Reporter gains first access to .io island for decades

A BBC journalist is believed to have become the first reporter to visit Diego Garcia, the main island of the contested British Indian Ocean Territory that owns the .io domain, in decades.

Alice Cuddy was given access to the island after a court battle as part of the Beeb’s coverage of litigation against the UK government, which administers BIOT, and spent five days there.

Her coverage does not mention the contested .io ccTLD at all, but it does provide a fascinating account of her time on the island, the largest of the Chagos Archipelago, which is used almost exclusively as a US military base.

The article describes what sounds like a tropical island paradise populated almost exclusively by squaddies and giant crabs, but administered by Kim Jong Un.

Cuddy was escorted everywhere she went, had reporting restrictions imposed, and wasn’t allowed to visit certain places (including places as innocuous-sounding as a bowling alley).

The report delves into the history of the island, from the forcible deportation of its native population in the 1970s to its strategic use supporting US/UK military misadventures in the Middle East.

There’s also a fair bit of local color, with Cuddy noting that, despite the name, BIOT is in equal parts very much American. She notes the electrical outlets and currency are American, she dined on “tater tots”, and everybody drives on the wrong side of the road.

It’s well worth the read if you have a passing interest in the place .io technically represents.

As I reported earlier today, .io’s registry, part of Identity Digital, sold almost $40 million of domains last year.

Plurals ban policy handed to ICANN board

The GNSO Council has approved a blanket ban on singular and plural versions of the same word being delegated as gTLDs in future and passed it to the ICANN board of directors for final consideration.

The proposed policy would prevent anyone applying for the singular/plural equivalent of an existing gTLD, and would put future applications for single/plural clashes into contention sets where only one would survive.

The ban would prevent a future .kitchens, for example, because there’s already a .kitchen, and there could be no .motorcycle gTLD because there’s already a .motorcycles.

It would also mean that if there are future applications in the same round for .podcast and .podcasts, for example, they would be placed in the same contention set, likely go to auction, and only one would be delegated.

Applicants would also be banned from applying for singular/plural variants of the few dozen strings found on a “limited blocked name list” that comprises mainly the names of internet policy organizations including ICANN, the IETF and the GNSO.

That list also includes dictionary words such as “onion”, “invalid”, “test”, “internal” and “local”, so there could never be a .onions or .locals gTLD under the policy.

ICANN would decide whether two strings are “the singular or plural version of the same word in the same language” by reference to a dictionary.

The idea behind the ban is mitigating abusive registrations that could be used in, for example, phishing attacks, as well as lazy gTLD applicants that might hope to piggyback on the success of their single/plural rival.

The policy recommendation was written by a “Small Team Plus” of 15 community volunteers after the ICANN board last year rejected the GNSO’s original singular/plural policy, which would have made exceptions to the ban based on the applicant’s “intended use” of the gTLD.

An example given was that if one applicant applied for .spring to represent the meteorological season and another applied for .springs to represent flexible coils of metal, the latter would not be judged a plural of the former.

But the board was worried that if ICANN had to make a call on “intended use”, ICANN would also have to monitor and enforce the use of the gTLD in future, breaking its bylaws promise not to regulate internet content.

Under the revised policy recommendation, .spring and .springs would be ruled as singular/plural equivalents of each other, regardless of how they were going to be marketed.

While the Small Team was not unanimous in its consensus recommendation, the GNSO Council was unanimous in approving it at its monthly meeting last week. The language will now be sent to the ICANN board for approval or rejection.

ICANN confirms new gTLD application fee

It’s $227,000. That’s the minimum ICANN expects to charge for each new gTLD application in the Next Round.

The Org confirmed the price, which is $42,000 more than it charged in 2012, in a blog post this afternoon.

It’s toward the low end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range discussed in June, but up on the $220,000 number being circulated a few weeks ago.

ICANN is able to put a tentative price on applications now because its board has now squared away all the outstanding policy items that could have substantially affected its evaluation costs.

That includes its new process for evaluating potential name collisions, which I wrote about just a few hours ago.

The fee is based on an estimate that ICANN will receive 1,500 applications, where $227,000 will allow it to recover its development, implementation, and operations costs. It may issue rebates if there are more applications.

The $227,000 fee is just a baseline. Applicants will be expected to pay more for extra services, such as if they want a Community Priority Evaluation or want to operate a dot-brand, ICANN said.

ICANN has previously said that most of the price increase over 2012 is due to inflation. But this hasn’t stopped grumbling that the fee is too high, given efficiencies such as technical back-end operations being evaluated separately.

Less well-financed wannabe applicants from certain countries — mostly outside Europe and North America — will have the chance to apply for a fee subsidy under the Applicant Support Program.

New gTLD application fee rises by thousands after collision call

ICANN has upped its expected new gTLD application fee after approving a costly new plan to tack name collisions.

The baseline price of applying for a single string, most recently pegged at $220,000, is now expected to go up by $5,000, according to a recent resolution of the ICANN board of directors.

The board earlier this month approved the Name Collision Analysis Project Study 2 Final Report, which proposed a way to prevent new gTLDs seriously interfering with existing non-standard TLD use on private networks.

Strings applied for successfully in the 2012 round had to agree to a 90-day post-launch period of “controlled interruption”, during which the entire gTLD was wildcarded with information to help affected parties fix their DNS configuration.

So if a company had been using .horse on its internal network, and a suddenly-delegated .horse gTLD started causing leakages to the public DNS, the company was quickly alerted to what the problem was.

Under the now-approved NCAP 2 plan, ICANN will take over responsibility for controlled interruption. Applied-for strings will be tested in the live DNS before a registry has even been contracted.

The results would be assessed by a Technical Review Team and applicants for strings considered at high risk of collisions would be able to submit mitigation plans for evaluation before having their registry contracts approved.

While approving NCAP 2 will generate more confidence that the Next Round will in fact go ahead in the second quarter of 2026, this extra stage of course will add friction and cost to the evaluation process.

ICANN estimates it will add $500,000 to its program implementation budget and $6.9 million to the application processing budget, increasing the application fee by $5,000 per application. That seems to assume 1,500 applications being submitted.

The likely increase has been flagged up for months, so is unlikely to surprise potential applicants, but will not appease those already grumbling that the fee has gone up so sharply from the $185,000 charged in the 2012 round.

It’s also bad news for companies that applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012, which were rejected due to the high risk of collisions.

The ICANN board rejected NCAP 2’s recommendation that these three gTLDs should be submitted to the new Name Collision Risk Assessment Process, potentially reawakening their applications from their Not Approved status.

Under the latest board action, anyone who applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012 will have no preferential treatment if they apply for the same strings again in 2026, according to the resolution.

Affected applicants were already offered a full refund for their rejected bids, with only deep-pocketed Amazon and Google so far not exercising that option. Now they have no excuse.

ICANN names its Supreme Court judges

ICANN has finally named the members of the quasi-judicial body that will oversee its highest accountability mechanism.

The names of the 12 members of the Independent Review Process Standing Panel were published by ICANN this afternoon and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, which manages the IRP, published their resumes.

They’re mainly lawyers and law professors with extensive arbitration experience. There’s one African, and the rest are either North American or European; none are from Asia or Latin America.

The Standing Panel has been a long time coming. It’s been over a decade since ICANN first said it would create one. The jurists were picked by a community committee in January, but ICANN wanted to get them all contracted and up to speed before naming them.

The idea is to streamline IRP, which currently is barely distinguishable from the judicial system when it comes to duration of cases, by allowing ICANN and complainants to select their panel from a known pool of trained, experienced, vetted experts.

The IRP is the final formal appeals mechanism within the ICANN process before lawsuits start flying. There’s been over 20 filed in the last 16 years, and ICANN’s win-to-loss ratio is not great.

ICANN hires new Ombuds from WIPO

ICANN has named its new Ombuds, who will take over the role vacated by Herb Waye almost a year ago.

She’s Liz Field, a HR specialist who spent most of her career at Amnesty International but most recently has been working for WIPO as an independent outside consultant, according to her LinkedIn.

After almost two decades at Amnesty, Field worked for two years as an anti-harassment coordinator for the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Field, who says she also speaks French and Spanish, will take over from complaints officer Krista Papac, who has been filling in for Waye since his resignation.

ICANN said that 36 people applied for the job — 22 men and 14 women. The Ombuds Search Committee interviewed five of them and two candidates were interviewed by the full board of directors.

The genders of the applicants is relevant in this case. Some female ICANN community members have previously said they would be reluctant to make gender-related complaints, such as sexual harassment, to a male Ombuds.

ICANN chair Tripti Sinha earlier this week linked the hiring of the new Ombuds to a strengthened anti-harassment policy that the board hopes to shortly introduce. Field seems to have the CV to support such a goal.

The Ombuds role is to hear complaints about unfair treatment and unpleasant behavior in and from the Org and community.

The job occupies a unique position in ICANN’s structure, answering directly to the board rather than the Org’s management hierarchy. Only four people have occupied the role since it was created 20 year ago.

Big twist as ICANN bans new gTLD auctions

ICANN is to ban new gTLD applicants from paying each other off if they apply for the same strings, removing a business model that saw tens of millions of dollars change hands in the 2012 application round.

But, in a twist, applicants will be able to submit second-choice strings along with their main application, allowing them to switch if they find themselves in contention.

While ICANN’s board of directors has yet to pass a resolution on private resolution in forthcoming application rounds, chair Tripti Sinha said in a letter to the GNSO Council (pdf) and blog post that there’s agreement on three principles.

“Private resolution of contention sets will not be permitted during the Next Round,” Sinha told the Council. The idea of permitting joint-venture resolution was also ruled out as impractical and open to gaming.

This of course means that where contention sets do occur, they’ll be resolved with a “last resort” auction where ICANN gets all the cash from the winning bidder.

Funds raised this way in the last round, along with a decade’s worth of investment interest, have been used to replenish ICANN’s reserve fund, to fund the current Grant Program, and may be shortly used to subsidize the Applicant Support Program.

Second, applicants will be able to submit at least one alternate string with their applications, allowing them to avoid a contention set and last resort auction.

This potentially makes the cost of acquiring a gTLD cheaper for the applicant while increasing the number of gTLDs that go live. ICANN might also have to issue fewer refunds for withdrawn applications.

ICANN thinks this measure might make gTLDs more affordable for less well-resourced applicants from the Global South, where ICANN is keen to diversify the industry, although the applicants may not get their first-choice strings.

Applicants would only be able to switch to an alternate string, which they will have to have pre-selected, if doing so would not create a new contention set or make the applicant join a different existing contention set.

They’d also only be able avoid a contention set of exact-match strings, and not sets subsequently created by the String Similarity Review or String Confusion Objection results.

So, to take an example from 2012, any of the seven .hotels applicants would have been able to switch to a second-choice string immediately after Reveal Day, but not after the similarity review placed them in contention with .hoteis.

The third point of agreement from the board is that the last resort auctions should keep the ascending-clock second-price method used for the 2012 round, deciding against lotteries or the Vickrey auction method.

The ascending clock method sees bids filed in rounds until all bidders but one had dropped out. The last applicant standing then pays ICANN the last price offered by the runner-up.

A Vickrey auction would have seen applicants submit their maximum bids at the time of application, not knowing who they were bidding against. Lotteries are legally problematic under California gambling law.

Sinha said the board intends to pass a resolution embodying these three principles “in the coming weeks”.

This is going to create some extra work for the GNSO, as ruling out joint ventures as a means to private resolution goes against community policy recommendations (and the board’s adoption of those recommendations).

The GNSO Council is set to discuss Sinha’s letter at its regular monthly meeting this Thursday.

ICANN to “strengthen” harassment rules as it picks another homophobic meeting host

ICANN has revealed it is to “strengthen” its anti-harassment policy, but the announcement came the same day as it picked another public meeting host country where being gay can lead to jail time.

“The Board Anti-Harassment Working Group has recently worked to evaluate and strengthen the ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy,” chair Tripti Sinha posted over the weekend. “We do not accept any form of harassment, and we must continually seek opportunities to improve.”

The draft revisions shortly follow the revelations of a sexual harassment legal action by a veteran former staffer, at least the third such instance in the last five years I’m aware of.

The current Community Anti-Harassment Policy is already pretty broad, covering a wide range of protected characteristics (from race to marital status) and behaviors (from groping to dirty jokes).

The proposed revisions will be posted for public comment before ICANN’s Annual General Meeting in Istanbul this November, Sinha wrote.

It’s not illegal to be gay in Türkiye, but it is in Muscat, Oman, where ICANN announced just hours before the anti-harassment post it plans to hold its 2025 AGM.

Men and women can get three years imprisonment for gay sex or “cross-dressing” there, according to the Human Dignity Trust. It’s also technically illegal for unmarried straight couples to share a hotel room, according to the UK government.

While the law in Oman might not be rabidly enforced, it’s understandable that some LGBT members of the ICANN community could be made to feel nervous and adjust their travel plans accordingly — things like traveling with a same-sex partner, hooking up with someone, or having Grindr on your phone might carry additional risk.

Oman is just one of many countries with homophobic laws on the books that ICANN has invited its community members to attend over the years.

Looking back over just the last 10 years of meetings, ICANN has been to Malaysia (in 2022), the UAE, and Morocco (twice), where gay sex acts get you prison time. It’s also been to Singapore (twice) and India, which have since decriminalized homosexuality.

It’s baffling to me that ICANN can lecture its community about “microagressions” and yet also routinely invites its not-insignificant contingent of gay community members to return to the closet for a week, under pain of arrest.

The new gTLD next, next and next round

“The goal is for the next application round to begin within one year of the close of the application submission period for the initial round.”

Believe it or not, that sentence appears in the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook that ICANN published in June 2012, 12 years of seemingly interminable review and revision ago.

Ah, 2012…

Obama was reelected for his second term. The final of the Euros took place in Kyiv. Gangnam Style topped the charts. Harvey Weinstein won an Emmy. Microsoft released Windows 8. Jedward sang for Ireland in Eurovision. Everyone had an opinion on Joseph Kony and Grumpy Cat.

Naturally enough, a lot of people aren’t very happy about the massive delay between the close of the last application window and the opening of the next one, currently penciled in for the second quarter of 2026.

So the community has done something about it, placing language in the draft of the next AGB that commits ICANN to open subsequent, post-2026 rounds without all the mindless navel-gazing and fannying around.

The intent is pretty clear — make application rounds more frequent and more predictable — but there’s still plenty of wiggle-room for ICANN to exploit if it wants to delay things yet again.

Here’s what the proposed AGB language (pdf) says:

ICANN works towards future rounds of new gTLDs taking place at regular and predictable intervals without indeterminable periods of review and, absent extraordinary circumstances, application procedures will take place without pause. A new round may be initiated even if steps related to application processing and delegation from previous application rounds have not been fully completed.

The ICANN Board will determine the timing of the initiation of a subsequent application round of the New gTLD Program as soon as feasible, but preferably not later than the second Board meeting after all the following conditions have been met:

1. The list of applied-for strings for the ongoing round has been confirmed and the window for string change requests has closed. This will provide applicants in a subsequent round with an understanding of which strings can be applied for.

2. ICANN org has not encountered significant barriers to its ability to receive and process a new batch of applications.

Absent extraordinary circumstances, future reviews and/or policy development processes, including the next Competition, Consumer Choice & Consumer Trust (CCT) Review, should take place independent of subsequent application rounds. In other words, future reviews and/or policy development processes must not stop or delay subsequent new gTLD rounds.

If the outputs of any reviews and/or policy development processes has, or could reasonably have, a material impact on the manner in which application procedures are conducted, such changes will apply to the opening of the application round subsequent to the adoption of the relevant recommendations by the ICANN Board. Once adopted by the Board, the implementation of that policy or review recommendation(s) will then become a dependency for the timing of that subsequent round of applications.

The language is among several draft sections of the 2026 AGB that ICANN this week opened for public comment.

An intriguing question now arises: will this commitment on subsequent round timing have any impact on the number of applications submitted in 2026?

People in the know tell us that there’s a decade-long backlog of wannabe applicants, particularly in the dot-brand world, but will any of them decide to slow down their ambitions if they know they only have an extra year or two to wait for another round?

Or will they trust ICANN’s record of delay over the somewhat flexible promises of the AGB?

It’s not just an academic question. How much applicants will ultimately pay ICANN in application fees, after rebates, will depend on how may applications are filed.

Russia calls for ICANN to split from US

The Russian government has called on ICANN to further distance itself from US legal jurisdiction, complaining that the current war-related sanctions could prevent its companies from applying for new gTLDs.

In recent comments, Russia said that “no single state or group of states should have the right to interfere in the operation of critical Internet infrastructure and/or the activities of ICANN, including the mechanisms for legal regulation of ICANN’s operations”.

It added that it is “necessary… to prepare by the ICANN community and stakeholders proposals for measures or mechanisms that can make ICANN less dependent on one state”.

The call came in comments filed in ICANN’s public comment period on the terms and conditions of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Support Program and Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program.

The Ts&Cs contain a clause requiring applicants to abide by all US economic sanctions, such as those overseen by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has sanctioned Russian entities since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s comment was filed late and has not been published or analysed by ICANN in the usual way. Instead, it was appended to the summary report (pdf) prepared by ICANN staff.

It’s not the only war-related beef Russia has with ICANN right now. The government has also complained (pdf) that about 400 domains registered by Russian entities, including airports and airlines, in the .aero gTLD have been suspended.

The .aero registry, aerospace industry IT service provider SITA, is headquartered in Switzerland but the contracting entity is a US-based subsidiary.

According to OFAC, domain registration services are exempt from the US sanctions. That has not stopped several domain registries and registrars ceasing business with Russians on moral grounds.

ICANN told Russia to file a complaint about SITA with its Compliance department. SITA has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Calls for ICANN to distance itself from the US have been coming for over two decades, usually from America’s opponents, and did not stop when the Org severed its formal ties with the 2016 IANA transition.