Three big registries will take down opioid domains for US govt

Verisign, Public Interest Registry and Neustar (now part of GoDaddy) will suspend domain names being used to illegally sell opioids under a pilot scheme with the US government.

The Food and Drug Administration announced this week that this new “trusted notifier” program will go into effect for 120 days.

When the FDA finds a site suspected of selling opioids illegally, it will notify the registry as well as the web site’s owner and hosting provider.

The registries will then be able to decide whether to suspend the domain or not. It’s voluntary.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will also take part in the project.

Verisign runs .com and .net, PIR runs .org and Neustar runs .us, .co and .biz.

Opioids are legal, pharmaceutical pain-killers derived from opium. They’re ridiculously addictive and account for as many drug overdose deaths in the US as heroin, but are over-prescribed by US doctors.

It’s not the first time registries have agreed to trusted notifier programs. Some new gTLD registries have deals with the movie and music industries to suspend domains involved in copyright infringement.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after ICANN rejected a deal that would have seen PIR create a community oversight body with responsibilities to monitor domain-suspension policies in .org.

Comment Tagged: fda, godaddy, ICANN, neustar, ntia, opioids, pir, verisign

Should Epik be banned from NamesCon as racism debate spills over into domain industry?

Should GoDaddy-owned domain conference NamesCon ban the controversial registrar Epik from its conferences, after a day in which the domaining fraternity descended into a race row?

The fight kicked off last night when Epik director and noted domain investor Braden Pollock announced he was quitting the board over ideological differences with CEO Rob Monster.

Since @robmonster and I don't share the same ideology it's time he and I part company. I don't agree with the direction of @EpikDotCom so I've decided to resign my Board seat, effective immediately.

— Braden Pollock (@BradenPollock) June 10, 2020

Pollock did not explain his exact reasons for quitting, but the assumption among domainers on Twitter and elsewhere, perhaps due to heightened race awareness during the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, was that it was race-related.

Pollock’s wife is the civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom, who is currently representing victims of police violence during the BLM protests.

Monster is a conspiracy theorist and Bible-bashing Christian who has been accused over the years of racism, antisemitism, and worse.

Even if Monster is not a racist (and plenty of his associates, even his critics, believe he is not), Epik is certainly friendly to racist registrants.

It caused controversy in March last year by publicly offering to host gab.com, the Twitter clone most often used by right-wing refugees escaping Twitter’s ban hammer.

It also took the domain business of 8chan, a forum site frequented by racists, though it refused to actually host the site.

The registrar is also very popular with domainers, due to its low price and domainer-friendly services.

Before long, Pollock’s tweet had spawned a thread of domainers expressing support for either Pollock or Monster, as well as casually throwing accusations of racism at each other.

Pretty much the same thing was going on over on NamePros and Facebook.

Epik all but confirmed that race was at the center of the disagreement by tweeting out the names of a couple dozen employees, whom I can only assume are not white, with the hashtag #diversity.

Monster himself posted a short video in which he appeared to denounce racism.

The rising tide of polarity is a false construct. Current events are a learning laboratory for all of us. For those with #EyesToSee there is unity in compassion, empowerment and love. #Wisdom pic.twitter.com/SnUjqX61ch

— Rob Monster – CEO Epik.com (@robmonster) June 10, 2020

Later today, Epik posted a screenshot of a Facebook comment by NamesCon CEO Soeren von Varchmin, in which he suggested Epik had been banned from the conference, which the company has previously sponsored.

The tweet tagged both GoDaddy and the US Federal Trade Commission.

Who owns @NamesCon? Post winning Best Registrar 2020, @EpikDotCom is in accelerated growth due to the love for our customers, diversity, innovation & the truth of how we maintain business. These attacks are #anticompetitive and hateful, and far from accurate or deserved. pic.twitter.com/RtC0Ygj5HZ

— Epik.com (@EpikDotCom) June 10, 2020

While the von Varchmin comment is genuine, I’m told that he was speaking in a personal capacity and it’s not current GoDaddy policy to ban Epik.

But should it?

24 Comments Tagged: black lives matter, epik, godaddy, namescon, racism

ICANN board tries to redefine mediocrity — literally

After 21 years of covering this stuff, the volume and extent of ICANN’s navel-gazing no longer amazes me, but every now and then I stumble upon something that forces a little angry smile from my lips.

It appears the ICANN board of directors is seeking to redefine mediocrity itself, in a very literal way, and it may well cost your money to do so.

I’ll explain.

Every two years, the board conducts a self-evaluation via a survey put together by ICANN staff. That survey recently came up for review by the board’s seven-person Board Governance Committee.

According to the meeting’s minutes, the BGC decided it was unhappy with the word “neutral” to describe a score of #3 on what I’m guessing is a five-point scale used for rating directors’ performances.

The word “seems somewhat vague”, the BGC noted, asking staff to “consult with external resources and suggest replacement for the term ‘neutral’ on the rating scale”.

I really hope “consult with external resources” means “google it” rather than “piss away registrants’ money on pricey consultants”, but I’m not confident.

The word I’d use is “mediocre”. If you have a better suggestion there’s a comments section below.

4 Comments Tagged: bgc, ICANN

GoDaddy starts protecting American customers’ privacy

GoDaddy has today started redacting the Whois records of its US-based customers, bringing them into line with the European counterparts.

The company was one of the few registrars to differentiate its European customers from those elsewhere when it implemented the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation two years ago, primarily because it was also one of the dwindling number of registrars charging for Whois privacy services.

American privacy customers are reportedly to be offered a partial refund or the chance to upgrade to a service that also includes two-factor authentication and malware scans.

From today, Whois records for American registrants only show a registrant organization, state and country. Email addresses and phone numbers are gone.

While this is no doubt a boon to most GoDaddy customers in terms of privacy protection, it’s likely to cause frowns in those parts of the community that rely upon Whois to make the job of tracking down ne’er-do-wells easier.

As the largest registrar by a considerable margin, the likes of law enforcement, intellectual property owners and security researchers have just lost access to millions of records.

There is a contact form at the bottom of each record that can be used to get in touch with the registrant, via GoDaddy, so it should still be possible to communicate with those who want to be communicated with.

2 Comments Tagged: gdpr, godaddy, privacy, whois

Will ICANN swap Hamburg for Zoom for 69?

ICANN’s board of directors is meeting this week to discuss arrangements for ICANN 69, and I think there’s a reasonable chance it will decide to take the meeting online-only.

The last official word from ICANN was that it is working on the assumption that normality will have resumed by September, and that October’s meeting could go ahead in Hamburg, Germany as planned.

But will it?

Current German coronavirus-related travel restrictions, which have been in place since March, forbid non-citizen incoming travelers from pretty much anywhere, even elsewhere in the EU.

Some travelers are being asked to self-quarantine for 14 days upon entry, which is obviously impractical for conference travel.

However, German is loosening its rules next week for EU travelers and will treat countries on a case-by-case basis, based on how many infections they’re recording at the time.

Americans will still not be allowed to travel to Germany and there’s no word on when the ban will be lifted.

German guidelines also currently prohibit any large gatherings of people, including conferences, until at least the end of August.

ICANN’s obviously going to have to do a bit of crystal ball-gazing, to guess whether business travel is going to be safe and permitted in October.

It’s also going to have to guess whether a large enough number of people will actually want to attend to make an in-person meeting worthwhile.

With many medical experts predicting a third-quarter resurgence of the pandemic, the so-called “second wave”, inviting guests from every continent to gather in the same room might be seen as risky.

Conferences in other industries that had been due to take place in Germany in October have been canceled or postponed.

Notably, Oktoberfest in Munich (which starts in September but runs into October) is not going ahead this year, but I’ve found examples of conventions in publishing, gaming and catering sectors that have also been canceled.

However, some events due to take place in March and April have been postponed UNTIL October, suggesting a level of confidence that the virus will be low-risk by that time.

Comment Tagged: coronavirus, covid-19, hamburg, ICANN, icann 69

Top-level reshuffle as ICANN loses its COO

ICANN today announced a series of organizational changes at the highest level of management after its COO decided to quit.

Susanna Bennett, senior veep and chief operations officer, will leave July 1 for pastures new after seven years on the job, and her role will be split between other senior figures.

ICANN also said today that Theresa Swinehart has been appointed head of the Global Domains Division, a role she’s been filling on an interim basis since Cyrus Namazi quit a few months back.

She’s also senior VP of multistakeholder strategy and strategic initiatives and CEO Göran Marby’s co-deputy. She’ll be keeping both of those jobs too.

In terms of ops, Bennett’s functions will be split between CFO Xavier Calvez, senior VP of HR Gina Villavicencio, and general counsel John Jeffrey. Calvez will also take on some of the MSSI responsibilities previously held by Swinehart.

The fact that Bennett and Namazi, who together were compensated to the tune of $860,000 in ICANN’s fiscal 2019, had functions that can be easily redistributed among other staffers does rather beg the question of whether ICANN has been spending domain registrants’ money as efficiently as possible.

Still, the rejigger will presumably be welcomed by those who believe that ICANN has in recent years become overly bloated and bureaucratic.

ICANN recently slashed its FY21 budget by 8% due to the expected impact of the coronavirus-related recessions.

3 Comments Tagged: budget, ICANN

Amazon finally gets its dot-brands despite last-minute government plea

Amazon’s three long-sought dot-brand gTLDs were added to the DNS root last night, despite an eleventh-hour attempt by South American governments to drag the company back to the negotiating table.

.amazon, along with the Japanese and Chinese translations — .アマゾン (.xn--cckwcxetd) and .亚马逊 (.xn--jlq480n2rg) — and its NIC sites have already gone live.

Visiting nic.amazon today will present you with a brief corporate blurb and a link to Amazon’s saccharine social-responsibility blog. As a dot-brand, only Amazon will be allowed to use .amazon domains.

The delegations come despite a last-minute plea to ICANN by the eight-government Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which unsuccessfully tried to insert itself into the role of “joint manager” of the gTLDs.

ACTO believes its historical cultural right to the string outweighs the e-commerce giant’s trademark, and that its should have a more or less equal role in the gTLD’s management.

This position was untenable to Amazon, which countered with a collection of safeguards protecting culturally sensitive strings and various other baubles.

Talks fell through last year and ICANN approved the gTLDs over ACTO’s objections.

ACTO’s secretary-general, Alexandra Moreira, wrote to ICANN (pdf) May 21 to take one last stab at getting Amazon back in talks, telling CEO Göran Marby:

the name “Amazon” pertains to a geographical region constituting an integral part of the heritage of its countries. Therefore, we Amazonians have the right to participate in the governance of the “.amazon” TLD.

…

Our side is ready to resume negotiations on the TLD’s governance with the Amazon Corporation., from the point where their side interrupted it, with a view to arriving at a satisfactory agreement.

Her letter came in response to an earlier Marby missive (pdf) that extensively set out ICANN’s case that talks fell apart due to ACTO repeatedly postponing and cancelling scheduled meetings.

Despite the fact that Amazon’s basically got what it wanted, seven years after filing its gTLD applications, ACTO’s members didn’t get nothing.

The contracts Amazon signed with ICANN back in December have Public Interest Commitments in them that allow the governments to reserve up to 1,500 culturally sensitive strings from registration, as well as giving each nation its own .amazon domain.

Comment Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, delegation, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, trademarks

South Africa might raise, or lower, some wholesale domain fees

ZADNA, the South African ccTLD registry, has put out a call for comments on plans to adjust the wholesale price of .za domain names.

For the last nine years, it’s had a two-tier pricing system, with registrars on its EPP registry paying a lower fee than those still on its outdated bespoke technology.

Now, the registry is talking about possibly raising the price of the EPP, which has been at ZAR 45 ($2.62) for the last five years, and/or scrapping the legacy system, where prices currently stand at ZAR 130 ($7.58).

The fee for the legacy registry has been going up for years, to encourage registrars to migrate to the more modern, efficient EPP system. Today, all but 2.5% of .za domains are on the EPP system.

While ZADNA says it has not made up its mind whether to raise, lower or freeze its fees, its consultation document (pdf) seems to pitch pretty hard for increases.

The registry argues that an hike linked to the local Consumer Price Index, which it says has gone up 21% since 2015, may be called in order to track the cost of doing business.

In terms of lowering the price, ZADNA says it may help .za become more competitive, but at the expense of its ability to invest in infrastructure.

Interested parties have until June 30 to send in their comments. A decision will be made by the end of July, and any price changes will come into effect in October,

2 Comments Tagged: .za, pricing, zadna

Verisign says its coronavirus fee waivers have saved businesses millions

Verisign has decided to extend the temporary fee waiver it introduced in April for another two months, declaring the scheme a success so far.

On April 2, the company said it would no longer charge a fee when a registrant restores a domain in the period between expiration and deletion. Many registrars passed this on to their customers.

The stated goal of the offer was to help out registrants laid low by coronavirus.

“We estimate these restore fee waivers have already saved several million dollars for registrants of all types, including hard hit small businesses,” Verisign said in a blog post yesterday.

The service typically retails for around $80, so we’re talking about tens of thousands of domains that have been restored post-expiration for free over the space of two months.

Now, Verisign says the offer, which had been due to expire at the start of June, will end on August 1.

The company added that it will also waive the restore fees for names in .cc, .tv, .name and its four IDN gTLDs effective June 1.

3 Comments Tagged: coronavirus, restore, verisign

Industry growth driven by new gTLD(s) in Q1

The number of domain names registered worldwide increased by 4.5 million in the first quarter, a sequential growth of 1.2%, largely due to new gTLDs and one new gTLD in particular, judging by Verisign’s latest data.

According to the company’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief, ShortDot’s .icu grew by 1.6 million domains during the quarter.

That’s more than half the growth of the new gTLDs as a whole, which grew by three million names to close March at 32.3 million.

.icu is one of those inexplicable, faddy Chinese phenomena. Its top registrar, West.cn, is currently selling them for the equivalent of $0.70 for the first year.

It’s now the eighth-largest TLD of any type, sitting on the DNIB league table between .org and .nl.

Fellow Chinese favorite .top was responsible for about 300,000 extra domains, though it’s lost most of that growth post-quarter, if zone files are any guide.

.xyz also appears to have had a decent quarter, growing by a couple hundred thousand names.

Verisign’s own .com contributed an additional 1.9 million domains, ending Q1 at 147.3 million. Baby brother .net was basically flat at 13.4 million.

The ccTLD space continued the decline of the last few quarters, coming in down 200,000 names at 157.4 million. Annually, ccTLDs were up by 600,000 names, however.

Overall, there were 366.8 million domain registrations in the world at the end of Q1, an increase of 14.9 million or 4.2% compared to the same moment last year.

Comment Tagged: .icu, dnib, shortdot, verisign