auDA refers former directors to police

Imploding Australian ccTLD registry auDA has ratted out “several” of its former directors to the local cops, it was revealed this week.
In a message to its community to mark Chris Leptos’ 150th day as chair of the organization, he wrote:

I am disappointed to advise you that in my first week as Independent Chair I was briefed on a number of practices of several former auDA directors. Your Board concluded that those practices warranted referral to the Victoria Police. As you would appreciate, it is not appropriate at this stage to provide further details regarding this matter.

I’m told there are 48 former auDA directors, and auDA has not said which of them have been referred to the police.
Josh Rowe, a former director who’s orchestrating a campaign to oust Leptos, auDA CEO Cameron Boardman, and two other directors, called the move a “heinous act of bullying against all 48 ex auDA directors”.
Another former director, the Aussie domain industry blogger David Goldstein, has suggested that the timing of the revelation was designed to “silence” critics including Rowe.
The Grumpier.com.au petition organized by Rowe and others has forced auDA to hold a members meeting at which the four directors’ future employment will be voted on.
auDA lawyers contacted Grumpier earlier this week to warn that any defamatory or confidential information posted on the site could lead to litigation.
But Leptos has now seemingly confirmed that the special members meeting will in fact go ahead.
Goldstein also suggested that the police referrals are related to insinuations contained within a pair of Freedom of Information Act requests filed late last year by domain consultant Ron Andruff.
In one of Andruff’s FOIA requests, he suggests that auDA may have paid legal fees of up to AUD 120,000 incurred by Rowe when he was sued almost a decade ago by a alleged domain slammer he had regularly criticized.
Rowe has called these inferences “grossly inaccurate” and “defamatory”.
In the other, which we have reported on previously, Andruff has asked for records of expenses incurred by former auDA CEO Chris Disspain, current vice-chair of ICANN.
Both FOIA requests have been denied by the Aussie government and subsequently appealed by Andruff.
Andruff is known to have beef with Disspain after he was passed over for a prominent ICANN volunteer role.
I should note for the record that, for all of the allegations swirling around, I have not seen any evidence directly connecting any individual to any wrongdoing.

CoCCA to charge trademark owners for Whois access

CoCCA has become the first domain registry to publicly announce that it will charge trademark owners for access to Whois records.
The company said it plans to release an updated version of its software and registry service, containing a range of features for ensuring General Data Protection Regulation compliance, on April 20.
The public Whois records of affected TLDs will have the name, email, phone and physical address of the registrant omitted, but only if the registrant is an EU resident or uses an EU-based registrar or reseller.
There will be ways to opt-out of this, for registrants who want their information public.
The changes will come into effect first at .af, .cx, .gs, .gy, .ht, .hn, .ki, .kn, .sb, .tl, .kn, .ms and .nf, CoCCA said.
But the registry runs almost 40 gTLDs on its shared infrastructure and has almost 20 more running its software. They’re all pretty small zones, mostly ccTLDs.
CoCCA said that it will give access to private data to law enforcement and members of the Secure Domain Foundation, a DNS reputation service provider.
But trademark owners will get hit in the wallet if they want the same privileges. CoCCA said:

intellectual property owners or other entities who have a legitimate interest in redacted data will be able to order historical abstracts online for a nominal fee (provided they sign an attestation).

While the affected TLDs are probably small enough that the IP lobby won’t be overly concerned today, if CoCCA’s policy becomes more widespread in the industry — which it well could — expect an outcry.

Grumpier Aussies call for more blood on the auDA boardroom floor

A group of pissed-off members of the Australian domain name industry are calling for the heads of auDA’s CEO, its new chair, and two other members of its board.
A triumvirate of long-time participants in the auDA community say they have secured enough signatures on a petition to force the organization to call the meeting under Aussie law.
They want a vote of no confidence in the CEO, Cameron Boardman, and the firing of all three “independent” directors: Chris Leptos (also chair), Sandra Hook and Suzanne Ewart.
Their list of beefs is long, but high on it is auDA’s plan to open up .au to direct, second-level registrations for the first time, enabling folk to register example.au instead of example.com.au.
If this all sounds worryingly familiar, it’s because it’s the second year in a row members have called a special meeting in order to oust its top brass.
A campaign orchestrated at Grumpy.com.au last year resulted in chair Stuart Benjamin quitting ahead of a member vote to fire him.
This year’s campaign is being coordinated, with a nod and a wink but none of Grumpy’s original leaders, at Grumpier.com.au.
Entrepreneur Josh Rowe appears to have held the pen on the petition, backed up by former head of auDA public affairs Paul Szyndler and businessman Jim Stewart.
As well as the direct registration issue, which the three men think is merely a cash-grab with no benefits for registrants, the petitioners have some harsh things to say about auDA’s governance and transparency.
The organization has promised to be more open in the wake of last year’s carnage, but Grumpier thinks “things have only got worse”.
The petition also alludes to rumors of “whispering campaigns” against former staff and “possible financial irregularities”.
Rowe recently complained on his blog about a freedom of information request related to his own conduct, filed by the same person pursing form auDA CEO (and current ICANN vice chair) Chris Disspain with FOIA requests.
They also unhappy that auDA is switching .au’s registry service provider from Neustar to Afilias, gaining a rumored 60% discount of which only 10% will be passed on to registrars.
It’s all getting rather nasty, and I’ve not even mentioned some of the rumors of shenanigans that I seem to find in my inbox on an almost daily basis.
To force a special member meeting under Australian law, Grumpier says it had to secure signatures of 5% of the members, which it says it has done.
That’s not much of a threshold, given that auDA only has about 320 members at the moment.
Assuming auDA agrees that it has to hold a meeting, it has a couple of months to do so.

auDA role “could have killed me” says resigning domainer

Domainer and activist blogger Ned O’Meara has resigned from the auDA board of directors, about four months after being elected.
He said in an apologetic blog post that the “negative stress” caused by being on the .au registry’s board had sent his blood pressure up, making him worry about having a third heart attack.
“[I]f I continued slugging it out at auDA, I believe it could have killed me,” he wrote.
He went on to say that he expected to be sidelined on key votes such as auDA’s decision to sell domains directly at the second level, due to perceived “conflicts of interest”, which he disputed.
O’Meara was elected in November as a “demand-class” member of the board, after using his blog to spearhead a campaign for greater transparency at the organization.
It sounds to me like he’s made the correct decision in stepping aside. No matter how important you believe a domain policy to be, it’s not worth your health. I wish him well.
auDA said it is now looking for two demand-class directors, to fill O’Meara’s vacant seat and another seat that is opening up due to the end of another director’s term.

Three more dot-brands throw in the towel

Two companies have told ICANN they no longer wish to operate some of their dot-brand gTLDs.
First, Sony has decided to junk its .xperia TLD.
Xperia is a brand of mobile phones the company sells. The matching gTLD, which entered the DNS root mid-2015, only ever had the contractually mandated nic.xperia delegated.
Sony still has .sony and .playstation active. The latter doesn’t seem to have any live web sites, but .sony is seeing some light usage with sites such as pro.sony and lostinmusic.sony.
The next dot-brand to get ditched is .meo, owned by leading Portuguese mobile telco MEO.
MEO has also dumped .sapo, which is its ISP brand.
Again, neither gTLD had never seen any action beyond their nic. sites, despite being delegated over three years ago.
Both companies told ICANN in January that they wish to end the Registry Agreement contracts.
ICANN last week decided not to open any of the strings for redelegation and opened up its decision for comments.

Now Latvia guts Whois to comply with GDPR

Latvia has become the latest country to announce plans to cut back on Whois provision to comply with incoming European Union privacy law.
Its .lv ccTLD is the first I’m aware of to announce that it plans to cut back on the amount of data it actually collects in addition to how much it publishes.
NIC.lv said it will not longer require registrants to submit one postal address, instead of two. It will not longer require a something called a “fax” number, whatever that is, either.
The registry currently does not publish the names or physical addresses of its natural person registrants, but following the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation in May it will stop publishing telephone numbers and email addresses too.
It will instead present a form that can be used to contact the registrant, a little like ICANN is proposing for gTLDs.
The company also plans to rate-limit Whois queries to mitigate harvesting.
The proposed changes are open for comments until April 12.
.lv has about 120,000 domains under management, according to its web site.

Portugal joins the million-domain club

Portuguese ccTLD .pt passed one million registrations for the first time earlier this month, DNS.pt said this week.
The millionth name was meckos.pt, registered by a local textile machinery company of that name, the registry said.
The ccTLD ended 2017 with 976,370 names under management and as of today stands at 1,001,552 names, according to statistics published on the DNS.pt web site.
The company says it is currently growing fast, taking 10,693 new registrations in January, up 30% compared to the same month last year.

Austria to stop publishing most Whois data

Austrian ccTLD operator nic.at will no longer publish any Whois information for individual registrants, in order to comply with incoming EU privacy law.
“Natural persons’ data will no longer be published from mid-May 2018,” the company said today.
Data concerning legal entities such as companies will continue to be published, it added.
The move is of course an effort to become compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation, which currently has the industry scrambling around in the dark looking for ways avoid avoid millions of euros of potential fines.
nic.at will continue to collect the private data of individual registrants, but it will only publish technical information such as the name of the registrar and name servers in response to public Whois queries.
Companies will have their names and addresses published, but will have the option to have their email address and phone number hidden.
nic.at said it will disclose records to “law enforcement agencies, lawyers or people who contact nic.at following domain disputes and can prove that their rights have been infringed”.
People will be able to opt-in to having their information published
It’s arguably a more Draconian implementation of GDPR than the one proposed by ICANN for gTLDs, but it appears to be in line with plans already announced by Nominet for .uk and DENIC for .de.

CentralNic and KeyDrive in merger talks

CentralNic and KeyDrive, two major European domain firms, are in merger talks, CentralNic confirmed this morning.
CentralNic said that the transaction, should it close, would be a “reverse takeover” of itself by KeyDrive.
That’s where a private company, in this case KeyDrive, reverses into a public one, in this case AIM-listed CentralNic.
Luxembourg-based KeyDrive is the holding company for brands including the registrars Key-Systems, Moniker and BrandShelter and the registries OpenRegistry and KSRegistry.
London-based CentralNic is a registry provider for the likes of .xyz, recent acquirer of Slovakian TLD .sk, and owner of registrars Internet.bs and Instra.
CentralNic said: “CentralNic and KeyDrive Group believe that the combination of the two businesses would have strong strategic logic and economies of scale, and would represent an opportunity to create a group with advanced technology platforms delivering significant recurring revenues for every major customer type within the industry.”
If a deal should be struck, it would happen in the second quarter, the company said.
The announcement was made today after news of the talks leaked.
Trading in CentralNic shares has been temporarily suspended.

After long fight, Donuts adds .charity to its gTLD stable

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Donuts has prevailed in the two-horse race for the .charity gTLD.
The company appears to have privately resolved its contention set, paying off rival bidder Famous Four Media, judging by updates to ICANN’s web site today.
The gTLD had been scheduled for an ICANN “last resort” auction in April, but that’s now off.
Famous Four has also withdrawn its application, leaving Donuts the only remaining applicant.
I believe it will be Donuts’ 239th 240th gTLD.
But for a while it looked like Famous Four had a slam-dunk on its hands.
Back in 2014, the Independent Objector of the new gTLD program had filed an Community Objection against Donuts’ application, saying it was too risky to unleash a .charity domain onto the world without registration eligibility restrictions.
The fear was (and probably still is) that fraudsters could use the domains to lend an air of credibility to their online scams.
The IO prevailed, pretty much gifting Famous Four — which had proposed restrictions — the TLD.
But Donuts embarked upon an arduous set of appeals, including an Independent Review Process case, that culminated, last December, in a ruling (pdf) that reversed the original Community Objection decision.
That cleared the way for Donuts back into the application process and, now, the private auction it seems to have won.
Due to ICANN’s adoption of Governmental Advisory Committee advice on sensitive strings, Donuts will be obliged to put some Public Interest Commitments into its .charity contract, with the aim of reducing abuse.