications were rejected — technically, placed in “Will Not Proceed” status — after GAC advice in July 2013. The advice was full-consensus, the strongest type, after the lone holdout, the United States, at the time trying to win support for the IANA transition, bowed out.

The advice came because the ACTO countries believe “Amazon” is a geographic string that belongs to them.

But Amazon filed an Independent Review Process appeal with ICANN, which it won last year.

The IRP panel declared that the GAC advice was built on shaky, opaque foundations and that the committee should not have a blanket “veto” over new gTLD applications.

ICANN has ever since been trying to figure out a way to comply with the IRP ruling while at the same time appeasing the GAC and the ACTO countries.

The GAC gave it a little wriggle room a year ago when it issued advice that ICANN should “continue facilitating negotiations between the [ACTO] member states and the Amazon corporation”.

ICANN took this to mean that its earlier advice to reject the bids had been superseded, and set about trying to get Amazon and ACTO to come to an agreement.

Amazon, for its part, has offered ACTO nations a suite of cultural protections, an offer to support future applications for .amazonia or similar, and $5 million worth of products and services, including free Kindle devices.

It has also offered to bake a collection of Public Interest Commitments — these have never been published — into its registry contract, which would enable ACTO governments to bring compliance actions against the company in future. 

That proposal was made in February, and ICANN has supposed to have been facilitating talks ever since.

According to a timeline provided by Marby, in a November letter (pdf) to ACTO secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza, ICANN has been working in this facilitation role since November 2017.

Problem is, at almost every step of the way it’s been dealing with Brazilian GAC rep Benedicto Filho, rather than with Mendoza herself, apparently on the assumption that when he made noises favorable to the Amazon proposal he was speaking for ACTO. 

And that’s not the case, according to Mendoza and Filho, in the newly published letters.

Whatever input Filho had was in the context of “informal and general conversations in which it was repeatedly and clearly indicated that no country had any mandate to negotiate on behalf of the other members of ACTO”, Mendoza wrote.

Filho himself goes on to accuse Marby of several “gross misrepresentation[s]” and “flagrant inaccuracies”, in an increasingly strident set of three emails forward by Mendoza to Marby.

He claims that he informed Marby every step of the way that he was not authorized to speak on behalf of ACTO, and that the idea he was involved in “obscure and secret negotiations” is “offensive”.

It seems that either one or both men is bullshitting about the extent to which Filho represented himself as an ACTO rep, or there has been a genuine breakdown of communication. For want of any definitive evidence, it seems fair to give them both the benefit of the doubt for now.

The situation as it stands now is that ACTO has called off planned peace talks with Amazon, facilitated by Marby, and has filed a Request for Reconsideration in an attempt to overturn the ICANN board’s October resolution.

Mendoza says ACTO will not engage in talks concerning .amazon until this request has been processed. 

So the fate of .amazon now lies with ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which is responsible for rejecting processing reconsideration requests. The test is usually whether the requester has brought new information to light that was not available when the board made its decision.

BAMC can either figure out a way to accept the request and put .amazon back in its “Will Not Proceed” status, smoothing out the path to negotiations (re)opening but placing Amazon back in indefinite limbo, or it can reject it and risk ACTO walking away completely.

It’s a tricky spot to be in, and no mistake.

First non-brand gTLD to go dark

The number of new gTLDs to voluntarily terminate their ICANN contracts has hit 45, with the first non-brand calling it quits.
It’s a geo-gTLD, .doha, which was meant to represent the Qatari capital of Doha.
There were no registered domains. Despite being delegated in March 2015, it never launched.
The registry was the country’s Communications Regulatory Authority, which also runs local ccTLD .qa.
No reason was given for the request — registries are allowed to terminate their contracts for any reason, with notice.
The registry’s web site hasn’t been updated in some time, so perhaps resources are an issue.
Given Doha is a protected geographic term, it’s unlikely to return in future unless the government changes its mind in future application rounds.
Dot-brand gTLDs to go the same way since I last reported the number include .blanco, .spiegel, .bond, .epost, .active and .zippo.

Amazon offered $5 million of free Kindles for .amazon gTLD

Amazon offered South American governments $5 million worth of free Kindles, content and cloud services in exchange for their endorsement of its .amazon gTLD application, it has emerged.
The proposal, made in February, also included an offer of four years of free hosting up to a value of $1 million.
The sweeteners came during negotiations with the eight governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which object to .amazon because they think it would infringe on their geographical and cultural rights.
Amazon has sought to reassure these governments that it will reserve culturally sensitive strings of their choice in .amazon, and that it will actively support any future applications for gTLDs such as .amazonas, which is the more meaningful geographic string in local languages.
I’ve reported on these offers before, but to my knowledge the offer of free Kindles and AWS credits has not been made public before. (UPDATE: Nope.)
According to a September letter from ACTO, published (pdf) this week, Amazon told it:

as an indication of goodwill and support for the people and governments of the Amazonian Region… [Amazon will] make available to the OTCA governments credits for the use of AWS services, Kindles preloaded with mutually agreed upon content, and similar Amazon.com services and products in an amount not to exceed $5,000,000.

Amazon also offered to set up a .amazon web site “to support the Amazonian people’s cultural heritage” and pay up to $1 million to host it for four years.
These kinds of financial sweeteners would not be without precedent.
The applicant for .bar wound up offering to donate $100,000 to fund a school in Montenegro, after the government noted the string match with the Bar region of the country.
The ACTO countries met in August to consider Amazon’s offer, but chose not to accept it.
However, they’re not closing off talks altogether. Instead, they’ve taken up ICANN on its offer to act as a facilitator of talks between Amazon and ACTO members.
The ICANN board of directors passed a resolution last month instructing CEO Goran Marby to “support the development of a solution” that would involve “sharing the use of those top-level domains with the ACTO member states”.
ACTO secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza has responded positively to this resolution (pdf) and invited Marby to ACTO headquarters in Brasilia to carry on these talks.

Amazon’s .amazon gTLD may not be dead just yet

South American governments are discussing whether to reverse their collective objection to Amazon’s .amazon gTLD bid.
A meeting of the Governmental Advisory Committee at ICANN 61 in Puerto Rico yesterday heard that an analysis of Amazon’s proposal to protect sensitive names if it gets .amazon will be passed to governments for approval no later than mid-April.
Brazil’s GAC rep said that a working group of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization is currently carrying out this analysis.
Amazon has offered the eight ACTO countries commitments including the protection of such as “rainforest.amazon” and actively supporting any future government-endorsed bids for .amazonas.
Its offer was apparently sweetened in some unspecified way recently, judging by Brazil’s comments.
ACTO countries, largely Brazil and Peru, currently object to .amazon on the grounds that it’s a clash with the English version of the name for the massive South American rain forest, river and basin region, known locally as Amazonas.
There’s no way to read the tea leaves on which way the governments will lean on Amazon’s latest proposal, and Peru’s GAC rep warned against reading too much into the fact that it’s being considered by the ACTO countries.
“I would like to stress the fact that we are not negotiating right now,” she told the GAC meeting. “We are simply analyzing a proposal… The word ‘progress’ by no means should be interpreted as favorable opinion towards the proposal, or a negative opinion. We are simply analyzing the proposal.”
ICANN’s board of directors has formally asked the GAC to give it more information about its original objection to .amazon, which basically killed off the application a few years ago, by the end of ICANN 61.
Currently, the GAC seems to be planning to say it has nothing to offer, though it may possibly highlight the existence of the ACTO talks, in its formal advice later this week.