M+M surprised by .mumbai snub

One of Minds + Machines’ key top-level domain applications has been thrown into confusion after government support for its .mumbai bid was apparently revoked.
In a letter that surfaced on the ICANN web site this week, Y.S. Mahangade, deputy director of IT at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, wrote (pdf):

Honorable Deputy Mayor of MCGM inadvertently issued a letter to one organization which has been revoked later by Honorable Deputy Major of MCGM. It may please be noted that the official position of the City of Mumbai is communicated by Municipal Commissioner.

Under ICANN’s rules, all applications for geographical gTLDs must be backed officially by the local government, otherwise they get rejected.
According to Wikipedia, the Mayor of Mumbai (and presumably the deputy) has a “largely ceremonial” function, “as the real powers are vested in the Municipal Commissioner”.
Wikipedia does not say what kind of power the deputy director of IT wields. I’m guessing it’s not much.
M+M CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a statement:

This is the first we have heard about this and we are looking into the matter with our client, India TL Domain Pvt Ltd, to whom the original letter of appointment was issued by the Deputy Mayor of Mumbai. Once we understand what the situation is viz-a-viz India TL Domain Pvt Ltd and the City of Mumbai, we will provide an update.

You can view the letter of support from the deputy mayor here.
M+M announced its deal with the .mumbai applicant, India TL Domain, in June. As I noted at the time, not much is known about the company.
But according to official records, the company’s managing director is Ashok Hiremath, who’s also chairman of Mumbai-based fungicide manufacturer Astec Lifesciences.
His brother Suresh, now apparently a British citizen living in London, appears to be the only one of the company’s three directors to have engaged, albeit lightly, in ICANN policy development.
The third director is also Astec’s corporate secretary. The company shares its address with Astec.
In June, M+M’s parent company, Top Level Domain Holdings, issued two million new shares to an unnamed consultant as a result of the .mumbai deal, raising £160,000 ($260,000).
This is not the first time a geographic gTLD applicant that apparently raised support from the necessary governmental entity has had its plans thrown into doubt.
The same happened to DotConnectAfrica, a potential .africa bidder, in May, after the African Union apparently did an about-face.
Mumbai is India’s largest city, with over 20 million citizens. It’s also the richest (although the poverty there is enough to make you weep) making .mumbai a potentially lucrative gTLD.

MelbourneIT talks to 270 .brand applicants

The Australian domain registrar MelbourneIT said it has talked to 270 companies and signed contracts with 17 that want to apply for “.brand” top-level domains.
The news came in the company’s “disappointing” first-half financial results announcement yesterday.
According to its official report (pdf), MelbourneIT has received 230 expressions of interest and has inked deals with 14, but managing director Theo Hnarkis reportedly told analysts the higher numbers.
The company is charging clients between AUD 45,000 ($47,000) and AUD 75,000 ($79,000) to handle the ICANN application process.
MelbourneIT’s preferred partner for back-end registry services is VeriSign, so the clients it signs are likely to become recurring revenue streams for VeriSign if their applications are successful.

Watch the .nxt conference live online

The .nxt conference on new top-level domains kicks off in San Francisco later today, but fear not if you were unable to make it in person – much of the content will be streamed live online.
Roughly half of the three-day meeting’s sessions will be made available live, and it appears that the whole lot will be available on demand for the next three months.
If the conference is as informative as the first one, which took place in February, the $95 fee .nxt is charging to access the streams seems like a pretty good deal.
It’s no substitute for being there in person – much of the value in these things lies in the networking opportunities – but if new gTLDs are likely to effect your business you’d be crazy not to check it out.
More details here.

Want Beyonce.xxx? JustinBieber.xxx? Forget it

ICM Registry has banned a whole bunch of celebrity names from the new .xxx top-level domain, in order to scupper cybersquatters and opportunistic porn webmasters.
Want to register Beyonce.xxx, AngelinaJolie.xxx, OlsenTwins.xxx, Madonna.xxx, BritneySpears.xxx, KimKardashian.xxx, HalleBerry.xxx or WinonaRyder.xxx?
How about JustinBieber.xxx, BradPitt.xxx, CharlieSheen.xxx, SimonCowell.xxx, GeorgeMichael.xxx, EltonJohn.xxx, VerneTroyer.xxx, DonaldTrump.xxx or OsamaBinLaden.xxx?
Forget it. According to Whois records, you’re out of luck on all counts. They’ve all been reserved by the registry.
These are all among what I’m guessing is at least hundreds – maybe more – of celebrity names that ICM has blocked from ever being registered.
The company won’t say how many celebrities have been afforded this privilege, or how it came up with the list, but it has said in the past that a total of about 15,000 domains have been registry-reserved.
That also includes the names of the world’s capital cities, culturally sensitive strings put forward by a handful of governments, and the “premium” names that ICM plans to auction.
I’m wondering what the cut-off point is for celebrities. How famous do you have to be to get your .xxx blocked by default by the registry? B-List minimum? D-List? What database is ICM using?
American Pie actor Tara Reid just entered Celebrity Big Brother here in the UK, which pretty much means her career is over, and she’s managed to make it to ICM’s reserved list.
While ICM has always said it would help protect personal names from abuse, it’s never been entirely clear about how it would go about it.
Its registry agreement with ICANN has for some time said that “unauthorized registration of personal names” would be forbidden, but there were no real details to speak of.
As I reported last week, its souped-up cybersquatting policy, Rapid Evaluation Service, has a special provision for personal names.
But presumptively blocking a subset of the world’s famous people from .xxx is bound to raise questions in the wider context of the ICANN new gTLD program, however.
As far as I can tell, no corporate trademarks have been given the same rights in .xxx as, say, David Cameron or Barack Obama.
If ICM can protect Piers Morgan’s “brand”, why can it not also protect CNN? Or Microsoft or Coke or Google? None of these brands are registry-reserved, according to Whois.
The trademark lobby will raise this question, no doubt. ICM has its own celebrity Globally Protected Marks List for .xxx, which only applies to individuals, they could argue.
There are some differences, of course.
Celebrities sometimes find they have a harder time winning cybersquatting complaints using UDRP if they have not registered their names as trademarks, which can be quite hard to come by, for example.
(UPDATE: And, of course, they may not qualify for ICM’s sunrise period if they don’t have trademarks, as EnCirca’s Tom Barrett points out in the comments below).
In addition, celebrity skin is a popular search topic on the web, which may give cybersquatters a greater impetus to register their names as domains, despite the high price of .xxx.
Also, if a registry were to reserve the brand names of, say, the Fortune 1000, it would wind up blocking many dictionary or otherwise multi-purpose strings, which is obviously not usually the case with personal names.

How not to upgrade to a .com – ask ICANN

The domain name world can be confusing, and there’s no shortage of timewasters ready to bother ICANN with their relatively minor problems and disputes.
The latest is violin maker Zeta Music Systems, which went to the extraordinary lengths of initiating an ICANN Reconsideration Request to get its hands on a domain name it does not own.
Zeta currently hosts its web site at zetamusic.net. The equivalent .com – which Zeta wants – is owned by a now-defunct company that went by the same name.
Even though the company is apparently bust and the Whois is no longer accurate, it had a long-term registration that is not due to expire until November 2012.
In his Reconsideration Request (pdf), filed in June, Zeta president Michael Gende wrote:

ICANN would be doing no harm to the former Zeta by reassigning the domain to us now. However, ICANN’s inaction with regard to this issue is doing harm to our company as potential customers naturally go to the zetamusic.com domain, and find nothing.

Individually handling second-level domain disputes is obviously none of ICANN’s business, and that’s exactly what Gende has been told (pdf) by its Board Governance Committee.
Reconsideration Requests are a rarely used, rarely successful review mechanism whereby ICANN’s decisions can be challenged if new information comes to light.
Gende’s is the first of 2011 and one of only four filed in the last five years.

Who should be ICANN’s next CEO?

With Rod Beckstrom now less than a year away from leaving the CEO job at ICANN, following his resignation this week, the rumor mill is already spitting out ideas about who should replace him.
While his contract is not set to expire until July 1, 2012, that does not necessarily mean Beckstrom’s replacement will not be named and in situ before then.
His predecessor, Paul Twomey, also gave about 10 months notice when he resigned in March 2009, and Beckstrom had taken over by July.
Twomey played out the remainder of his contract in an advisory capacity, to smooth the transition. He eventually left in January 2010.
So it’s quite possible ICANN’s executive search team will start its hunt sooner rather than later. But where should they look and what type of candidate should they choose?
It’s proved to be a well-compensated but often thankless job.
Candidates must be equally capable of sharing applause with world leaders one day and then sitting in a stuffy meeting room patiently taking shit from community members the next.
They need to be able to act not just as a figurehead but as a diplomat, negotiator and man manager, somebody confident handling large budgets and larger egos.
Candidates with cat-herding experience and a target tattooed on their foreheads will be a shoo-in.
It’s been pointed out ICANN’s four CEO appointees to date have alternated between, for want of better words, “insider” and “outsider” candidates. (The chair has a similar rule.)
Beckstrom came directly from the US government, whereas Twomey had been steeped in ICANN culture for four years as head of the Governmental Advisory Committee when he took over in 2003.
There’s no point speculating about “outsiders” at this point – ICANN could hire basically anyone – but people are already talking about known faces that might put themselves forward.
An insider may be a good call this time around, given the major challenges – new gTLDs and the renewal of the IANA contract, to name two – ICANN faces over the coming year.
As ICANN alum Maria Farrell, one of the people responsible for publicizing criticism of Beckstrom’s management style, noted yesterday, “we need someone who can hit the ground running.”

Put it another way, globally, there are probably about 500 key people involved in running the DNS and numbering systems. If the CEO doesn’t know these people already, and know where the bodies are buried – i.e. is not already one of the 500 – then she or he will be a liability for at least the first year.

That’s a pretty strong endorsement of an “insider” candidate – somebody who already knows their way around ICANN’s complex personality-driven machinery.
While there’s nothing stopping ICANN promoting somebody from within its own ranks, no names jump out as obvious candidates.
Most senior staffers are either Beckstrom-era appointees with less than two years under their belt, or hold specialist roles that would not necessarily make them CEO fodder.
An “insider”, in this case, is more likely to mean somebody from the broader ICANN community.
Two names that have popped up more than once during conversations since Beckstrom’s announcement are Chris Disspain (head of auDA in Australia) and Lesley Cowley (head of Nominet in the UK).
Both, it is whispered, were on the shortlist in 2009. Disspain now sits on the ICANN board of directors and Cowley is the newly installed chair of the ccNSO (replacing Disspain).
Both know ICANN pretty much inside-out and have many years experience managing the policy bodies for their own respective country-code top-level domains.
They are also native English speakers. That’s obviously a slight advantage – English is ICANN’s lingua franca – but not necessarily a deal-breaker.
Some say ICANN could look elsewhere in the world for its new leader. Nigel Roberts, CEO of ccTLD manager Island Networks, wrote yesterday:

ICANN should at least seriously consider this time to appoint a CEO from a non-Anglo-Saxon background to show the rest of the world it really is serious about its purported commitment to diversity.

While blind affirmative action would obviously be a terrible idea, I would have little difficulty imagining the likes of Accenture veteran Cherine Chalaby or career diplomat Bertrand De La Chapelle – ICANN directors native to non-Anglo nations – being put forward as candidates.
Both men have shown a dedication (ambition?) within ICANN, with British-Egyptian Chalaby unsuccessfully standing for chairman this year and BDLC quitting his job in the French government in order to take on his uncompensated role on ICANN’s board.
I hear good things about Chalaby, and his experience in the business world is extensive, though with just a year’s ICANN time served some may say he’s a little green. And if BDLC gets the job, we may have to extend ICANN meetings by a few days to cope with his verbosity.
While a CEO could be hired from essentially anywhere in the world, a willingness to live and work in Marina Del Rey, California may also prove an advantage.
Even though Beckstrom is based just a few hundred miles away in Silicon Valley, I don’t doubt that his distance from ICANN headquarters has contributed to the perception that he’s out of touch with his troops, surrounded by an inner circle of trusted advisers.
That said, I believe that Twomey managed to get away with spending a lot of his time in his native Australia while he was CEO, to little complaint.
Experience in the business world will also be an advantage.
ICANN has a $70 million budget for this fiscal year, and it could well find itself handling double or triple that amount when the new gTLD program kicks off next year.
Would a candidate with experience with similar budgets make a better choice? If so, how many likely applicants would actually would fit that criterion?
There are not a great many “insiders” with CEO experience at organizations of a comparable size, and companies that large do not usually send their CEOs to ICANN meetings anyway.
A senior executive from a domain name company, perhaps a VP looking to get their teeth into their first C-level position, may be a more likely applicant.
But a hire from industry could also present a perception of conflict of interest problem, coming at a time when ICANN is coming under pressure to review its ethics policies.
If Peter Dengate Thrush’s move to Minds + Machines from ICANN’s chair raised eyebrows, imagine how it could appear if ICANN’s CEO was hired directly from a registry or registrar.
As fun as it would be, I think we can probably rule out Bob Parsons for the time being.

Beckstrom quits ICANN

The CEO and president of ICANN has quit.
Rod Beckstrom tweeted within the last hour:

I have decided to wrap up my service at ICANN July 2012. Press release soon.

Many in the ICANN community kinda knew this was coming.
Over the coming hours, expect to read a lot of people question whether the words “I have decided” are strictly accurate.
UPDATE: I’ve covered the story in more depth for The Register.

Breaking: Ad industry piles on ICANN

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents over 500 companies including Facebook, Google, eBay and Microsoft, has told ICANN to put a stop to its new top-level domains program.
The cry calls just a couple of weeks after the Association of National Advertisers said it would lobby Congress and may take ICANN to court over the controversial program.
Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the IAB, said in a press release:

ICANN’s potentially momentous change seems to have been made in a top-down star chamber. There appears to have been no economic impact research, no full and open stakeholder discussions, and little concern for the delicate balance of the Internet ecosystem.
This could be disastrous for the media brand owners we represent and the brand owners with which they work. We hope that ICANN will reconsider both this ill-considered decision and the process by which it was reached.

The IAB’s membership is a Who’s Who of leading online media companies, purportedly responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the US.
It counts AOL, Digg, Amazon, the BBC, Bebo, CNN, Ziff Davis, LinkedIn, Time Warner, Slate, Thomson-Reuters, IDG, the Huffington Post and many other well-known names as members.
Demand Media, too.
If the ANA represents advertisers themselves, the IAB represents the places they spend their advertising money.
It looks like a large portion of corporate America is not happy about new gTLDs. ICANN may have found itself a new, extremely well-funded enemy.

ANA’s response to the Beckstrom letter in full

The Association of National Advertisers has issued statements in response to ICANN president Rod Beckstrom’s admonishment of its attempt to hold up the new top-level domains program.
ANA appeared out of nowhere last week, vaguely threatening to sue ICANN unless it suspended the program, which it believes will cost brand owners billions of dollars.
But yesterday Beckstrom replied, saying the program was developed through a “multi-stakeholder” policy-making process over several years in which ANA had ample opportunity to participate.
He also pointed out that ANA appears to have made faulty assumptions about how the program is supposed to work, particularly with regards “.brand” gTLDs.
This the official response to Beckstrom’s letter from Bob Liodice, ANA’s president and CEO:

We are not surprised by ICANN’s response although disappointed that ICANN chose to defend its process and deny any doubt as to consensus. Rather, ICANN needs to respond to the real concern from the brand owner community.
There is no question that this Program will increase brand owners’ costs by billions of dollars. We should not be debating if 40 or 45 comment periods were held; instead, ICANN should be justifying its economic analysis regarding the Program against the staggering costs to brands.
ANA welcomes further discussions and an opportunity for further economic study to quantify the need for more TLDs and what it will mean for industry and other stakeholders, such as the public interest community who will face the same brand dilution concerns.

ANA general counsel Doug Wood, from the law firm Reed Smith, stated:

Now is not the time for either side to ‘dig in its heels’ much less defend the process, especially in a depressed economy. ANA has raised real concerns regarding economic losses, brand dilution and resultant privacy/cyber-security harms.
In light of our shared goals of a safe and stable global Internet, ICANN should return to the negotiating table and work with all concerned parties, including the ANA and its members, to resolve brand owners’ legitimate concerns in a manner consistent with ICANN’s consensus obligations.

These are of course concerns that have been debated to death for several years in the ICANN community, lately without ANA’s participation.
The organization submitted a couple of comments more than two years ago and then seemed to disappear from the process.
One could argue that’s very odd behavior for an apparently well-funded outfit now loudly claiming that it’s “horrified” by new gTLDs.

It’s official: South Sudan to get .ss

The new African nation of South Sudan has officially been given the two-letter country code SS, meaning it is likely just months away from getting the top-level domain .ss.
The SS string appeared on the International Standards Organization’s ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 code list this week, following a request by the government of the country.
The 3166 list is the standard by which ICANN judges a territory’s eligibility to be delegated a country-code top-level domain.
South Sudan does not yet appear on IANA’s list of ccTLDs, but it’s likely to be added soon.
The last three nations to form, following the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles last October, already have ccTLD records in the IANA database, although none have yet been officially delegated to a registry or added to the DNS root system.
The delegation of a new ccTLDs is usually a much more straightforward proposition than the redelegation of an existing ccTLD to a new manager, which can take many years.
South Sudan declared independence July 9 this year and was officially recognized by the United Nations five days later.
It’s one of the world’s poorest and unhealthiest nations: it is estimated that 11% of its children die before their fifth birthday and that 2% of mothers die in childbirth.
Getting a ccTLD is probably quite low on the nation’s list of priorities.
According to reports, the South Sudan government was well aware of the connection “SS” has to the Nazis in Europe when it asked for the string.
It’s pretty tenuous connection, and I doubt anyone reasonable would take offense, but the incoming registry may want to add a few well-chosen strings to its reserved list just in case.