ICANN director withdrew gTLD application

ICANN director Judith Vasquez applied for a new gTLD but then withdrew the bid at the last minute.
That’s among a tapestry of factoids relating to conflicts of interest to emerge from the minutes of recent meetings of ICANN’s board of directors that were published this week.
It’s also emerged that the New gTLD Program Committee — established as a subset of the board “without conflicted members” — actually now has four “directors with conflicts that have been mitigated”.
Vasquez, a businessperson heavily involved in media and telecoms in the Philippines, according to the minutes of the May 6 meeting:

disclosed that she withdrew her new gTLD application through the customer service center, though the withdrawal cannot be completed through the TAS due to the system being offline.

As you may recall, the TLD Application System (TAS) went down April 12, suggesting that Vasquez’s bid was withdrawn close to or after that date — the original deadline for filing new gTLD applications.
It’s not know what gTLD she (or a company she works for) was applying for, or why the application was withdrawn.
The potential for a conflict in her case was first noted in her published statement of interest when she joined the board in October last year.
But as I’ve noted before, Vasquez continued to vote on matters relating to the new gTLD program up until February 7.
She’s since joined the New gTLD Program Committee.
From the same May 6 minutes, it has emerged that directors Bill Graham and Kuo-Wei Wu were both probed for conflicts by a board subcommittee — set up a year ago in the wake of Peter Dengate Thrush’s move from the ICANN chair to Top Level Domain Holdings — which:

found that both of them had conflicts, but they had been already mitigated to the satisfaction of the subcommittee. And, therefore, the subcommittee determined that those two individuals, though conflicts were identified, had mitigated those conflicts with regard to the New gTLD Program.

Details of these conflicts have not been published. Both men have sat on the committee since its inception April 10.
A non-voting board liaison, Thomas Narten, was also considered conflicted but sufficiently “mitigated” to join the committee. He works as a software engineer for IBM, which has applied for a dot-brand.
Two other directors — Sebastien Bachollet and Bertrand de La Chapelle — were identified as having conflicts which they tried and apparently failed to mitigate to the satisfaction of the board.
Bachollet was unhappy with that classification, according to a statement he entered into the minutes several weeks later, which partly reads:

I still disagree with the conclusion of the Subcommittee and on the proposed mitigating measures. I will not enter into detail here, but now I have to accept this decision and I do.
I take this opportunity to underline that there is no appeal procedure in place allowing a second view on the matter.

Bachollet is a director of the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, .xxx’s nominal sponsoring organization, which is funded by ICM Registry, an applicant for three porn-related gTLDs.
The policy think-tank founded by De La Chapelle is or was funded by companies that applied for new gTLDs or offered services to applicants, according to his latest statement of interest.
The New gTLD Program Committee has 12 voting directors at present, three of which have been previously identified as conflicted but with their conflicts mitigated.
According to the May 6 minutes, ICANN’s chief lawyer John Jeffrey explained, in response to a query from de La Chapelle, why this is not a problem:

The General Counsel and Secretary explained that there are situations where a conflict may still exist, but mitigation can be completed that will remove that conflict from having an impact on the fiduciary responsibilities to ICANN or the other entity with whom the conflict may have arisen. Those directors or liaisons may then participate as if they were nonconflicted, acting without conflict in the decisions they make for the Board. He also noted that there could be situations where, upon mitigation, there may not be a conflict at all.

New gTLD timetable expected this week

ICANN plans to publish a new timetable for its new gTLD program later this week, according to its latest update.
Its board of directors’ New gTLD Program Committee said in a report (pdf) published this morning:

The roadmap will show how the separate schedules for evaluation applications, possible dates for GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] input, comment & objection periods, and other program elements fit together. The plan will demonstrate interdependencies, indicate risk areas, describe schedule uncertainty, and indicate how applicants might be affected by changes to the plan.
The roadmap will be released by the week of August 6, 2012.

New gTLD applicants have been waiting for this report since the Prague meeting in late June, when it became clear that the original timetable, based on application batching and “digital archery”, was dead.
Potential objectors will also be sharply impacted by the timetable; decisions could hit their wallets.
If the window for filing private sector objections closes before the GAC deadline to object, for example, the cheaper wait-for-the-GAC strategy for objecting becomes a non-starter.
Today’s report from ICANN also discloses a little more about how the 1,930 new gTLD applications are being processed: they’re being grouped by applicant and/or by back-end registry provider, in an attempt to create efficiencies.
According to ICANN, this will enable the evaluators to ramp up to a maximum capacity of 300 applications per month, but that it will take a few months to fully ramp up to that speed.
The Initial Evaluation phase of the process began about a month ago, in line with its July 12 target date, ICANN said.

Adding some time for ICANN to organize and publish results, this means that initial evaluation results will be published in 11-12 months after the July 12 start date, i.e., May or June 2013.

With the timetable set to be published this week, the ongoing public comment process about application metering will presumably not have an impact on what is published.
With that in mind, any timetable released this week is unlikely to answer every outstanding question about the timing of go-live dates for successful new gTLD applicants.

Aussies get new gTLD conference

A conference dedicated to new generic top-level domains is set to run in Australia this November.
The New TLD Summit, organized by a new company called Brand Huddle, will feature local speakers including ICANN director Chris Disspain (of auDA) and vice-chair Bruce Tonkin (of Melbourne IT).
The three-day event is “aimed and assisting trademark and brand owners navigate through the new ICANN TLD Program.”
The conference appears to have a general upbeat take on the topic, with speakers from some antipodean gTLD applicants, but with sessions on brand infringement and risk management to balance it out.
Ticket prices for the workshops do not yet seem to be available, and some of the agenda is still TBC, but the expo part of the show is said to be free.
The New TLD Summit will run from November 21 to 23 this year at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Center.

The ANA is right: there needs to be more time for new gTLD public comments

The Association of National Advertisers has told ICANN that more time is needed for the public to file comments on new gTLD applications. I think it has a point.
As it stands, ICANN plans to forward any comments submitted before August 12 to the program’s evaluators, but the ANA thinks several more months are needed.
In a letter (pdf) to ICANN interim CEO Akram Atallah, ANA president Bob Liodice wrote:

When ICANN initially approved the gTLD Program in June 2011, ICANN’s own planning and financial estimates only envisioned 500 applications; it is possible that a sixty-day comment window might have been sufficient to evaluate that number of applications. However, almost four times that number of applications has been received, and so a mere sixty days is not enough time for the public to evaluate the details of the many string applications that may impact their interests.

Liodice asks for at least 180 more days for public comments.
The letter has been circulated to various members of the US government, but for once there’s no threat of a lawsuit.
I have to say I agree with the ANA on this occasion: more time is needed for commenting, although I’m not sure a full extra six months is necessary.
Making sense of the sheer volume of data available since the Big Reveal can be overwhelming, even for somebody who covers this topic every day.
Comments filed to date — about 1,400 of them — are narrowly focused on a small subset of wedge-issue applications. About half were organized by Morality in Media and probably could be described as anti-porn astroturf.
It’s very likely that many regular ICANN community members who intend to file substantive comments intend to do so at the last minute, per standard ICANN practice, but I think in this case there needs to be more input from outside of the usual circle of suspects.
More time to comment, and more media outreach by ICANN, might be able to create a stronger mandate — or highlight more potential problems — for some of these 1,930 applications.
With a single year-long Initial Evaluation batch now essentially confirmed could the public comment window not also be extended?

First anti-gay gTLD opponent emerges

The first public objections have been filed against applications for the .gay generic top-level domain.
Abdulaziz Al-Zoman reckons .gay shouldn’t be allowed because being gay is “against the law and public morality” in many countries, according to a comment that he filed against all four .gay applications.
Here’s the whole comment:

ICANN is dealing and playing a very strong role in worldwide public policies. It sets global public Internet-related policies that effect many worldwide societies and communities with verity of values and cultures. Therefore, ICANN MUST adhere and respect these cultures and values and not to impose its own “western” culture and values to other communities.
If “gay” is an accepted activity in USA it does not mean it is also accepted or welcomed elsewhere. ICANN should not enforce western culture and values into other societies. It should not ignore other society’s values. If the new gTLD programs had been limited to the United States, the homeland of ICANN, then it might be accepted to have the applied-for gTLDs strings (.gay). In spite of this, even if these strings (.gay) represent a permitted western standard of expressions, ICANN should not impose it globally upon the rest of the world. ICANN should not ignore the fact that activities related to this string are considered criminal act or unlawful in some parts of the world. Furthermore, ICANN should stick to GAC principles that call for respecting the sensitivity regarding terms with national, cultural, geographic and religious significance.
The applied-for gTLD string (gay) is not welcomed in many societies and communities and is against the law and public morality. ICANN should work for the benefit of all societies. It should not indulge itself in prompting and expanding western culture on the Internet. If it is really desired and needed in the ICANN home community (USA), then it can be provided under the .us TLD (e.g., gay.us) but not in the worldwide root space.

Al-Zoman appears to be referring to Saudi society, which has about as slim a grasp on morality as you’ll find anywhere in the world.
Sadly, his comments are likely a precursor to a battle within ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee over whether a formal GAC objection to .gay should be filed.
This is Big Question stuff.
Should ICANN operate according to the internet’s principles of openness, fairness and inclusion, or should it make its decisions based on demands emerging from medieval, theocratic backwaters?
You can probably guess what my opinion is.

New gTLD winners could be named June 2013

ICANN has sketched out a tentative timetable for the evaluation of its new generic top-level domain applications that would see the first successful gTLDs appear over a year from now.
But the plan has little meat on its bones, and ICANN has admitted that it still doesn’t know exactly how the evaluation process is going to pan out.
In a new call for comments, ICANN confirmed that all 1,930 applications are going to be evaluated at the same time, and that the evaluators have already started work.
The winners and losers from Initial Evaluation, ICANN said, could be announced June or July 2013.
This would mean that the first new gTLDs would start going live on the internet “in late third quarter of 2013, six months later than originally expected”, ICANN said.
But which successful applications would start hitting the root first is still wide open to debate.
The idea that the applications would be processed in batches of 500 or thereabouts, is now pretty much dead. That’s been obvious since digital archery was killed off, but it’s now confirmed.
ICANN said it has a “tentative project plan” that “foresees the processing of applications in a single batch, and simultaneous release of results” about a year from now.
But with “batching” dead, we now have a “metering” problem.
Hypothetically, as many as 1,409 unique gTLD applications could emerge successfully from evaluation at the same time, in June or July next year.
That’s the theoretical ceiling; in reality the number will be substantially reduced by withdrawals, objections and contention.
But before any of them can go live the applicants need to negotiate and/or sign registry agreements with ICANN and undergo formal pre-delegation technical testing. That creates two bottlenecks at ICANN in its legal and IANA departments.
ICANN now wants to know how to “meter” successfully evaluated applications, to smooth out the roll-out so that no more than 1,000 new gTLDs are delegated in any given year.
An idea that emerged in Prague was to order applications according to how “clean” they were, as measured many clarifying questions the evaluators had to ask the applicants. But that idea has now been dismissed as “unworkable”, ICANN said.
ICANN’s board of directors had promised to make about three weeks after the Prague meeting – a deadline that passed over a week ago – but it’s now turning to the community for ideas.
Before August 19, it wants to know:

1. Should the metering or smoothing consider releasing evaluation results, and transitioning applications into the contract execution and pre-delegation testing phases, at different times?
a. How can applications be allocated to particular release times in a fair and equitable way?
b. Would this approach provide sufficient smoothing of the delegation rate?
c. Provide reasoning for selecting this approach.
2. Should the metering or smoothing be accomplished by downstream metering of application processing (i.e., in the contract execution, pre-delegation testing or delegation phases)?
a. How can applications be allocated to a particular timing in contract execution, pre-delegation testing, or delegation in a fair and equitable way?
b. Provide reasoning for selecting this approach.
3. Include a statement describing the level of importance that the order of evaluation and delegation has for your application.

My hunch based on conversations in Prague is that the majority answer to question 1 will be “No” and that the majority answer to question 2 will be “Yes”, but that’s just a hunch at this point.

Go Daddy, Neustar and eNom join White House fake pharma takedown project

Big name companies from the domain name industry are among those leading a new White House-backed project aimed at tackling bogus internet pharmacies.
DI first reported on the formation of the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies back in December 2010, but it only fully announced itself on Monday this week.
It’s a US-based public-private partnership that counts Go Daddy, Neustar and eNom among its members. Other participants include Google, Microsoft, PayPal and Yahoo.
The project was announced along with officials from the US Department of State and the Food and Drug Administration at an event in Washington DC earlier this week.
The goals are consumer education and enforcement action against “rogue” pill sites.
Go Daddy’s acting general counsel Nima Kelly said in a statement:

Go Daddy’s partnership with the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies is to help create awareness and fund educational campaigns in conjunction with the FDA. Go Daddy is also hosting the safemedsonline.org site pro bono.

Neustar vice president of business affairs Jeff Neuman, who’s also treasurer of CSIP, told us:

the overall goals of CSIP include providing a neutral forum for sharing relevant information about illegal US internet pharmacies among members and aiding law enforcement efforts where appropriate.
…
Neustar is working with the rest of the partners to address rogue pharmacies at their very source—their web addresses. Neustar has been and will continue to be vigilant in taking down rogue sites that contain malware and those that do not comply with our acceptable use policies – which include compliance with applicable drug laws.

ICANN fixes new gTLD portal bugs

ICANN has brought its new gTLD program customer service portal back online after about five days of patching-related downtime.

In a notice posted late last night, ICANN said the delay was due to the wait for a vendor patch. ICANN said:

A recent, proactive review of the CSC system identified potential vulnerabilities. To address these vulnerabilities, the CSC portal was taken offline while vendor-provided patches were applied. There have been no known compromises to any data.

New gTLD applicants will now have to log in to their TLD Application System accounts, which use the Citrix remote terminal software, to use their customer service tools.
Non-applicants will be able to ask customer service questions via email.
The Knowledge Base — essentially a program FAQ — is still offline, but ICANN said it hopes to bring it back up within a few days.

New gTLD applicants: here’s how to lobby the GAC

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has let it be known that it’s open to receiving communications from new gTLD applicants.
But the GAC will only hear briefings from applicants at the request of GAC members, according to a notice posted on the GAC’s web site recently.
The GAC has strong powers to recommend the rejection of new gTLD applications, so naturally enough some applicants have already been lobbying to reinforce their positions.
Applicants are now being asked to send information to a specific email address or — implicitly — to lobby GAC representatives individually.
The new statement reads:

It is important to bear in mind that GAC members are still in the process of analysing the list of applications and applicants for new gTLDs. However, there have been a number of requests from applicants or other interested stakeholders to brief or provide briefing material to the GAC.
Briefings for the GAC will only be scheduled on a best-efforts basis and entirely at the request of GAC members.
An internal process for handling requests and tracking materials is being put in place, but those wanting to make their interest or availability known or to express an interest in providing written materials to the GAC can contact the GAC via gacsec@gac.icann.org. A list of those expressing interest or availability or that have provided materials will be made available to the GAC membership.

The GAC caused controversy last month when it accepted the European Broadcasting Union’s application for Observer status on the committee.
The EBU is also an applicant for .radio, which is contested by Donuts, Afilias and BRS Media.
BRS Media claims this is a conflict of interest and recently started lobbying for the EBU to withdraw its application. This week, it set up a web site to promote its cause.

.radio applicant slams GAC “conflict of interest”

BRS Media, one of the four applicants for the .radio generic top-level domain, claims ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has a “direct conflict of interest” over the gTLD.
As DI reported two weeks ago, the European Broadcasting Union, another .radio applicant (the others are Afilias and Donuts), joined the GAC during ICANN’s public meeting in Prague.
While the EBU only has Observer status, and may not vote, it’s still able to participate in discussions. Whether these include discussions about GAC objections to new gTLDs is unclear.
BRS Media, which already runs the radio-themed .fm and .am ccTLDs, is not taking any chances, however. In a letter to GAC chair Heather Dryden, company CEO George Bundy wrote (pdf):

We believe these activities to be a direct Conflict of Interest, by the European Broadcasting Union within the New TLD Application process.

Optimistically, to say the least, BRS requests that the EBU “recuse itself from the New TLD process by withdrawing its applications immediately”.
While I can’t see that happening, it seems to me that the GAC does have to formally address the conflicts issue if it wants to avoid looking like a bunch of hypocrites.
The GAC does not appear to have a formal conflicts of interest policy, even though it pushed hard for similar provisions in the ICANN board.
Now that it has its hard-fought veto rights over new gTLD applications, some sort of safeguards seem appropriate.