Another new gTLD applicant lawyers up on ICANN

Another rejected new gTLD applicant has filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN, claiming the org failed to follow proper procedures on fairness and transparency.

And I think it’s got a pretty good chance of winning.

A Bahrain company called GCCXI has filed the IRP, eight years after its application for .gcc was thrown out by ICANN on the vague advice of its Governmental Advisory Community.

.gcc is for Gulf Cooperation Council, the short-hand English name for the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, a proto-union of six states on the east coast of the Arabian peninsula.

The applicant’s problem is that it’s not affiliated with, nor supported by, the GCC or its member states.

The GAC, in its controversial Beijing communique of April 2013 objected to GCCXI’s application in the same breath and under the same power as it objected to DotConnectAfrica’s .africa bid.

Back then, the GAC was much more secretive than it is today, and did not have to provide a rationale for its advice. Its powers to object to gTLD applications pretty much amounted to a veto.

ICANN dutifully followed the GAC’s advice, throwing out the .gcc application later that year.

The applicant has evidently been trying to get ICANN to change its mind, using the Request for Reconsideration and then Cooperative Engagement Processes, since early 2014. That CEP concluded in May, and GCCXI filed for IRP in June.

Why did the CEP — a form of arbitration designed to avoid expensive IRP complaints and lawsuits — take so long and ultimately fail?

Don’t look to the IRP complaint published by ICANN (pdf) for answers — it’s redacted the whole ruddy lot, a few pages of text, without explanation.

That’s ironic given that a lack of transparency is one of GCCXI’s beefs against the org, along with an alleged failure to follow its bylaws on neutrality and fairness.

ICANN has ignored all of its carefully developed and documented policies, and instead has kowtowed to unspecified government concerns — devising a secret process to kill Claimant’s investment and opportunity, and completely disregarding the public interest in delegating the TLD for use.

The continued fight for a gTLD it surely has no hope of ever operating is a ballsy move by the applicant.

It’s roughly equivalent to some random European company applying to run .eu to represent the geographic region of EU member states without the consent of the EU institutions themselves and then complaining when it’s told to take a walk.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it will lose the IRP. In fact, I think it has a pretty good chance of winning.

GCCXI does not deserve to prove it should be given .gcc, it only needs to show that ICANN broke its own bylaws.

DotConnectAfrica, which was rejected by the GAC and then ICANN for pretty much the same unsubstantiated reasons — the GAC “veto” — won its IRP in 2015, with the panel finding that ICANN accepted the GAC’s unexplained advice without even rudimentary due diligence, violating its commitment to fairness.

It was particularly embarrassing for the GAC, whose then-chair admitted that the committee deliberately kept its advice vague and open to interpretation

While .africa is not exactly the same as .gcc (the former is officially a geographic string, the latter is not), GCCXI had DCA had their applications rejected based on the exact same piece of GAC advice.

It’s also similar to Amazon’s IRP fight for .amazon, which it won. That bid was also kicked out as a result of ICANN’s adoption of opaque GAC advice from the Beijing communique.

You’ve got to think GCCXI has a decent shot at a victory here, though if recent IRPs and general ICANN foot-dragging on accountability are any guide we won’t know for a couple years.

New gTLD buzz is back again as ICA hosts “second round” webinar

It’s beginning to feel a little like 2011 again.

The Internet Commerce Association today said it will host a Zoom webinar next month to pitch the looming second new gTLD round to prospective applicants.

Moderated by Christa Taylor, the panel features domain industry jacks-of-all-trades Jeff Neuman and Jothan Frakes, and consultant Phil Buckingham. All four know what they’re talking about.

The ICA said the session will cover “an examination of material changes, expected timing and operations within the broader ecosystem will help participants determining whether to pursue a new gTLD for their new entrepreneurial venture, global brand or growing business”.

Expect a lot more of these types of meetings over the next couple of years. The 2012 gold-rush may have disappointed many, but there’s still money to be made in selling shovels, especially to brands.

And the next round is still a ways off.

While policy changes have been approved by the Generic Names Supporting Organization, they need to be approved by the ICANN board of directors before the serious implementation work begins.

The policy won’t be put before the board until ICANN org has completed its Operational Design Phase work, which CEO Göran Marby recently said will take “longer than six months”.

Then there’ll be at least one revision of the Applicant Guidebook open for public comment, as well as the creation of new systems and a global outreach campaign lasting several months before the application window opens.

I’d say we’re looking at an absolute minimum of 18 months between the start of the ODP and the opening of the next application window, and I’m being incredibly generous to ICANN in that estimation.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about these things early. The ICA webinar will be at 1800 UTC August 4. You can read more and register for free here.

Nope, no Seattle meeting for ICANN

ICANN’s planned public meeting in Seattle will have no face-to-face component, the board of directors decided yesterday.

In a resolution published last night, the board cited the global vaccine inequity and the ongoing difficulties with international travel and visas during the coronavirus pandemic.

But it added that it plans to go ahead with a hybrid online/in-person meeting for ICANN 73 in San Juan, Puerto Rico next March “if it is feasible to do so”.

The board noted that its last in-person AGM, held in late 2019, saw 68% of its participants come from outside the US, suggesting Seattle would go ahead with a majority of its community members absent.

It added that “it is likely that ICANN72 could be a meeting of in-person attendees from just a couple of regions, which does not serve global participants in ICANN’s multistakeholder model”

While some of the pandemic-related issues may be resolved by October, ICANN had to make the call now to avoid wasting money on a physical meeting it may have had to later cancel.

The results of the board vote have not yet been published. A similar resolution last year saw some directors vote in favor of a return to face-to-face meetings by October 2020.

The resolution states that ICANN org should use the next eight months to ensure the hybrid model planned for San Juan is as effective as possible for those who will still be unable or unwilling to attend in person due to the pandemic.

It adds that smaller regional meetings, where travel restrictions are less irrelevant, could still go ahead this year.

A recent poll showed a majority of community members from all regions were keen to return to in-person meetings for Seattle, but the majority was greater in North America than elsewhere.

A group of participants from the Asia-Pacific region recently wrote to ICANN to state that it was likely that nobody from that region would be able to show up in Seattle.

ICANN 72 will be the sixth consecutive public meeting to be held virtually.

ICANN to hold hybrid meeting in October (not that one)

ICANN said yesterday that is plans to hold a “hybrid” meeting in October with an in-person component.

It’s not the Seattle public meeting ICANN 72 — no decision has been made there yet — but rather the Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy.

APIGA is basically a set of internet governance training sessions for adult students aged 18 to 35 in the Asia-Pac region, particularly South Korea.

It’s normally held for a week, in-person. But this time it will be spread over a full two months from October 1 with one or two evening sessions held online per week.

At the end, there’ll be a hybrid day, with South Korean participants gathered in person and others Zooming in remotely.

Is this a harbinger of things to come with the Seattle meeting, where there’s already some distress from Asian participants that they probably won’t be able to attend?

I don’t think so. APIGA appears to have been a decision of the ICANN staff, whereas 72 is going to a board vote later this month.

Cambodia looking at new registry overseer

The Cambodian government is reportedly planning to create a new group to oversee its national ccTLD, .kh.

According to The Phnom Penh Post, the local telecommunications ministry is considering legislation that would create KH Network Information Centre.

KHNIC would be modeled on APNIC and combine domain name and IP address management under one roof, the report says.

.kh is currently delegated to Telecommunication Regulator of Cambodia and managed by Telecom Cambodia.

There are reportedly only around 3,000 .kh domains under management. The infrastructure-poor south-east Asian country has about 16.5 million inhabitants but only around 250,000 fixed broadband subscribers.

Will you use SSAD for Whois queries?

ICANN is pinging the community for feedback on proposed Whois reforms that would change how people request access to private registrant data.

The fundamental question is: given everything you know about the proposed System for Standardized Access and Disclosure (SSAD), how likely are you to actually use it?

The SSAD idea was dreamed up by a community working group as the key component of ICANN’s response to privacy laws such as GDPR, and was then approved by the Generic Names Supporting Organization.

But it’s been criticized for not going far enough to grant Whois access to the likes of trademark lawyers, law enforcement and security researchers. Some have called it a glorified ticketing system that will cost far more than the value it provides.

Before the policy is approved by ICANN’s board, it’s going through a new procedure called the ODP, for Operational Design Phase, in which ICANN staff, in coordination with the community, attempt to figure out whether SSAD would be cost-effective, or even implementable.

The questionnaire released today will be an input to the ODP. ICANN says it “will play a critical role in assessing the feasibility and associated risks, costs, and resources required in the potential deployment of SSAD.”

There’s only eight questions, and they mostly relate to the volume of private data requests submitted currently, how often SSAD is expected to be used, and what the barriers to use would be.

ICANN said it’s asking similar questions of registries and registrars directly.

There’s a clear incentive here for the IP and security factions within ICANN to low-ball the amount of usage they reckon SSAD will get, whether that’s their true belief or not, if they want ICANN to strangle the system in its crib.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that the potential user groups the questionnaire identifies do not include domain investors nor the media, both of which have perfectly non-nefarious reasons for wanting greater access to Whois data. This is likely because these communities were not represented on the SSAD working group.

You can find the questionnaire over here. You have until July 22.

“Diversity” warning over ICANN Seattle

ICANN has been told that it risks disenfranchising community members from outside the US if it goes ahead with a return to in-person meetings at ICANN 72 in Seattle this October.

APAC Space, a group comprising participants from the Asia-Pacific region, reckons there’s almost no chance that any of its members will be able to make it to Seattle, due to pandemic restrictions.

The group wrote (pdf):

Like the rest of the community, the APAC Space members are keen to see a return to face-to-face meetings, but we have serious concerns about continued, longterm disenfranchisement if this return is done in an inequitable way. If a hybrid meeting does go ahead in Seattle, we are reasonably confident that there will be minimal, if any, in-person attendance from the APAC region

APAC Space goes on to note that ICANN 73 next March is also scheduled to take place in the same region, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The letter continues:

We are concerned that holding a hybrid meeting in which participants from only some regions can participate in-person is not in line with ICANN’s goal to reflect regional and cultural diversity, and risks further disenfranchising regions that are already under-represented within ICANN’s processes.

A recent ICANN survey found that a majority of community members were keen to return to face-to-face meetings. While this was true everywhere, the majority was stronger among North Americans and Europeans.

ICANN’s board of directors is due to make a decision about Seattle later this month.

This article was updated July 9 to clarify authorship of the letter to ICANN.

ICANN backtracks on executive pay transparency

ICANN has not disclosed the results of a recent board vote to award the CEO his bonus, apparently reversing an earlier move to make that kind of information public.

The board voted last week to give Göran Marby his “at risk” compensation for the second half of the org’s fiscal 2021.

It’s not clear from the resolution whether he’s getting his full 30% or just a portion thereof.

It’s also not clear whether the vote was unanimous or not.

As I noted in February, ICANN disclosed that three directors voted against a resolution to give Marby a pay rise, which put him well over the million-dollars-a-year mark.

I wondered aloud back then whether the unprecedented decision to publish the vote on a matter of executive compensation was an accident, or a move towards increased transparency by the org, which I would have applauded.

The resolution from last week contains no such information, suggesting February may have been a publication accident after all.

The minutes from the February meeting have yet to be published, four months after the fact.

US Feds seize 33 Iranian news site domains

The US government said it has seized control of 33 domain names previously belonging to an Iranian TV news station that the US considers linked to terrorism.

The Department of Justice said the domains had been registered by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union, which it said is controlled by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, designated as a terrorist organization.

Among the domains is presstv.com, used by Press TV, an Iranian state-owned station that broadcasts news in English and French.

The DoJ said the sites were “disguised as news organizations or media outlets” and “targeted the United States with disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations”.

All of the seized names reportedly use .com, .net and .tv domains, which are all operated by Verisign.

The DoJ obtained a court order to grab the names.

As an overseas registrar was used to register the names, it appears the court order instructed Verisign, based in the US, to hand them over.

The domains now direct to a US government placeholder informing visitors of the seizure. Some of the affected web sites have reportedly started using new domains.

Under US law, “Specially Designated Nationals” listed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control are forbidden from obtaining services from US companies without a special license.

The DoJ said it has seized an additional three domains owned by Kata’ib Hizballah (Kataib Hezbollah), an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.

Domain firms plan “Trusted Notifier” takedown rules

Domain name registries and registrars are working on a joint framework that could speed up the process of taking down domain names being used for behavior such as movie piracy.

Discussed last week at the ICANN 71 public meeting, the Framework on Trusted Notifiers is a joint effort of the Registrar Stakeholder Group and Registries Stakeholder Group — together the Contracted Parties House — and is in the early stages of discussion.

Trusted Notifiers are third parties who often need domain names taken down due to activity such as copyright infringement or the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and are considered trustworthy enough not to overreach and spam the CPH with spurious, cumbersome, overly vague complaints.

It’s not a new concept. Registries in the gTLD space, such as Donuts and Radix, have had relationships with the Motion Picture Association for over five years.

ccTLD operator Nominet has a similar relationship with UK regulators, acting on behalf of Big Copyright and Big Pharma, taking down thousands of .uk domains every year.

The joint RrSG-RySG effort doesn’t appear to have any published draft framework yet, and the discussions appear to be being held privately, but members said last week that it is expected to describe a set of “common expectations or common understandings”, establishing what a Trusted Notifier is and what kind of cooperation they can expect from domain firms.

It’s one of several things the industry is working on to address complaints about so-called “DNS Abuse”, which could lead to government regulations or further delays to the new gTLD program.

It obviously veers into content policing, which ICANN has disavowed. But it’s not an ICANN policy effort. Whatever framework emerges, it’s expected to be non-contractual and voluntary.

Trusted Notifier relationships would be bilateral, between registry and notifier, with no ICANN oversight.

Such deals are not without controversy, however. Notably, free speech advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been complaining about Trusted Notifier for years, calling it “content policing by the back door” and most recently using it as an argument against Ethos Capital’s acquisition of Donuts.