NomCom confirms Americans rejected from ICANN board

North American candidates for ICANN’s board of directors are having their applications politely rejected, the Nominating Committee has confirmed.

Speaking to the GNSO Council at ICANN 82 in Seattle yesterday, NomCom chair-elect Tom Barrett said ICANN’s rules forbid the committee from now considering candidates from the region.

“When we opened the application window, January 15, there were no geographic restrictions for these three positions,” he said. “As you know, that has now changed…. We’ll be maxed out terms of the geographic limitation for North America.”

The specific changes of circumstance are the recent elections of Canadian Byron Holland by the ccNSO and American Greg DiBiase by the GNSO.

ICANN’s bylaws state that no more than five voting members of the board, excluding the CEO, may be from the same region. The board already has three other North Americans.

Candidates from North America who had already applied for the three open board seats will be emailed to inform them they are no longer eligible, Barrett said.

Candidates that had identified as North American but have dual citizenship with a country in a different region are eligible to reapply under their other affiliation, he said.

ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program

ICANN says it will use a combination of AI and crowdsourcing to translate new gTLD program materials on the cheap.

Org said in a blog post that when a community member trying to drum up interest in new gTLDs in their local community needs some official ICANN documents in an unsupported language, ICANN will prepare a translation on demand.

The first run will be done with AI machine translation, and the draft will be posted on a community wiki for review by volunteers who can read the relevant language before ICANN finalizes and publishes a final PDF.

ICANN seems ready to post drafts of documents such as FAQs and info sheets in languages such as Hindi, Italian and Portuguese after next week’s ICANN 82 public meeting.

Program documents are usually only available in the six official UN languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian — so this project should bring the new gTLD program to a much wider audience.

Using AI and volunteers should mean it costs almost nothing beyond the work hours ICANN staff put in to administer it.

ChatGPT tells me that there are 195 to 200 official national languages in the world and 3,500 to 4,000 written languages altogether, but I didn’t check whether those numbers are correct.

If the AI is wrong, let me know in the comments.

Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board

Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon, has been elected to serve on ICANN’s board of directors, representing registries and registrars.

He beat Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows, in the two-horse second round of voting, and five other candidates overall, to become the Contracted Parties House selection for Seat 13 on the board.

He will replace Becky Burr, an ICANN community lifer formerly with Neustar, who is term-limited and will leave the board after nine years at the Org’s Annual General Meeting in Muscat, Oman, this October.

DiBiase is currently chair of the GNSO Council and identifies as a registrar rather than a registry (Amazon is both).

He said in his candidate statement (pdf) late last year that ICANN today is too “risk-averse”, focussing too much on its fear of lawsuits, and that it should be more accountable when responding to community complaints.

DiBiase told DI:

I look forward to serving the Contracted Parties in this role and am honored by their trust in me. During the course of the election, my fellow candidates articulated a wealth of ideas on how to improve ICANN and multi-stakeholder model. These perspectives will guide me as a member of the ICANN Board.

The election result needs to be given the nod by the GNSO Council and the ICANN Empowered Community, both of which are usually pretty much formalities, before he can formally take on his board role.

Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io

US president Donald Trump has indicated he is likely to back a UK-Mauritius treaty that puts the long-term future of .io domains into question.

Speaking to the media yesterday before a meeting with UK prime minister Keir Starmer, Trump said he was “inclined” to support the deal, which would see sovereignty of the Chagos Islands transferred to Mauritius.

Chagos, officially the British Indian Ocean Territory, has the popular .io ccTLD, which is managed by a UK shell company belonging to Identity Digital.

The change of control would likely lead to a change of name, which could eventually lead to .io being retired, as I have previously written.

Trump’s opinion on the deal was seen as critical, as Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia, is currently home to a strategically important UK-US military base. The proposed treaty would see the UK lease Diego Garcia from Mauritius for at least 99 years.

UK ministers have recently indicated that the US had an effective veto on the treaty, but Trump said yesterday: “They’re talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, about 140 years actually. That’s a long time, and I think we’ll be inclined to go along with your country.”

While it’s not a definite yes, it perhaps shows the direction of travel, and it’s not great news for .io registrants. Any retirement of .io would take five to 10 years from the point the process starts, so there’s no need to panic just yet.

UK intros global domain takedown law

The UK government has introduced legislation that would give police the power to order registries and registrars outside the country to take down domain names being used for serious crime.

The new Crime and Policing Bill (pdf), published yesterday, is a sprawling piece of proposed legislation, covering everything from mobile phone theft to antisocial behavior.

But it includes a section that would codify the police’s ability to demand domain names and IP addresses to be suspended for the first time.

The law would allow the police to ask a judge for a “domain name suspension order”, applicable for up to a year, where they believe the domain is being used to commit “serious crime”.

That’s defined as “the use of violence” or conduct that “results in substantial financial gain” or that would reasonably be expected to carry a jail sentence of three years or more.

Today, the UK police have voluntary relationships with local companies on takedowns. Nominet suspends many thousands of domains every year, most related to intellectual property crime, on the advice of police.

But according to the explanatory notes provided by the government, the law will not replace these deals. It says:

The government strongly supports these voluntary arrangements, and they will continue to be the first port of call for any activity in this space.

However, most domain name registries and registrars are situated outside of the UK and require a court order before they will action requests. These orders (an IP address suspension order or a domain name suspension order) will therefore primarily be served internationally, to ensure that any threat originating from outside the UK can be effectively tackled.

If overseas registries/registrars declined to enforce the court order, UK police could use “police-to-police cooperation and Mutual Legal Assistance” to get it done, the notes say.

The bill has to follow the usual parliamentary process before it becomes law.

No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat

ICANN’s country-code registries have picked their next representative for the ICANN board of directors.

Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA won the seat, which was vacated last September with the abrupt resignation of incumbent Katrina Sataki, who had already been reelected for a second term.

I believe Holland will join the board, after the formality of approval by ccNSO and the ICANN Empowered Community, immediately as Sataki’s replacement, rather that waiting for this year’s AGM as would usually be the case.

Holland comfortably beat Nick Wenban-Smith, general counsel of .uk registry Nominet, by 73 votes to 30 in a two-horse race described by one candidate as a disappointing choice between “two kind of middle-aged white guys and native English speakers”.

The election of a Canadian to replace a European as ccNSO representative means the ICANN board has topped out its quota of North Americans, which could have an impact on other election/selection processes.

ICANN’s bylaws state that each of the five geographic regions can have no more than five voting directors.

Directors Tripti Sinha, Sarah Deutsch and Miriam Sapiro all hail from North America. Term-limited Becky Burr, also American, is to be replaced later this year, but the shortlist of her replacement options are both also Americans.

This seems to mean that the Nominating Committee, charged this year with replacing term-limited European Maarten Botterman and renewing or replacing Sajid Rahman and Chris Chapman, both from Asia-Pacific, has had its field of candidates limited somewhat.

The Address Supporting Organization is also in election mode for its board seat this year, but neither of the candidates are North American.

ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist

An Independent Review Process panel has thrown out a case filed by a failed new gTLD applicant because the applicant was found to have not existed for almost seven years.

A Bahrain-based company called GCCIX had applied to run .gcc, for Gulf Cooperation Council, in 2012. Its bid was rejected by ICANN the following year on the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee because it had no affiliation with the actual GCC, a political grouping of nations in the Middle East.

GCCIX has been challenging the rejection ever since, filing an IRP against ICANN in 2021.

But it turns out GCCIX, which apparently had only one employee, has not legally existed in Bahrain since 2018, when it lost its corporate registration for reasons that still seem a mystery even to the IRP panelist.

This kinda scuppers the former company’s ability to do stuff like signing a contract to operate a top-level part of the internet’s infrastructure. Dismissing the case, the IRP panelist wrote:

The Tribunal determines that GCCIX’s status as company “deleted by law” precludes it from engaging in commercial activity under Bahrani law. Those commercial activities undoubtedly include entering into a Registry Agreement and providing the technical and other services required to operate a gTLD… GCCIX has not had the legal capacity to operate a gTLD since at least 2018 and has not revived its capacity despite having ample time to do so.

The question now is who has to pay for this debacle, which seems to involve somewhere between four and 12 years worth of legal fees and other costs. ICANN says it wants sanctions against GCCIX, too.

The panelist said that a decision on costs would have to be made by a full IRP panel, and it’s asked both parties to have a chat about whether they want one.

Could Musk’s DOGE kill off D3’s .doge?

The creation of the US Department of Government Efficiency raises the possibility of a government objection to .doge, a gTLD that D3 Global has announced it plans to apply for.

D3, a domain name consultancy that is promising to deliver gTLDs in next year’s application round that connect to identities currently only available on blockchains, has said it it working on a bid for .doge.

But that’s an exact match to DOGE, a not-quite “department” of the US government created by President Trump in the last few weeks and headed by megalomaniac billionaire troll Elon Musk.

DOGE is tasked with cutting government spending, waste and fraud, and the department’s devil-may-care modus operandi seems to spawn fresh controversy on an almost hourly basis.

In the D3 context, the word “doge” rather refers to a social media meme from well over a decade ago — a photo of a dog called Kabosu, now dead, used as the mascot of a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin.

D3’s partner on the bid is Own The Doge, a project of PleasrDAO that says it paid $4,240,000 in 2021 for the non-fungible token (NFT) of the original Kabosu photo.

Own The Doge then broke the NFT up into almost 17 billion pieces, which are traded like other digital assets. It also makes money selling Kabosu merch, licensing the image, and selling ownership of single pixels of the original image.

The silly governmental meaning and the silly crypto meaning are linked. Musk, a known fan of Dogecoin, seems to have first proposed DOGE as the name of the agency he proposed to lead as a kind of in-joke.

His first tweet on that topic came August 20 last year, a few weeks before the .doge bid was announced.

Given the timing, the exact-match spelling, and the crossover in the semantic Venn diagram, it seems a .doge gTLD application could present a pretty big target for a formal objection.

If the US decided to start throwing its weight around on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which has substantial powers to scupper gTLD applications, it’s easy to see how it could horse-trade its way to getting a full consensus GAC objection.

But would a Musk-influenced Trump administration choose to object? Or could its mere existence actually prove beneficial to .doge’s future prospects?

We asked D3, and chief marketing officer Mark Trang told us:

While we’re not going to speculate on whether or not the Department of Government Efficiency will affect a future TLD like .doge, anything the current administration does to raise the visibility of domains, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains we view as a positive for our industry.

It almost certainly is far too early to speculate, but that’s never stopped me before.

Quite apart from the .doge issue, the Trump administration has yet to show its hand on how it will interact with internet governance in general and ICANN and the domain name industry in particular.

It looks today, over a year before the next new gTLD application window is scheduled to open, that this kind of thing is pretty far down the Trump administration’s priority list, if it’s even on the radar at all.

The relatively small National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which supplies the US with its civil service GAC representatives, doesn’t even have its politically appointed leadership yet.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, seen by some as Trump’s playbook for government reform, says nothing about ICANN or domain names in its NTIA section (pdf), and even gets the meaning of the A in the name wrong, calling it the “Agency”.

As for Musk, he’s known to be well across domain names as a concept, though he may be a .com fanboy. When he reacquired x.com from PayPal, before subsequently renaming Twitter around the domain, he said it was for sentimental reasons.

While it was pretty much an open secret that the pre-Musk Twitter planned to apply for a .twitter gTLD, the renaming to X of course means that it cannot be a dot-brand under ICANN rules banning single-character Latin TLDs.

But rules don’t seem to matter too much at this moment in history, when the US seems more than ready to dispose of decades-old conventions and use raw financial power to achieve its goals.

So, yeah, it’s pretty much too early to speculate about what .doge and the domain name universe looks like under the Trump/Musk administration, but it’s probably not too early to be worried, or maybe even a little afraid.

$2 million Christmas bonus for ICANN

The domain industry performed better than expected in the back half of last year — well, better at least than ICANN had predicted.

The Org today said it took in $2 million more in revenue than it expected in the second half of 2024 — ICANN’s fiscal first half — because the gTLD registries and registrars that primarily fund it processed more transactions than it had planned for.

Registry and registrar transaction fees — paid on registrations, renewals and transfers — were both a million bucks ahead of budget at $29 million and $20 million respectively

Its FY25 takings to the end of December totaled $74 million, ahead of its $72 million estimate but flat on its FY24 budget.

Operating costs were in-line with expectations and down on FY24 numbers due to fewer people having their flights and hotels paid for at ICANN 82 in Istanbul last October.

ICANN hacked to promote crypto scam

ICANN’s Twitter account appeared to be hacked briefly last night, and was used to promote what looks like a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scam.

A series of tweets from the official @ICANN account plugged a memecoin named $DNS from around 0200 UTC today, just when ICANN’s California crew would have been clocking off for the day.

“2025: The Internet Gets Its Own Currency. @icann is redefining digital ownership with $DNS – the first memecoin to merge domain governance & Web3 culture,” one of the tweets read, according to a screen capture from domain lawyer John Berryhill.

ICYMI pic.twitter.com/f8R3AzaLaO

— John Berryhill (@Berryhillj) February 12, 2025

The posts linked to dnscoin.org, which at the time was a live web site promoting “$DNS. Own the Internet Again. ICANN’s decentralized memecoin for domain governance”, according to what little remains visible in Google’s index.

The domain, which had been registered for years, has already been deleted entirely. Not suspended. It’s just gone.

ICANN seems to have restored control over its Twitter account fairly quickly, but Berryhill’s caps show the scam tweets were viewed by at least a couple thousand of @ICANN’s 104,000 followers.

The apparent scam appears to be either a modern-day pump-and-dump scheme, where investors hype up a crypto coin only to cash out when its value peaks, or what crypto investors call a “rug pull”, which is more akin to straightforward theft.

Either way, it seems possible that some people may have lost some money, and ICANN’s not-great reputation for security has certainly suffered another embarrassing setback.

It seems likely that @ICANN either had a weak password, or somebody with access to the account got their device compromised in some way.

ICANN, no doubt sifting through the evidence this morning, has yet to publish an official statement.