ICANN asks the US to cut it loose

ICANN has officially requested the loosening of its contractual ties to the US government.
In a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (pdf), ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the US should finally make good on its promise to privatize the management of the internet’s naming and addressing resources.
Currently, ICANN manages the so-called IANA functions, which give it powers over the domain name system’s root zone, under a no-fee procurement deal with the NTIA.
That contract is up for renewal in September, and the NTIA recently issued a Notice Of Inquiry, soliciting public comments on how the IANA functions should be handled in future.
In Beckstrom’s response to the NOI, he says that a US government procurement contract is not the most suitable way to oversee matters of global importance.
Its close links to the NTIA are often cited by other governments as proof that ICANN is an organization that operates primarily in the interest of the US.
Beckstrom said there is “no compelling reason for these functions to be performed exclusively pursuant to a U.S. Government procurement contract.”
He noted that the original plan, when ICANN was formed by the Clinton administration in 1998, was to transition these functions to the private sector no later than September 2000.
The privatization of the DNS is, in effect, 11 years late.
Beckstrom wrote:

The IANA functions are provided for the benefit of the global Internet: country code and generic top-level domain operators; Regional Internet Registries; the IETF; and ultimately, Internet users around the world. Applying U.S. federal procurement law and regulations, the IANA functions should be performed pursuant to a cooperative agreement.

His position was not unanticipated.
At the start of ICANN’s San Francisco meeting last week, Beckstrom and former chairman Vint Cerf both said that a “cooperative agreement” would be a better way for the US to manage IANA.
VeriSign’s role in root zone management is currently overseen by this kind of arrangement.
The NTIA has specifically asked whether IANA’s three core areas of responsibility – domain names, IP addresses and protocol parameters – should be split between three different entities.
Beckstrom also argued against that, saying that there are “many examples of cross-functional work”, and that ICANN already has the necessary expertise and relationships in place to handle all three.
The NOI (pdf) is open until end of play next Thursday, March 31. Half a dozen responses have already been filed here.
At least one respondent believes the IANA powers could be broken up.

Facebook files 21 domain name complaints

Facebook has filed a UDRP complaint covering 21 domain names that include its trademark.
All seem to belong to the same domainer: Mike Mann. His company, Domain Asset Holdings, which has over 162,000 domains to its name, is listed in the Whois for each.
It’s the largest single UDRP filing by Facebook to date, and only its second to include brand+keyword domains.
The contested domains include: aboutfacebook.com, facebookbabes.com, facebookcheats.com, facebookclub.com, facebookdevelopment.com, killfacebook.com and many more.
All 21 covered by the UDRP are currently available for sale at Mann’s DomainMarket.com, with list prices between $350 and $8,000 and above.
A quick search on that site for other well-known social media brands returned dozens of results.
Mann is known as co-founder of BuyDomains, and more recently as one of the former owners of sex.com, which sold for $13 million last year.

Canon’s sexy reason for .canon?

Canon made headlines and gave a small amount of momentum to the idea of “.brand” top-level domains when it announced, a year ago, that it would apply to ICANN to manage .canon.
There are plenty of good reasons why the company would want the TLD.
Beyond the more obvious search-oriented branding opportunities, some say Canon could try to boost customer loyalty and create new revenue streams by offering camera buyers services such as photo hosting at personalized .canon domains.
But here’s another reason that doesn’t seem to have received many column inches: as I recently discovered from a few continental friends, “canon” also means “sexy” in French slang.
I expect this coincidence was the very least of Canon’s concerns when its executives met to discuss their .brand TLD strategy, but it does highlight a major issue that some companies will have to deal with when the ICANN new gTLD program gets underway.
They may think their brand is unique, but unless they’ve done their homework they may find themselves competing with, or blocked by, equally legitimate applicants from other nations.
Companies planning to participate in the program – even only as a challenger – will need to have done a fairly daunting audit of their key brands if they want to avoid nasty surprises.
Ensuring a brand is a unique, registered trademark in one’s home territory is only the beginning.
Companies need to also ask themselves what, if anything, their mark means in other languages, what it looks like in non-Latin scripts such as Arabic and Chinese, and whether it has similarity of “appearance, phonetic sound, or meaning” to any other potential new TLD string.
We already have at least one double entendre in the DNS – the ccTLD for the tiny Pacific island of Niue, .nu, means “.naked” in French, as the registry discovered to its benefit many years ago.
If Canon had not decided to apply for .canon, could a French-speaking pornographer have applied for the TLD instead, on the quite reasonable basis that it is also a “generic” string?
ICANN’s trademark protection policies would make such a delegation highly unlikely, but Canon would have found itself forced into a defensive fight to protect its mark.
Of more immediate concern to the company is of course the question of who gets to register canon.xxx.
It seems likely that ICM Registry’s sunrise policy is strong enough to ensure that this particular .xxx domain is never used for pornography, but only if a) no existing pornographer has a trademark on the string and b) Canon remembers to defensively register.
In the unlikely event that Canon forgets to defend its mark, a pornographer who registered canon.xxx for a legitimate French porn site could well find himself with a UDRP-winning domain.
And don’t get me started on Virgin…

US upset with ICANN over .xxx

The US government has expressed disappointment with ICANN for approving the .xxx top-level domain, surprising nobody.
Fox News is reporting Lawrence Strickling, assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce and one of ICANN’s keynote speakers at the just-concluded San Francisco meeting:

We are disappointed that ICANN ignored the clear advice of governments worldwide, including the US. This decision goes against the global public interest, and it will open the door to more Internet blocking by governments and undermine the stability and security of the Internet.

As I reported Friday, ICANN used a literal interpretation of its Governmental Advisory Committee’s advice in order to make it appear that it was not disagreeing with it at all.
Essentially, because the GAC didn’t explicitly say “don’t delegate .xxx”, the ICANN board of directors was free to do so without technically being insubordinate.
Whether the GAC knew in advance that this was the board’s game plan is another question entirely.
Strickling is of course duty-bound to complain about .xxx – no government wanted to be seen to associate themselves with pornography – but he’s in a unique position to do something about it.
Strickling heads the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the named “Administrator” of the DNS root and ergo ICANN’s overseer.
It’s within his power to refuse to instruct VeriSign to inject .xxx into the DNS root system, but it’s a power few observers expect him to exercise.
As Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project noted yesterday:

If the US goes crazy and interferes with XXX’s entry into the root it will completely kill ICANN and open a Pandora’s box for governmental control of the DNS, a box that will never be closed.

Dire consequences indeed. It’s unlikely that the NTIA would risk killing off the ICANN project after so many years over a bit of T&A.

Porn rally underway at ICANN San Francisco

A small group of Free Speech Coalition supporters are currently holding a protest against the .xxx top-level domain, outside the ICANN meeting in San Francisco.
The rally outside the Westin St Francis hotel on Union Square has attracted about 25 people by my count, chanting slogans such as “We want porn! No triple-X!”
Noted porn producer/performer John “Buttman” Stagliano is among them, although he seems to be keeping to the sidelines.
Not to judge, but another of the protestors appears to be the same homeless guy who’s been bothering me for change and cigarettes all week.
Also attending, first amendment attorney Paul Cambria. There’s an unsubstantiated rumor he’s ready to serve ICANN and/or ICM Registry with a lawsuit if .xxx gets approved tomorrow.
He declined to comment on the rumor.
There’s an FSC press conference shortly, and Cambria tells me he’s going to be making a statement at the ICANN public comment forum later this afternoon.
I’ll update when it becomes clearer what the FSC’s game-plan is.

ICANN names compliance chief

ICANN has found itself a new senior director of contractual compliance, nine months after the post was vacated.
Maguy Serad, most recently with Nissan North America, starts April 4 at ICANN’s headquarters in Marina Del Rey, California.
She’s apparently a Black Belt Six-Sigma (don’t worry, that’s a real thing), Liberian by birth and currently a Lebanese citizen. She speaks English, French and Arabic.
ICANN has also hired Colombian intellectual property lawyer Carlos Alvarez as a new contractual compliance manager/auditor. He has a history in initiatives fighting software piracy and child pornography.
The timing of the hires means ICANN has probably dodged a bullet.
There have been grumblings in some parts of the ICANN community about the vacant compliance posts for some months, and some stakeholders here at the San Francisco meeting planned to make their feelings known to ICANN’s senior staff and board.
ICANN’s compliance team is responsible for monitoring and enforcing ICANN’s contracts with registries and registrars, which will become a lot more important when the new top-level domains program kicks off.

Beckstrom calls for ICANN’s independence

ICANN president Rod Beckstrom has called for the organization to be allowed to further loosen its ties to the US government.
The two-hour opening ceremony of its 40th public meeting, here in San Francisco this morning, had a heavy focus on ICANN’s relationship with governments, and looked as much to its roots in the Clinton administration as it addressed more immediate concerns internationally.
Beckstrom and others tackled the renewal of the soon-to-expire IANA contract, with which the US grants ICANN many of its powers over the domain name system, head-on.
Beckstrom said some have expressed “a belief that the US government should live up to its 1998 White Paper commitment to transfer management of the IANA functions to the private sector-led organization entrusted to manage the DNS, which is ICANN. ”
That would mean severing one of the most frequently criticized links between ICANN and the USA.
In a press conference later, he confirmed that this is in fact his belief, saying that internet governance is “evolving behind the curve” as internet usage grows internationally.
The US handing the keys to the internet over to ICANN doesn’t appear to be immediately likely, however. But there may be some ways to continue to phase out the US special relationship on a shorter term basis.
Beckstrom took the stage shortly after Lawrence Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the US Department of Commerce, made some frank criticisms.
While stressing the Obama administration’s commitment to what he called “multistakeholderism” in internet governance, he had a few pointed remarks to make about ICANN’s decision-making process.
He accused the ICANN board of directors of “picking winners and losers” by making decisions in situations where the community has been unable to reach a consensus policy.
He singled out two recent policies where he believes ICANN has failed to sufficiently rationalize its decisions: registry-registrar integration and economic studies into new TLDs.
The criticisms are not new, and many of them may well go away if and when ICANN implements the recommendations of its Accountability and Transparency Review Team.
My initial sense is that the fact Strickling was able to speak so frankly and so publicly about the administration’s feelings is an encouraging sign of ICANN’s maturity.
And Beckstrom’s response was equally ballsy, urging ICANN’s supporters to lobby the NTIA for a loosening of US-ICANN ties.
The NTIA’s Notice Of Inquiry regarding IANA, which floats the idea of breaking up the IANA functions and possibly assigning them to three different entities, was released a few weeks ago.
During his address this morning, former ICANN chair Vint Cerf put forth the view that this kind of government procurement contract may be an inappropriate mechanism for overseeing IANA functions:

I believe that that concept of procuring service from ICANN really ought to change to become a cooperative agreement because I believe that format expresses more correctly the relationship between ICANN and the Department of Commerce.

Beckstrom evidently agrees with Cerf. At the press conference, he pointed out that the disadvantage of a procurement contract is that it’s short term, undermining confidence in ICANN.
It also requires ICANN to run the IANA to the benefit of the American people, rather than the international community, he said. This obviously can reinforce the perception in some parts of the world that ICANN has an untenable American bias.
“A cooperative agreement seems more befitting of the relationship the NTIA and ICANN has developed,” he said, noting that this is currently the structure of NTIA’s relationship with VeriSign.
The Number Resource Organization may give a further clue to ICANN’s game plan in this email (pdf) published today, in which the NRO says:

We strongly believe that no government should have a special role in managing, regulating or supervising the IANA functions.
…
The NRO suggests that ICANN, through these coming negotiations, should advocate for a staged reduction of the level of DoC’s oversight to IANA. This process could possibly involve a transitionfrom a contract to a cooperation agreement, and ultimately arrival at a non-binding arrangement, such as an affirmation of commitments

Beckstrom now wants your help to make this happen. During his keynote, he urged the ICANN community to make its disparate views known to the NTIA, “openly and in writing”.
“This is the chance to add your voice to those determining the fate of the IANA function,” he said. “If your voice is to be heard, you must speak up.”
“When all voices are heard, no single voice can dominate an organization – not even governments. Not even the government that facilitated its creation,” Beckstrom said.
Details about how to respond to the NOI can be found in this PDF.

ICANN to skip stakeholders for more GAC talks

ICANN stakeholder groups will miss out on their usual formal sit-down with the board of directors at the San Francisco meeting next week, due to talks between the board and governments.
ICANN has confirmed the touted second day of Governmental Advisory Committee consultations, centering on new top-level domains and .xxx, for next Tuesday.
Tuesdays at ICANN meetings are informally referred to as Constituency Day, where the various interest groups that make up the “bottom” of ICANN’s policy-making process meet up.
Usually, the board moves between these meetings, gathering feedback on policy issues from stakeholders such as registrars, registries, ISPs, IP owners and non-commercial users.
According to some attendees, that won’t happen in San Francisco.
ICANN staff will still attend the constituency sessions, but the GAC consultation will take up the board’s undivided attention.
It make perfect sense, of course. There are only so many hours in the day, only so many days in the week, and ICANN is eager to put work on the new TLD program to bed as soon as possible.
But that logic is unlikely to prevent grumblings from some stakeholders.

Brussels’ biggest winner?

(Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by consultant Michael Palage).
Analyzing the aftermath of last week’s ICANN Board-GAC non-bylaws consultation in Brussels, the biggest winner may be Rod Beckstrom. Many who attended the meeting or followed it remotely may have found it unusual how little he spoke during the three-day session. Why was Rod so quiet in Brussels?
Soon Beckstrom will begin the third and final year of the contract that he executed in June 2009 – yes, it has been almost two years since Rod assumed the mantle as ICANN’s fourth President and CEO. He got off to a quick start with the successful expiration of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA), the execution of the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC), and the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) in country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) earning the accolades of myself and others.
Then came the ICANN meeting in Kenya and Rod’s statement that “[t]he domain name system is more fragile and vulnerable today than it has ever been. It could stop at any given point in time, literally.” To say that this was not warmly received by many within the broader ICANN community would be an understatement. However, instead of back-tracking, Beckstrom doubled down with his high-profile DNS Vulnerabilities and Risk Management panel discussion in Brussels reinforcing his claims about the fragile nature of the Internet.
Some in the community have also voiced concern about the continued exodus of senior ICANN staff, while others have questioned some of Rod’s recent hires. While I have not yet had the opportunity to meet with John Nakamura, Advisor to the CEO on Government Affairs, and Elad Levinson, Vice-President of Organization Efficiency, these are two hires which I myself have a hard time reconciling while other key positions remain unfilled.
However, to Rod’s credit a number of his new senior hires appear to be making positive impacts and look to increase the overall professional skill set within ICANN staff. Although Paul Twomey’s original two senior staff hires, John Jeffrey and Kurt Pritz, continue to dominate important policy and operational matters within ICANN, this may be in part due to the fact that there is so little institutional knowledge left within the senior staff.
Since the June 2010 Brussels meeting, Rod has maintained a lower profile, focusing on ICANN’s continued accomplishments in the areas of new IDN ccTLDs being added to the root and the final allocation of IPv4 address space by IANA. Whether Rod would seek a second term is still an unknown. Of ICANN’s four Presidents, only Twomey ever made it to a second contract renewal, although the high churn rate can in large part be attributed to the stresses associated with the job.
This is why Beckstrom’s silence in Brussels was so interesting. While there were some pointed exchanges between ICANN Chair Peter Dengate Thrush and certain GAC members, Rod left the meeting unscathed. Over the next couple of months as the ICANN Board and GAC resolve their outstanding issues regarding the new gTLD implementation process, Beckstrom positions himself well for a potential contract extension as his Chairman continues to serve as a lightning rod in these consultations.
For the moment, only Beckstrom knows if he is actively seeking a contract extension. While he can go out on a high note listing the following high profile accomplishments during his three year tenure: AoC, IDN TLDs, new gTLDs, exhaustion of IPv4 address space, and a new IANA contract; Rod may wish to stick around and achieve some yet unknown additional accomplishments.
Michael Palage is an intellectual property attorney and an information technology consultant. He has been actively involved in ICANN operational and policy matters since its formation in both an individual and leadership role, including a three-year term on the ICANN Board of Directors.
Palage is President and CEO of Pharos Global, Inc, which provides consulting and management services to domain name registration authorities and other technology related companies.

ICANN hires weight-loss guru as vice president

ICANN has quietly hired a new vice president with a very peculiar résumé.
Elad Levinson, a psychotherapist with a distinctly Buddhist bent who has previously specialized in weight loss, joined the organization in early January as Vice President for Organization Effectiveness.
He’s been on the payroll as a consultant since May 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile and other sources, but only joined ICANN as a full-time VP two months ago.
ICANN currently has only about a half dozen vice presidents. The most recent to be officially announced (pdf) was noted cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, now VP of information security.
Unlike Diffie, Levinson did not get an announcement when he joined ICANN. Two months after joining the organization, he’s still not even listed on the ICANN staff web page.
(UPDATE: As of last night he is listed on the web site. Possibly because somebody was tipped off I was writing this post.)
I’ve confirmed that he started work there at the start of the year, but I’m not entirely clear what his role is. He appears to be some kind of human resources consultant slash life coach.
He’s previously consulted for a number of California-based corporations.
I understand Levinson is based in the Silicon Valley office, which I believe has about a dozen employees and is located roughly 300 miles from ICANN’s headquarters in the Los Angeles suburb of Marina Del Rey, where the vast majority of its staff are based.
Levinson has described himself as the author of “several publications regarding the power of self awareness and the integration of western social psychology and Buddhist Psychology” and an advocate of “the use of mindfulness and Buddhist Psychology in its application to organization development, leadership practices, stress reduction and related problems, relationships and parenting.”
His LinkedIn profile, which erroneously refers to ICANN as the “Internet Corporation Assigning Numbers and Naming”, says:

My goals are to bring the arts of relationship building and creation-intention generation to the science of causing tangible, factual results that increase shareholder value and develop highly adaptable cultures supporting the best in human spirit and actions.

The same profile discloses that Levinson has founded or co-founded at least four organizations: Noble Purpose Consulting, Pounds For Poverty, Lose Weight Mindfully and Growth Sherpas.
He’s still listed as an employee on three of those. Noble Purpose’s domain resolves to a blank page.
Pounds For Poverty, with which he was apparently involved until at least June last year, is a California consultancy offering “practical solutions for difficulties with over eating, anxiety, and depression.”
Its web site suggests that the money fat Californians spend on over-eating would be better used fighting hunger elsewhere but, despite the name, it does not appear to be a poverty charity in the usual sense.
Archive.org’s most-recent capture of Noble Purpose, from 2009, reveals it had aims such as “supporting human being’s nobility of purpose on earth” and “insuring that the skills and knowledge necessary for your noble purpose reside internally”.
If you don’t understand what any of the above means, you’re not alone.
Wikipedia’s (poorly sourced) page on “organizational effectiveness” helpfully explains it is “the concept of how effective an organization is in achieving the outcomes the organization intends to produce” and “an abstract concept… basically impossible to measure.”
“Mindfulness” is a Buddhist teaching relating to meditation and focus that has found its way into Western psychology over the last few decades.
It’s not a huge secret that ICANN has issues, internally. Clearly somebody over there believes that some kind of consultant like Levinson is required at the VP level.
According to the Growth Sherpas web site, Levinson is “the one you turn to when you want help solving a thorny company-wide or people problem and want the solution to stick.”
Outsiders are generally more concerned with staffing issues such as the lack of resources to support policy development and compliance initiatives, which will both become even more important once the new top-level domains program kicks off.