ICANN approves domain takedown rules

ICANN’s board of directors has formally approved amendments to its standard registry and registrar contracts aimed at forcing companies to take action against domains involved in DNS abuse.

At its meeting last weekend, the board passed a resolution amending the Registrar Accreditation Agreement and Base gTLD Registry Agreement to include tougher rules on tackling abuse.

Registrars must now “promptly take the appropriate mitigation action(s) that are reasonably necessary to stop, or otherwise disrupt, the Registered Name from being used for DNS Abuse” when provided with evidence of such abuse.

Registries have a similar obligation to take action, but the action might be to refer the abusive domain to the appropriate registrar.

The rules follow the now industry-standard definition of DNS abuse: “malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam (when spam serves as a delivery mechanism for the other forms of DNS Abuse listed)”.

The changes were crafted by ICANN along with registries and registrars and voted through late last year by a hefty majority of both camps.

The two contracts are now in the hands of the ICANN CEO and her lawyers for final action before becoming enforceable.

Has Epik gone “woke”?

The epic saga of disgraced registrar Epik has taken a weird twist this week, with the company appearing to do a 180 on its longstanding devotion to “free speech”, going on a Twitter rampage, sarcastically embracing “wokeness”, and ejecting one of its most controversial anchor tenants, which is now threatening to sue.

On the face of it, it seems quite possible that the company’s official Twitter account may have been compromised. So take any quotes here from @EpikLLC with a pinch of salt. There’s also a non-zero chance that the account has shared child sexual abuse material this evening, so be careful.

The current chapter of the story appears to begin in mid-December, when the owner of the web forum KiwiFarms.net — which Wikipedia says “facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities” — claimed that Epik suspended his domain for an unspecified terms of service violation.

The domain seems to have moved to Namecheap a couple of days later, where it still sits today.

A month of online drama later, earlier today the person running Epik’s Twitter account either changed, or lost their mind. This was posted this morning as the company’s pinned tweet:

Alright all Whiny, Beta Snowflakes. Our DEI hires of the month cancelled #Kiwifarms @XJosh sorry. We don't like hate speech, porn, or doxxing. #JoeBiden will fix it! 2024! @EndWokeness

— Epik LLC (@EpikLLC) January 23, 2024

DEI stands for “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” a workplace buzzword in some parts of the world, loved by some on the political left, hated by some on the right. @XJosh is KiwiFarms.net owner Josh Moon.

The content of the @EpikLLC tweet and the @EndWokeness mention suggests sarcasm. Epik has been known for the last several years for being a relatively safe home for some of the web’s most controversial content — typically sites for those with hard-right views.

After a series of tweets along the same lines, the @EpikLLC account reappeared this evening to post a screen grab apparently of a KiwiFarms.net page. The image in the tweet contained censored personal details and blurred photos of a naked male.

I won’t post the full tweet containing the image here, but the accompanying tweet text reads: “Here’s the complaint received that violated our TOS for doxxing. We believed this to be underage porn also. Regardless, Epik doesn’t want to do business with websites like this. If we misread this we apologize. Did we make the right choice in cancelling KF?”

Other Twitter users immediately pointed out that the Epik account had just shared an image it “believed to be underage porn”. Others said that the image showed a 19-year-old man rather than a child.

Moon, who goes by the handle “Null” on his web site, is currently asking his users whether they would be willing to crowd-fund a defamation lawsuit against Epik for claiming on Twitter that law enforcement had ordered the suspension of the domain and that the site hosted “child porn”. He says both claims are false.

KiwiFarms.net moved to Epik in September 2022 after its previous registrar, Cloudflare, kicked it out citing an “an imminent and emergency threat to human life” believed to relate to the targeting of a transgender Twitch streamer.

It’s not currently clear who owns or manages Epik. After a financial mismanagement scandal lasting many months, the company said last June that it had changed ownership. Contact details published by ICANN show it “belongs” to a company called Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in anonymous company formations.

ICANN said in June that it was doing due diligence on the new owners, but that the process could take several months.

First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week

The internet community will officially get eyes on the draft Applicant Guidebook for ICANN’s next new gTLD Applicant Guidebook as early as next week.

The ICANN staff/community Implementation Review Team crafting the language of the AGB is targeting February 1, next Thursday, for opening a formal Public Comment on drafts of seven sections of the document.

These sections mostly cover some of the low-hanging fruits — explanatory text or rules that have not changed a great deal from the 2012 round. They are:

• Code of Conduct and Conflict of Interest Guidelines.
• Conflicts of Interest Process for Vendors and Subcontractors. Along with the above, these sections specify what ICANN’s vendors (such as application evaluators) must not do in order to avoid the perception of conflicts of interest, such as not accepting gifts and not entering into deals to acquire applicants.
• Applicant Freedom of Expression. This section is a single-paragraph disclaimer warning applicants to be “mindful of limitations to free expression”. In other words, if your applied-for string breaks ICANN rules, your free speech rights are forfeit.
• Universal Acceptance. A brief warning or disclaimer that even successfully applied-for gTLDs may not work everywhere on the internet due to lack of software support.
• Reserved and Blocked Names. Covers the variety of reasons why an applied-for string will be rejected or subject to additional review, including names that break technical standards, are geographic in nature, or refer to organizations in the ICANN ecosystem.
• Geographic Names. Specifies when an applied-for string is considered a Geographic Name and is therefore banned outright or requires governmental approval for the application to proceed. There’s at least one potential applicant, thinking of applying for .eth, that I predict will not be happy with one of these rules.
• Predictability Framework. This is new to the 2026 round. It’s a procedure designed to tackle unexpected changes to process or policy that are required after applicants have already paid up and submitted their paperwork. In some circumstances, it requires ICANN to consult with a community group called SPIRT to make sure applicants are not affected too adversely.

The full AGB is not expected to be completed until May 2025, with ICANN currently hoping to open the next application window in April 2026.

The public comment period on the first batch of docs is expected to run from February 1 to March 19. If you want to get the jump on what is very likely to be published, drafts can be found here.

ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable

There will be no applications for closed generic gTLDs in the 2026 application round, ICANN has confirmed.

While the Org has yet to publish the results of last weekend’s board meeting, chair Tripti Sinha has written to community leaders to let them know that companies won’t be able to apply for exclusive-use, non-trademark strings for the foreseeable future.

The ban follows years of talks that failed to find a consensus on whether closed generics should be permitted, and subsequent advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee, backed up by the At-Large Advisory Committee, that they should not.

Apparently quoting board output from its January 21 meeting, Sinha wrote (pdf):

the Board has considered the GAC Advice and has determined that closed generic gTLD applications will not be permitted until such time as there is an approved methodology and criteria to evaluate whether or not a proposed closed domain is in the public interest.

Closed generics were permitted — or at least not explicitly outlawed — in the 2012 application round, but were retroactively banned by ICANN following GAC advice in 2013, stymying the plans of dozens of applicants.

Ironically, it was the clumsy wording of the 2013 advice that saw the debate re-open a few years ago, with the initiation of a closed-doors, Chatham House Rules “facilitated dialogue” between the pro- and anti- camps, which also failed to reach a consensus.

By drawing a line under the issue now, ICANN has finally officially removed closed generics as a potential delaying factor on the next gTLD application round, which is already 13 years late.

After 14 years, ICANN practices what it preaches on IDNs

Almost 14 years after the first non-Latin domain names were added to the DNS root, ICANN has finally declared itself IDN-compatible.

“ICANN staff can now send emails to and receive emails from internationalized email addresses,” the Org said in a blog post today.

“ICANN also supports short and long ASCII top-level domains in all systems, as well as ASCII-based Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in Punycode (A-label) in public-facing systems,” Org added. “In addition, IDNs in Unicode (U-label) work in ICANN’s public-facing systems.”

It’s the weakest brag imaginable.

ICANN is the organization that is tasked with ensuring the internet’s naming and addressing systems are interoperable globally. It’s the one organization on the planet that absolutely, by definition, has to deal with the owners of IDNs.

And yet it’s taken almost 14 years for this milestone to be reached. The first IDN TLDs — the Arabic translations of the ccTLDs of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — were delegated to the DNS root May 5, 2010.

As my post from that time reflects, IDN support then, even in browsers, was awful.

There have been 159 IDN TLDs in the root since the first batch (about half a dozen or so were dot-brands that have since been retired) and a great many Latin-script TLDs support IDNs at the second level.

To be fair, ICANN cannot shoulder all the blame for this tardiness. Presumably, Org uses the same off-the-shelf email systems as the rest of us, so it would have been reliant on its vendors to add the necessary support.

Today’s blog post notes that ICANN had to work with its technology partners to impress upon them the importance of IDN support and Universal Acceptance in general.

ICANN has made greater IDN adoption one of its main goals of the forthcoming next application round of the new gTLD program, part of an effort to get more registries founded in currently under-served regions.

But there are some who believe this focus on IDNs has come at the cost of ignoring Universal Acceptance issues affecting Latin-script TLDs.

Popular social networking apps — surely the most common vector for link-sharing nowadays — have been found lacking in their support for the most recently created TLDs, and some say ICANN has failed its duty to reach out to developers to school them on UA.

Last year, the CEO of .tube discovered that popular software was relying on a hard-coded list of TLDs in the Android operating system that had not been updated since November 2015, meaning the 468 TLDs that have been delegated since then would not be recognized as domains and not “linkified” when shared on apps such as WhatsApp.

It also seems that Twitter as of this week is still relying on a hard-coded TLD list that has not been updated since 2020, meaning domains in the three TLDs that have been delegated since then — .spa, .kids and .music — are not linkified.

Given how simple updating a TLD list should be, and given that somebody at ICANN presumably has the ear of somebody at Twitter or Meta or Google or wherever — Android updated its list pretty quickly when alerted to to the problem by .tube — it’s baffling to me that these problems persist in the light of ICANN’s stated focus on UA.

Weak demand for private Whois data, ICANN data shows

There were fewer than six requests for private Whois data per day in December, and most of those were denied, according to newly published ICANN data.

The disappointing numbers, which also show that only about 2.5% of accredited registrars are participating, show that ICANN’s new Registration Data Request Service is certainly off to a slow start.

RDRS launched in November. It’s a ticketing system that enables people to request unredacted private Whois data, with no guarantee the requests will be granted, from registrars via an ICANN portal.

As it’s a two-year trial, ICANN promised to publish usage data every month. The first such report was published today (pdf).

The report shows that 1,481 requester accounts have been created so far, but that just 174 requests were made in December — about 5.6 per day on average.

Almost a third of requesters were intellectual property interests, with domain investors at 4.5% and law enforcement at 8%. Security researchers accounted for 15% of requests.

The data shows that most requests — 80.47% — were marked as “Denied” by registrars, largely because the registrar needed more information from the requester before it could process their request. ICANN said RDRS has no visibility into whether data was ultimately handed over outside of the system.

The supply-side data isn’t particularly encouraging either. Only 72 registrars were participating in RDRS at the end of the year.

That’s 2.5% of the 2,814 registrar entities ICANN contracts with, but if we exclude the 2,000+ drop-catching shell registrars owned by the likes of TurnCommerce, Newfold Digital and Gname, participation might be more fairly said to be closer to 10%.

ICANN said that the 72 registrars, which include many of the largest, account for 53% of all registered gTLD domain names, so you might think requesters have a better-than-even chance of being able to use the system for any given domain.

That’s not the case. RDRS data requesters are finding that the domain they are querying belongs to a non-participating registrar far more often than not — 80% of queries through the system were for domains not in the system, the report shows.

And when the registrar is participating, chances are that the data request will be denied — 80% were denied versus just 11.72% approved and 1.56% partially approved.

It takes on average two days for a request to be denied and four days for a request to be approved, the report shows.

While the results to date are arguably disappointing, given the years of effort the ICANN community and staff put in to build this thing, it’s still early days.

I also think it quite likely some of the numbers have been skewed by both the Christmas and New Year holiday period and early-adopter requesters kicking the tires with spurious requests.

DNS Women barred from ICANN funding?

A networking group set up to support women in the domain name industry, especially in the developing world, may be banned from applying for ICANN funding under rules published earlier this week.

Concerns have been raised that DNS Women may be excluded from the $10 million in non-profit Grant Program funding ICANN is making available this year because its CEO participated in the program’s community rule-making process.

ICANN’s rules, written by Org staff based on the recommendations of the Cross-Community Working Group on New gTLD Auction Proceeds (CCWG-AP), ban anyone from applying for grants — set at between $50,000 and $500,000 — if they have potential conflicts of interest.

Participation in the CCWG-AP is listed as one such conflict:

No person that participated as a member (including temporary member appointments) of the Cross-Community Working Group on New gTLD Auction Proceeds (CCWG-AP) is eligible to apply for or be included within funded proposal activities as principals, advisors, or in other roles. Grants may not be awarded to businesses and organizations owned in whole or in part by the CCWG-AP members or their family members. Grant funding may not be used to pay compensation to CCWG-AP members or their family members.

DNS Women is currently led by Vanda Scartezini, who was a member of CCWG-AP representing the At-Large Advisory Committee. She’s written to ICANN to express surprise to find herself suddenly unable to apply for funding. ICANN has responded with a pointer to the CCWG-AP’s recommendations, where the language closely mirrors that found in the new application rules as implemented.

But if Scartezini has shot herself in the foot, she may not be alone. According to the CCWG-AP’s final report, there may have been almost enough foot-shooting to create a Paralympic football team.

Of the 22 people who participated as full members of the group — and would be therefore barred from financially benefiting from grants — 10 people answered “yes” or “maybe” when asked to disclose whether they or their employer expected to apply for funding (almost all, including Scartezini, were “maybes”).

The $10 million tranche available this year comes from a $217 million fund ICANN raised auctioning off contested gTLDs following the 2012 application round.

INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital

Internet Naming Co has sold one of its gTLDs to Identity Digital, barely a year after taking it from UNR.

The Registry Agreement for .juegos — Spanish for “games” — was assigned to ID subsidiary Dog Beach in early December, according to ICANN records.

ID already runs the English-language .games, while XYZ runs the singular .game. There is no singular gTLD in the Spanish.

.juegos in volume terms has been a disappointment. Originally with UNR predecessor Uniregistry, it peaked at 2,353 domains under management in 2016, when names were priced at around $20 a year.

But the gTLD was affected by Uniregistry’s decision to massively increase prices to compensate for weak volume in 2017, which caused some of the leading registrars to drop the TLDs from their storefront.

To this day, GoDaddy still does not carry .juegos, but Tucows seems to have started selling it again, at an eye-watering $500 a year. Wholesale pricing is believed to be $300 a year. Namecheap sells it for $368 a year.

.juegos had 649 domains under management at the last count. The largest registrar in Entorno, which unsurprisingly based in Spain.

INCO took over .juegos, along with a bunch of other former Uniregistry gTLDs, in late 2022.

It will be interesting to see if ID reduces prices to match .games, which is believed to wholesale at $20 a year.

Five more gTLDs get launch dates

Internet Naming Co has revealed the launch dates for the five dormant gTLDs it acquired late last year.

The company plans to go to Sunrise with .diy, .food, .lifestyle, .living, and .vana on January 24, according to ICANN records.

Before general availability on March 6, there’ll be a week-long Early Access Period, with prices starting at $25,000 wholesale and decreasing daily to settle at GA prices.

Unusually, and I think uniquely, there’s also going to be a 24-hour “Customer Loyalty Period” on February 28/29, which has the same prices as day one of EAP.

INCO CEO Shayan Rostam told me this period “gives us the opportunity to provision domains to certain existing customers or partners after sunrise but before GA.” He described it as a “1-day pioneer program phase for the registry.”

The five gTLDs were bought from Lifestyle Domain Holdings last year, as the would-be registry carried on dumping or selling off its portfolio of long-unused gTLDs.

.vana was a brand, but INCO plans to use it to do something as-yet-unrevealed related to blockchain naming systems. .diy refers to “Do It Yourself”, the practice of carrying out home improvements or repairs without hiring professional experts.

All of the five will be unrestricted. They’ve all been moved to the Tucows back-end registry service provider.

$10 million of ICANN cash up for grabs

ICANN has officially launched its Grant Program, making $10 million available to not-for-profit projects this year.

The Org expects to start accepting applications for between $50,000 and $500,000 between March 25 and May 24 and start handing out the cash early next year.

It’s the first phase of a program that currently sees ICANN sitting on a distributable cash pile of $217 million that it raised by auctioning off contested new gTLD registry contracts under the 2012 gTLD application round.

The money is only available to registered charities that in some way support ICANN’s mission in terms of developing internet interoperability or capacity building.

Organizations worldwide will be able to apply, but it seems unlikely anyone from a country currently subject to US government sanctions will be successful. Conflicted organizations — such as those led by somebody involved with the program — are also barred.

Applications for grants will be assessed by ICANN staff, a yet-to-be-named Independent Application Assessment Panel comprising “a diverse collective of subject matter experts”, and ultimately the ICANN board of directors.

More information and the application form can be found here.