Court denies ICANN’s #MeToo “cover up” attempt

A Los Angeles court has ruled against ICANN’s attempt to have a former employee’s sexual harassment lawsuit against it thrown out, which the plaintiff claims was an attempt to “silence” her.

Tanzanica King, one of ICANN’s longest-serving employees, sued ICANN last August, claiming that had been repeatedly sexually harassed by her superior and others, as well as being paid less than male counterparts and passed over for promotions.

She was ultimately let go in ICANN’s round of layoffs last year. King, who has given her consent to be named in this reporting, claims that she was fired for becoming a whistleblower.

ICANN’s response to the suit was to point out that King’s employment contract, signed in 2002, requires her to take all disagreements to arbitration, rather than the courts, so the case should be dismissed.

But a US Federal law signed onto the statute books in 2023 in the wake of the #MeToo movement — the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFAA) — says that employees cannot be forced into arbitration.

ICANN argued, according to the court’s ruling (pdf) that the EFAA did not apply and local California state arbitration law should apply instead, but the judge disagreed.

The Superior Court in LA last week ruled, following precedent from Casey v. Superior Court last year:

The EFAA prohibits enforcing arbitration agreements against persons who allege sexual harassment… The EFAA applies to any dispute arising or accruing on or after the enactment of the act, May 2022

King’s lawyer, Jonathan Delshad, said in a statement:

ICANN tried to silence Ms. King and suppress the truth behind the secret walls of arbitration. This ruling affirms her right to tell her story in a public forum so that all can see what ICANN did to her. The Court’s decision makes clear that companies cannot use California law to escape accountability for sexual harassment and retaliation and make an end around the EFAA.

A trial date in July 2027 (not a typo) has been set.

An end to “Club Med for geeks” ICANN?

ICANN has dragged its community to 60 cities around the world over the 26 years and 75 in-person meetings since its foundation, but that degree of globe-trotting could soon come to an end.

A recently closed public comment period saw mixed responses to ICANN’s plan to reform its meetings strategy, but there was little dissent on one proposal; the community seems to be cool with ICANN narrowing the diversity of its venues.

The community was asked whether ICANN should prioritize affordability when it picks its host cities, even if that means it has to sign up to discounted long-term commitments on venues and hotels and return to the same locations over and over again.

They all said “Yes”. There was no division along the usual party lines.

ICANN is obligated by its bylaws to rotate its meetings around five geographic regions, but there’s no requirement to visit a diversity of nations. Hub cities such as Los Angeles, Singapore and Buenos Aires have played host multiple times.

Many commenters said that ICANN should stick to its geographic rotation commitments even if it means visiting fewer locations. Tucows suggested that one meeting per year should be in a “unique” location.

Perhaps the most on-point comment came from Blacknight Solutions boss Michele Neylon. He wrote: “ICANN meetings are work, so returning to well equipped facilities in accessible locations shouldn’t be a problem.”

A change of policy on meeting locations could also incidentally go some way to address the perception (not, I think, held by people who actually attend them) that ICANN spaffs cash jetting its community around the world on a series of cocktail-fuelled exotic jollies.

The most famous expression of this belief came perhaps in a 2008 Computerworld article, picked up by the Wall Street Journal, that ICANN was little more than a borderline corrupt “Club Med for geeks”.

But the effort to reform the meetings strategy is purely a financial one. ICANN wants to cut the cost of meetings at a time when its revenues can no longer be relied upon to predictably head north every year.

Perhaps the key idea in the new batch of proposals is whether to cut the length of its early-year Community Forum from six days to five, perhaps by rejiggering some of the scheduling so larger rooms at the venue do not need to be rented for as long.

There was much less agreement here. Supporters of the idea included the Intellectual Property Constituency, which pointed out that IP lawyers have paid work with other clients that they could be getting on with with a day in hand.

Opponents of the idea included the Registrars Stakeholder Group, which said: “This is unlikely to save significant costs as travel needs, the biggest expense to ICANN, does not change, although hotel and venue costs would be reduced — at the expense of getting all the required work done.

Another idea that received mixed opinions was whether the ICANN board’s meetings with the community’s various stakeholder groups would be better consolidated into one community-wide session, to reduce what is often duplicative and navel-gazey work.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group said the move was a good idea and would “significantly enhance transparency, promote collective understanding, and reduce redundancy from separate interactions”.

Opposing, the IPC said: “The perspective of an individual group can easily be diluted or ignored in community-wide engagement sessions. The IPC values its one-on-one time with the Board”.

Commenters addressed a range of other questions related to the ICANN-drafted proposals.

Notably, while ICANN already seems to have ruled out bringing in registration fees for its meetings, which are all currently free on the door, registrars as represented by the RrSG, Tucows and Blacknight all suggested a nominal attendance fee should still be considered.

Comments can be read here, or you can wait for the ICANN staff summary, which is due to be published next week.

.io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty

The UK government has signed a treaty handing over sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius, which could eventually turn out to be bad news for .io domain name owners.

Currently known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, Chagos was seized in the 1960s and 1970s, its citizens deported, and is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.

The new treaty (pdf) is not of course interested in issues as small-beer as ownership of ccTLDs — it’s much more concerned with the control of spectrum critical to running the base — but there are some elements of the text that may be cause for concern.

• A name change now seems inevitable. With Mauritius now assuming full sovereignty of the whole archipelago, the name BIOT seems destined for the trash heap of history. The treaty does not refer to BIOT once.
• The treaty does explicitly grant Mauritius control over “regulation of commercial activities, including the provision of electronic communications services, unrelated to the operation of the Base”.
• The UK is to inform the United Nations that it no longer exercises sovereignty over Chagos and Mauritius will also gain full representation for Chagos at the International Telecommunications Union.

Who gets to talk to the UN on behalf of the islands is important because of how country names and the codes used for ccTLDs are assigned.

The Statistics Division of the United Nations Secretariat publishes a standard known as M49, “Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use”. That’s where ccTLD codes first appear.

That list is used by the International Organization for Standardization when it builds its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which is in turn used by ICANN/IANA to decide which territories qualify for a ccTLD and what the ccTLD is.

If Chagos is no longer recognised by the UN as a separate territory for statistical purposes, that would set a chain of events in motion that would see .io removed from the DNS root in five to 10 years.

If Chagos retains its place on the various lists, and Mauritius changes not only the name but the two-letter code, that would see .io retired and replaced with the ccTLD matching the new code, again in five to 10 years.

Or Mauritius could change the name, but not the code, meaning .io registrants would be safe. The ccTLD is believed to have over a million registrations and is popular with tech companies as a domain hack for I/O or input/output.

Identity Digital runs .io via a UK-based shell company it acquired several years ago. Perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, the company recently made a deal to become the back-end registry operator for .mu, the Mauritian ccTLD, so it has a foot in the door in the country.

ICANN “reaffirms its commitment to diversity and inclusion”

It’s not exactly a U-turn, but ICANN has issued a statement clarifying that it’s still committed to the values of “diversity and inclusion”, if perhaps not the words themselves.

CEO Kurt Lindqvist posted on the ICANN blog last night:

While some terminology may have changed, the values that guide our work have not. Our actions and commitments remain the same. We have not stepped back from, retreated from, or abandoned ICANN’s core values, or an environment where all voices are welcomed, respected, and valued.

The metadata summary of the post, which shows up in RSS feeds and such if not the visible components of the web page itself, reads: “ICANN reaffirms its commitment to diversity and inclusion amid recent updates to webpage language.”

There have been no changes to policy or ICANN programs like the Fellowship or NextGen, he wrote.

The post follows the revelation last Thursday that ICANN had expunged almost all references to “diversity” and “inclusion” from a page formerly called “Diversity at ICANN” and now called “Representation at ICANN”.

What Lindqvist’s clarification does not clarify, or even address, are the reasons why ICANN felt the need to suddenly and sharply distance itself from language it has been enthusiastically promoting for over a year.

But perhaps no explanation is necessary. Anyone paying a modicum of attention to US politics this year can’t have failed to notice that the abbreviation “DEI” — diversity, equity, inclusion — has become politically toxic and the target of attacks from the Trump administration and its loyal MAGA followers.

What we seem to be looking at here is the ICANN equivalent of the Department of Defense panickedly erasing the Enola Gay from its web site.

While ICANN’s structural ties to the US government have been pretty loose and minimal since the IANA transition in 2016, it really doesn’t need to find itself fighting off a Trump attempt to renationalize the root.

ICANN kills off diversity and inclusion

ICANN seems to have become the latest American organization to back away from commitments to “diversity” and “inclusion” in the wake of a universe now controlled by the whims of Donald Trump.

The Org has recently started removing references to the D-word from its web site, sloppily editing its diversity-related web pages, replacing it with the less politically loaded term “representation”.

The “Diversity at ICANN” page is now called the “Representation at ICANN” page, and ICANN’s stated commitments have been changed from:

ICANN is entrusted with ensuring the stability, resiliency, and interoperability of the Internet’s unique identifier systems in an open Internet, and was founded on the belief that it should reflect the diversity of the Internet community.

to:

ICANN is entrusted with ensuring the stability, resiliency, and interoperability of the Internet’s unique identifier systems Internet and was founded on the belief that it should represent the broad Internet community.

The words “inclusive” and “inclusion”, also from the now apparently toxic “DEI” abbreviation, also seem to be deemed inappropriate. ICANN has changed its web site language from:

To live up to this responsibility, ICANN is committed to promoting greater diversity and supporting broad, inclusive participation in its processes.

to the apparently hastily edited (random comma in original):

To live up to this responsibility, ICANN is committed to supporting broad, participation in its processes.

The page no longer contains links to ICANN’s Diversity & Inclusion Toolkit, a set of educational materials designed to tell people that asking other community members where they come from means they’re a racist.

Also gone is the link to an ICANN Learn course on “Unconscious Bias”, which teaches you that not all nurses are female and not all CEOs are white men and apparently ICANN has money to burn.

While ICANN previously said it offers its staff “Diversity & Inclusion Training”, it now says it offers “Culture Training”.

All six references to “inclusion” present in the November 2024 archived page have been removed from today’s live page. All five uses of the word “inclusive” have also been deleted.

The November archive uses the word “diversity” 32 times and “diverse” twice. On the live page, those counts are down to two (where the word was used to refer to a named group or report), and none, respectively.

The link to “Diversity at ICANN” in the web site’s site-wide footer has also been removed.

Some of the edits are incredibly sloppy. The old page had a bullet point that read:

Community-wide surveys on Age Diversity and Participation and Gender Diversity and Participation

The findings offer insights into perceptions of gender and age diversity in the community, potential and perceived barriers to participation, and the community’s support for initiatives to enhance age and gender diversity.

But that now reads:

Community-wide surveys and

The findings offer insights into perceptions of gender and age in the community, potential and perceived barriers to participation, and the community’s support for initiatives to enhance understanding.

ICANN’s backtracking from earlier virtue signalling comes at a point in history when corporate America is steering away from DEI initiatives lest they incur the wrath of US President Donald Trump.

The question is: is this all just cosmetic, or will it affect ICANN policy?

The Org is currently considering changes to its Community Anti-Harassment Policy that would change the boundaries of what is considered acceptable behavior at ICANN meetings.

The proposed changes would either, depending on your point of view, a) make life more comfortable for people with protected characteristics, or b) make it easier to get cancelled for a cultural faux pas.

It’s been a few months since the public comments closed on the policy changes, so ICANN board action shouldn’t be far off. Will the Org’s retreat from DEI have an impact on its decision?

Kaufmann picked for ICANN board

Christian Kaufmann from Akamai has been reselected to represent the Address Supporting Organization on ICANN’s board of directors.

He’s the incumbent in Seat 10, having first been picked by the ASO in 2022, but he faced competition this time from Australian Karl Kloppenborg of Reset Data.

Kaufmann’s current term ends at ICANN 84 in October, but will be immediately extended for another three years.

Conflicted? STFU under new ICANN rules

ICANN community members who refuse to disclose their conflicts of interest should keep their mouths shut during public meetings, according to a proposed new code of conduct now open for comment.

An updated Community Participant Code of Conduct Concerning SOIs was published this week, following an initial public comment period late last year, which saw some community members ask for more clarity on what the rules mean in practice.

A key change states that people who won’t disclose their potential conflicts shouldn’t even get up to the mic to express an opinion in public, even when they’re not directly participating in policy-making.

“When disclosure cannot be made, the participant must not participate in ICANN processes or make interventions at ICANN sessions on that issue,” the new draft states (changes in bold).

The change might lead to some community members staying in their seats or keeping their microphones muted during discussions at public ICANN meetings.

The policy is intended to improve the perceived legitimacy of ICANN’s processes and policies by forcing community volunteers to publish a statement of interest (SOI) naming who’s paying their wages.

The proposal has largely been championed by registries, registrars and governments, and opposed by lawyers in private practice, some of whom think they shouldn’t, or ethically can’t, name their clients.

The argument goes that if somebody is being paid by a company that wants to torpedo or delay the new gTLD program, or is working on a patent covering RDAP, you’d want to know if they were working on policies covering new gTLDs or RDAP.

The counter-argument goes that if an attorney is working on new gTLD policy on behalf of Coca-Cola, putting that information in an SOI would tip off Pepsi that a .coke gTLD application is in the works.

The updated policy draft clarifies what SOIs must disclose — it doesn’t just cover employers or clients — and provides lengthy guidance on specific scenarios where disclosures must be made.

The types of interests that should be disclosed are broad, and cover a variety of influences and relationships, both monetary and nonmonetary. These could include: familial relationships; employment relationships; agreements to represent a specific person, entity or group of entities; vendor or contracting relationships; stock/equity ownership (other than de minimis ownership); and all similar types of influences and relationships that impact the discloser’s participation within ICANN. Interests can be general or they can be issue-specific.

Working group chairs would get the right (though not, it seems, the obligation) to temporarily kick anyone found to be in violation of the rules. Complaints could also be escalated to the Ombuds, but she’s not getting any extra enforcement powers.

Lawyers have had their objections to the policy roundly rejected. The guidelines now state:

When an attorney is engaged to participate in ICANN on behalf of a client, while that attorney holds specific duties to their client, those duties do not override the need for others participating within ICANN to understand what other interests are advocating and participating within ICANN processes… when that attorney starts participating within processes, such as participating in mailing lists, making public comments, joining working groups, etc., on behalf of that client, the client’s and attorney’s obligations to the broader ICANN community emerge

The updated policy clarifies that governments enjoy some immunity — they don’t have to disclose who lobbied them on a particular issue they’re engaged with — with ICANN assuming their nations’ own transparency laws will cover that type of thing.

For the domain industry, volunteers will have to disclose all the roles their employer has. Nominet, for example, would have to disclose that it’s a ccTLD registry, a contracted gTLD registry, and a back-end registry services provider.

The policy now also provides guidance for trade groups, academics and IP owners.

The draft is now open for public comment until June 30. It’s possibly the last chance you’ll get to file a comment without disclosing your interests.

ICANN cuts off money to UASG

ICANN is the stop funding and supporting the Universal Acceptance Working Group, an independent outside group tasked with making sure domain names work everywhere on the internet regardless of TLD or language.

With no money or staff support, Org has likely signed the death warrant for the UASG, but ICANN insists it’s not turning its back on UA as a general principle.

“With the focus changing to implementation work, ICANN will no longer provide funding or staff support to the UASG after June 2025,” ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist wrote in a blog post today.

I don’t believe ICANN has ever revealed publicly how much money it was giving the group, but it was clearly significant enough to warrant review at a time when ICANN is tightening its belt in the face of budget pressures.

Budgets published in previous years have put UASG’s spending at anywhere from $500,000 to $1.4 million a year.

The move probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. A close reading of a board resolution from ICANN 82 in March strongly suggests ICANN was gently breaking the news that it planned to wind down the group.

Lindqvist’s post and the resolution both point out that UASG’s founding charter, written in 2015, called for it to be a 10-year awareness-raising project, and that 10 years is now up.

Lindqvist said ICANN will create a UA Expert Working Group of “invited members and nominated representatives” from across the community to “provide guidance for ICANN’s work on UA adoption”.

While the UASG has been mainly focused on internationalized domain names and awareness-raising in parts of the world that might not track ICANN very closely, much of the hands-on work has been done by ICANN itself.

Last year, Twitter and Meta-owned platforms like Whatsapp updated their linkification code base to more effectively support UA, but that seems to have happened largely due to ICANN engineers battering on their doors.

ICANN has also taken to directly engaging with smaller open source projects, many of which develop libraries used in much larger platforms, to make sure they support the freshest TLDs, regardless of script.

Lindqvist said ICANN will to continue to support UA Day, a series of educational gatherings held around the world each year.

Verisign gave Trump $100,000

Remember January 20, 2025, about a thousand years ago, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States?

Remember how the dais at the Capitol rotunda was stacked with tech bros including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, each of whom had authorized million-dollar donations to the Trump inauguration fund?

You will not have seen Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos among the crowd of VIP supporters, but it turns out that’s probably only because his company didn’t cough up enough cash.

The .com registry operator donated $100,000 to the Trump Vance Inauguration Committee, records published Sunday by the Federal Election Commission show.

I’ve searched the disclosure (pdf) for other deep-pocketed domain industry companies and CEOs but couldn’t find any.

The Verisign donation is only a tenth of the size of donations made by Meta, Google and Cook, and is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall size of the fund, which reports put at an eye-watering $245.3 million.

The aforementioned tech bros were accused at the time of making the donations in order to curry favor with the new administration. Some, such as Meta, have since changed their policies to pander to Trump’s sensibilities.

Verisign’s most critical engagement with the US government comes via its Cooperative Agreement with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Department of Commerce.

The Cooperative Agreement is the document that cements Verisign’s monopoly over .com and gives it its price-raising powers, currently set at 7% in four out of the six years of the contract’s duration.

The deal was renewed last year and is not due to be renewed under the current Trump administration (unless…). Prices had been frozen for six years under Obama, but Trump reinstated the 7% powers in 2018 during his first term.

But Verisign has also been engaged in talks with the NTIA about downstream pricing — at registrars and domain investors — that have a lot of people worried.

Renewing the agreement last November, the NTIA said that “prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed”.

These talks appear to have stalled due to lack of leadership at NTIA, which is headed by a political appointee. Even 91 days after Trump was inaugurated, the agency does not yet have a confirmed chief.

Adam Cassady, formerly with the Federal Communications Commission, is currently acting assistant secretary, but Trump’s pick as his permanent replacement is Arielle Roth, policy director on the Senate’s commerce committee.

Roth came in for a grilling over suggestions she would use her powers over broadband policy to benefit Elon Musk’s Starlink, but seems to be a shoo-in for confirmation

In Verisign’s most recent earnings call, Bidzos noted that “unregulated retail price increases exceed our wholesale price increases”, adding “we look forward to engaging with our new regulators”.

So what does a hundred grand buy you nowadays? I guess we’ll find out soon.

The Soviet Union might be safe after all

The ccTLD from the defunct Soviet Union may be safe from deletion, judging by the ccNSO’s latest pronouncement on the issue.

It seems like, following a bit of a kerfuffle at ICANN 82 in Seattle last month, IANA has been sniffing around behind the scenes trying to figure out whether its own policy on ccTLD retirements applies to .su.

Responding to an unpublished email from IANA chief Kim Davies, the ccNSO seems to have clarified that .su, which has over 100,000 registrations despite its associated territory ceasing to exist 30-odd years ago, is not covered by the policy.

IANA can put a ccTLD into the root if the International Organization for Standardization adds it to its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list of two-letter country codes.

SU is not on the main list of codes under 3166 but, along with UK, AC (Ascension Islands) and EU, it is on an “exceptionally reserved” sub-list.

ICANN’s policy on deleting ccTLDs was until quite recently not fully codified, but ICANN in 2022 approved a formal Retirement Policy (PDF, from page 13).

That policy allows ICANN to to set the wheels in motion for a deletion whenever a “triggering event” occurs, and:

For 2 letter ccTLDs which corresponded to an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 Code Element – The Trigger is the deletion of that corresponding Alpha-2 Code Element from the ISO 3166-1 Standard by the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency (“ISO 3166/MA”)

IANA seems to have wanted clarification on whether “Alpha-2 Code Element” also means “exceptionally reserved” codes. If it does, then .su probably enjoys the same protected status as .uk.

The policy specifically says that .uk, .ac and .eu are eligible as ccTLDs, but ignores .su entirely for reasons unknown.

The ccNSO told Davies in its April 10 letter (pdf):

it is our view that the Policy is relevant only in circumstances where, as a result of action taken by the ISO, a delegated 2-letter code is no longer on the list of country names or an exceptionally reserved code element.

My read of this is that the ccNSO is saying that, unless ISO removes SU from its “exceptionally reserved” list, there’s no “triggering event” that would compel IANA to delete .su from the DNS root zone.

SU has been removed from the 3166 list once before, back in the 1990s, but it might be a stretch to retroactively accept that as a triggering event, given that it’s been “exceptionally reserved”, apparently at the .su registry’s request, since 2008.

So… is .su safe? It’s certainly looking safer now than it did a few weeks ago, in my view.

This could be seen as good news for ICANN, which might now be able to avoid a damaging confrontation with Russia while also dodging accusations that it’s ignoring its own policies in an embarrassing capitulation to Moscow.