Afilias gets Guinness record for .au migration

Afilias has got its recent takeover of .au recognized by Guinness as an official world record.
The company was given the title of “Largest Migration of an Internet Top-Level Domain in a Single Transition” at an event in New York today, according to a company press release.
It relates to its migration of .au from former registry provider Neustar to its own back-end a few months ago.
Australia’s .au ccTLD had about 3.1 million names under management at the time, about 400,000 names more than the previous record — the 2003 .org transition Afilias also handled.
I understand there’s a licensing fee due to Guinness for this kind of (let’s face it) shameless-but-effective PR stunt, but no guarantee the record will actually be printed in future editions of the annual Guinness Book of World Records.
I hope the fresh salt in Neustar’s wounds isn’t stinging too badly this evening.

Comment Tagged: .au, afilias, auda, guinness, migration, neustar

KSK vote was NOT unanimous

ICANN’s board of directors on Sunday voted to approve the forthcoming security key change at the DNS root, but there was some dissent.
Director Avri Doria, a Nominating Committee appointee, said today that she provided the lone vote against the DNSSEC KSK rollover, which is expected to cause temporary internet access problems for potentially a couple million people next month.
I understand there was also a single abstention to Sunday’s vote.
Doria has released a dissenting statement, in which she said the absence of an external, peer-reviewed study of the risks could prove a problem.

The greatest risk is that out of the millions that will fail after the roll over, some that are serious and may even be critical, may occur; if this happens the lack of peer reviewed studies may be a liability for ICANN, perhaps not legal, but in terms of our reputation as protectors of the stability & security of internet system of names.

She added that she was concerned about the extent that the public has been notified of the rollover plan, and questioned whether the current risk mitigation plan is sufficient.
Doria said she found comments filed by Verisign (pdf) particularly informative to her eventual vote, as well as comments from the At-Large Advisory Committee (pdf), Business Constituency (pdf) and Registries Stakeholder Group (pdf).
These groups had called for more study and data, better outreach, more clearly defined success/failure benchmarks, and more delay.
Doria noted in her dissenting statement that the ICANN board did not have a chance to quiz any of the minority of the members of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee who had called for further delay.
The board’s resolution, apparently arrived at after two hours of formal in-person discussions in Brussels at the weekend, is expected to be published shortly.
The rollover, which has already been delayed a year, is now scheduled to go ahead October 11.
Any impact is expected to be felt within a couple of days, as the change ripples out across the DNS.
ICANN says that any network operator impacted by the change has a simple fix: turn off DNSSEC. Then, if they want, they can update their keys and turn it back on again.

1 Comment Tagged: board, dns, DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover, root, security, verisign

ICANN turns 20 today (or maybe not)

ICANN is expected to celebrate its 20th anniversary at its Barcelona meeting next month, but by some measures it has already had its birthday.
If you ask Wikipedia, it asserts that ICANN was “created” on September 18, 1998, 20 years ago today.
But that claim, which has been on Wikipedia since 2003, is unsourced and probably incorrect.
While it’s been repeated elsewhere online for the last 15 years, I’ve been unable to figure out why September 18 has any significance to ICANN’s formation.
I think it’s probably the wrong date.
It seems that September 16, 1998 was the day that IANA’s Jon Postel and Network Solutions jointly published the organization’s original bylaws and articles of incorporation, and first unveiled the name “ICANN”.
That’s according to my former colleague and spiritual predecessor Nick Patience (probably the most obsessive journalist following DNS politics in the pre-ICANN days), writing in now-defunct Computergram International on September 17, 1998.
The Computergram headline, helpfully for the purposes of the post you are reading, is “IANA & NSI PUBLISH PLAN FOR DNS ENTITY: ICANN IS BORN”.
Back then, before the invention of the paragraph and when ALL CAPS HEADLINES were considered acceptable, Computergram was published daily, so Patience undoubtedly wrote the story September 16, the same day the ICANN proposal was published.
A joint Postel/NetSol statement on the proposal was also published September 17.
The organization was not formally incorporated until September 30, which is probably a better candidate date for ICANN’s official birthday, archived records show.
Birthday meriments are expected to commence during ICANN 63, which runs from October 20 to 25. There’s probably free booze in it, for those on-site in Barcelona.
As an aside that amused me, the Computergram article notes that Jones Day lawyer Joe Sims very kindly provided Postel with his services during ICANN’s creation on a “pro bono basis”.
Jones Day has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of ICANN cash over the intervening two decades, billing over $8.7 million in fees in ICANN’s most recently reported tax year alone.

6 Comments Tagged: barcelona, iana, ICANN, icann 63, jon postel, jones day, network solutions

Van der Laan to leave ICANN board

Former Dutch politician Lousewies van der Laan is to leave the ICANN board of directors next month and be replaced with the former CEO of the Serbian ccTLD.
ICANN said yesterday that Danko Jevtovic, who headed RNIDS from 2013 until July last year, has been selected to occupy van der Laan’s seat following the Annual General Meeting in Barcelona.
Van der Laan, who had been selected by the Nominating Committee for a second term, has had to decline the offer “due to unforeseen family obligations”, ICANN said.
Jevtovic will take his seat at the same time as fellow NomCom appointee, Tripti Sinha of the University of Maryland, who oversees management of the DNS D-root server and replaces term-limited George Sadowsky.
El Salvadorean ccTLD founder Rafael “Lito” Ibarra is the third NomCom appointee this year, starting his second term next month.

Comment Tagged: board, ICANN, nomcom

Set buttocks to clench! ICANN approves risky KSK rollover

ICANN has approved the first rollover of the domain name system’s master security key, setting the clock ticking on a change that could cause internet access issues for millions.
The so-called KSK rollover, when ICANN deletes the key-signing key that has been used as the trust anchor for the DNSSEC ecosystem since 2011 and replaces it with the new one — will now go ahead as planned on October 11.
The decision was made yesterday at the ICANN board of directors’ retreat in Brussels.
ICANN chief technology officer David Conrad posted this to an ICANN mailing list this morning:

The Board voted to approve the resolution for ICANN org to move forward with the revised KSK rollover plan. So barring unforeseen circumstances, the KSK-2017-signed ZSK will be used to sign the root zone on 11 October 2018.

The rollover was due to happen October 11 last year, but ICANN delayed it when it emerged that many DNS resolvers weren’t yet configured to use the new key.
That’s still a problem, and nobody knows for sure how many endpoints will stop functioning properly when the new KSK goes solo.
While most experts weighing in on the rollover, including Conrad, agreed that the risk of more delay outweighed the risk of rolling now, that feeling was not unanimous.
Five members of the 22-member Security and Stability Advisory Committee — including top guys from Google and Verisign — last month dissented from the majority view and said ICANN should delay again.
The question now is not whether internet users will see a disruption in the days following October 11, but how many users will be affected and how serious their disruptions will be.
Based on current information, as many as two million internet users could be affected.
ICANN is likely to take flak for even relatively minor disruptions, but the alternative was to continue with the delays and risk an even bigger impact, and even more flak, in future.
The text of ICANN’s resolution and the rationale behind it will be published in the next day or so.

2 Comments Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover, rollover, ssac

Mediators hired as Whois reformers butt heads

ICANN has hired professional mediators to help resolve strong disagreements in the working group tasked with reforming Whois for the post-GDPR world.
Kurt Pritz, chair of the Expedited Policy Development Process for Whois, last week told the group that ICANN has drafted in the Consensus Building Institute, with which it has worked before, to help “narrow issues and reach consensus”.
Three CBI mediators will brief the EPDP group today, and join them when the WG meets face-to-face for the first time at a three-day session in Los Angeles later this month.
Their goal is not to secure any particular outcome, but to help the disparate viewpoints find common ground, Pritz told the group.
It’s been Pritz’s intention to get the mediators in since day one — he knew in advance how divisive Whois policy is — but it’s taken until now to get the contracts signed.
The EPDP WG’s job is to create a new, privacy-conscious, consensus Whois policy that will apply to all gTLD registries and registrars. Its output will replace ICANN’s post-GDPR Temporary Specification for Registration Data, which in turn replaced the longstanding Whois policy attached to all ICANN registry and registrar contracts.
Since the working group first convened in early August — about 500 emails and 24 hours of painful teleconferences ago — common ground has been hard to find, and in fact the EPDP group did not even attempt to find consensus for the first several weeks of discussions.
Instead, they worked on its first deliverable, which was finalized last week, a “triage report” that sought to compile each faction‘s opinion of each section of ICANN’s Temp Spec.
The idea seemed sensible at the time, but with hindsight it’s arguable whether this was the best use of the group’s time.
The expectation, I believe, was that opposing factions would at least agree on some sections of text, which could then be safely removed from future debate.
But what emerged instead was this, a matrix of disagreement in which no part of the Temp Spec did not have have at least one group in opposition:
The table is potentially misleading, however. Because groups were presented with a binary yes/no option for each part of the spec, “no” votes were sometimes recorded over minor language quibbles where in fact there was agreement in principle.
By restricting the first few weeks of conversation to the language of the Temp Spec, the debate was arguably prematurely hamstrung, causing precious minutes to trickle away.
And time is important — the EPDP is supposed to deliver its consensus-based Initial Report to the ICANN 63 meeting in Barcelona about five weeks from now.
That’s going to be tough.
What’s becoming increasingly clear to me from the post-triage talks is that the WG’s task could be seen as not much less than a wholesale, ground-up, reinvention of the Whois wheel, recreated with GDPR as the legal framework.
Who is Whois for?
Discussions so far have been quite mind-expanding, forcing some fundamental rethinking of long-held, easy assumptions, at least for this lurker. Here’s an example.
One of the fundamental pillars of GDPR is the notion of “purposes”. Companies that collect private data on individuals have to do so only with specific, enumerated purposes in mind.
The WG has started by discussing registrars. What purpose does a registrar have when it collects Whois data from its registrants?
None whatsoever, it was claimed.
“To execute the contract between the registrant and the registrar, it’s really not necessary for registrars to collect any of this information,” GoDaddy head of policy James Bladel, representing registrars, told the group on its latest call Thursday.
Registrars collect data on their customers (not just contact data, but also stuff like credit card details) for billing and support purposes, but this is not the same as Whois data. It’s stored separately and never published anywhere. While covered by GDPR, it’s not covered by Whois policy.
Whois data is only collected by registrars for third parties’ purposes, whether that third party be a registry, ICANN, a data escrow agent, a cop, or an intellectual property enforcer.
“Other than a few elements such as domain name servers, there is nothing that is collected in Whois that is needed for the registrar to do their business,” At-Large Advisory Committee chair Alan Greenberg told the WG. “All of them are being collected for their availability to third parties, should they need it.”
While this may seem like a trivial distinction, drawing a hard line between the purposes of registries, registrars and ICANN itself on the one hand and law enforcement, cybersecurity and IP lawyers on the other is one of the few pieces of concrete advice ICANN has received from European data protection regulators.
There’s by no means unanimous agreement that the registrars’ position is correct, but it’s this kind of back-to-basics discussion that makes me feel it’s very unlikely that the EPDP is going to be able to produce an Initial Report with anything more than middling consensus by the October deadline.
I may be overly pessimistic, but (mediators or no mediators) I expect its output will be weighted more towards outlining and soliciting public comment on areas of disagreement than consent.
And the WG has not yet even looked in depth at the far thornier issue of “access” — the policy governing when third parties such as IP lawyers will be able to see redacted Whois data.
Parties on the pro-access side of the WG have been champing at the bit to bring access into the debate at every opportunity, but have been
Hey, look, a squirrel!
The WG has also been beset by its fair share of distractions, petty squabbles and internal power struggles.
The issues of “alternates” — people appointed by the various constituencies to sit in on the WG sessions when the principles are unavailable — caused some gnashing of teeth, first over their mailing list and teleconference privileges and then over how much access they should get to the upcoming LA meeting.
Debates about GDPR training — which some say should have been a prerequisite to WG participation — have also emerged, after claims that not every participant appeared clued-in as to what the law actually requires. After ICANN offered a brief third-party course, there were complaints that it was inadequate.
Most recently, prickly Iranian GAC rep Kavouss Arasteh last week filed a formal Ombudsman complaint over a throwaway god-themed pun made by Non-Com Milton Mueller, and subsequently defended by fellow non-resident Iranian Farzaneh Badii, in the Adobe Connect chat room at the September 6 meeting.
Mueller has been asked to apologize.

7 Comments Tagged: barcelona, cbi, Consensus Building Institute, epdp, gdpr, ICANN, icann 63, privacy, whois

US scraps fucking stupid “seven dirty words” ban

Neustar and the US government have agreed to dump their longstanding ban on profanity in .us domains.
A contract change quietly published in July has now made it possible to register .us domains containing the strings “fuck”, “cunt”, “shit”, “piss”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker” and “tits”.
These are the so-called “seven dirty words” popularized by a George Carlin comedy routine and incorporated into US censorship law via the Supreme Court decision Federal Communications Commission v Pacifica Foundation in 1978.
Neustar banned the strings from .us when it originally won the registry contract from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in 2002, and kept it upon renewal.
Until recently, it was conducting post-registration reviews of new .us domains and suspending names that used the strings in sweary contexts.
However, a July contract amendment (pdf) has released Neustar from this duty, allowing registrants to register whatever the fuck they want.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the change came about after itself and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School complained to the government about the suspension of the domain fucknazis.us, which registrant Jeremy Rubin had been using to raise money to fight the extreme right in the US.
That domain was registered in late 2017, but Neustar appears to have been discussing whether to repeal the idiotic ban in various policy groups for at least three years.
When Network Solutions was the sole registrar for .com, .org and .net it too banned the seven dirty words but this practice fizzled out after ICANN introduced competition into the registrar space almost two decades ago.

3 Comments Tagged: .us, eff, neustar, ntia, seven dirty words

Beginning of the end for DomainTools? Court orders it to scrub Whois records

DomainTools has been temporarily banned from collecting and publishing the Whois records of all .nz domains.
A Washington court yesterday handed down a preliminary injunction against the company, after New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission sued it in July for scraping and republishing its Whois in violation of its terms of service.
Notably — especially if you’re involved in the ongoing Whois reform debate — Judge Robert Lasnik’s scathing order (pdf) rubbished DomainTools’ claims that its historical Whois service provides a public interest benefit that outweighs the privacy interests of .nz registrants.
The ruling by its own admission also potentially opens the floodgates for other registries and registrars to obtain injunctions against DomainTools for the own customers.
DomainTools has been “enjoined from accessing the .nz register while DomainTools’ limited license remains revoked and/or publishing any .nz register data DomainTools had stored or compiled in its own databases”.
DNC, the policy body that oversees .nz registry InternetNZ, had alleged that DomainTools had created a “secondary or shadow register” by bulk-downloading Whois records.
Since mid-2016, each .nz Whois record has contained a notice that such behavior is prohibited, and Lasnik agreed that DomainTools must surely have been aware of this.
Lasnik further agreed with DNC that DomainTools’ service is “sabotaging” its efforts to bring more privacy protection to .nz customers; since November last year it has offered individuals the ability to opt out of having their private data published, an offer 23,000 people have taken up.
That was enough for the judge to conclude that DNC’s case had met the “irreparable harm” test required for an injunction.
He was less impressed with DomainTools’ argument that implementing the injunction would take many months and cost it up to $3.5 million.
“Defendant can presumably filter the .nz data using relatively simple database tools,” he wrote, ordering DNC to post a “nominal” $1,000 bond to cover DT’s potential losses.
Lasnik also said the public interest would be better served by permitting registrant privacy than by serving the interests of DomainTools’ cybsecurity and law enforcement customers:

defendant argues that the products it creates from its meticulously collected register data are critical cybersecurity resources and that the public interest would be harmed if the reports provided to government, financial, and law enforcement entities were incomplete because the .nz data were excised. The .nz register is comparatively small, however (approximately 710,000 domains compared with over 135,000,000 .com domains), and the defendant and its customers can access the registration information directly through plaintiff’s website if it appears that a bad actor is using an .nz domain. On the other hand, the .nz registrants’ privacy and security interests are compromised as long as defendant is publishing non-current or historical .nz information out of its database. The Court finds that the public has an interest in the issuance of an injunction.

While arguably limited to historical Whois records, it’s a rare example of judicial commentary on the privacy rights of registrants and may well play into the ongoing debate about Whois in the post-GDPR world.
Even if it turns out not to have wider policy implications, the legal implications for DomainTools are potentially devastating.
While .nz has only about 710,000 domains under management, and is but one of over 1,500 TLDs, DomainTools, DNC and Judge Lasnik all seem to agree that the floodgates for further litigation may have now opened. Lasnik wrote:

defendant argues that a preliminary injunction in this case could start an avalanche of litigation as other registers attempt to protect the privacy of their registrants. If defendant built a business by downloading, storing, and using data from other registers in violation of the terms that governed its access to that data, defendant may be correct — other registers may be encouraged to pursue a breach of contract claim if plaintiff is successful here. It would be ironic, however, if a plaintiff who has shown a likelihood of success and irreparable injury were deprived of preliminary relief simply because defendant may have acted wrongfully toward others as well

DNC said in a statement: “Managers of other countries domain name systems across the world will want to pay attention to the judgment. This may raise confidence to fight their own cases should DomainTools be breaching their terms of use.”
The case has yet to go to court, but the fact that DNC won the injunction indicates that the judge believes it has a likelihood of winning.

Comment Tagged: .nz, dnc, domain name commission, DomainTools, gdpr, internetnz, privacy, whois

PIR chief: registries should stop stressing about volume

Public Interest Registry has announced some sweeping changes to how it markets .org and its other TLDs, with interim CEO Jay Daley telling DI that there’s too much focus on volumes in the industry today.
PIR is scrapping is volume discount programs after the current batch of incentives expires at the end of the year.
These are the programs that offer rebates to registrars if they hit certain performance targets, all based around newly created domains.
“They particularly favor large registrars, and we don’t think that’s appropriate going forward,” Daley told DI yesterday.
He said that when PIR removed some developed markets from its geographically-targeted discount programs, it saw creates go down but revenue improve.
He suggested that some registries have too much focus on volumes as a benchmark of success, failing to take account of important factors such as renews and abuse rates.
Part of the problem is that success is often measured (by folk including yours truly) by domains under management, rather than TLD health or revenue-per-domain.
“How many people are simply trying to get their numbers up without worrying about the underlying revenue, or taking a very low underlying revenue in order to get their numbers up?” Daley said.
“We’re not in any way somebody who is trying to get our numbers up at all costs, certainly not,” he said.
Another marketing program getting a makeover is pay-per-placement, where PIR would pay for prominent positions in the TLD drop-down menu of registrars storefronts.
These relationships have been based purely on new creates, Daley said, with appropriate “clawback” provisions when registrations turn out to be predominantly abusive.
In future, PIR intends to take a “longer-term, hygiene oriented view” of how its marketing money is used, making better use of data, he said.
“We need to be looking more at the quality of the registrations we get, the level of technical abuse generated by those registrations, looking at the renewal rates that come from those registrations,” he said.
PIR has a new four-strong channel services team that will be leading these changes.
“We are a public interest organization and need to take a public interest view on everything we do,” Daley said. “We need to be looking at our promotions for more than just commercial reasons, we need to be looking at public interest reasons as well.”
Daley, who ran New Zealand’s .nz registry from 2009 until this January, said that the big changes he is overseeing do not reflect an attempt to put his stamp on PIR and take over the CEO office on a permanent basis.
He does not want to run a registry and does not want to relocate to PIR’s headquarters in Virginia, he said.
“I’ve been a registry CEO for nine years,” he said. “I’ve done this and it’s time for me to look at other things.”
He also sits on PIR’s board of directors.

Comment Tagged: .org, discounts, marketing, pir, public interest registry, rebates

.CLUB sees spam double after China promotion

.CLUB Domains has seen the amount of spam in .club double a month after seeing a huge registration spike prompted by a deep discount deal.
The registry saw its domains under management go up by about 200,000 names over a few days in early August, largely as a result of a promotion at Chinese registrar AliBaba.
AliBaba sold .club domains for CNY 3 ($0.44) during the promotion, helping it overtake GoDaddy as the top .club registrar.
At that time, spam tracker SpamHaus was reporting that 17.9% of the .club domains it was seeing in the wild were being used in spam.
Today, that number is 35.4%, almost double the August 7 level. SpamHaus does not publish the actual number of spammy domains for .club; that honor is only bestowed upon the top 10 “bad” TLDs.
Correlation does not equal causation, of course. There could be factors other than the AliBaba promotion that contributed to the increase, but I believe there’s probably a link here.
.CLUB chief marketing officer Jeff Sass told DI:

When registrars have domains “on sale”, there is always the chance that low-cost domains will be attractive to abusers. We monitor abuse proactively, and respond promptly to complaints, as well as monitor our registrar partners collectively and individually.

It’s almost certainly unfair of me to single out fluctuations in .club here, rather than take a comparative look at multiple TLDs. There are certainly many worse TLDs per SpamHaus’ statistics — .men leads among the gTLDs, with 87.2% spam.
But, given the industry truism that cheaper domains leads to more abuse, I think such a large increase correlating with such a successful promotion is a useful data point.

Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, alibaba, spam, spamhaus