Chehade to join World Economic Forum

Outgoing ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade is to join the World Economic Forum as a senior advisor, WEF announced today.
The person he will advise is Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and executive chairman, according to a press release.
WEF is the Switzerland-based non-profit think tank famous for its annual summits in Davos, where world leaders and super-rich businesspeople congregate in order to shed their skin-suits and plot world domination whilst in their true reptilian form.
Chehade, it seems, will be primarily involved in the “Global Challenge Initiative on the Future of the Internet”, a WEF project (pdf) focusing on internet governance, access, cybercrime and so on.
This year’s Davos meeting has been taking place this week. Much of the attention has been focused on pressing humanitarian and economic issues such as the Syrian refugee crisis and European Union immigration policy.
Chehade announced he was leaving ICANN in May last year.
He’s suspected of suffering from ICANN burnout after just a few short, albeit transformational, years on the job.
He said in August he’s taking on a role with Boston-based private equity firm ABRY Partners.
Last month, he became a joint founder of the “Wuzhen Initiative”, a China-led internet governance talking shop along the same lines as the NetMundial Initiative.
His successor has yet to be named, but given Chehade is leaving in March the announcement cannot be too many weeks away.
He starts at WEF April 1.

ICANN confirms domain privacy is for all

Commercial entities will not be excluded from buying domain privacy services, ICANN’s GNSO Council has confirmed.
The Council last night voted unanimously to approve a set of recommendations that would make it compulsory for privacy and proxy services to be accredited by ICANN for the first time.
The recommendations govern among other things how privacy services are expected to behave when they receive notices of trademark or copyright infringement.
But missing is a proposal that would have prevented the use of privacy for “transactional” web sites, something which caused a great deal of controversy last year.
The newly adopted recommendations clearly state that nobody is to be excluded from privacy on these grounds.
The Council voted to adopt the final, 93-page report of the Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues (pdf) working group, which states:

Fundamentally, P/P services should remain available to registrants irrespective of their status as commercial or non-commercial organizations or as individuals. Further, P/P registrations should not be limited to private individuals who use their domains for non-commercial purposes.

The minority view that web sites that process financial transactions should not be able to use privacy came from intellectual property, anti-abuse and law enforcement community members.
However, opponents said it would infringe the privacy rights of home business owners, bloggers, political activists and others.
It could even lead to vicious “doxing”-related crimes, such as “swatting”, where idiots call in fake violent crime reports against rivals’ home addresses, some said.
It also turned out, as we revealed last November, that 55% of US presidential candidates operate transactional web sites that use privacy on their domains.
Two separate registrar initiatives, one backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started letter-writing campaigns that resulted in over 20,000 comments being received on the the PPSAI’s initial report last July.
Those comments are acknowledged in the PPSAI final report that the GNSO Council just approved.
The adopted recommendations (which I’ll get into in a separate article) still have to be approved by the ICANN board of directors and have to undergo an implementation process that puts the rather broad policies into concrete processes and procedures.

Kinderis calls on industry to cut the bullshit

Domain Name Association chair Adrian Kinderis has called for the industry to “grow up”.
The former ARI CEO, now Neustar veep, said Monday it’s time for the industry to kick out the handful of bad actors that ruin its reputation, and to quit the “bullshit bickering” about which TLDs are best.
“For far too long this industry has turned a blind eye to the less than scrupulous activities,” he said, “and these activities have plagued this industry. Bad actors have tarnished the perception of this industry.”
“This may have been acceptable when it was a few insiders first grasping at a fledgling product in the early nineties but… we are now front and center of the internet,” he said.
“These practices of a few bad actors have led to the frustration of consumers. We have not served the best interests of our consumers at all times,” he said. “This has to change.”
He was speaking to an audience of registries, registrars and investors at the opening session of the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday.
It was a fairly standard DNA sales pitch, the kind Kinderis has given before, but few could deny the truth of his remarks.
He called upon the industry to more effectively self-regulate, working with ICANN, to keep the boogeymen of government legislators and law enforcement agencies at bay.
“It’s time to grow up and show that we can regulates ourselves and build a strong sustainable industry with integrity,” he said.
He also called for unity among industry participants, pointing out that the threats to their businesses are external to the domain industry.
“The domain name war must be over,” he said. “The infighting and bullshit bickering has to stop. The .coms, the not-.coms, the IDNs, the g’s versus the cc’s… this must stop.”
“As an industry we have been very lucky. We’ve stumbled through 20 years without a collective strategy nor cohesion,” he said. “Outside forces have not had a massive impact on us, yet. QR codes have tried. Apps are trying.”
He pointed to the recent positive “bump” that many domain companies have experienced as a result of investment from China, but attributed to “dumb luck” rather than the result of any smart marketing or outreach.
The 10-minute speech can be viewed below or on the NamePros YouTube channel.

Bladel romps home in ICANN election re-run

Go Daddy VP of policy James Bladel has been elected chair of ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization Council.
The result came a month after the GNSO Council embarrassingly failed to elect a chair to replace outgoing Jonathan Robinson.
This time Bladel ran unopposed, securing the unanimous support of both his own Contracted Parties House and the Non-Contracted Parties House, which did not field a candidate.
In the October vote, the NCPH had nominated academic Heather Forrest.
Due to personal friction between commercial and non-commercial NCPH Council members, Bladel lost that election to “none of the above” by a single vote.
Forrest has been elected vice-chair, along with Neustar’s Donna Austin.
Volker Greimann and David Cake, who had been running the Council on an interim basis for the last month, have stepped aside.

ICANN reveals $1m of not-lobbying lobbying expenses

ICANN has revealed how much it has spent so far on a few controversial professional services firms that have been accused of “lobbying” the US government on behalf of the organization.
It said today that between July 2015 and September 2015 it spent $1,070,438 on six companies providing “Education/Engagement” services related to the transition of IANA from US government oversight.
Two of the payees are consulting firms run by former high-level US officials.
One is Albright Stonebridge Group LLC, founded by Clinton-era secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
The other is Rice Hadley Gates LLC, which counts W-era officials Condoleeza Rice, Stephen Rice and Robert Gates as its principles.
The $1 million figure also includes payouts to PR firm Edelman, which has been working with ICANN for as long as I can remember, a video production company, and two other consultants.
It’s substantially less than the $2.4 million spend estimated by Kieren McCarthy, whose public-forum questions at the last two ICANN meetings and subsequent The Register article seem to be responsible for the latest disclosures.
McCarthy, in heated public clashes with ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, had argued that these payouts were essentially “lobbying” expenses that had not been disclosed because they fall into a “loophole” in US regulations that require lobbyists to disclose their clients.
ICANN said it spent $765,829 on external lobbying services — both related to the IANA transition and not — over the same period.
Its in-house lobbyist, James Hedlund, has separately disclosed a spend of $890,000 over the period.
McCarthy had argued that ICANN was trying to hide the true extent of its lobbying, because it’s trying to make a case with US authorities for ICANN the organization that is at odds with what the community-led IANA transition process is trying to achieve.
Today’s disclosures show that ICANN spent $4,809,949 — almost half of its transition-related professional services spend — on the two law firms that have been advising the two volunteer groups developing the IANA transition proposals.
It spent a more modest $1,150,213 on its own legal advisers, Jones Day.

Most US presidential hopefuls use Whois privacy despite begging for cash

More than half of the remaining US presidential candidates could have risked losing their official campaign web sites under proposed Whois privacy rules.
Today I carried out Whois queries on all 18 candidates to discover that 10, or over 55%, use a Whois privacy service.
Of the three remaining Democrat candidates, only Bernie Sanders uses privacy. Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton do not.
Here’s a table of the Republican candidates and their chosen privacy services. N/A means their campaigns are using what appears to be genuine contact information.
[table id=38 /]
The results are interesting because rules under discussion at ICANN earlier this year — which are apparently still on the table in other international fora — would have banned the use of privacy services for commercial web sites that allow financial transactions.
All 18 candidates — even Trump — solicit donations on their campaign sites, and many sell T-shirts, bumper stickers and such.
Back in May, a minority of ICANN’s Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group (PPSAI) were in favor of banning privacy for such registrants.
The rationale was that criminals, such as those selling counterfeit drugs, should not be allowed to mask their Whois details.
Judging by a working group report at the ICANN meeting in Dublin last month, the proposed new rules have been killed off by the PPSAI after a deluge of comments — around 22,000 — that were solicited by registrars and civil rights groups.
However, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at the exact same time as the PPSAI was revealing its change of heart, the US government was pushing for virtually identical policy at a meeting of the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The EFF says the proposed OECD Recommendation “would require domain name registration information to be made publicly available for websites that are promoting or engaged in commercial transactions with consumers.”
It’s remarkable that the US government is apparently pushing for rules that are being violated by most of its own hopeful commanders-in-chief as part of the democratic process.
Clearly, fake pharmacies are not the only class of crook to find value in privacy.

ICANN opens blog to comments, immediately trolled

Welcome to my world, ICANN.
The organization on Friday opened its blog to commenters for the first time in years, allowing any registered user of the ICANN site to submit comments on its posts.
The switch appears to be retroactive on all previous posts on the platform.
The post announcing the move was immediately commented on by habitual, single-issue commenter Graham Schreiber, a name familiar to anyone who regularly reads the comments sections of industry blogs.
He’s the guy who unsuccessfully sued ICANN — for some reason — back in 2012 and has continued his tirade against the organization in social media ever since.
Trolling aside, it’s a good move by ICANN, something it should have done a long time ago.
While ICANN obviously accepts comments on pretty much everything it does, the usual format of emailed PDFs perhaps lacks some of the brevity, openness and immediacy of a two-way blog.

Aussie government slams .food closed generic bid

The Australian government is among those asking ICANN deny a request to make .food a “closed generic” gTLD.
Eight people have filed comments opposing Lifestyle Domain’s application for Specification 13 status for its .food registry contract, which would allow the company to keep all .food domains for itself, since we reported the news earlier this month.
The Aussies are arguably the highest-profile opponent, and the one most likely to be taken seriously by ICANN.
Governmental Advisory Committee rep Annaliese Williams wrote:

The Australian Government issued an Early Warning to Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc on the grounds that ‘food’ is a common generic term, and that restricting common generic strings, such as .food, for the exclusive use of a single entity could have a negative impact on competition…
The Australian Government does not consider that Lifestyle Domain Holdings’ application to operate .food for its exclusive use serves a public interest goal.

Lifestyle Domain is a subsidiary of Scripps Networks, the company that runs the Food Network TV stations and Food.com web site.
The company claims that it has trademark rights to the word “food” that should allow it to run .food as a dot-brand gTLD.
That would mean nobody but Scripps, which won the right to .food at auction, would be able to register .food domains.
ICANN has also received negative comments from employees of registrars (both retail and corporate) and registries.
One comment, taken at face value, appears to be pro-Scripps, but I’m fairly confident it’s actually just extreme sarcasm.
The decision about whether to allow Scripps to add Spec 13 to its contract will be made by ICANN legal staff.
ICANN told me this week that there’s no ETA on a decision yet.

.gay applicant appeals community loss, again

dotgay LLC has appealed its Community Priority Evaluation defeat again, filing a new Request for Reconsideration with ICANN this week.
It’s an unprecedented second use of the RfR process to appeal its CPE loss, in which the Economist Intelligence Unit panel decided the applicant’s definition of “gay” was far too broad to award dotgay enough points to pass the evaluation.
But dotgay wants ICANN to initiate a third CPE, to be carried out by anyone other than the EIU.
The EIU panel said earlier this month that it had “determined that the applied-for string does not sufficiently identify some members of the applicant’s defined community, in particular transgender, intersex, and ally individuals”.
Basically, EIU was pointing out, for the second time, that transgender people and straight “allies” aren’t “gay”.
It awarded dotgay 0 out of the possible 4 points available on “Nexus” criteria, meaning the applicant failed to hit the 14 points required to win.
While the RfR dodges the transgender issue altogether, dotgay has some interesting arguments in response to the “ally” question.
It’s now claiming that “ally” refers to companies and organizations that support the equal rights cause (because non-human legal entities don’t have a gender identity or sexual preference) and to proxy registrars:

Now, since an organization or company in itself can impossibly be “lesbian” or “gay”, Requester has been seeking for a way to also position these companies and organizations in this community definition. For this reason, Requester has referred to these organizations as “allies” in the context of the LGBTQIA definition.
Furthermore, as stated in the Application, LGBTQIAs are a vulnerable group in many countries and societies, and too often still the subject of prosecution for who they are. In order to put in place safeguards for those gay community members who do not wish to be directly associated with a domain name registration, organizations and companies who in essence cannot be “non-heterosexual” should have the possibility to act as a proxy service, which is common practice in the domain name industry.
In any case, any such “ally” must be approved by an Authentication Partner in order to be able to register a domain name in its own name or in the name or on behalf of a third party who meets the LGBTQI requirements.

It’s an interesting argument, but I can’t see anything in its original application that would support such a position.
dotgay may be on stronger ground with its claim that it unfairly lost one point on the “Opposition” criteria of the CPE.
Two points were available there. Applicants could lose one point immediately if there was a single letter of opposition from a relevant, non-negligible organization.
The EIU seems to have been in possession of such a letter, though its CPE ruling does not name the opponent.
dotgay thinks the opponent was the Q Center, a community center in Portland, Oregon, which opposed dotgay in writing in 2014 but, following a change in its board of directors, retracted that opposition (pdf).
So it may be the case that dotgay unfairly lost a point.
Regaining that point would not be enough to give the company a winning CPE score, but if the EIU screwed up that may be grounds for ICANN to initiate another rerun of the CPE.
However, it’s quite rare for ICANN’s board of directors to approve an RfR.
If dotgay loses, it will either have to go to auction against its rival applicants or file an Independent Review Process complaint, its final avenue of appeal.
Read its RfR here.

Three new ICANN directors started today

A former Dutch politician, a cable company VP and a Latin American ccTLD manager joined the ICANN board of directors today.
The three new directors took their seats at the conclusion of the ICANN 54 public meeting in Dublin.
Two were Nominating Committee appointees, the third was selected by the Address Supporting Organization to replace six-year veteran Ray Plzak.
Lousewies van der Laan is possibly the highest-profile new director.
She is a former politician who has sat as a member of both Dutch national and European parliaments.
She was a member of the super liberal D66 party in the Netherlands, briefly leading whilst it was part of a governing coalition before a leadership vote defeat and her subsequent retirement from politics in 2006.
Wikipedia has her as a former party spokesperson for “foreign policy, higher education, justice, technology, European affairs and gay rights”
Since then, she has spent time as chief of staff of the president of the International Criminal Court and an independent public affairs consultant.
She’s the second former MEP to sit on the current ICANN board, after German Facebook lobbyist Erika Mann.
The other NomCom appointee is Rafael “Lito” Ibarra, who runs SVNet, the ccTLD manager for El Salvador’s .sv domain.
According to ICANN, he is known as the “father of the Internet” in El Salvador, due to his contributions over the last couple of decades.
He seems to have received the .sv delegation from Jon Postel himself, in the pre-ICANN days.
He’s also on the board of LACNIC, the Latin American IP address registry.
The ASO appointee is Ron da Silva, VP of network engineering at US cable giant Time Warner Cable.
His previous employers include AOL and Sprint. He’s also been chair of ARIN’s advisory council.
The NomCom also reappointed incumbent George Sadowsky, who already has six years of ICANN board service under his belt.
The other two departing directors were Wolfang Kleinwachter and Gonzalo Navarro.