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Privacy could be a million-dollar business for ICANN

Kevin Murphy, March 22, 2018, 09:49:52 (UTC), Domain Registrars

ICANN has set out the fees it plans to charge to officially accredit Whois proxy and privacy services, in the face of resistance from some registrars.
VP of finance Becky Nash told registrars during a session at ICANN 61 last week that they can expect to pay $3,500 for their initial accreditation and $4,000 per year thereafter.
Those are exactly the same fees as ICANN charges under its regular registrar accreditation program.
Registrars that also offer privacy should expect to see their annual ICANN flat fees double, in other words. Per-domain transaction fees would be unaffected.
The up-front application fee would be reduced $2,000 when the privacy service is to be offered by an accredited registrar, but it would stay at $3,500 if the company offering service is merely “affiliated” with the registrar.
Nash said all the fees have been calculated on a per-accreditation basis, independent of the volume of applications ICANN receives.
Director of registrar services Jennifer Gore said that while ICANN has not baked an estimate of the number of accredited providers into its calculations, registrars have previously estimated the number at between 200 and 250 companies.
That would put the upper end of annual accreditation fees at $1 million, with $875,000 up-front for initial applications.
Volker Greimann, general counsel of the registrar Key-Systems, pointed out during the session that many registrars give away privacy services for free or at cost.
“This just adds cost to an already expensive service that does not really make money for a lot of providers,” he said.
He suggested that the prices could lead to unexpected negative consequences.
“Pricing this in this region will just lead to a lot of unaccredited providers that will switch names every couple months, an underground that we don’t really want,” he said. “We want to have as many people on board as possible and the way to do that is to keep costs low.”
“Pricing them out of the market is not the way to attract providers to join this scheme,” he said.
Nash responded that registrars are forbidden under the incoming privacy/proxy policy from accepting registrations from unaccredited services.
She added that the fees have been calculated on a “cost-recovery” basis. Costs include the initial background checks, outreach, contract admin, compliance, billing and so on.
But some registrars expressed skepticism that the proposed fees could be justified, given that ICANN does not plan to staff up to administer the program.
Another big question is whether proxy/privacy services are going to continue to have value after May this year, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation kicks in.
The current ICANN plan for GDPR compliance would see individual registrants have all of their private information removed from the public Whois.
It’s not currently clear how many people and what kinds of people will continue to have access to unmasked Whois, so there are likely still plenty of cases where individuals might feel they need an extra layer of protection — if they live in a dictatorship and are engaged in rebellious political speech, for example.
There could also be cases where companies wish to mask their details ahead of, say, a product launch.
And, let’s face it, bad actors will continue to want to use privacy services on domains they intend to misuse.
The proxy/privacy policy came up through the formal GNSO Policy Development Process and was approved two years ago. It’s currently in the implementation phase.
According to a presentation from the ICANN 61 session, ICANN hopes to put the final implementation plan out for public comment by the end of the month.

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Comments (3)

  1. Volker Greimann says:
    March 22, 2018 at 3:32 pm

    Thanks for the quotes.
    This thing is just so ridiculous. One main motivation behind the entire PDP was to create a standard that all privacy services should follow, including those that are not immediately recognizable as such.
    With this accreditation model, ICANN is creating a deterrent for privacy services to join the scheme.
    It will already cost many service providers a lot to comply with the requirements of the accreditation, to create additional paperwork and to follow the practices laid out. To add an additional cost barrier for providers is a just a bad joke!
    Ultimately, I will repeat what I have been saying all along: This is something that benefits the ICANN community and that it has been calling for for years. So it should be the ICANN community that picks up the bill for it through the general budget.
    I’d rather see less fellows luxuriate at the beach than accepting that providers are burdened with additional costs for a program that ultimately does not even provide benefit to them at all.
    Add to that the fun fact that Whois Privacy is going to be a lot less interesting after May 25 and you have a recipe for failure.

    Reply
  2. Rubens Kuhl says:
    March 22, 2018 at 5:33 pm

    For an organisation that is saying it won’t raise fees, 1 million looks like a good raise.

    Reply

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