Registries reject lower fees for anti-abuse prowess

Registries have largely rejected a proposal for them to be offered financial incentives to lower the amount of abuse in their gTLDs.
That’s despite the idea gaining broad support from governments, intellectual property interests and restricted-registration registries.
The concept of ICANN offering discounted fees to registries that proactively fight abuse was floated by the Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT) back in November.
It recommended in its draft report, among other things:

Consider directing ICANN org, in its discussions with registries, to negotiate amendments to existing Registry Agreements, or in negotiations of new Registry Agreements associated with subsequent rounds of new gTLDs to include provisions in the agreements providing incentives, including financial incentives for registries, especially open registries, to adopt proactive anti-abuse measures.

“Proactive” in this case would mean measures such as preventing known bad actors from registering domains, rather than just waiting for complaints to be filed.
Given that registries have been calling for lower ICANN fees in other instances, one might expect to see support from that constituency.
However, the Registries Stakeholder Group said in a document filed to ICANN’s public comment period on the CCT’s latest recommendations that, it “opposes” the idea of such financial incentives. It said:

The RySG supports recognizing and supporting the many [registry operators] that take steps to discourage abuse, but opposes amending the RA as recommended, to mandate or incentivize ‘proactive’ anti-abuse measures.

The RySG complained that such a system would require lots of complex work to arrive at a definition of abuse and what kinds of measures would qualify as “proactive”.
Even if such definitions could be found, and amendments to the standard RA successfully negotiated, there’s still no guarantee that bad registries would sign up for the incentives or stick to their promises, “resulting in no net improvement to the current situation”, the RySG said.
The group is also concerned that adding more anti-abuse clauses to the RA could increase registries’ risk of liability should they be sued over abuse carried out by their customers.
Not all registries agreed with the RySG position, however.
The informal Verified Top-Level Domains Consortium, which comprises the two registries behind .bank, .insurance and .pharmacy, filed comments supporting the proposal.
It said that gTLDs with vetted eligibility requirements see no abuse but have lower registration volumes and therefore pay higher ICANN fees on a per-domain basis. It said:

ICANN should help to offset these costs to create a more level playing field with high-volume unrestricted registries, i.e., to enhance competition as well as consumer trust. If ICANN made it more financially advantageous to verify eligibility, other registries may be encouraged to adopt this model. The outcome would be the elimination of abuse in these verified TLDs.

Outside of the industry itself, the Governmental Advisory Committee and IP interests such as the Intellectual Property Constituency and INTA, filed comments supporting anti-abuse incentives.
The IPC “strongly” supported the recommendation, but added that the finer details would need to be worked out to ensure that lower ICANN fees did not translate automatically to lower registration fees and therefore more abuse.
Shocking nobody, it added that “abuse” should include intellectual property infringements.
Conversely, the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group said it “strongly” opposes the recommendation, on the basis that it would push ICANN into a “content policeman” role in violation of its technical mandate:

ICANN is not a US Federal Trade Commission or an anti-fraud unit or regulatory unit of any government. Providing guidance, negotiation and worse yet, financial incentives to ICANN-contracted registries for anti-abuse measures is completely outside of our competence, goals and mandates. Such acts would bring ICANN straight into the very content issues that passionately divide countries — including speech laws, competition laws, content laws of all types. It would invalidate ICANN commitments to ourselves and the global community. It would make ICANN the policemen of the Internet, not the guardians of the infrastructure. It is a role we have sworn not to undertake; a role beyond our technical expertise; and a recommendation we must not accept.

Also opposed to incentivizing anti-abuse measures was the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (an independent entity, not an ICANN working group), which said there’s no data to support such a recommendation.

The reports provide no data that showcase what the implications of altering the economic underpinnings of a highly competitive market may entail, including inadvertent side effects such as registries that already sell low price domains being rewarded with lower ICANN fees. In fact, it may ultimately result in a race to the bottom and higher rates of domain abuse.

Instead, M3AAWG said that ICANN should concentrate is contractual compliance efforts on those registries that the data shows already have large amounts of abuse — presumably meaning the likes of .top, .gdn and the Famous Four Media stable.
ICANN itself filed a comment on the proposal, pointing out that it is not able to unilaterally impose anti-abuse measures into registry agreements.
One imagines that lowering fees at a time when its own budget is under a lot of pressure would probably not be something ICANN would be eager to implement.
These comments and more were summarized in ICANN’s report on the CCT public comment period, published yesterday. The comments themselves can be found here.
The comments feed back into the CCT review team’s work ahead of its final report, which is due to be published some time during Q1.
Under its bylaws, the CCT review is one of the things that ICANN has to complete before it opens the next round of new gTLD applications.

Comment Tagged: abuse, cct, ICANN, new gTLDs, security, spam

Domain universe grows almost 1% in 2017 despite new gTLD slump

The total number of registered domain names in all TLDs was up 0.9% in 2017, despite a third-quarter dip, according to the latest data compiled by Verisign.
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published yesterday, shows that there were 332.4 million domains registered at the end of the year.
That’s up by 1.7 million names (0.5%) on the third quarter and up 3.1 million names (0.9%) on 2016.
Growth is growth, but when you consider that 2015-2016 growth was 6.8%, under 1% appears feeble.
The drag factors in 2017 were of course the 2012-round new gTLDs and Verisign’s own .net, offset by increases in .com and ccTLDs.
New gTLD domains were 20.6 million at the end of the year, down by about 500,000 compared to the third quarter and five million names compared to 2016.
As a percentage of overall registrations, new gTLDs dropped from 7.8% at the end of 2016 to 6.2%.
The top 10 new gTLDs now account for under 50% of new gTLD regs for the first time.
The numbers were primarily affected by big declines in high-volume spaces such as .xyz, which caused the domain universe to actually shrink in Q3.
Verisign’s own .com fared better, as usual, with .net suffering a decline.
The year ended with 131.9 million .com names, up by five million names on the year, exactly offsetting the shrinkage in new gTLDs.
But .net ended up with 14.5 million names, a 800,000 drop on 2016.
In the ccTLD world, total regs were up 1.4 million (1%) quarterly and 3.4 million (2.4%) annually.
Excluding wild-card ccTLD .tk, which never deletes domains and for which data for 2017 was not available to Verisign, the growth was a more modest 0.7 million (0.5%) quarterly and 2.3 million (1.8%) annually.
The DNIB report for Q4 2017 can be downloaded here (pdf).

2 Comments Tagged: .com, .net, cctlds, dnib, newgTLDs, verisign

Donuts may make .travel names easier to buy after acquiring its first legacy gTLD

Donuts has added .travel to its swelling portfolio of gTLDs, under a deal with original registry Tralliance announced today.
It’s the company’s first acquisition of a legacy, pre-2012 gTLD, and the first “community” gTLD to join its stable of strings, which now stands at 239.
.travel went live in 2005, a part of ICANN’s 2003 round of “sponsored” TLD applications.
As a sponsored TLD, .travel has eligibility and authentication requirements, but executive vice president Jon Nevett told DI that Donuts will look at “tinkering with” the current process to make domains easier to buy.
The current system requires what amounts to basically a self-declaration that you belong to the travel community, he said, but you have to visit the registry’s web site to obtain an authentication code before a registrar will let you buy a .travel domain.
Given that the community captured by .travel is extremely broad — you could be somebody blogging about their vacations and qualify — it seems to be a barrier of limited usefulness.
Nevett said Donuts has no immediate plans to migrate the TLD away from the Neustar back-end upon which it currently sits.
The rest of its portfolio runs on its own in-house registry platform, and one imagines that .travel will wind up there one day.
While .travel is one of Donuts most-expensive domains — priced at $99 retail at its own Name.com registrar — Nevett said there are no plans to cut pricing as yet.
There may be discounts, he said, and possibly promotions involving bundling with other travel-related gTLDs in its portfolio.
Donuts already runs .city, .holiday, .flights, .cruises, .vacations and several other thematically synergistic name spaces.
.travel had about 18,000 domains registered at the last count, with EnCirca, Name.com, 101domain, Key-Systems and CSC Corporate as its top five registrars.
It peaked 10 years ago at just under 215,000 registrations, largely due to to speculative bulk registrations made by parties connected to the registry that were dumped a couple of years later.
It’s been at under 20,000 names for the last five years, shrinking by small amounts every year.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Comment Tagged: .travel, acquisition, donuts, neustar, new gTLDs, tralliance

ICANN chief to lead talks over blocked .amazon gTLD

ICANN CEO Goran Marby has been asked to help Amazon come to terms with several South American governments over its controversial bid for the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors passed a resolution last week accepting the suggestion, which came from the Governmental Advisory Committee. The board said:

The ICANN Board accepts the GAC advice and has asked the ICANN org President and CEO to facilitate negotiations between the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization’s (ACTO) member states and the Amazon corporation

Governments, prominently Peru and Brazil, have strongly objected to .amazon on the grounds that the “Amazon” river and rain-forest region, known locally as “Amazonas” should be a protected geographic term.
Amazon’s applications for .amazon and two Asian-script translations were rejected a few years ago after the GAC sided with its South American members and filed advice objecting to the gTLDs.
A subsequent Independent Review Process panel last year found that ICANN had given far too much deference to the GAC advice, which came with little to no evidence-based justification.
The panel told ICANN to “promptly” take another look at the applications and “make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications”.
Despite this, the .amazon application is still classified as “Will Not Proceed” on ICANN’s web site. That’s basically another way of saying “rejected” or “denied”.
Amazon the company has promised to protect key domains, such as “rainforest.amazon”, if it gets to run the gTLDs. Governments would get to help create a list of reserved, sensitive domains.
It’s also promised to actively support any future bids for .amazonas supported by the governments concerned.
.amazon would be a dot-brand, so only Amazon would be able to register names there.

4 Comments Tagged: amazon, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, trademarks

Economist would sue ICANN if it publishes private emails

The Economist Intelligence Unit has threatened to sue ICANN if it publishes emails related to its evaluations of “community” gTLDs.
That’s according to a document published by ICANN this week, in which the organization refused to reveal any more information about a controversial probe into the Community Priority Evaluations the EIU conducted on its behalf.
EIU “threatened litigation” should ICANN publish emails sent between the two parties, the document states.
New gTLD applicant DotMusic, which failed its CPE for .music but years later continues to fight for the decision to be overturned, filed a Documentary Information Disclosure Policy request with ICANN a month ago.
DIDP is ICANN’s equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act.
DotMusic’s request among many other items sought the release of over 100,000 emails, many sent between ICANN and the EIU, that ICANN had provided to FTI Consulting during FTI’s investigation into whether the CPEs were fair, consistent and absent ICANN meddling.
But in its response this week, ICANN pointed out that its contract with EIU, its “CPE Provider”, has confidentiality clauses:

ICANN organization endeavored to obtain consent from the CPE Provider to disclose certain information relating to the CPE Process Review, but the CPE Provider has not agreed to ICANN organization’s request, and has threatened litigation should ICANN organization breach its contractual confidentiality obligations. ICANN organization’s contractual commitments must be weighed against its other commitments, including transparency. The commitment to transparency does not outweigh all other commitments to require ICANN organization to breach its contract with the CPE Provider.

DotMusic’s DIDP sought the release of 19 batches of information, which it hopes would bolster its case that both the EIU’s original reviews and FTI’s subsequent investigation were flawed, but all requests were denied by ICANN on various grounds.
In more than one instance, ICANN claims attorney-client privilege under California law, as it was actually ICANN’s longstanding law firm Jones Day, rather than ICANN itself, that contracted with FTI.
The FTI report cleared ICANN of all impropriety and said the EIU’s CPE process had been consistent across each of the gTLD applications it looked at.
The full DIDP request and response can be found here.
ICANN has yet to make a decision on .music, along with .gay, .hotel, .cpa, and .merck, all of which were affected by the CPE reviews.

Comment Tagged: .music, community, cpe, dotmusic, economist, eiu, fti, ICANN, new gTLDs

Hundreds of words and acronyms banned from .au, domains frozen

auDA has added hundreds of words, phrases and acronyms to its list of strings that are banned in .au and locked domains containing those strings.
There were only about 40 strings on the old banned list; now it’s closer to 300.
auDA has added to the list the names of brands protected by direct legislation, such as “Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix” and “Australian Defence Force Reserves”.
Also, phrases such as “What a Great Place for the Great Race” and “Commonwealth games Bronze”.
But what will be most concerning for non-cybersquatter .au registrants will be the acronyms and dictionary words that have been added.
These include the word “university” and acronyms such as “ran”, “adi” and “ara”, which could quite easily appear as substrings of legitimate words such as “grandma”, “radio” and “karate”.
Registrants of domains that exactly match the newly banned strings will find themselves unable to renew those domains, according to an auDA FAQ:

All words, phrases or acronyms on the list at Schedule A have been blocked from registration at the Registry. If you believe that you should be able to renew the domain name, you will need to demonstrate to your Registrar and auDA that you have Ministerial consent to use the domain name or your use of the domain name does not attract the restriction.

If there’s only a partial, substring match, registrants won’t be able to transfer the domain to a different registrant, according to the FAQ:

auDA has placed a lock on domain names that contain words, phrases or acronyms which appear on the list in Schedule A to prevent the transfer of these names to third parties. auDA will remove the lock where registrants can provide the requisite consent, or demonstrate that the use of the domain name does not attract the restriction.

The list was expanded following an auDA policy review that looked at what words are protected under Australian legislation.
The review itself acknowledged that the banned list is a bit of a blunt instrument, as in many cases it’s not the string that is banned but rather the use of the string.
Presumably, if you own “karate.com.au” it will be fairly straightforward to show you’re not infringing the rights of the Australian Regular Army.
The registry’s advice to registrants who believe their names are affected is to lawyer up:

Registrants are encouraged to check whether their domain name/s contain any words, abbreviations, acronyms or phrases appearing on the Schedule. If a name appears on the Schedule, registrants should seek independent legal advice on appropriate action. auDA cannot provide legal advice.

The new list of banned words can be found here. I’ve taken a screen capture of the old list from Google’s cache of January 20, here.

1 Comment Tagged: .au, auda, banned

Full $185,000 refunds offered to risky new gTLD applicants

ICANN is to offer applicants for three new gTLDs identified as too risky to go live full refunds of their application fees.
Its board of directors acknowledged at its weekend retreat that it has no intention of delegating .corp, .home and .mail, and that each applicant should be able to get their entire $185,000 application fee back.
The applicants will have to withdraw their applications in order to get the refund.
Ordinarily, withdrawing an application would only qualify the applicants for a partial refund.
The ICANN board said in its resolution that it “does not intend to delegate the strings .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL in the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program”.
It added that “the applicants were not aware before the application window that the strings .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL would be identified as high-risk, and that the delegations of such high-risk strings would be deferred indefinitely.”
The three strings are considered risky because they already receive vast amounts of “name collision” traffic, largely from DNS queries that leak out from private networks.
There’s a concern that delegating any of them would create a big security risk in terms of confidential data leakage and stuff just generally breaking.
It’s been six years since the last new gTLD application window was open, and some applicants for the strings abandoned their bids years ago.
There are five remaining .corp applicants (and one withdrawal), five for .mail (two withdrawals) and ten for .home (one withdrawal).
The refunds will be taken from ICANN’s separate new gTLD program budget so presumably will not have an impact on its current operating budget woes.
The board noted that technically it did not have to give full refunds, under the terms of the Applicant Guidebook, but that it was doing so in the interest of “fairness”.
This may come as little comfort to applicants whose money has been tied up in limbo for the last six years.

Comment Tagged: .corp, .home, .mail, ICANN, new gTLDs, refunds, withdrawals

Famous Four chair pumps $5.4 million into AlpNames to settle COO lawsuit

Famous Four Media chair Iain Roache has bought out his former COO’s stake in AlpNames, its affiliated registrar, settling a lawsuit between the two men.
He’s acquired Charles Melvin’s 20% stake in the company for £3.9 million ($5.4 million), according to a press release.
A spokesperson confirmed that the deal settles a lawsuit in the companies’ home territory of Gibraltar, which we reported on in December.
Roache said in the press release that he has a plan to grow AlpNames into a “Tier 1 registrar”:
“I’ve got a 10 year strategic plan, which includes significant additional investment, to set the business up for future growth and success,” he said. “We’re going to bring the competition to the incumbents!”
AlpNames is basically the registrar arm of Famous Four, over the last few years supporting the gTLD portfolio registry’s strategy of selling domains in the sub-$1 range and racking up huge market share as a result.
But it’s on a bit of a slide, volume-wise, right now, as hundreds of thousands of junk domains are allowed to expire.
According to today’s press release, AlpNames has 794,000 gTLD domains under management. That’s a far cry from its peak of 3.1 million just under a year ago.
Seller Melvin, according to the press release, “has decided to pursue other interests outside of the domain name industry”.
It appears he left his COO job at Famous Four some time last year, and then sued Roache and CEO Geir Rasmussen (also an AlpNames investor) over a financial matter. Previous attempts to buy him out were rebuffed.
Last October, the Gibraltar court ruled that the defendants has supplied the court with “forged documents” in the form of inaccurately dated invoices between the registry and AlpNames.
The pair insisted to the court that the documents were an honest mistake and their lawyer told DI that there was no “forgery” in the usual sense of the word.
But it appears that Melvin’s split from the companies was less than friendly and the £3.9 million buyout should probably be viewed in that light.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, alpnames, Famous Four Media, lawsuit, new gTLDs

Why are you doing that Whois search? DENIC wants to know

In a taste of what might be coming under EU privacy legislation, DENIC wants you to jump through some new hoops before it lets you see Whois data.
When doing a Whois query on its web site today, the German ccTLD registry first asks you to answer the question: “How do you justify your legitimate interest in accessing the whois data?”
It’s a multiple-choice question, with an extra field for typing in your reasons for doing the query.
Possible answers include “because you think that the use of the domain raises a legal problem”, which appears to be for trademark lawyers, and “because you want to collect information about the domain holder for business purposes”, which appears to be for domainers.

There’s no wrong answer that will deny you access to the Whois record you want to see, but users are warned that their use of Whois data is only to be for “legitimate purposes”, under pain of legal action.
A DENIC spokesperson told DI that the new system was introduced today “for statistical reasons”
“Its aim is just to get a better idea of the DENIC whois usage pattern and of the extent to which different user groups are utilising the extended service,” she said.
The move should be viewed in the context of the incoming General Data Protection Regulation, an EU privacy law that becomes fully implemented in May this year.
While there’s been a lot of focus on how this will effect ICANN and its harem of contracted gTLDs, it’s easy to forget that it affects ccTLDs just as much.
By conducting this mandatory survey of real Whois users, DENIC will presumably be able to gather some useful data that will inform how it stays GDPR-compliant after May.

2 Comments Tagged: denic, gdpr, privacy, whois

dotgay lawyer insists it is gay enough for .gay gTLD

What do Airbnb, the Stonewall riots and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting have in common?
They’re all cited in a lengthy, somewhat compelling memo from a Yale law professor in support of dotgay LLC’s argument that it should be allowed to proceed with its .gay gTLD application unopposed by rival applicants.
The document (pdf), written by William Eskridge, who has decades of publications on gay rights under his belt, argues that dotgay’s Community Priority Evaluation and the subsequent review of that evaluation were both flawed.
At the crux of the dispute is whether the word “gay” can also be used to describe people who are transgender, intersex, and “allied” straight — dotgay says it can, but the Economist Intelligence Unit, which carried out the CPE, disagreed.
dotgay scored 10 out of 16 points on its CPE, four shy of a passing grade. An acceptance of dotgay’s definition of the “gay” community could have added 1 to 4 extra points to its score.
The company also lost a point due to an objection from a gay community center, despite otherwise broad support from gay-oriented organizations.
Eskridge spends quite a lot of time on the history of the word “gay”, from Gertrude Stein and Cary Grant using it as a wink-wink code-word in less-tolerant times, via the 1969 Stonewall riots, to today’s use in the media.
The argument gets a bit grisly when it is pointed out that some of the 49 people killed in the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida — routinely described as a “gay” club in the media — were either transgender or straight.

My research associates and I read dozens of press and Internet accounts of this then-unprecedented mass assault by a single person on American soil. Almost all of them described Pulse as a “gay bar,” the situs for the gay community. But, like the Stonewall thirty-seven years earlier, Pulse was a “gay bar” and a “gay community” that included lesbians, bisexual men and women, transgender persons, queer persons, and allies, as well as many gay men.

Eskridge argues that EIU erred by applying an overly strict definition of the applied-for string with dotgay, but not with successful community applicants for other strings.
For example, he argues, a manufacturer of facial scrubs would qualify for a “.spa” domain, and Airbnb and the Orient Express train line would qualify for “.hotel” domains under that applicant’s definition of its community, even though it could be argued that they do not fit into the narrow categories of “spas” and “hotels”.
Similarly, a transgender person may not consider themselves “gay” and a straight person certainly would not, but both might feel a part of the broader “gay community” when they get shot at a gay nightclub.
It’s an unpleasant way to frame the argument, but in my view it’s compelling nevertheless.
Eskridge also thinks that dotgay should have picked up an extra point or two in the part of the CPE dealing with community support.
It dropped one point there because the Q Center, a community center for LGBTQ people in Portland, Oregon, sent a letter objecting to the dotgay application (an objection apparently later revoked, then reinstated).
Eskridge spend some time questioning the Q Center’s bona fides as a big-enough organization to warrant costing dotgay a point, noting that it was the only member of a 200-strong umbrella organization, CenterLink, to object. CenterLink itself backed the bid.
He then goes on to cite articles seemingly showing that Q Center was in the midst of some kind of liberal paranoia meltdown — accused of racial insensibility and “transphobia” — and allegations of mismanagement at about the same time as it was objecting to dotgay’s application.
He also insinuates that Q’s base in Portland is suspicious because it’s also where rival applicant Top Level Design is based.
In summary, Eskridge reckons the EIU CPE and FTI Consulting’s subsequent investigation were both flimsy in their research, unfairly applying criteria to .gay that they did not apply to other strings, and that dotgay should have picked up enough points to pass the CPE.
It’s important to remember that this is not a case of ICANN getting decide whether the gTLD .gay gets to exist — it’s going to exist one way or the other — but rather whether the winning registry is selected by auction or not.
If dotgay wins either by getting another CPE or winning the auction then .gay will be restricted to only vetted members of the “gay” community. This could mean less homophobic abuse in .gay domains but probably also less opportunity for self expression.
If it goes to Top Level Design, MMX or Donuts, it will be open to all comers. That could increase cyber-bulling with .gay domains, but would remove barriers to entry to those who would otherwise be excluded from registering a domain.
ICANN has had .gay on hold for years while the dispute over the CPE has worked itself out, and it now has a piece of paper from FTI declaring the result hunky-dory. I doubt there’s any appetite to reopen old wounds.
My feeling is that we’re looking at an auction here.

5 Comments Tagged: .gay, community, cpe, donuts, dotgay, eiu, fti, ICANN, mmx, top level design