ICANN names new directors, replaces Facebook exec

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has picked two new directors to join the board of directors this November.
They are: Mandla Msimang, a South African technology policy consultant, and Ihab Osman, a serial director who ran Sudan’s ccTLD two decades ago but whose main current gig appears to be managing a Saudi Arabian dairy company.
Dutch domain industry figure Maarten Botterman, who had a stint heading Public Interest Registry, has been reappointed for his second three-year term.
But Tunisian Khaled Koubaa, head of public policy for North Africa at Facebook, who joined the board with Botterman in 2016 and also previously worked for PIR, is not being asked to return.
Msimang and Osman replace Koubaa and Cherine Chalaby, the current Egyptian-born chair, who after nine years on the board is term-limited.
Basically, it’s two Africans out, two Africans in.
In a statement, NomCom chair Damon Ashcraft noted that the committee had received 56 applications from Africa, more than any other region. Only two applications were received from North Americans.
This is perhaps unsurprising. NomCom had been duty-bound to pick at least one African, in order to maintain ICANN’s bylaws-mandated geographic balance, but there were no spots available for North Americans.
Replacing one male director with one female may also go some way to appease critics — including the ICANN board itself — who have claimed that the board needs to be more gender balanced.
The switch means that, after November, the eight NomCom appointees on the board will be evenly split in terms of gender. However, only seven out of the total 20 directors will be women.
The other directors are selected by ICANN’s various supporting organizations and advisory committees.
NomCom received applications from 42 women and 85 men this year.
ICANN has not yet published the official bios for the two new directors, but here’s what the internets has to say about about them.
Mandla Msimang. Msimang’s career appears to show her playing both hunter and gamekeeper in the South African telecommunications market, first working for the national regulator, and later for leading mobile phone operator Cell C. In 2007 she founded Pygma Consulting, a boutique IT consultancy, which she still runs.
Ihab Osman. Osman’s day job appears to be general manager of NADEC New Businesses, a unit of Nadec, a foods company partly owned by the Saudi government. He’s also president of the US-Sudan Business Council, which seeks to promote trade between the two countries. He has a long career in telecommunications, and from 1997 until 2002 was in charge of Sudan’s .sd ccTLD.
Both new directors will take their seats at the end of ICANN’s annual general meeting in Montreal this November.
There’s no word yet on who’s taking over as chair.

Amazon tells power-hungry governments to get stuffed

Amazon has rejected attempts by South American governments to make the would-be gTLD .amazon “jointly owned”.
In a letter to ICANN last week, Amazon VP of public policy Brian Huseman finally publicly revealed the price Amazon is willing to pay for its dot-brand, but said members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization are asking for way too much power.
It turns out three of ACTO’s eight national government members have proposed solutions to the current impasse, but Amazon has had to reject them all for commercial and security reasons. Huseman wrote (pdf):

Some member states require that we jointly own and manage the .AMAZON TLDs. Some require that we give the member states advance notice and veto authority over all domain names that we want to register and use—for both trademarked terms as well as generic words. Some suggest a Governance Committee can work only if it has governance that outweighs Amazon’s voice (i.e. the Governance Committee has a representative from one of each of the eight member states, while Amazon has one); and some want to use .AMAZON for their own commercial purposes.

From Huseman’s description, it sounds like the ACTO nations basically want majority control (at least in terms of policy) of .amazon and the Chinese and Japanese translations, applications for which have been essentially frozen by ICANN for years.
Huseman told ICANN that Amazon cannot comply.
If the company were to give eight South American governments advanced notice and veto power over .amazon domains it planned to register, it would make it virtually impossible to contain its business secrets prior to the launch of new services, he said.
The governments also want the right to block certain unspecified generic strings, unrelated to the Amazon region, he wrote. Amazon can’t allow that, because its range of businesses is broad and it may want to use those domains for its own commercial purposes.
Amazon has offered to block up to 1,500 strings per TLD that “represent the culture and heritage of the Amazonia region”.
Nine .amazon domains would be set aside for actual usage, one for ACTO and one each for its members, “that have primary and well-recognized significance to the culture and heritage of the region”, but they’d have to use those domains non-commercially.
The proposal seems to envisage that the countries would select their two-letter country code as their freebie domain. Brazil could get br.amazon, for example.
They could also select the names of Amazonian indigenous peoples’ groups or “the specific terms OTCA, culture, heritage, forest, river, and rainforest, in English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish.”
They would not to be allowed to use third-level domains, other than “www”.
The governments would have up to two years to populate the list of 1,500 banned terms. The strings would have to have the same “culture and heritage” nexus, and Amazon would get veto power over whether the proposed strings actually meet that test.
As the whole policy would be enshrined as a Public Interest Commitment in the .amazon registry contract with ICANN, ACTO members would be able to protest such rejections using the PIC Dispute Resolution Policy.
Amazon would also get veto power over the content of the web sites at the domains used by the governments. They’d have to be basically static sites, and all user-generated content would be strictly verboten.
It’s a power struggle, with little evident common ground once you get down into the details, and it’s likely going to be up to ICANN to decide whether Amazon’s proposal is sufficient to overrule the ACTO and Governmental Advisory Committee concerns.
ICANN had set a deadline of April 21 to receive the proposal. The timetable it has previously set out would see its board of directors make a decision (or punt it back to Amazon) at the Marrakech public meeting in late June.
However, board chair Cherine Chalaby has told ACTO that if it wants to negotiate a joint proposal with Amazon, it can still do so. ICANN would need to receive this revised proposal by June 7, he said.

ICANN heading to Japan and Canada in 2019

ICANN has named two of the host cities for its 2019 public meetings.
The community will descend upon Kobe, Japan in March 2019 for the first meeting of the year and will head to Montreal, Canada, for the annual general meeting in November.
Both locations were approved by the ICANN board of directors at a meeting this weekend.
The location of the middle “policy forum” meeting for 2019 has not yet been identified.
ICANN is currently meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. Later this year it will convene in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Spanish speakers can rejoice next year, when the locations, in order, are Barcelona, Panama City and San Juan (the Puerto Rican one).