Exclusive gang of 10 to work on making ICANN the Whois gatekeeper

Ten people have been picked to work on a system that would see ICANN act as the gatekeeper for private Whois data.

The organization today announced the composition of what it’s calling the Technical Study Group on Access to Non-Public Registration Data, or TSG-RD.

As the name suggests, the group is tasked with designing a system that would see ICANN act as a centralized access point for Whois data that, in the GDPR era, is otherwise redacted from public view.

ICANN said such a system:

would place ICANN in the position of determining whether a third-party’s query for non-public registration data ought to be approved to proceed. If approved, ICANN would ask the appropriate registry or registrar to provide the requested data to ICANN, which in turn would provide it to the third party. If ICANN does not approve the request, the query would be denied. 

There’s no current ICANN policy saying that the organization should take on this role, but it’s one possible output of the current Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois, which is focusing on how to bring ICANN policy into compliance with GDPR.

The new group is not going to make the rules governing who can access private Whois data, it’s just to create the technical framework, using RDAP, that could be used to implement such rules.

The idea has been discussed for several months now, with varying degrees of support from contracted parties and the intellectual property community.

Registries and registrars have cautiously welcomed the notion of a central ICANN gateway for Whois data, because they think it might make ICANN the sole “data controller” under GDPR, reducing their own legal liability.

IP interests of course leap to support any idea that they think will give them access to data GDPR has denied them.

The new group, which is not a formal policy-making body in the usual ICANN framework, was hand-picked by Afilias CTO Ram Mohan, at the request of ICANN CEO Goran Marby.

As it’s a technical group, the IP crowd and other stakeholders don’t get a look-in. It’s geeks all the way down. Eight of the 10 are based in North America, the other two in the UK. All are male. A non-zero quantity of them have beards.

• Benedict Addis, Registrar Of Last Resort.
• Gavin Brown, CentralNic.
• Jorge Cano, NIC Mexico.
• Steve Crocker, former ICANN chair.
• Scott Hollenbeck, Verisign.
• Jody Kolker, GoDaddy.
• Murray Kucherawy, Facebook.
• Andy Newton, ARIN.
• Tomofumi Okubo, DigiCert.

While the group is not open to all-comers, it’s not going to be secretive either. Its mailing list is available for public perusal here, and its archived teleconferences, which are due to happen for an hour every Tuesday, can be found here. The first meeting happened this week.

Unlike regular ICANN work, the new group hopes to get its work wrapped up fairly quickly, perhaps even producing an initial spec at the ICANN 64 meeting in Kobe, Japan, next March.

For ICANN, that’s Ludicrous Speed.

2 Comments Tagged: gdpr, ICANN, rdap, tsg-rd, whois

Governments blast ICANN over Amazon gTLDs

ICANN seems to have found itself in the center of a diplomatic crisis, after eight South American governments strongly denied they approve of Amazon being given the .amazon gTLD.

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, along with the government of Brazil, blasted ICANN CEO Goran Marby for multiple alleged “untrue, misleading, unfortunate and biased statements”, in a December 7 letter  (pdf) published yesterday.

ACTO claims that ICANN was “premature” and “ill-informed” when its board of directors un-rejected Amazon’s gTLD applications in an October resolution.

In bruising terms, the letter goes on to criticize Marby for failing to set up promised talks between ACTO and Amazon and then characterizing “informal” conversations with Brazil’s Governmental Advisory Committee rep as if they represented ACTO’s collective view.

It’s just about as harsh a critique of ICANN management by governments I’ve read.

Amazon, the retailer, has been trying to get .amazon, along with transliterations in Chinese and Japanese scripts, since 2012.

Its applications were rejected — technically, placed in “Will Not Proceed” status — after GAC advice in July 2013. The advice was full-consensus, the strongest type, after the lone holdout, the United States, at the time trying to win support for the IANA transition, bowed out.

The advice came because the ACTO countries believe “Amazon” is a geographic string that belongs to them.

But Amazon filed an Independent Review Process appeal with ICANN, which it won last year.

The IRP panel declared that the GAC advice was built on shaky, opaque foundations and that the committee should not have a blanket “veto” over new gTLD applications.

ICANN has ever since been trying to figure out a way to comply with the IRP ruling while at the same time appeasing the GAC and the ACTO countries.

The GAC gave it a little wriggle room a year ago when it issued advice that ICANN should “continue facilitating negotiations between the [ACTO] member states and the Amazon corporation”.

ICANN took this to mean that its earlier advice to reject the bids had been superseded, and set about trying to get Amazon and ACTO to come to an agreement.

Amazon, for its part, has offered ACTO nations a suite of cultural protections, an offer to support future applications for .amazonia or similar, and $5 million worth of products and services, including free Kindle devices.

It has also offered to bake a collection of Public Interest Commitments — these have never been published — into its registry contract, which would enable ACTO governments to bring compliance actions against the company in future. 

That proposal was made in February, and ICANN has supposed to have been facilitating talks ever since.

According to a timeline provided by Marby, in a November letter (pdf) to ACTO secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza, ICANN has been working in this facilitation role since November 2017.

Problem is, at almost every step of the way it’s been dealing with Brazilian GAC rep Benedicto Filho, rather than with Mendoza herself, apparently on the assumption that when he made noises favorable to the Amazon proposal he was speaking for ACTO. 

And that’s not the case, according to Mendoza and Filho, in the newly published letters.

Whatever input Filho had was in the context of “informal and general conversations in which it was repeatedly and clearly indicated that no country had any mandate to negotiate on behalf of the other members of ACTO”, Mendoza wrote.

Filho himself goes on to accuse Marby of several “gross misrepresentation[s]” and “flagrant inaccuracies”, in an increasingly strident set of three emails forward by Mendoza to Marby.

He claims that he informed Marby every step of the way that he was not authorized to speak on behalf of ACTO, and that the idea he was involved in “obscure and secret negotiations” is “offensive”.

It seems that either one or both men is bullshitting about the extent to which Filho represented himself as an ACTO rep, or there has been a genuine breakdown of communication. For want of any definitive evidence, it seems fair to give them both the benefit of the doubt for now.

The situation as it stands now is that ACTO has called off planned peace talks with Amazon, facilitated by Marby, and has filed a Request for Reconsideration in an attempt to overturn the ICANN board’s October resolution.

Mendoza says ACTO will not engage in talks concerning .amazon until this request has been processed. 

So the fate of .amazon now lies with ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which is responsible for rejecting processing reconsideration requests. The test is usually whether the requester has brought new information to light that was not available when the board made its decision.

BAMC can either figure out a way to accept the request and put .amazon back in its “Will Not Proceed” status, smoothing out the path to negotiations (re)opening but placing Amazon back in indefinite limbo, or it can reject it and risk ACTO walking away completely.

It’s a tricky spot to be in, and no mistake.

1 Comment Tagged: amazon, dot-brands, geographic

No more free transfers in Denmark

The Danish ccTLD registry has announced that it is to introduce a charge for .dk transfers for the first time in January.

From the start of 2019, transfers between registrants will cost DKK 50 (about $7.50), DK Hostmaster said today.

Currently, transfers are free.

It appears that the new fee will be levied on the gaining registrant.

DK Hostmaster said that the fee is to cover “administrative costs”.

.dk has about 1.3 million domains under management.

5 Comments Tagged: .dk, dk hostmaster

ICANN outs two more deadbeat new gTLDs

ICANN has published breach notices it has sent to two more new gTLD registries, which it says have failed to pay their quarterly accreditation fees.

One is a dot-brand, the other is not.

The brand is the Arabic اتصالات . (.xn--mgbaakc7dvf), managed by Emirati telecommunications powerhouse Etisalat.

With about $14 billion of annual revenue, no domains other than its obligatory NIC site, and an allegedly non-functioning contact phone number, it appears the UAE-based company may simply have forgotten its dot-brand exists.

The other registry allegedly in breach is Desi Networks, the US-based company that targets .desi at people hailing from the Indian subcontinent.

While it’s been on the market for over four years, and has an addressable market of over a billion people, .desi has failed to claw together much more than 3,700 domains under management.

I thought it would have performed better. The ccTLD for India has over two million domains, and the country has a thriving domain market.

With a retail price in the region of $20 per year, it’s easy to see why the .desi may be having trouble scraping together the $6,250 quarterly flat fee ICANN registry contracts demand.

Desi Networks also commits on its web site to donate some portion of its reg fees to worthy causes in the South Asian region, which was probably optimistic with hindsight.

ICANN first sent notices of late payment to both registries in September, but did not receive the requested money.

Both have until the first week of January to pay up, or ICANN will initiate termination proceedings.

3 Comments Tagged: .desi, .xn--mgbaakc7dvf, desi networks, etisalat, ICANN, اتصالات

.eu domains to be sold to non-residents

In a few years, you’ll no longer have to live in the European Union in order to buy a .eu domain name.
Residency requirements are to be dropped under new regulations approved by the European Parliament, Council and European Commission last week.
When the new rules come into effect — not expected until April 2023 — EU citizens based anywhere in the world will be able register .eu domains.
It’s not entirely clear how EURid, the current registry, will determine eligibility at point of sale, but I guess they have plenty of time to think about it.
Notably, the proposed new Regulation will shift oversight of .eu from one based on EU regulations to one based on a contract between the Commission and the registry operator.
It is hoped that this will give EURid the flexibility to more rapidly change its business model in future, merely having to agree upon a contract change rather than waiting for the EU institutions to chug through their lengthy legislative processes.

2 Comments Tagged: .eu, eurid

DNS inventor says .luxe first innovation in a decade

DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris has endorsed MMX’s foray into the blockchain as “the first genuine piece of DNS related innovation that I have seen in the last decade”.
The quote came in an MMX press release this morning, which provided an update on the launch of .luxe as the first gTLD that publishes information to the Ethereum blockchain as well as the DNS.
As I attempted to describe a few months ago, .luxe is being sold as an alternative way to address blockchain assets such as cryptocurrency wallets, which currently use nonsense, immemorable 40-character hashes.
MMX has built an API that allows registrars to automatically associate .luxe domains with Ethereum addresses.
The registry said today it now has 11 registrars signed up to use this API, along with 60 more selling vanilla .luxe domains.
In addition to its launch distribution partner, the wallet provider imToken, MMX said it has also signed up Bitxbank, BeeNews, BEPAL, Hillstone Partners, Math Wallet, MTC Mesh Network, Qufen, Fbee, and ChainDD, which all appear to be Asian blockchain software companies.
It expects to announce support for two non-Ethereum blockchains in the first half of next year.
Judging by zone files, .luxe names have not exactly been flying off the shelves since launch.
It had around 2,600 names in its zone file yesterday, having entered general availability about a month ago.
Despite this, CEO Toby Hall said in this morning’s press release that MMX’s initial investment in .luxe (I assume he’s referring to the R&D investment rather than the cost of applying for the gTLD) has already been recouped.

3 Comments Tagged: .luxe, blockchain, ethereum, imtoken, mmx, new gTLDs

New gTLDs continue growth trend, but can it last?

New gTLDs continued to bounce back following a year-long slump in registration volumes, according to Verisign data.
The company’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief, covering the third quarter, shows new gTLDs growing from 21.8 million names to 23.4 million names, a 1.6 million name increase.
New gTLDs also saw a 1.6 million-name sequential increase in the second quarter, which reversed five quarters of declines.
The sector has yet to surpass its peak of 25.6 million, which it reached in the fourth quarter of 2016.
It think it will take some time to get there, and that we’ll may well see a decline in next couple quarters.
The mid-point of the third quarter marked the end of deep discounting across the former Famous Four Media (now GRS Domains) portfolio (.men, .science, .loan, etc), but the expected downward pressure on volumes wasn’t greatly felt by the end of the period.
With GRS’s portfolio generally on the decline so far in Q4, we might expect it to have a tempering effect on gains elsewhere when the next DNIB is published.
Verisign’s data showed also that ccTLDs shrunk for the first time in a couple years, down by half a million names to 149.3 million. Both .uk and .de suffered six-figure losses.
Its own .net was flat at 14.1 million, showing no signs of recovery after several quarters of shrinkage, while .com increased by two million names to finish September with 137.6 under management.

3 Comments Tagged: cctlds, dnib, new gTLDs, verisign

No .web until 2021 after Afilias files ICANN appeal

Afilias has taken ICANN to arbitration to prevent .web being delegated to Verisign.
The company, which came second in the $135 million auction that Verisign won in 2016, filed Independent Review Process documents in late November.
The upshot of the filing is that .web, considered by many the best potential competitor for .com — Afilias describes it as “crown jewels of the New gTLD Program” — is very probably not going to hit the market for at least a couple more years.
Afilias says in in its filing that:

ICANN is enabling VeriSign to acquire the .WEB gTLD, the next closest competitor to VeriSign’s monopoly, and in so doing has eviscerated one of the central pillars of the New gTLD Program: to introduce and promote competition in the Internet namespace in order to break VeriSign’s monopoly

Its beef is that Verisign acquired the rights to .web by hiding behind a third-party proxy, Nu Dot Co, the shell corporation linked to the co-founders of .CO Internet that appears to have been set up in 2012 purely to make money by losing new gTLD auctions.
Afilias says NDC broke the rules of the new gTLD program by failing to notify ICANN that it had made an agreement with Verisign to sign over its rights to .web in advance of the auction.
The company says that NDC’s “obligation to immediately assign .WEB to VeriSign fundamentally changed the nature of NDC’s application” and that ICANN and the other .web applicants should have been told.
NDC’s application had stated that .web was going to compete with .com, and Verisign’s acquisition of the contract would make that claim false, Afilias says.
This means ICANN broke its bylaws commitment to apply its policies, “neutrally, objectively, and fairly”, Afilias claims.
Allowing Verisign to acquire its most significant potential competitor also breaks ICANN’s commitment to introduce competition to the gTLD market, the company reckons.
It will be up to a three-person panel of retired judges to decide whether these claims holds water.
The IRP filing was not unexpected. I noted that it seemed likely after a court threw out a Donuts lawsuit against ICANN which attempted to overturn the auction result for pretty much the same reasons.
The judge in that case ruled that new gTLD applicants’ covenant not to sue ICANN was valid, largely because alternatives such as IRP are available.
ICANN has a recent track record of performing poorly under IRP scrutiny, but this case is by no means a slam-dunk for Afilias.
ICANN could argue that the .web case was not unique, for starters.
The .blog contention set was won by an affiliate of WordPress maker Automattic under almost identical circumstances earlier in 2016, with Colombian-linked applicant Primer Nivel paying $19 million at private auction, secretly bankrolled by WordPress.
Nobody complained about that outcome, probably because it was a private auction so all the other .blog applicants got an even split of the winning bid.
Afilias wants the .web IRP panel to declare NDC’s bid invalid and award .web to Afilias at its final bid price.
For those champing at the bit to register .web domains, and there are some, the filing means they’ve likely got another couple years to wait.
I’ve never known an IRP to take under a year to complete, from filing to final declaration. We’re likely looking at something closer to 18 months.
Even after the declaration, we’d be looking at more months for ICANN’s board to figure out how to implement the decision, and more months still for the implementation itself.
Barring further appeals, I’d say it’s very unlikely .web will start being sold until 2021 at the very earliest, assuming the winning registry is actually motivated to bring it to market as quickly as possible.
The IRP is no skin off Verisign’s nose, of course. Its acquisition of .web was, in my opinion, more about restricting competition than expanding its revenue streams, so a delay simply plays into its hands.

12 Comments Tagged: .com, .web, afilias, donuts, ICANN, irp, ndc, new gTLDs, nu dot co, verisign

Nevett lands at PIR

Donuts alumnus Jon Nevett has been named the new CEO of Public Interest Registry.
Non-profit PIR, which runs .org and related gTLDs, said he will start in the role December 17.
Nevett was most recently executive VP at Donuts, the new gTLD registry he co-founded.
He left Donuts in October, not long after he cashed out when the company was sold to private equity firm Abry Partners.
The PIR corner office had been empty since May, after the unexpected and still unexplained resignation of Brian Cute.
Jay Daley, a member of the board of directors, was filling the role on an interim basis, but told us definitively in September that he was not interested in taking over permanently.

Comment Tagged: .org, abry, donuts, pir

ICANN attendance soars but “females” stay away

ICANN attendees identifying themselves as female plummeted to 20% of the total at ICANN 63, even as overall attendance rocketed.
According to just-published stats from ICANN, 2,639 people checked in at the Barcelona venue for the late-October meeting.
That compares favorably to the Abu Dhabi meeting a year earlier, which saw 1,929 participants show up, to the last European meeting, Copenhagen in March last year, where there were 2,089 attendees, and to the last European AGM, 2015’s Dublin meeting with its 2,395 people.
Oddly, the number of people self-declaring their femaleness was down hugely. It reliably hovers around the 33% mark usually, but in Barcelona it was down to one in five.
The number of “males” was also down, from 59% in Abu Dhabi to 53% in at 63.
It seems very likely that the gender balance has not substantially changed, but that fewer people are ticking the gender box when they sign up.
The number of participants who chose not to disclose their gender was 27%, up from 10% in Abu Dhabi, 11% at ICANN 61 and 14% at ICANN 62.
There were wide regional differences in gender balance.
There were 1,440 attendees from Europe in Barcelona, more than half the total, and 28% of them did not disclose their gender. That number was just 8% among North Americans and 9% for Africans.
I’m at a loss to explain why the number of undeclareds would see such a sharp increase — did ICANN change how it gathers gender data this time around, or are people, women in particular, becoming more reticent to disclose their gender?
Perhaps Europeans registering on-site, where perhaps the gender option was easier to ignore on the terminals, tilted the balance? I’m speculating.
In other stats, it seems the number of sessions and session-hours is (thankfully) on the decline.
There were 338 session at 63, down from 407 a year ago, and the number of hours was down by 100, from 696 to 596.
The numbers also show a strong bias towards sessions involving the Governmental Advisory Committee when it comes to attendance, but that’s probably due to the GAC being so bloody big compared to other groups.
All this, and more additional statistics than anyone could possibly ever find useful, can be found here.

7 Comments Tagged: barcelona, gender, ICANN, icann 63