Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

US official Heineman joins GoDaddy

Kevin Murphy, November 5, 2019, Domain Policy

Former US government official Ashley Heineman has joined the staff of GoDaddy.
Heineman was until quite recently a policy specialist at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the US representative on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
But GoDaddy confirmed to DI today that she’s now left NTIA and joined the market-leading registrar.
I don’t know what her job title is yet. One assumes it’s related to policy or legal issues.
Heineman spent 15 years at NTIA and has been the ICANN GAC rep for the US for the last few years.
She’s had a respectably hands-on role, for a GACer, including being a member of the ongoing “EPDP” cross-community working group conducting a post-GDPR review of Whois policy.
Judging by my embarrassing error at the weekend, the US is currently being represented on the GAC by the NTIA’s Vernita Harris.
I’ve also heard rumors from ICANN 66 that another former NTIA official has also recently moved into the domain name industry. I’ll blog it up just as soon as I get confirmation.

.amazon frozen AGAIN as endless government games continue

Kevin Murphy, June 25, 2019, Domain Policy

Amazon’s application for the .amazon gTLD has yet again been frozen, after a South American government invoked ICANN’s appeals process.
The bid, as well as applications for the Chinese and Japanese versions, were returned to “on-hold” status at the weekend, after Colombia filed a formal Request for Reconsideration, an ICANN spokesperson confirmed to DI.
“The processing toward contracting of the .AMAZON applications has been halted pending the resolution of Request 19-1, per ICANN organization’s normal processes,” the spokesperson said.
This means the applications could remain frozen for 135 days, until late October, while ICANN processes the request. It’s something that has happened several times with other contested gTLDs.
Colombia filed RfR 19-1 (pdf) on June 15. It demands that ICANN reverses its board’s decision of May 15, which handed Amazon a seemingly decisive victory in its long-running battle with the eight governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.
ACTO’s members believe they should have policy control over .amazon, to protect the interests of their citizens who live in the region they share.
To win an RfR — something that hardly ever happens — a complainant has to show that the ICANN board failed to consider pertinent information before it passed a resolution.
In Colombia’s case, it argues that the board ignored an April 7 letter (since published in PDF format here) its Governmental Advisory Committee representative sent that raises some interesting questions about how Amazon proposes to operate its TLDs.
Because .amazon is meant to be a highly restricted “dot-brand” gTLD, it would presumably have to incorporate Specification 13 into its ICANN registry agreements.
Spec 13 releases dot-brands from commitments to registrar competition and trademark protection in exchange for a commitment that only the brand itself will be able to own domains in the TLD.
But Colombia points out that Amazon’s proposal (pdf) to protect ACTO governments’ interests would give the eight countries and ACTO itself “beneficial ownership” over a single domain each (believed to be names such as co.amazon, .br.amazon, etc).
If this means that Amazon would not qualify for Spec 13, it could follow that ICANN’s board made its decision to continue processing .amazon on faulty assumptions, Colombia argues.
Colombia points to the case of .sas, a dot-brand that is apparently shared by two companies that have the same brand, as a possible model for shared management of .amazon.
RfRs are handled by ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee.
BAMC took just a couple of days to rule out (pdf) Colombia’s request for “urgent reconsideration”, which would reduce its regular response time from 90 days to 7 days.
The committee said that because the .amazon applications were being placed back on-hold as part of normal procedure during consideration of an RfR, no harm could come to Colombia that would warrant “urgent” reconsideration.
According to ICANN’s spokesperson, under its bylaws the latest the board can respond to Colombia’s request is October 28.
At a GAC session at the ICANN 65 meeting in Marrakech, taking place right now, several ACTO governments have just spent over an hour firmly and publicly protesting ICANN’s actions surrounding .amazon.
They’re still talking as I hit “publish” on this post.
In a nutshell, they believe that ICANN has ignored GAC advice and reneged on its commitment to help Amazon and ACTO reach a “mutually acceptable solution”.

ICANN waves goodbye to Adobe Connect over security, pricing

Kevin Murphy, April 4, 2019, Domain Policy

ICANN has decided to dump its longstanding web conferencing service provider, Adobe Connect, in favor of rival Zoom.
The organization reckons it could save as much as $100,000 a year, and mitigate some security fears, by making the switch.
Adobe has been the standard remote participation tool for not only ICANN’s public meetings, but also its policy-development working groups, for at least seven or eight years.
It enables video, audio, screen-sharing, public and private chat, voting and so on. ICANN says that Zoom has “nearly all of the same features”.
But some of ICANN’s more secretive bodies — including the Security and Stability Advisory Committee and Board Operations — have been using Zoom for a little over a year, after an SSAC member discovered a vulnerability in Adobe that allowed potentially sensitive information to be stolen.
A clincher appears to be Zoom’s voice over IP functionality, which ICANN says will enable it to drop Premiere Global Services Inc (PGi), its current, $500,000-a-year teleconferencing provider, which participants use if they dial in from on the road.
“Based on feedback, Zoom’s voice connectivity and overall experience seem to be superior to equivalent Adobe Connect experiences,” ICANN said.
As somebody who has lurked on more than his fair share of Adobe Connect rooms, I’ve noticed that people losing their voice connection is a very common occurrence, which can delay and break the flow of discussions, though it’s not usually clear where the blame lies.
According to a Zoom feature list (pdf) provided by ICANN, Zoom currently lacks many features on its web client, but updates are expected to bring the feature set in line with the mobile apps and PC/Mac executables by the end of the year.
ICANN expects to use Zoom exclusively by ICANN 65, in Marrakech this June. In the meantime, it will provide training to community members.
The cynic in me wants to say “expect teething troubles”, but the ICANN meetings team runs a pretty tight ship. The switch might be surprisingly smooth.

ICANN heading back to Morocco in 2019

Kevin Murphy, November 6, 2017, Domain Policy

ICANN has picked Morocco for its mid-year meeting in 2019.
The June 24-27 meeting, ICANN 65, will be hosted by the Mediterranean Federation of Internet Associations at the Palmeraie Resort in Marrakech. That’s the same venue as ICANN 55 in March 2016.
It’s a Policy Forum meeting, meaning it has an abridged agenda, an expected lower attendance, and a tighter focus on policy work than the other two annual meetings.
It will be sandwiched between the March meeting in Kobe, Japan and the November meeting in Montreal, Canada.
More pressingly, it now seems all but certain that ICANN is heading to Puerto Rico in March 2018 for ICANN 61, despite the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Maria in September.
During the public forum at ICANN 60 in Abu Dhabi last week, the customary spot where the next meeting’s hosts get five minutes to plug their city or nation was notably different.
Shots of landscapes, sunsets and cultural attractions were instead replaced by a series of government and local tourism officials encouraging ICANNers to visit. The message was basically: everything’s okay, it’s safe for you to come.

The convention center venue for ICANN 61 was so lightly damaged by Maria that it was actually used as the headquarters of the recovery effort immediately after the storm. You may have seen news footage of it when President Trump showed up.
ICANN said October 7 that it was monitoring the situation but that it still intended to have the March meeting in San Juan as planned.
The city would no doubt welcome the modest economic boost that a few thousand tech professionals and lawyers showing up for a week will provide.
I’m planning on attending.