Now Nokia scraps a dot-brand

Finnish tech company Nokia has become the latest company to get rid of a dot-brand gTLD.

It’s asked ICANN to terminate the contract for the IDN .诺基亚 ( .xn--jlq61u9w7b), which is the Chinese transliteration of “Nokia”.

Like .nokia itself, the TLD is not currently in use. Nokia has not asked ICANN to terminate .nokia (or, at least, ICANN has not published such a notice).

Other companies that chose to terminate their Chinese IDNs include Richemont and Volkswagen. In Richemont’s case it was followed by all its other gTLDs.

Bugatti dumps dot-brand under new owners

Bugatti, which makes incredibly expensive limited-edition sports cars, is dropping its dot-brand.

The French company asked ICANN to release it from its .bugatti registry contract about a month ago, according to ICANN documents.

Bugatti entered new ownership last November, under a joint venture between Rimac and Porsche, and recently reportedly underwent a branding overhaul.

It seems the dot-brand had no place under the new marketing strategy.

Its previous owner had been Volkswagen, which still has a (unused) dot-brand, despite dumping its Chinese-script equivalent. But Porsche had been an opponent of the new gTLD program back in 2011.

.bugatti had actually been used, albeit lightly. A couple of live, non-redirecting sites still remain.

Over 100 dot-brands have terminated their contracts to date.

In pictures: from tuk-tuks to cheese wheels, every ICANN national stereotype 2016-2022

What’s the one thing that ICANN most associates with your country?

For the The Netherlands, it seems to be cheese. For Puerto Rico, rum. For Morocco, um… camels.

ICANN ships about 12 metric tons (10 tonnes) of gear to its meeting locations three times a year, and a few weeks after the meeting concludes it issues a “By The Numbers” report, containing a treasure trove of data about the meeting.

The reports include data on how much equipment — servers, routers, mics, headsets etc — was shipped, along with a lighthearted “that’s the equivalent of” comparison.

It started in 2016 with elephants and cars, but from round about the third report, the ICANN 57 meeting in Hyderabad, India, ICANN started picking a comparison with a local connection.

I thought it might be fun to collect all these images in one place for easy reference.

ICANN 55, Marrakech, Morocco

3.5 African elephants. I’m not convinced this one was connected to the host. Probably just representative of “a heavy thing”.

ICANN 56, Helsinki, Finland

12.2 mid-sized cars. Again, this might just be “a heavy thing”. Finland isn’t really known for its cars. Maybe ICANN thought it was in Sweden.

ICANN 57, Hyderabad, India

77 tuk-tuks. This cheap form of private-hire transport is as ubiquitous in India as it is in many parts of Asia.

ICANN 58, Copenhagen, Denmark

1,365 bicycles. Copenhagen is reportedly one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. I recall walking pretty much the full distance from the airport to the venue along a cycle path when I arrived for ICANN 58.

ICANN 59, Johannesburg, South Africa

8 giraffes. South Africa is known for its tourist safaris.

ICANN 60, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

6,517 falcons. Falconry is a popular pass-time and tourist attraction in the UAE.

ICANN 61, San Jose, Puerto Rico

34 barrels of rum. I had to google this one to be honest, but it turns out the Puerto Rico government calls the US territory the “Rum Capital of the World”. It even has a .gov web site to promote the product.

ICANN 62, Panama City, Panama

145 sacks of coffee beans. Panama isn’t exactly internationally renowned for its coffee exports, but I guess it’s difficult to weigh stuff in terms of canals.

ICANN 63, Barcelona, Spain

6,849 Spanish guitars. It has the word “Spanish” in it, do you see?

ICANN 64, Kobe, Japan

17 cows. Kobe is known for its beef, if you’re into that kind of thing.

ICANN 65, Marrakech, Morocco

23 camels.

ICANN 66, Montreal, Canada

38 barrels of maple syrup. A gimme… the leaf is right there on the flag.

ICANN 74, The Hague, Netherlands

1,191 cheese wheels. Who doesn’t love a bit of Dutch cheese?

Did ICANN pay for most meeting attendees to show up in The Hague?

ICANN may have lauded the return to in-person meetings for its gathering in The Hague in June, but there’s good reason to believe more than half of those who showed up may have been there on ICANN’s dime.

ICANN 74, which was the first public meeting with a face-to-face component since the Covid-19 pandemic began in late 2019, attracted 917 in-person attendees, according to the Org’s latest By-The-Numbers report (pdf).

But more than a quarter of the badge-holders were on ICANN’s payroll, and as many as a third more could have had their flights, hotels and food reimbursed by ICANN.

The report shows that 28.7% of in-person attendees — 263 people — were either ICANN staff (14.9%), board of directors (1.7%), or event support staff (12.1%).

If ICANN’s travel support reimbursements track with previous meetings, as many as half of the remaining 651 attendees could also have had their trips fully or partially paid for by ICANN.

ICANN typically pays for around 300 non-staffers to attend its thrice-annual meetings, largely community volunteers in key roles on committees, advisory groups or working groups, who are expected to work for their money, as well as those on outreach programs such as Next-Gen.

Supported travelers for the June 2019 meeting in Marrakech, Morocco amounted to 326 people at a cost of about $820,000. For the Montreal AGM later that year, ICANN spent $1.1 million supporting 366 community travelers.

There’s reason to believe that the number of supported travelers could be lower due to the pandemic, of course, but it does seem quite realistic that more than half of the people who turned up for ICANN 74 did so with their hands in ICANN’s pocket.

That’s not counting the remote participants who asked ICANN to reimburse them for their extra internet access costs to Zoom in during the meeting.

According to the ICANN report, 32 people claimed up to $60 each for their broadband during ICANN 74. That was down a little on the prior meeting in March, but up on the number claiming reimbursements during the height of the pandemic.

ICANN also broke down the nations each in-person attendee hailed from, for I believe the first time, revealing Ghana as a surprisingly enthusiastic participant.

The Netherlands and US occupied the top two slots of the participants-by-country rankings, with 149 and 121 delegates, but Ghana was third with 43, ahead of the UK’s 41 and Germany’s 35.

Early “dot-brand” adopter wants to scrap its gTLD

One of the first adopters of the dot-brand gTLD concept, which has an active portfolio of resolving domains, has asked ICANN to tear up its registry contract.

The Australian Cancer Research Foundation said it no longer wishes to operate .cancerresearch, which it has used since 2014.

It’s a bit of a strange, possibly unique, situation, which may explain why its termination request, submitted in April, is only now being published by ICANN.

Technically, .cancerresearch was more like a closed generic than a dot-brand. It did not have a trademark on the string or the Specification 13 exceptions in its registry contract, which would make it a dot-brand.

Instead, ACRF had the TLD delegated, registered a bunch of resolving names to itself, and never officially launched. There was never even a sunrise period.

Pretty significant loophole in the rules for the 2012 application round if you ask me.

But ICANN is treating .cancerresearch as if it was a dot-brand anyway. Because nobody except ACRF ever owned any domains there, there’s no need to transition to a new registry to protect registrants.

This also means nobody else will be able to apply for the same string for two years, assuming an application window opens in that period.

ACRF still has live non-redirecting web sites on domains such as lung.cancerresearch, breast.cancerresearch and donate.cancerresearch.

It’s the first gTLD termination request since last October.

ICANN staffer to referee closed generics fight

An ICANN policy staffer seems set to chair discussions between governments and the gTLD community over how to regulate “closed generic” domains in the next round of new gTLD applications.

ICANN has put forward its own conflict resolution specialist Melissa Peters Allgood to facilitate the talks, and the Governmental Advisory Committee and GNSO Council have apparently concurred, according to recent correspondence.

“We are of the view that Ms. Allgood’s experience, qualifications, and neutrality in the matter meets the suggested criteria from the GAC and the GNSO Council,” ICANN chair Maarten Botterman told his GAC and GNSO counterparts.

The talks will attempt to reach a consensus on how closed generics can be permitted, but limited to applications that “serve a public interest goal”.

A closed generic is a dictionary-word gTLD that the applicant hopes to operate as a dot-brand even though it does not own a matching trademark. Think Nike operating .sneakers and excluding Adidas and Reebok from registering names there.

While the GNSO community was unable to come to consensus on whether they should be permitted in subsequent rounds, the nine-year-old “public interest goal” GAC advice is still applicable.

The GAC and GNSO have agreed that the talks will exclude the propositions that closed generics should be unrestricted or banned outright.

Once both parties have formally agreed to Allgood’s appointment, and to the size and makeup of the discussion group, Allgood will prepare more paperwork outlining the problem at hand before talks start to happen, according to Botterman.

Covid vaccine maker takes RDNH loss to ICANN board

An Indian pharmaceuticals firm with a $2 billion turnover has complained at the highest level of ICANN after it was handed a Reverse Domain Name Hijacking decision over the .com matching its company name.

Zydus Lifesciences, which produces mainly generic drugs but last year earned government approval to manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine, says a UDRP panel “exhibited extreme bias” when it threw out its UDRP complaint against the owner of zydus.com last month.

The company had claimed the anonymous registrant was cybersquatting, but the WIPO panel instead found RDNH.

The panel was not convinced that the registrant should have been aware of Zydus’ existence when he registered the name in 2004, and said his use of the name — which it characterized as a fanciful five-letter generic — to redirect to various affiliate marketing sites was not “bad faith”.

But now Zydus is claiming that the panel ignored evidence that it was already a very large company, with a $110 million turnover, at the time of registration, and says the UDRP decision shows evidence of bias against developing-world companies. The latter card is played pretty hard.

I believe this is only the second time that a UDRP decision has been challenged with a formal Request for Reconsideration with the ICANN board of directors, and there’s a pretty good chance it will be summarily dismissed like the first one.

Zydus will probably have to sue, or pay up.

Feds warn of Covid risk from “dark” Whois

The US Food and Drug Administration has escalated its beef with ICANN, warning that inaccessible Whois data is making it harder to tackle bogus Covid-19 “cures” and the country’s opioid crisis.

Catherine Hermsen from the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations wrote to ICANN CEO Göran Marby last week to complain that some registrars do not adequately respond to abuse complaints and that ICANN ignores follow-up complaints from government agencies.

She doubled down on the FDA’s previous complaint that ICANN’s inaction may be because it is funded by the industry, but back-pedaled on previous insinuations that ICANN’s leadership were putting their own big salaries ahead of public safety.

The beef started in early June, when an organization called Coalition for a Secure & Transparent Internet — basically a front for the likes of DomainTools and other companies whose business models are threatened by privacy legislation — held a one-sided webinar entitled “The Threat of a Dark WHOIS”.

On that webinar, Daniel Burke, chief of the FDA’s Investigative Services Division, lamented the lack of cooperation his agency gets when requesting private Whois data from “certain” registrars, and pointed to cases where the FDA’s inability to quickly get fake pharma sites, including those related to Covid-19, shut down have led to deaths.

He also said that complaints to ICANN about non-compliant registrars fall on deaf ears, to the point that it no longer bothers complaining, and suggested that ICANN and domain companies are financially incentivized to be uncooperative.

Burke quoted the writer Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

“I have found that’s the case with my interactions with ICANN and certain registries and registrars,” Burke said. “They just don’t want to listen… it’s a money-maker for them right now, it’s not profitable for them to deal with it.”

Marby also “spoke” on the CSTI webinar, but his brief intervention was actually just an out-of-context snippet — the “GDPR is not my fault!” T-shirt speech — taken from a recording of an ICANN webinar back in January and presented — dishonestly in my opinion — as if it had been filmed as a contribution to the CSTI discussion.

His inability to directly respond to Burke live led him to write to the FDA (pdf) a couple of weeks later to dispute some of his claims.

First, Marby said the the FDA does not need to obtain a subpoena to get access to Whois data. Registrars are obliged to respond to “legitimate interest” requests, when balanced against the privacy rights of the registrant, he said. He added:

In a few instances, government agencies have submitted complaints to ICANN Contractual Compliance regarding registrars’ refusal to provide non-public registration data. These agencies were ultimately successful in gaining access to the requested data without having to obtain a subpoena or lawful order.

Second, Marby disputed the financial motivation claims, writing: “ICANN’s leadership’s salaries are in no way tied to or dependent upon domain name registrations.”

Third, he offered a (pretty weak, in my view) defense against the claim that ICANN ignores complaints from government agencies, pointing out: “ICANN is not political and, therefore, takes actions to ensure that the workings of the Internet are not politicized.”

He also pointed out that ICANN operates a system called DNSTICR which monitors reports of DNS abuse related to the pandemic and alerts the relevant registries and registrars.

The problem here is that ICANN’s definition of abuse is pretty narrow and does not extend to web sites that sell industrial bleach as a Covid cure. That would count as “content” and ICANN is not the “content police”.

That’s pretty much what Hermsen says in the latest missive (pdf) in this row.

DNS security threats such as malware and phishing, however, were not what SA Burke was referring to in his presentation. Given the agency’s public health mission, FDA has been working during the pandemic to protect Americans from unproven or fraudulent medical products claiming to treat, cure, prevent, mitigate or diagnose COVID-19…

Given your stated concerns regarding COVID-19-related malware and phishing activity, we trust that you are equally concerned about registrars who may not be following the [Registrar Accreditation Agreement’s] requirements to “investigate” and “respond appropriately” following receipt of notifications about abuse, particularly complaints reporting activity involving COVID-19-related fraud or activity exacerbated the current opioid addiction crisis — especially in light of ICANN’s singular ability to enforce the terms of RAAs.

She also comes back, splitting hairs in my opinion, on the ICANN salaries claim, stating: “SA Burke was not referring to ICANN’s leadership salaries… SA Burke was referring more generally to the substantial source of funding ICANN receives from domain name registries and registrars.”

ICANN has just started work on a Whois Disclosure System that, while pretty weak, may make it slightly easier for government agencies to obtain the data they want.

ICANN names NomCom chairs

ICANN has announced its picks for chair and chair-elect of its influential Nominating Committee, raising questions about the latter role for not the first time.

The board of directors has picked Vanda Scartezini as chair and Amir Qayyum as chair elect, according to a newly published resolution.

It’s the third time in recent years that the previous year’s chair-elect, in this case Damon Ashcraft, has not gone on to become chair, as the ICANN bylaws anticipate.

The bylaws say that the chair-elect, who does not have a vote, is basically an apprentice to the chair who spends a year on the committee to prepare her or him for the big seat. The bylaws also say that the ICANN board can pick another person for chair if it wants to.

In this case, while Scartezini was on the 2022 committee she was not chair-elect.

Something similar happened last year, when the board picked 2021 chair-elect Tracy Hackshaw for chair, then changed its mind two weeks later.

It also caused a controversy in the 2015 cycle when it snubbed Ron Andruff.

The NomCom is responsible for picking several leadership roles in the ICANN community, including three directors per year.

New chair Scartezini is from the At-Large community and Brazil. Qayyum is from the root server community and Pakistan.

ICANN’s top brass get pay raises

ICANN’s CEO and several top executives are to receive pay raises amounting to tens of thousands of dollars.

The Org’s board of directors has approved a 4% raise for Göran Marby and four other of the top brass, with CFO Xavier Calvez getting an extra 4.5%.

The board also approved the payment of Marby’s bonus, but the amount — capped at 30% of his salary — will likely not be disclosed until ICANN files its tax returns.

It’s the fourth year in a row the CEO has received a pay rise.

Last year it was 3% andthe year before’s was 5%, but it was not a unanimous decision of the board. It’s not yet known how this year’s vote broke down.

The other execs receiving a raise of up to 4% are general counsel John Jeffrey, senior VPs Theresa Swinehart and David Olive and CIO Ashwin Rangan. None of them earned less than $450,000 in ICANN’s last tax filings.

The board resolution states that Marby’s salary is still lower than the low end of the 50-75th percentile of comparable industry salaries, though this formula is sometimes criticized for weighing tech industry CEOs in with non-profit CEOs.