This is why ICANN is worried about new gTLDs right now

ICANN’s board of directors yesterday laid out a whole bucket list of concerns it has about the next round of new gTLDs, some of which it thinks might take over a year to resolve.

The board told the GNSO Council on a conference call that it has 38 areas of concern that will need to be addressed before it can fully approve the policy recommendations sent to it two years ago.

ICANN has identified 298 recommendations emerging from the GNSO’s Final Report (pdf) into the future of the new gTLD program.

The board intends to fully approve 94 of those recommendations March 16, at its meeting in Cancun, which begins next week. A further 168 are believed to be covered by already-approved policy and will simply be “acknowledged”.

That leaves 38 that will need further discussion between the board, Council and Governmental Advisory Committee, covering areas such as legal and financial exposure, potential bylaws violations, and worries about gaming.

Here’s my non-exhaustive hot take on the issues that look most interesting to me.

First-come, first-served

Most surprising to me are indications that the current board appears to favor a gradual transition to making new gTLDs available to applicants on a first-come, first-served basis.

The GNSO’s Final Report was firm that the program continue to operate in discrete, regular rounds, with finite application windows. It rejected the idea of FCFS for a host of persuasive reasons.

But director Becky Burr told the Council yesterday: “The Board really would like to consider whether it makes sense to move to a system of continuous applications at some point.”

“In other words, moving out of rounds into a first-come first-served mode at some point, because that would have a lot of potential advantages with respect to string similarity issues and contention sets and the like,” she said.

FCFS could remove these costly aspects of the program — no contention sets means no auctions, for a start — but do we really want a process where the fastest trigger-finger is the sole decider of who gets a gTLD?

This would make obtaining a gTLD more akin to drop-catching. Anyone remember digital archery?

The board suggests the GNSO reconvene its Policy Development Process working group to address this issue, with a target date of June this year for resolution.

Emojis

The board is also worried that the Final Report suggests a blanket ban on emojis “at any level” in gTLDs, for security and stability reasons — since there’s no standard for how emojis are rendered in software, the chance of confusion is pretty high.

This appears to be an easily fixable problem of wording. The board points out that it only has power to set policy for gTLDs and second-level domains, a ban “at any level” — which would include [emoji].example.example domains — may be ultra vires.

Simply clarifying that the ban only applies at any “registerable” level may be enough to put this concern to bed, but the board reckons it might take until October.

The Content Police

As previously reported, the board has concerns about proposals for “Registry Voluntary Commitments”, which would be contractually enforceable promises to only allow, for example, certain types of content or registrant.

This could go against ICANN’s bylaws commitments to stay out of policing internet content, a very sensitive issue.

ICANN has previously floated the idea of amending the bylaws to enable RVCs, but now the board wants to talk further with the GNSO before taking any action. It thinks it could take until April 2024, 13 months from now, to sort this out.

Watching the Pennies

The board has a number of concerns that some GNSO recommendations may risk emptying ICANN’s coffers.

It wants to revisit the idea that the Applicant Support program be expanded to include lawyers fees and application-writing services, for example. In 2012, it only subsidized ICANN’s own application fees.

The board is also worried that releasing dot-brand owners from the required to post a financial bond to cover the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator’s costs should the TLD fail may end up costing ICANN money.

The Future

The good news arising from yesterday’s briefing appears to be that the board is set on approving the continuation of the new gTLD program in less than two weeks.

The bad news is that there are a few dozen recommendations, grouped into 16 buckets, that it thinks need more work before they can be approved. It thinks these issues can be wrapped up by April 2024, however.

First two proper registrars join Web3 Domain Alliance

Two significant ICANN-accredited registrars have signed up to a body that commits them to, among other things, endorse the position that blockchain-based alt-root TLDs have trademark rights to their strings.

United-Domains and MarkMonitor are among about 50 companies now listed as new members of the Web3 Domain Alliance, the association created late last year by well-financed alt-root registry Unstoppable Domains.

The other companies listed appear to be players in the crypto/blockchain/Web3/NFT space, rather than the traditional domain name industry.

The moves by the two registrars are significant because the Alliance’s platform stands to be a significant thorn in ICANN’s side when it finally opens up the next new gTLD application round, which could happen in the next couple years.

According to the Alliance’s web site, members have to commit not only to promote the market acceptance and interoperability of blockchain alt-root domains, but also:

To advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.

This could be a big problem in the next new gTLD round, as current ICANN policy proposals, developed before the likes of Unstoppable became such a big deal, do not specifically account for claims by alt-root providers.

Trademark owners will be able to challenge gTLD applications if the applied-for string matches their mark, but historically it’s not really been possible for companies to obtain trademarks on TLDs.

Along with the membership announcement, Unstoppable has said that it will not enforce its patents against any Alliance member that implements its standards, provided the member agrees not to enforce its own patents.

United-Domains is part of United-Internet, the same company that runs IONOS, 1&1, Sedo and InternetX.

MarkMonitor, since November, has been part of Newfold Digital, the parent of Network Solutions, Web.com, Register.com, BigRock, SnapNames, and others.

New gTLDs report came in under budget

ICANN spent less than expected carrying out the Operational Design Phase of the new gTLD program last year, according to financials published yesterday.

The Org’s second fiscal quarter (fourth calendar quarter) report shows it spent $6.8 million on the ODP, which ended in mid-December with the delivery of the Operational Design Assessment.

That’s under the low-end of the $7 million to $9 million ICANN’s board of directors had approved for its budget.

The report also reveals that roughly 15 full-time equivalents, mostly ICANN staff, spent a total of over 27,000 hours to produce the ODA report, which is currently awaiting board approval.

The financial report shows that ICANN spent about $400,000 more than expected on its AGM in Kuala Lumpur last October. This, it said, was due to higher airfare costs, partially offset by 45 fewer funded travelers than expected attending.

Overall, ICANN received about $1 million more in funding than it expected, at $76 million, due to not losing as many registrars as expected, and its FY23 spend to date was $67 million, about $5 million under budget due to “lower than planned professional services and personnel costs”.

It had an average 399 staff over the period and ended the year with total assets of $558 million, $438.3 million of which is invested.

ICANN to approve next new gTLD round next month (kinda)

ICANN’s board of directors is sending mixed signals about the new gTLD program, but it seems it is ready to start approving the next round when the community meets for its 76th public meeting in Mexico next month.

It seems the board will approve the GNSO’s policy recommendations in a piecemeal fashion. There are some undisclosed sticking points that will have to be approved at a later date.

Chair Tripti Sinha wrote this week that the board “anticipates making incremental decisions leading up to the final decision on opening a new application window for new gTLDs”.

While “many” recommendations will be approved at ICANN 76, the board “will defer a small, but important, subset of the recommendations for future consideration”.

The good news is that the board is erring towards the so-called “Option 2” sketched out in Org’s Operational Design Assessment, which would be much quicker and cheaper than the five-year slog the ODA primarily envisaged.

Sinha wrote:

the Board has asked ICANN Org to provide more detail on the financing of the steps envisioned in the ODA, and to develop a variation of the proposed Option 2 that ensures adequate time and resources to reduce the need for manual processing and takes into account the need to resolve critical policy issues, such as closed generics.

The closed generics issue — where companies can keep all the domains in a generic-term gTLD all to themselves — did not have a community consensus recommendation, and the GNSO Council and Governmental Advisory Committee have been holding bilateral talks to resolve the impasse.

There’s been an informal agreement that some closed generics should be allowed, but only if they serve the global public interest.

A recent two-day GAC-GNSO discussion failed to find agreement on what “generic” and “global public interest” actually mean, so the talks could be slow going. The group intends to file an update before ICANN 76.

Earthquake survivors given domain renewal holiday

ICANN has announced that registrants in earthquake-hit Türkiye and Syria could have their domains protected from expiration.

It’s triggered part of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement that permits registrars to avoid deleting names owned by registrants unable to renew due to “extenuating circumstances”.

ICANN has declared last week’s quakes, which have claimed tens of thousands of lives, such a circumstance.

The move requires registrar participation to be truly effective. There are nine registrars based in Türkiye, none in Syria, but the offer is valid to all accredited gTLD registrars.

ICANN has exercised this power three times before — after Hurricane Maria, during the Covid-19 outbreak, and last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.

How ICANN could help out after Türkiye earthquake

A new ICANN program could see funds directed to Türkiye and Syria after Monday’s devastating earthquakes.

Interim CEO Sally Costerton last month said that the Org has created an Emergency Assistance Program, which emerged out of the $1 million it pledged towards the crisis in Ukraine almost a year ago.

The initial donation saw money go to the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), a network of humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, charities and private companies that provides connectivity to disaster zones.

ETC said this week that a coordinator is on the ground in Türkiye to assess the need for its services. It has been in Syria for many years due to the ongoing bloody civil war.

While ICANN’s donation to ETC was a one-off, it intends to open an expressions of interest process soon for global organizations that provide communications during disasters. Contributions up to $1 million will be considered.

Much like the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there were calls this week for Elon Musk to make his Starlink satellites available over Türkiye to help coordinate emergency relief, but his subsequent offer was reportedly declined by the government.

There have also been reports today that the Turkish government has blocked access to Twitter in the country, after receiving criticism over its handling of rescue efforts.

While ICANN’s funds will of course not be available during the current phase of the crisis, they could if connectivity issues persist. The Turkish government has declared a three-month state of emergency.

The earthquake hit close to home for ICANN, which has several staff at its satellite office in Istanbul, more than a thousand kilometers from the quake’s epicenter.

New gTLDs: the next round just got real

It seems ICANN can multi-task, after all.

Its board of directors has yet to formally approve the next application round, but staff have started looking for a company to build the application system, regardless.

Org has published an RFI (pdf) for potential developers of a “gTLD Application Lifecycle System” that ICANN, applicants and third-party contractors will be able to use to manage bids from application to delegation.

The document details the 18 system services outlined in the Operational Design Assessment ICANN completed in December.

The deadline for submitting responses is February 24 and there’ll be a follow-up, invitation-only RFP in April. Companies have to respond to the RFI to have a chance at joining the RFP.

By ICANN’s recent standards, this is a pretty ambitious timetable, and will no doubt raise the spirits of those in the GNSO who have been calling for the Org to get a move on after the lengthy and disappointing ODA.

It may also please those worried about ICANN’s apparent inability to operate in anything other that a serial manner — it’s setting the ball rolling now, before the board has approved the program.

It may also give a hint at which way the board is leaning. It met eight days ago to discuss the next round and the ODA but did not formally pass any resolutions or provide any color on the nature of the talks.

Guy wants to be ICANN CEO and turn off 1.5 million Iranian domains

With the role of ICANN CEO opening up for applicants following the resignation of Göran Marby in December, the CEO of VPN.com appears to have thrown his hat in the ring.

In an unusual and ambiguous press release, “VPN.com CEO Reviews ICANN CEO Opening”, Michael Gargiulo strongly suggests he’s thinking about applying for the gig, currently filled on an interim basis by Sally Costerton.

“Stepping away from VPN.com to lead a global organization like ICANN that aligns with our mission of freedom and a secure Internet for all is something I have considered before, but the timing was not right,” he writes.

“ICANN does not need an empty suit filling this position; it needs someone with vision, ability to address lingering problems that ICANN has faced for extended periods of time, and the guts to stand up to countries like Russia,” he writes.

VPN.com is an strange hybrid of VPN review site and domain brokerage, formed after Gargiulo bought the domain for $1 million in 2017.

The press release is odd in that Gargiulo not only gets a couple of basic facts about ICANN wrong, but also draws attention to an occasion in 2019 when he called for Marby and President Trump to delete Iran’s .ir ccTLD from the DNS root in protest at the country’s human rights violations

The release refers to ICANN’s chair as Maarten Botterman, which hasn’t been true since September, and its headcount of “140 employees”, which is about 260 short of the actual number.

But it’s the opinion that Iran’s human rights violations, surely more acutely felt today than in 2019, should lead to the suspension of .ir’s 1.5 million domain names is surely a disqualifying position for a would-be ICANN CEO.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, ICANN faced calls to punish Putin by turning off .ru, which it resisted to broad community support.

Gargiulo did not respond to a request for clarification.

ICANN kicks the can on .org price cap defeat

ICANN has deferred action on its recent Independent Review Process defeat over price caps on .org and .info, instead referring the decision to one of its committees.

The IRP panel ruled in late December that ICANN broke its own bylaws when it approved the removal of price caps from the .org and .info registry contracts in 2019. It recommended that ICANN look into ways to restore the caps.

The ICANN board of directors at the weekend voted to ask its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) to “review, consider, and evaluate” the IRP decision and recommend next steps.

The IRP was fought by the registrar Namecheap.

No masks required at ICANN Cancun

ICANN is considerably loosening up its Covid-19 restrictions for its next meeting, due to take place in Cancun, Mexico, in March.

The Org said last night that face masks will no longer be compulsory inside the venue, though they will still be provided for free and are “strongly recommended”. Testing kits will also be handed out.

It also won’t need to see your vaccination papers any more. You’ll merely need to check a box confirming that you’re fully up-to-date on your shots at time of registration.

Also gone are proof-of-vaccination wrist-bands, though the color-coded lanyard system, which allows people to indicate their comfort level with social proximity, will remain in place.

The meeting will take place from March 10 at the Cancun Center, but you have to register online before March 8. You can’t just rock up on the day and register on the door like you could pre-pandemic.