ICANN might be a director light after election stalemate

Months of internecine bickering have led to ICANN facing the possibility that it might enter its 25th anniversary meeting this October without a properly elected director in one seat of the board.

Chair Tripti Sinha has written to (pdf) the heads of the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group and Commercial Stakeholder Group — and then published the letter, no doubt to light a fire under their arses — to demand they name their candidate for Seat 14 on the board.

The name was due under ICANN’s bylaws by April 26, which is six months before the Hamburg AGM, she said.

Without an appointment, any newly picked director won’t be able to participate in training and meetings to help them hit the ground running at the conclusion of ICANN 78’s AGM, she said.

Seat 14 is selected by the Non-Contracted Parties House. That’s every participant in the GNSO that is not a registry or registrar. It comprises the NCSG and CSG. The incumbent director is Matthew Shears, first picked in 2017.

The CSG has made it clear that it does not want Shears, the NCSG’s initially preferred candidate, reappointed for a third term. It seems the group is unhappy with his performance. It has also rejected alternate Rafik Dammak.

The NCSG meanwhile rejected CSG preference Mark Datysgeld, saying he lacks ICANN experience.

The problem seems to be election rules (pdf) agreed to by the two SGs in 2018 that requires them to reach a “consensus” on a candidate, which can be difficult when by definition they have two fundamentally opposing policy goals.

There may also be confusion about whose “turn” it is to pick a candidate. As the names of the SGs suggests, the two groups represent diametrically opposed interests, so there’s been an informal agreement to rotate nominations between the SGs. The question is whether NCSG/Shears’ turn has ended, or whether he gets the full nine years.

Eight months after the NCPH leaders started to discuss Seat 14, there appears to be four candidates currently under consideration, albeit only at the very early interview phase of the process.

The CSG has put forward Khaled Koubaa and Ihab Osman as candidates. The names are notable as they’re both previous ICANN directors who each served a single term as Nominating Committee appointees (until 2019 and 2022 respectively).

The NCSG has picked “ICANN Policy Ninja” Amr Elsadr and Chris Buckridge, a policy guy from the Regional Internet Registry world, as its two nominees.

With three Africans in the mix, there’s a possibility that next year’s NomCom may have more freedom than usual when trying to fill its geographic diversity quota. None of the slate are female.

Right now, with voting not yet underway, it seems the chances of the two SGs settling on a consensus candidate before Sinha’s end-of-August deadline are close to zero.

ICANN’s general counsel John Jeffrey wrote to (pdf) the NCPH heads back in May to remind them that their nomination was a month late and that any failure to pick a new director before the AGM would lead to Shears retaining the role while his successor is picked (assuming he wants the gig).

There seems to be some concern among ICANN’s top brass that the deadlock within the NCPH — caused, as so many ICANN conflicts are, by a failure to compromise — might reflect badly on ICANN and the multistakeholder model in general.

Yup.

ICANN turns down money from blockchain alt-root

It seems ICANN is turning down free money from blockchain alt-root providers, apparently as a matter of principle.

We hear one such alt-root, Freename.io, tried to sponsor the upcoming ICANN 78 meeting in Hamburg, but was rebuffed.

“At this time, ICANN is not interested in having Freename serve as a sponsor and will not be moving forward with a sponsorship agreement,” the Org told the company in an unsigned email.

Freename had offered to be a general sponsor, and not at the cheapest tier, I’m told.

ICANN sponsorship offers typically start in the low thousands but can get up to six figures at the higher tiers. Sponsorship is overall a very small part of ICANN’s revenue.

Org has become increasingly rattled in recent years with the proliferation of alt-roots, which have been gradually gaining market acceptance while ICANN’s own efforts to expand the domain universe languish in interminable policy knots.

ICANN delayed the sale of the UNR portfolio of gTLDs until buyers renounced their ownership rights to blockchain versions of their authoritative root strings.

Clearly, splashing an alt-root’s branding all over an ICANN stage would be seen as problematic.

Freename.io plans to attend the Hamburg meeting anyway.

CentralNic chief calls on industry to tackle climate change

CentralNic CEO Michael Riedl is calling on his counterparts at other large domain name registries and registrars to meet up to coordinate the industry’s response to climate change.

During a broad keynote at the London Domain Summit this morning, Riedl said that each domain company is too small to make an impact on the industry’s carbon footprint individually, and that coordination is needed.

He said the industry’s carbon footprint is currently “relatively reasonable” but said “we need to get it down to zero… together I’m pretty sure we can make an impact”.

Speaking to DI shortly after his speech, Riedl said he will soon invite industry leaders to a climate change “summit” in Hamburg, Germany, to coincide with ICANN’s 78th public meeting.

He said the domain industry needs to coordinate and standardize its approach to emissions, following the leads of other industries such as automotive.

He said he hoped he could get the CEOs of the big domain companies — he named Verisign and GoDaddy, who rarely send their CEOs to ICANN meetings — to show up.

Planning for the meeting is in the very early stages and Riedl said he has not spoken publicly about the initiative until today’s speech.

Closed generics ban likely to remain after another policy group failure

Closed generic gTLDs are likely off the table for ICANN’s next application round, after a secretive policy development working group failed to reach a consensus on how they could be permitted.

The chairs of the ALAC-GAC-GNSO Facilitated Dialogue on Closed Generic gTLDs have put their names to a draft letter that essentially throws in the towel and recommends ICANN sticks to the status quo in which closed generics are not permitted.

The chairs of the three committees write that they “believe that it is not necessary to resolve the question of closed generic gTLDs as a dependency for the next round of new gTLDs, and we plan to inform the ICANN Board accordingly.”

In other words, whatever latency related to needing a closed generics policy that was built in to ICANN’s recent April 2026 target for opening the next application round could be eliminated from the timeline.

The three chairs added (emphasis in original PDF):

We agree with the ICANN Board (in its original invitation to the GAC and the GNSO to engage in a facilitated dialogue) that this topic is one for community policy work, rather than a decision for the Board. As such and based on our collective belief that there is neither the need nor the community bandwidth to conduct additional work at this stage, we also plan to ask that, for the next round, the Board maintain the position that, unless and until there is a community-developed consensus policy in place, any applications seeking to impose exclusive registry access for “generic strings” to a single person or entity and/or that person’s or entity’s Affiliates (as defined in Section 2.9(c) of the Registry Agreement) should not proceed. Finally, we also plan to inform the Board that any future community policy work on this topic should be based on the good work that has been done to date in this facilitated dialogue.

But that position — still a draft — is already facing some push-back from community members who disagree about what the current status quo actually is.

The 2012 application round opened up with the assumption that closed generics were A-okay, and it received hundreds of such applications.

But the governments of the GAC, no doubt stirred by competition concerns, balked when they saw big companies had applied for gTLD strings that could enable them to dominate their markets.

The GAC demanded that closed generics must service the public interest if they were to be permitted, so ICANN Org — in what would turn out to be an Original Sin injected into the destiny of future rounds — retroactively changed the rules, essentially banning closed generics but allowing applicants to withdraw for a refund or open up their proposed registration policies.

The third option was to defer their applications to a future application round, by which point it was assumed the community would have established a closed generics policy. No applicant took that option.

But making that policy was the job of a committee called SubPro, but when turned its attention to the issue, entrenched positions among volunteers took hold and no consensus could be found. It couldn’t even agree what the status quo was. The group wound up punting the issue to the ICANN board.

The discussion moved on last year when ICANN decided to launch the “Facilitated Dialogue”, forcing the GAC and the GNSO to the negotiating table in last-ditch attempt to put the issue to bed for good.

Ironically, it was the 2013 GAC advice — made at time when the governments drafted their advice in secret and were deliberately ambiguous in their output — that killed off closed generics for a decade that ICANN used to reopen the issue. The GAC hadn’t wanted a blanket ban, after all, it just wanted to mandate a “public interest” benefit.

The assumption was that the Facilitated Dialogue would come up with something in-between a ban and a free-for-all, but what it actually seems to have come up with is a return to the status quo and disagreement about what the status quo even is.

It really is one of those situations where ICANN, in its broadest definition, can’t see to find its ass with two hands and a flashlight (and — if you’ll indulge me — a map, GPS coordinates, and a Sherpa).

Rejected former director threatens to sue Nominet

The person Nominet barred from standing in its non-executive director election this year says he was unfairly excluded and intends to sue.

Lawyer Jim Davies, who was a Nominet director over a decade ago and stood unsuccessfully last year, said on his blog that he has asked Nominet to suspend the election, slated for September.

“If they refuse, I will apply to court for an injunction,” he wrote.

Davies was one of five people nominated for the NED seat this year. Incumbent Phil Buckingham eventually pulled out of the race, and Nominet said Davies, who the company did not initially name, was denied candidacy for not completing a mandatory security screening, carried out by third-party consultant Reed, by the deadline.

“I have asked Nominet and Reed for disclosure of specific documents as a matter of urgency, in anticipation of making an application to court to obtain a declaration that I am a valid candidate in the 2023 NED election,” Davies wrote.

Nominet’s head of comms Will Guyatt has told members that there was a June 30 deadline to submit information for the screening, which he said Davies missed. He said Davies was reminded of the deadline June 28.

In a lengthy timeline, Davies says that he completed the screening application process June 28, and carried on talking to Reed about the screening as late as July 11, when he was told the screening had not found anything “adverse” to his candidacy.

Part of the problem seems to be that Reed wanted him to submit client invoices as part of the screening, and some of Davies’ clients don’t trust Nominet enough to reveal their relationship with him.

Guyatt told Nominet members that the board had agreed unanimously to exclude Davies’ bid on July 19 to be fair to all candidates.

It’s the second time in the last year that Davies has tried to get a Nominet election called off.

Last year, when he was a candidate, he started his WeightedVoting.uk campaign, which seeks to demonstrate that Nominet’s current voting system illegally breaks the company’s own rules. That election went ahead and was won by Kieren McMcarthy.

Davies was briefly a director of Nominet until 2009 when he quit during a lawsuit filed against him over his domain industry client base.

April 2026 is the date for the next new gTLD round

ICANN has given itself an April 2026 target for accepting the next round of new gTLD applications.

Board chair Tripti Sinha wrote yesterday that ICANN expects the next Applicant Guidebook — the Book of Mormon for the program — to be completed in May 2025 “which enables the application round to open in Q2 2026 (with the goal of April 2026)”.

She noted, as if it needed note, that there could be delays.

Back in May, ICANN had indicated May 2026 as the likely date. That was in a fairly obscure Inside Baseball document. The newly revealed date is an official ICANN announcement.

Other key dates come in the fourth quarter 2025, when ICANN will start accepting applications for its Applicant Support Program and registry service provider pre-evaluation program.

Sinha said the board last week approved an Implementation Plan that lays out the work — and costs — for the next three years.

ICANN expects the program to cost it $70 million between Q2 2023 and Q2 2026. It’s assuming it gets roughly 2,000 applications, in with its experience in 2012. It will hire 29 new staff.

Doria leaving ICANN board a loss for new gTLD program

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has announced its 2023 selections for many of the Org’s leadership positions, and the big shocker is that director Avri Doria is not among the picks.

NomCom said it has reappointed lawyer Sarah Deutsch for a third three-year term, but Doria’s seat is being taken by Catherine Adeya, a Kenyan tech policy expert who describes herself as a “Senior Digital Transformation & Governance Specialist”.

Adeya holds various directorships and was director of research at the World Wide Web Foundation for a couple of years until layoffs in late 2022, according to her socials.

While Adeya seems incredibly well-qualified for the role, I can’t help but lament the loss of Doria’s institutional expertise. She, along with fellow ICANN lifer Becky Burr, have recently been doing a pretty good job working with the GNSO to help oil the wheels of implementation and get the new gTLD program up and running again.

The NomCom picks mean that the number of voting Africans on the 20-person board doubles from one to two and the number of North Americans is reduced by one. The gender mix of course remains the same, with six out of the 16 voting seats filled by women.

There’s been a lot of talk this year, particularly from chair Tripti Sinha, about a goal to achieve “gender parity” in ICANN’s leadership positions, and NomCom’s 2023 appointments certainly seem to reflect that.

Despite as few as 27% of the 155 applicants ticking the female box on the application form, versus 59% male, only two of the nine open positions were filled by men.

Two of the nine hail from Asia-Pacific, with three from Africa, two from North America, and one each from Europe and Latin America.

ICANN’s bylaws require at least one director from each of the five geographic regions and the board every year encourages NomCom to keep gender and geographical diversity in mind when making their picks.

All the NomCom picks take their seats at the end of ICANN’s public meeting this October.

Three candidates stand for Nominet board

Nominet has revealed the three candidates who will stand for election for a non-executive directorship on its board this year.

The candidates are Thomas Rickert, David Thornton and Steve Wright.

German lawyer Rickert is a familiar face in ICANN policy-making circles, currently as a representative of the ISPs constituency on the GNSO Council. He’s head of domains policy at German trade group eco.

Domain investor Thornton, has been on the Nomninet board as a NED before. He stood for reelection in 2021 but received less than 6% of the first-round votes and was beaten by Simon Blackler and Ashley La Bolle.

Wright is COO of hosting company Redcentric, which he joined earlier this year after it acquired his own hosting firm, according to his socials.

Their candidate statements are hidden behind a Nominet membership paywall.

Nominet said two other candidates were nominated but one pulled out — presumably incumbent Phil Buckingham, who has left for personal reasons — and other other failed to provide enough information for Nominet’s security screening.

“As Nominet is entrusted with managing critical internet infrastructure, these checks are important and all directors who join the company are asked to complete them,” the company said.

Candidates do not have to be members, but they do have to be nominated by two members to be eligible. The ballot, in which members get a number of votes dependent on how many domains they manage, will be held in September.

Next round of gTLDs could come much sooner than expected

ICANN’s next new gTLDs application round may be closer than we thought, after a policy working group dramatically reduced the timetable for completing its work.

The Internationalized Domain Names Expedited Policy Development Process team has managed to shave a whopping 13 months off its schedule, potentially leading to a similar period being shaved off the runway to the next application window.

The IDNs EPDP had expected to deliver its final deliverables — policy recommendations on how IDNs are handled in gTLD applications — in November 2025, meaning the earliest they could be adopted by the ICANN board would be March 2026.

Because the IDNs policy is seen as a critical gating factor to the next round commencing, the date ICANN penciled in for the next application window was May 2026.

But now the IDNs EPDP group has revised its deadline down to October 2024, member Donna Austin told the GNSO Council last Thursday. This could mean the board could approve its work in early 2025.

The new target means that IDNs are no longer the biggest delaying factor on the critical path to the next window — that honor now falls on the “closed generics” problem, which a “small team” of the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee have been working on in private all year.

The latest thinking on closed generics is that another EPDP would be formed with an estimated run-time of 96 weeks (22 months) — a mid-2025 end date, in other words.

But there are even question marks over that optimal timeline now, following a less than supportive informal public comment period that closed last week. The closed generics small team has apparently taken a week off to ask itself some fundamental questions.

One possibility that has been suggested to speed things up is to take closed generics out of the critical path by retaining the current de facto ban for the next round.

If that were to happen, we could be looking at an application window in 2025.

But nobody ever won money betting on ICANN hitting deadlines, so take this speculation with a pinch of salt big enough to give an elephant hypertension.

Government to regulate UK-related domain names

The UK government is to trigger a law that would allow it to take control of .uk, .wales, .cymru, .scot and .london if their registries get thoroughly abused and they fail to do anything about it.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said today it is to activate (or “commence”) the parts of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 that give it the power to appoint a new manager for any “UK-related” TLDs.

DSIT would only be able to exercise these powers if the registry in question had let DNS abuse or cybersquatting run amok and failed to follow government orders to fix it. I don’t believe any of the affected registries are currently in such a state.

The government has now launched a consultation, running until the end of August, to get industry and public feedback on its definitions of abuse and what it called “unfair domain use”, meaning cybersquatting.

Nominet, which runs .uk, .wales and .cymru, said in a statement:

The proposed prescribed requirements are consistent with Nominet’s current voluntary procedures, which Government has made clear it believes Nominet operates in a perfectly satisfactory manner. As the Government has had a reserve power to “step in” ever since the DEA was introduced, the purpose of the new provisions is to give Government a formal mechanism to do so, should it ever be required. Our understanding is that Government is enacting these provisions now to ensure the UK meets international best practice on governance of country code top-level domains in line with key global trading partners and future global trading commitments.

Based on my first read, I expect registries and registrars will think it looks generally pretty palatable. It seems DSIT has followed ICANN and the industry’s lead in terms of what qualifies as abuse, and Nominet said in a statement tonight that all three affected registries have been meeting with DSIT to craft the consultation.

Domain investors may take issue with the precise wording of the cybersquatting definition, however.

The definitions of abuse cover the industry standard five bases: malware, phishing, botnets, pharming and spam (insofar as it facilitates any of the other four) and cybersquatting is defined thus:

the pre-emptive, bad faith registration of trade marks as domain names by third parties who do not possess rights in such names. This includes ‘typosquatting’, when an end user takes advantage of common misspellings made by Internet users who are looking for a particular site or a particular provider of goods or services, in order to obtain some benefit.

Domainers will notice the document talks about “bad faith registration”, whereas UDRP talks about bad faith “registration and use”, which is sometimes an important edge-case distinction in cybersquatting disputes. Nominet’s DRS uses bad faith registration “or” use.

Where the consultation gets vague, and the potential for debate arises, is when it talks in general, high-level terms about how dispute resolution procedures should be designed.

Failure to deal with child sexual abuse material, as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in an affected TLD could also result in the government appointing a new registry.

The four gTLDs affected by the legislation all are considered geographic under ICANN rules and had to secure local government support when they applied for their strings. ICANN has a contractual right to terminate them if that government says so.

After the consultation is complete, DSIT intends to make its definitions law through secondary legislation.

This post was updated shortly after publication to add Nominet comments.