The Queen has beef with Prince Harry’s domain name

Queen Elizabeth II reportedly wants her grandson Prince Harry to stop using the domain name sussexroyal.com.
Harry and his wife, Meghan, recently announced that they’re going to quit their royal duties and spend part of the year in Canada. They will no longer get taxpayer handouts, and will probably (speculating here) make money launching a line of fragrances or something.
The Queen’s beef is that by opting out of the royal family, by convention Harry should no longer get to call himself “royal”. It’s like when his parents divorced, Diana no longer got to use the “Her Royal Highness” title.
They will continue to be known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
But it seems Harry and Meghan are going to have to pick a new brand to put on the tacky mugs and dish rags they will inevitably end up flogging to gullible Americans. They’ve been using Sussex Royal as their social media handle too, and have filed for trademarks on the term.
It’s a strange edge case of domain ownership law, where royal edict and constitutional convention is seemingly going to trump trademark law.
I look forward to the ICANN working group.

3 Comments Tagged: parasites, royal sussex, the queen

ICANN wants to take your temperature before letting you into ICANN 67

Face masks, hand-sanitizer stations, and nurses taking your temperature on the doors… these are some of the measures ICANN plans to deploy at its upcoming public meeting in Cancun next month, in an effort to mitigate the risk of a Covid-19 outbreak.
That’s assuming the meeting goes ahead at all, which is still undecided.
Speaking to community leaders in a teleconference this evening, ICANN staffers outlined the following precautionary measures they expect to put in place:

• A doctor from International SOS will be on site, alongside the usual two medics.
• A team of nurses will be deployed at the venue’s two entrances to check attendees’ temperatures (via the forehead, you’ll be pleased to hear) as they enter the building.
• “Anyone registering a fever will be escorted to the doctor for assessment.”
• ICANN is “stockpiling” face masks and is already shipping some to the venue. This is complicated by the global supply shortage. Attendees will be encouraged to source their own before leaving home.
• Hand sanitizer facilities will be dotted around, particularly at large meeting rooms and outside bathrooms.
• A Mexican familiar with the local public health service will be available.
• It will be up to the local Mexican authorities to determine how to respond to a confirmed case. It’s not particularly clear what the policy would be on quarantine and the dreaded “cruise ship scenario”. There have been no cases in Mexico yet.

The temperature checks will be daily. One would assume that people leaving the venue for lunch, or a cigarette or something will be checked more frequently.
ICANN has yet to decide whether the meeting is going to go ahead. Its board of directors will meet on Wednesday to make a call, but CEO Göran Marby noted that should the situation with Covid-19 change there’s always the possibility it could be cancelled at a later date.
The meeting could also be cancelled if a large enough number of ICANN support staff refuse to go.
Some companies have already informed ICANN that they won’t be sending employees to the meeting. Marby said that if it looks like only 600 or 700 people are going to show up, the meeting probably won’t go ahead.
Governmental Advisory Committee chair Manal Ismail said on the call that only 30 GAC members have so far indicated that they’re going to attend. That’s about half of the usual level, she said.
If it were to be cancelled, the meeting would go ahead online. All ICANN meetings allow remote participation anyway, but ICANN has been prepping for the possibility that its online tools will need much greater capacity this time.
The audio recording of the call can be found here. Thanks to Rubens Kuhl for the link.
Are you going to go to Cancun, or will you cancel due to Covid? Let me know in the comments.

8 Comments Tagged: cancun, coronavirus, covid-19, ICANN, icann 67

ICANN might cancel Spring Break over Covid-19 fears

ICANN’s next public meeting, which is due to kick off in Cancun, Mexico less than three weeks from now, is in peril of being canceled due to fears about Covid-19, aka Coronavirus.
CEO Göran Marby is to host a call with community leaders in a few hours to discuss the issue. ICANN has assembled a “crisis management team” to monitor the spread of the disease.
The fear isn’t that attendees could pick up the virus from Mexican locals — there’s not a single confirmed case in Mexico yet — but rather that an already-infected person might show up and transmit the disease to others, who might then take it back home with them.
Or — even worse — ICANN is considering the possibility of “a ‘cruise ship’ scenario in which a suspected or confirmed case is identified during the meeting, necessitating the mass-quarantine of all attendees and locals”.
That’s a reference to the cruise ship currently anchored off Japan, where 3,400 people have been quarantined for the last couple of weeks.
Imagine that. Trapped at an ICANN meeting for weeks. The boredom might kill more people than the virus.
Given that the vast majority of Covid-19 cases so far — over 70,000 — have been in China, ICANN is also worried about Chinese attendees getting racially profiled and hassled by others.
ICANN notes that the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been cancelled, and Cisco has cancelled a conference that had been slated to go ahead in Australia around the same time.
Could ICANN follow suit? It wouldn’t be the first time ICANN has changed is meeting plans due to a virus outbreak. Could ICANN 67 be the first remote-only ICANN meeting? It certainly seems like a possibility.

7 Comments Tagged: cancun, coronavirus, covid-19, ICANN, icann 67

Verisign shits on domainers, again

It’s probably no exaggeration to say that Verisign makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year from .com domain investors, and yet it’s been developing a habit in recent years of shitting on them whenever it serves its purpose.
The company’s submission to ICANN’s just-closed public comment period on the proposed new .com contract, which re-enables Verisign’s ability to increase its prices, is the latest such example.
In the letter, which is unsigned, Verisign accuses the Internet Commerce Association, as well as registrars Namecheap and Dynadot, of conducting a “deceptive” campaign to persuade .com registrants to submit comments opposing the deal.
It notes that ICA represents “speculators” — it never uses the term “investors” — as if this was some kind of closely guarded secret, and describes the practice of domaining in a way that implies that the practice is somehow “illegitimate”, like this:

More than any other group engaged in the ICANN multistakeholder process, these speculators are highly sensitive to even the smallest wholesale price changes because of the enormous portfolios of .com domain names they control.
…
Speculators sometimes sell these domain name registrations to other speculators, but often they pass these costs along when they sell the domain names to legitimate internet users who wish to use .com domain names to build websites. We believe this resale activity adds little value to the DNS.

It’s not wrong, but good grief! The chutzpah on this company is sometimes jaw-dropping.
It’s like a car manufacturer complaining that its billion-dollar range of off-road SUVs are mostly being used by obese city dwellers for the school run. Just take the billion dollars and stop complaining about your biggest customers!
It’s not the first time Verisign has rolled out this line of attack. Back in 2018, when price caps were being negotiated with the US government, it posted an article on CircleID accusing domainers of “exploit[ing] consumers” and “scalping”.
Verisign’s able to get away with this kind of attitude, of course, because most domainers have an almost erotically slavish devotion to .com. The company could spend all day every day emailing them disgustingly personalized “yo momma” jokes and they wouldn’t stop buying up its product by the millions.
The two sides are trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship but they can’t break up because they’re both making so much goddamn money out of it. They’re like the Clintons of the domain world, in other words.
Anyway, the gist of the company’s comment to ICANN is basically “Ignore the 9,000 other comments you’ve received, the commenters were suckered into writing them by lying registrars”.
Read it here (pdf).
As a matter of disclosure, Verisign cites the DI piece last week about covid-19.com as an example of why domainers suck. That wasn’t the intent of the article, but there you go.

20 Comments Tagged: .com, domainers, ICANN, price caps, pricing, verisign

9,000 people tell ICANN they don’t want .com price increases. Here’s what some of them said

The public have spoken: they don’t want Verisign to get the right to raise .com prices again.
ICANN’s public comment period on the amended .com contract closed on Friday, with just shy of 9,000 comments which appear to be overwhelmingly against price-raising powers.

Almost 2,000 of the comments have the same subject line, “Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement”, suggesting they were generated by the Internet Commerce Association’s semi-automated outrage tool.
It’s a lot, but it’s dwarfed by seemingly non-ICA submissions, which will make the opposition to the deal harder to ignore than with last year’s .org deal, where many of the 3,000 comments were written off as “akin to spam”.
.com’s wholesale fee has been frozen at $7.85 per year since 2012, but Verisign managed to persuade the Trump administration in 2018 to allow it to return to the old policy of being able to raise prices by 7% in four out of the contract’s six years.
After a year’s negotiation, ICANN agreed to incorporate that change into its Registry Agreement with Verisign. Some commentators, including the Registrars Stakeholder Group, are now saying that ICANN should put contracts out to comment BEFORE they are negotiated.
The RrSG said of price increases:

The RrSG is concerned that the proposed price increases are without sufficient justification or an analysis of its potentially substantial impact on the DNS. ICANN has not explained how increase domain name prices are in the public interest or how this furthers the security and stability of the DNS. The price increases appear only to benefit one company, which has the right to operate .com in perpetuity (and without a competitive bidding process). This is inconsistent with ICANN’s bottom-up multi-stakeholder model.

It’s also understandably pissed off that Verisign is to get the right to own its own registrar for the first time, which could shake up the retail domain market.
While the proposed contract does not allow the hypothetical Verisign registrar to sell .com domains, the registrars think they’ve spotted a loophole:

nothing in the amendment prevents Verisign from reselling .COM domains via another registrar. In theory, Verisign could resell .COM domain names at or below cost and still profit from the wholesale .COM price

Some registrars submitted separate comments that echoed the RrSG collective view.
GoDaddy commented that there should be an economic study on the potential impact of higher pricing on competition before any increases are allowed to go into effect, adding:

GoDaddy believes that ICANN has agreed to a framework for wholesale price increases in .COM that will negatively impact current and future registrants of .COM domain names, as well as the overall domain name industry, which is disproportionately dependent and impacted by changes in .COM pricing. We are further concerned that there is no effective competition to assist in establishing what is a reasonable price for .COM.

Namecheap, which has also been vocal in fighting .org price increases, noted that .com prices could go up by as much as 70% over the next decade, due to the compound impact of annual 7% rises, adding:

The .com registry is well-established, so due to gained efficiencies, the cost of .com domain names should remain static or go down. It is not clear how much registrars will pass these price increases along to consumers, but it is likely that most of this increase will be paid for by domain name registrants.

Drop-catch specialist TurnCommerce/NameBright called for .com to be put out for competitive bidding:

There is simply no legitimate argument that competition for registry contracts—especially the largest registry contract—is bad for the domain name system or for consumers. Without the prospect of competitive pressure, Verisign has no incentive to be efficient, innovative, and effective. In the time that Verisign has operated the registry, prices have increased, we believe innovation has stalled, while Verisign’s operating costs have apparently declined.

As far as I can tell, the Registries Stakeholder Group, of which Verisign is a member, did not submit a comment. But some other constituencies did.
The Business Constituency generally supports ICANN’s somewhat hands-off approach to price regulation, but it did complain that there should have been a public consultation before the bilateral contract talks began a year ago. It wrote:

The BC has no practical objection to price increases that average just 4.5% per year for businesses who register .COM domains. Some BC members are concerned that Verisign has not provided justification for increasing .COM prices, though we are not aware of any requirement for gTLD operators to provide such justification. And while some BC members would prefer that ICANN seek competitive bids to operate existing registries, the BC has generally supported presumptive renewal performance incentives in registry agreements.

If you’re picking up hints of internal BC dissent in that comment, it’s almost certainly because BC member Zak Muscovitch is also general counsel of the ICA and was one of several contributors to its drafting.
The only other formal GNSO stakeholder group to submit a comment appears to be the Intellectual Property Constituency, but it took no position on pricing.
The At-Large Advisory Committee, which according to its web site “acts on the interests of Internet users”, sent a borderline humorous “Valentine” to the ICANN board that does not mention pricing but does congratulate ICANN on securing a $20 million Verisign bung, which is earmarked for DNS security work.
Here’s a sample of 10 public comments I clicked on randomly:

I’m writing to express disappointment and concern regarding the recent ICANN changes made to their contract with Verisign. These changes potentially create a lot of harm and unnecessary expense to customers for years to come. Please take customers into consideration before going forward with this.

Please don’t increase .com prices. As a small business owner we feel every price increase in our family business. We want to be able to keep the domain name that we have spent years building as our small business home on the web.

I’m here to tell you to stop this proposed price increase. You are being greedy. 40% price hikes with no caps in sight are ridiculous, stop it. I’m tired of getting ripped off by big secretive corporations and sleazy government agencies, and now this includes YOU!. We aren’t going to just put up with it, I, and a lot of others are here to fight! We demand to know
what you are doing with the money you propose to reap from us, aside from lining your pockets! Proveme wrong, give the internet community the clarity it deserves, and now demands!

This is a disgrace and not right.

I disagree with the changes that this amendment (3) will make to the domain registry system. I believe that this increase of fees will stifle innovation and takes the web further towards privatization and big money.
I know that I would not have taken as many opportunities or risks if prices were significantly higher and domains were a larger cost of business.
I urge you to reconsider these changes and reject this amendment.

I am writing in opposition to the proposed Verisign deal with respect to .com domains. I believe the current arrangement should be kept and strict price controls from ICANN should be preserved for .com domains. Verisign has no business exerting control or influence over ICANN, and the deal as proposed will be bad for consumers and anyone who holds a .com domain.
Please do not proceed with the proposed changes.

Please stop trying to fuck up the internet. It has been excessively adapted to suit capitalism. I think many more than just me have had enough. Stop being a shady ass business.

I do not agree with the extraordinary increase in prices for .com domains that appears to be a direct response to a bribe paid by Verisign company to the board of ICANN.
We live in perilous times, where democracy is threatened in every side by the resurgence of corruption, cronyism, and the far right.
You appear to be allowing the backbone of the internet become corrupted by greed, which would horrify the founding fathers of this essential technology.
Show some integrity and don’t give in to the basest of your natures.

I am a registrant of more .com domain names. I am against the proposed price increase to .COM domains. Verisign is merely your manager of the .COM Registry – it has no business dictating the price. ICANN is supposed to govern the domain name system in the public interest.

Thanks first for your hard work.
Please keep prices as they are and avoid this change that could have dire consequences for the entire internet as other less democratic countries will start soon offering alternative domains to .com. Furthermore, any increase will cause difficulties for us who are part of the third world.

If you’ve got more time on your hands than I have, you can peruse all 9,000 comments at your leisure over here. If you find anything good, please do drop a link in the comments.
Some poor bastard at ICANN now has the job of going through and summarizing all of them into ICANN’s official comment report, which has a March 6 deadline.

8 Comments Tagged: .com, ICANN, price caps, pricing, verisign

Covid-19: It’s official, domainers are faster than journalists

The .com domains matching the new name of Coronavirus were registered today before even the first news reports emerged.
The World Health Organization today officially named the deadly disease Covid-19. CO for Corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for 2019, the year in which it was discovered.
The announcement was made at a WHO press conference in Geneva this afternoon. The press conference, which streamed live on YouTube seems to have kicked off shortly after 1500 UTC.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus officially named the disease Covid-19 not too long after the press conference started.
At 1509 UTC, WHO’s official Twitter account tweeted:

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

"We now have a name for the #2019nCoV disease:

COVID-19.

I’ll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine – COVID-19"

–@DrTedros #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/Kh0wx2qfzk

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) February 11, 2020

Within five minutes, an anonymous domainer had picked up covid-19.com — according to Whois records, it was created at NameCheap at at 1513 UTC.
But domainers hate hyphens, right?
Even after Tedros spelled it out for clarity, including the hyphen, a domainer with an even fastest trigger finger decided to omit it, registering the domain covid19.com at 1510 UTC, three whole minutes before the hyphen version and an extremely impressive ONE MINUTE after the WHO tweet.
As far as print journalists go, you have to wait a full thirty minutes before you start to see lines from the likes of Reuters and the AFP.
The lesson here is clear: if you’re one of those domainers who tries to snap up novel terms from the news as quickly as possible, you need to cut out the middleman and go directly to source.
And ignore the bloggers, too. It took me two and a half hours after the WHO tweet to publish this post.
I’m pathetic.

7 Comments Tagged: coronavirus, covid-19

ICA will help you support .com price increases (but doesn’t want you to)

The Internet Commerce Association has released a new version of its semi-automated commenting tool, making it a bit easier for domainers and others to complain to ICANN about the proposed .com price increases.
Surprisingly, the tool will also help you file a comment in support of Verisign’s 7%-a-year price-raising powers, though obviously ICA would prefer you do not.
The tool is based on the one ICA launched last year when Public Interest Registry was due to get its .org price caps lifted by ICANN, but ICA general counsel Zak Muscovitch says that it’s been refined following feedback.
It allows users to identify what kind of registrant they are (domainer, end user, or just concerned netizen) and select from several options to create pre-written comments that reflect their own views. They can also enter their own free text before hitting submit.
One of the options is “I support the proposed price increase which allows for a 31% price increase through 2024”, but I can’t imagine anyone apart from Verisign staff and shareholders checking that particular box.
The .org version of the tool caused a bit of a stir last year after ICANN’s Ombudsman compared submissions made through it to “spam”. He caught some flak for that.
Muscovitch tells DI that it’s not just domainers using the service. Some registrars are directly contacting their customers to encourage them to submit comments, he said, so the views of “the public at large” are being reflected.
At the time of publication about 350 comments have been submitted, more than half of which appear to have originated via the ICA tool.
The public comment period closes February 14.
If you don’t fancy using the ICA tool, submitting a comment directly to ICANN doesn’t appear to be particularly difficult. You simply go here, click the “Submit Comment” button, and ICANN will open up your mail client’s compose window with the appropriate address pre-populated.
Perhaps predictably, I remain skeptical that this kind of thing will have any impact on ICANN’s decision to approve a contract it spent a year negotiating.
But it can’t hurt, right? After all, the reason Verisign only gets to raise prices in four out of six years is because so many people complained about the much more expansive proposed powers back in 2006, and ICANN is still reeling from the outrage over .org…

Comment Tagged: .com, ica, ICANN, price caps, pricing, verisign

.gay hires pop star equality campaigner as spokesperson

Top Level Design has hired a pop musician with a history of gay rights activism and anti-bullying work as its new spokesperson for .gay, which launches today.
Logan Lynn has a 20-year career as a musician and TV presenter with nine studio albums under his belt. He also has experience doing public relations for LGBT charities.
He’s also been the recipient of homophobic trolling. Last year, he told People magazine about the relentless online abuse he suffered after putting his friend, Hollywood actor Jay Mohr, full-frontal nude in one of his music videos in 2018.
He wrote on Top Level Design’s blog over the weekend:

Over the past couple of years, as online abuse directed at me reached an all-time high, I realized I was in a unique position to use my platform and story to help usher in change. It’s this fight that has led to me partnering with Top Level Design on the launch of .gay.
…
We know that we will not be able to single-handedly turn the internet into a hate-free zone, but .gay is committed to doing our part, and we absolutely reject the status quo — which is to do nothing without a court order.

The registry, which kicks off its sunrise period today, has policies in place that allow it to suspend .gay domains if they’re being used for homophobic bullying. General availability begins May 20.

Comment Tagged: .gay, bullying, new gTLDs, top level design

Watch: climate change denier on why she trusts .org more than .com

This isn’t news, but I found it amusing, irritating, and slightly confusing — a clip of a climate change denier rubbishing a scientific article because it appears on a .com domain rather than a .org.
The video below, featuring comedian Joe Rogan interviewing conservative political commentator Candace Owens, dates from May 2018, but I first came across it when it popped up on Reddit’s front page this morning.
In it, Rogan attempts to school Owens on why human-influenced climate change, which she believed is a liberal conspiracy, is a scientific fact. At one point, his producer pulls up an article from Scientific American, the respected, 174-year-old popular science magazine, which uses scientificamerican.com.
Owens responds:

What web site is this? .com though? That means it’s making money. I don’t trust that. If it was a .org I would probably take that, but this is just a random web site.

The argument has been made, in the ongoing controversy over .org’s sale to Ethos Capital, that .org domains carry a higher level of trust than other TLDs, through the mistaken belief that you need to be a not-for-profit in order to own one, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard that belief openly expressed in a widely-viewed forum by a public figure, albeit not a very bright one.
Confusingly, at around the 11.50 mark in the video, Owens starts banging on about how she doesn’t trust research conducted by “.orgs” such as mediamatters.org.
She appears to be someone who, in the age of fake news, pays attention to TLDs when deciding what is and isn’t true online. I can’t decide whether that’s an admirable quality or not. At least she has a filter, I guess.

1 Comment Tagged: .org, candace owens, climate change, ethos, joe rogan, pir

Ethos’ .org pricing promise may be misleading

The more Ethos Capital protests that its plans for .org pricing are not as bad as its critics think, the less I believe it.
Since November, the would-be buyer of Public Interest Registry has being publicly committing to maintain what it calls PIR’s “historic practices” related to pricing.
PIR, under its last ICANN contract, was allowed to raise prices by up to 10% per year, but it did not always exercise that right. In fact, the wholesale price of .org has been fixed at $9.93 since August 2016.
Ethos has described its price increase plans in a very specific, consistent way. In November it said:

Our plan is to live within the spirit of historic practice when it comes to pricing, which means, potentially, annual price increases of up to 10 percent on average — which today would equate to approximately $1 per year.

Last month, chief purpose officer Nora Abusitta-Ouri wrote:

We committed to limiting any potential increase in the price of a .ORG domain registration to no more than 10% per year on average

Last week, she wrote:

Ethos has committed to limiting any potential increase in the price of a .ORG domain registration to no more than 10% per year on average

Over the weekend, she added:

we are not saying that we will raise prices 10% every year — our commitment is that any price increase would not exceed 10% per year on average, if at all.

Clearly, the talking point has been copy-pasted a few times, and it always includes the words “10% per year on average”.
On average.
What does that mean? What are we averaging out here? It can’t be across the .org customer base, as registries aren’t allowed to vary pricing by registrant, so we must be talking about time. PIR has a 10-year contract with ICANN, so we must be talking about prices going up no more than 10% per year “on average” over the next decade.
If PIR, under Ethos’ stewardship, decides to raise prices by exactly 10% every year starting in 2020, the wholesale cost of a .org domain will be $25.76 by 2029, a 159% increase on today’s rate.
Assuming for the sake of this thought experiment that .org stays flat at 10 million registrations (it’s actually a little more today, but it’s declining), Ethos would be looking at a $258 million-a-year business by 2029, up from today’s $99 million.
Over the course of the 10-year contract, .org would be worth a cumulative $1.74 billion in reg revenue, up from the $993 million it would see without price increases.
But Ethos is only promising that price increases will be no more than 10% per year on average, remember, and it’s even hinted that there could be some years with no increases at all.
I noted in November that this commitment could see Ethos raise prices in excess of 10% early on, then freeze them so the increase averages back down to 10% over time.
It would of course make the most sense to front-load the price increases, to maximize the return.
At one extreme, Ethos could raise the price to $25.76 a year immediately, then lock the price down until 2029. That would make .org a $258 million-a-year business overnight, and making the cumulative 10-year revenue around the $2.58 billion mark.
Or, it could raise prices by 20% in alternate years, adding up to $1.77 billion in total top-line and a price to registrants of $24.71 by 2028.
There’s an infinity of variations on these strategies, and Ethos’ modeling is certainly more complex than the envelope upon which I just jotted these simplified figures down, but it’s pretty clear that while the company may well stick to the letter of its promises, it gets its best returns if it raises prices hard and early.
The more I read “on average” repeated in Ethos’ literature, the more convinced I become that this is exactly what it has in mind.

11 Comments Tagged: .org, acquisition, ethos, ICANN, isoc, pir, price caps, pricing