.kids gTLD auction probably back on

Amazon, Google and a small non-profit appear to be headed to auction to fight for ownership of child-friendly new gTLDs.
ICANN last week defrosted the contention set for .kids/.kid; DotKids Foundation’s bid for .kids is no longer classified as “On-Hold”.
This means an ICANN-managed “last resort” auction is probably back on, having been cancelled last December in response to a DotKids request for reconsideration.
The RfR was thrown out by the ICANN board of directors, on the recommendation of its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, in May.
.kids and .kid are in the same contention set because DotKids fought and won a String Confusion Objection against Google’s .kid application.
It’s also directly competing with Amazon for .kids.
A last-resort auction would mean that proceeds would be deposited in a special ICANN bank account currently swollen with something like a quarter-billion dollars.

2 Comments Tagged: .kid, .kids, amazon, auction, google, ICANN, new gTLDs

Archaeologists protest “televangelist” .bible gTLD

The head of the Biblical Archaeology Society has harshly criticized .bible and ICANN for the gTLD’s restrictive registration policies.
Writing in the latest issue of its Biblical Archaeology Review, Robert Cargill said .bible is on its way to becoming “the internet’s equivalent of televangelism.”
The gTLD is operated by the American Bible Society, best known for its “Good News” translation of the book.
Under its rules, registrants can’t use a .bible domain to “encourage or contribute to disrespect for the Bible or the Bible community”, with ABS determining what constitutes disrespect.
Cargill writes that his own publication could be at risk of losing its hypothetical .bible domain for publishing fact-based articles about Biblical history.
Cargill writes:

No one “owns” the Bible, and no one should have to submit to the American Bible Society’s ill-conceived holiness code in order to register a .BIBLE domain name. ABS should not be able to deny a .BIBLE domain name because it feels a website does not revere the name of God enough—or because it dares not endorse “orthodox Christianity.” How ICANN ever allowed this is beyond belief!

He’s also pissed that archaeology.bible is a premium domain with a retail price of close to six grand for the first year.
He’s not the first scholarly, secular voice to air concerns about .bible policy.
In March, the head of the Society of Biblical Literature was also critical of what he described as ABS’s “bait and switch” gTLD application.
The registry earlier this year revised its original policy to permit Jewish people to register names, after complaints from the Anti-Defamation League, among others.

3 Comments Tagged: .bible, abs, american bible society, biblical archaeology society, ICANN, new gTLDs

.co first ccTLD to get China approval

Repurposed Colombian ccTLD .co has obtained official government approval to operate in China, according to a consultant whose client worked on the project.
Pinky Brand blogged this week that .co is the “first” foreign ccTLD to get the nod, among the raft of gTLDs that have gone down the same route over the last couple of years.
China’s own .cn and Chinese-script equivalents are of course already approved.
Under China’s policy regime, administered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, TLD registries have to set up a local presence and agree to Draconian takedown policies.
Non-approved TLDs are not permitted to have resolving domains, under the rules.
Most companies seeking Chinese approval tend to use a local proxy provider such as ZDNS, which seems to be the route taken by .co here.
.co is managed by Neustar via its Colombian subsidiary .CO Internet.

5 Comments Tagged: .co, china, miit, neustar, zdns

All Cyrillic .eu domains to be deleted

Eurid has announced that Cyrillic domain names in .eu will be deleted a year from now.
The registry said that it’s doing so to comply with the “no script mixing” recommendations for internationalized domain names, which are designed to limit the risk of homograph phishing attacks.
The deletions will kick in May 31, 2019, and only apply to names that have Cyrillic before the dot and Latin .eu after.
Cyrillic names in Eurid’s Cyrillic ccTLD .ею will not be affected.
The plan has been in place since Eurid adopted the IDNA2008 standard three years ago, but evidently not all registrants have dropped their affected names yet.
Bulgaria is the only EU member state to use Cyrillic in its national language.

Comment Tagged: .eu, .ею, cctlds, cyrillic, eurid, idns

ICANN heads to Cancun for Spring Break boondoggle

ICANN has named the three venues for its 2020 public meetings. They are Cancun, Kuala Lumpur and Hamburg.
The first meeting of the year, the so-called Community Forum, will be held March 7 to 12 at the Cancun International Convention Center.
Cancun is pretty horrific at the best of times, but the March dates place ICANN 67 in peak Spring Break — the time of year when American university students descend on Cancun by their thousands to take advantage, to excess, of Mexico’s more reasonable drinking age laws.
Don’t expect to keep your T-shirts dry.
Meeting two, the more modest Policy Forum, will see ICANN head to Malaysia, specifically the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center, from June 22 to 25. The local chapter of the Internet Society is hosting.
Finally, the AGM will be held in Hamburg, Germany, where eco, DENIC and the local city council will host at the Congress Center.
Before 2020, we still have Barcelona later this year, and Kobe, Marrakech (again) and Montreal (again) in 2019. The Panama City policy forum is going on right now.
ICANN’s rules require it to rotate its meeting locations around the five major geographic regions.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, meetings

GoDaddy signs up for basically unrestricted .travel gTLD

Donuts has started to market the now practically prehistoric and newly liberalized gTLD .travel, and it’s signed up GoDaddy to offer domains there.
The registry, which acquired .travel from former owner Tralliance in February, announced a soft relaunch on its blog last week, highlighting that GoDaddy, Name.com and Encirca are now among its registrars.
GoDaddy appears to be only new signing there — Encirca and Name.com have been carrying .travel from long before Donuts got involved and are in fact its two largest registrars.
The big daddy of the registrar space appears to have become interested after Donuts “simplified” the process of registering .travel domains. Donuts said:

Since the acquisition, Donuts has simplified the registration process, enabling registrants to stay on the registrar’s website for the entirety of the registration/checkout process. Donuts believes that this streamlined registration process will increase registrations, as compared to the previous process, which was disjointed and complex for registrants.

What this seems to translate to is: .travel is essentially an unrestricted TLD, despite being applied for in 2003’s round of “sponsored” gTLDs.
If you attempt to register a .travel domain at GoDaddy today, the only additional friction en route to the purchase button is a simple, prominent check-box asking you to confirm you are a member of the travel community.
That’s apparently enough for Donuts to say it has fulfilled the part of its ICANN contract that says it has to carry out a “review of Eligibility prior to completion of all registrations.”
Under its previous ownership, .travel required registrars to bounce their customers to the registry web site to obtain an authentication code during the registration process.
.travel names are still pretty pricey — GoDaddy was going to hit me with a bill of over $110 before I abandoned my cart, and that was just a year-one promotional price.
The gTLD peaked at 215,000 domains 10 years ago but now sits at under 18,000, having seen slight declines every month for the past five years.

Comment Tagged: .travel, donuts, godaddy, new gTLDs, sponsored

Biggest TLD handover in history happens this weekend

Australia’s ccTLD registry will be down for 36 hours this weekend as it executes the biggest back-end transition in the history of the DNS.
Starting 0800 AEST on Saturday (2200 UTC on Friday), Afilias will take over the running of .au from Neustar-owned AusRegistry, after about 16 years in the saddle.
DNS will not be affected — meaning all .au domains should continue to resolve — but there won’t be any new creates, renews, transfers or changes during the downtime.
There are over 3.1 million domains in .au, more than the 2.7 million names in the .org registry when Afilias took over that contract from Verisign in 2003.
Afilias was picked from a pool of nine candidate back-end operators last December.
auDA, the registry, will save itself AUD 9 million ($7 million) per year at least, due to the lower per-domain fee Afilias is charging.
But hardly any of that saving is going to be passed on to registrars and ultimately registrants.
Bruce Tonkin, who chaired the selection committee for auDA, told us a few months back that much of the cash will be invested in marketing.

1 Comment Tagged: .au, afilias, auda, ausregistry, neustar

Web.com to be acquired for $2 billion

Web.com is to go private in a deal valued at roughly $2 billion.
The company, which owns pioneering registrars Network Solutions and Register.com as well as SnapNames and half of NameJet, will be bought by an affiliate of Siris Capital Group, a private equity firm.
The cash, $25-a-share deal has been approved by the Web.com board but is still open to higher bids from third parties until August 5.
The offer is a 30% premium over Web.com’s 90-day average price prior to the deal’s announcement.
While Nasdaq-listed Web.com has briefly topped $26 over the last year, you’d have to go back five years to find it consistently over the $25 mark.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, network solutions, register.com, siris capital, web.com

$44 billion company is latest deadbeat gTLD registry

Indian car-making giant Tata Motors has become the latest new gTLD registry to fail to pay its ICANN fees.
According to a breach notice (pdf), $44 billion-a-year Tata hasn’t paid its $6,250 quarterly registry fee since at least November last year (though probably much earlier).
Listed on the New York Stock Exchange and elsewhere and part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, the company runs .tatamotors as a dot-brand gTLD.
The breach notice, dated 10 days ago, also says that the company is in breach of its contract for failing to publish an abuse contact on its nic.tatamotors web site, something it seems to have corrected.
.tatamotors had half a dozen domains under management at the last count and seems to have at least experimented with using the TLD for private purposes.
Tata becomes the second dot-brand registry to get a slap for non-payment this year.
Back in April, the bank Kuwait Finance House, with revenues of $700 million a year, was also told it was late paying its fees.

1 Comment Tagged: .tatamotors, breach, compliance, dot-brands, fees, ICANN, new gTLDs, tata motors

How ICANN thinks YOU could get full Whois access

With blanket public Whois access now firmly a thing of the past due to GDPR, ICANN has set the ball rolling on an accreditation system that would reopen the data doors to certain select parties.
The org yesterday published a high-level framework document for a “Unified Access Model” that could give Whois access to approved users such as police, lawyers, and even common registrants.
It contains many elements that are sure to be controversial, such as paying fees for Whois access, the right of governments to decide who gets approved, and ICANN’s right to see every single Whois query carried out under the program.
It’s basically ICANN’s attempt to frame the conversation about Whois access, outlining what it expects from community members such as registries and registrars, governments and others.
It outlines a future in which multiple “Authenticating Bodies” would hand out credentials (either directly or via referral to a central authority) to parties they deem eligible for full Whois access.
These Authenticating Bodies could include entities such as WIPO or the Trademark Clearinghouse for trademark lawyers and Interpol or Europol for law enforcement agencies.
Once suitably credentialed, Whois users would either get unexpurgated Whois access or access to only fields appropriate to their stated purpose. That’s one of many questions still open for discussion.
There could be fees levied at various stages of the process, but ICANN says there should be a study of the financial implications of the model before a decision is made.
Whois users would have to agree to a code of conduct specific to their role (cop, lawyer, registrant, etc) that would limit how they could use the data they acquire.
Additionally, registrars and registries would have to log every single Whois query and hand those logs over to ICANN for compliance and audit purposes. ICANN said:

based on initial discussions with members of the Article 29 Working Party, ICANN proposes that registry operators and registrars would be required to maintain audit logs of domain name queries for non-public WHOIS data, unless logging a particular entry is contrary to a relevant court order. The logs would be available to ICANN org for audit/compliance purposes, relevant data protection authorities, the registrant, or pursuant to a court order.

On the higher-level question of who should be given the keys to the new gates Whois — it’s calling them “Eligible User Groups” — ICANN wants to outsource the difficult decisions to either governments or, as a backstop, the ICANN community.
The proposal says: “Eligible User Groups might include intellectual property rights holders, law enforcement authorities, operational security researchers, and individual registrants.”
It wants the European Economic Area members of its Governmental Advisory Committee, and then the GAC as a whole, to “identify or facilitate identification of broad categories” of eligible groups.
ICANN’s next public meeting, ICANN 62, kicks off in Panama at the weekend, so the GAC’s next formal communique, which could address this issue, is about a week away.
ICANN also wants the GAC to help it identify potential Authenticating Bodies that would hand out credentials.
But the GAC, in its most recent communique, has already declined such a role, saying in March that it “does not envision an operational role in designing and implementing the proposed accreditation programs”.
If it sticks with that position, ICANN says it will turn to the community to have this difficult conversation.
It notes specifically the informal working group that is currently developing a “community” Accreditation & Access Model For Non-Public WHOIS Data.
This group is fairly controversial as it is perceived by some, fairly I think, as being dominated by intellectual property interests.
The group’s draft model is already in version 1.6 (pdf), and at 47 pages is much more detailed than ICANN’s proposal, but its low-traffic mailing list has almost no contracted parties on board and the IP guys are very decidedly holding the pen.
There’s also a separate draft, the Palage Differentiated Registrant Data Access Model (or “Philly Special”) (Word doc), written by consultant Michael Palage, which has received even less public discussion.
ICANN’s proposal alludes to these drafts, but it does not formally endorse either as some had feared. It does, however, provide a table (pdf) comparing its own model to the other two.
What do not get a mention are the access models already being implemented by individual registrars.
Notably, Tucows is ready to launch TieredAccess.com, a portal for would-be Whois users to obtain credentials to view Tucows-managed Whois records.
This system grants varying levels of access to “law enforcement, commercial litigation interests, and security researchers”, with law enforcement given the highest level of access, Tucows explained in a blog post yesterday.
That policy is based on the GDPR principle of “data minimization”, which is the key reason it’s currently embroiled in an ICANN lawsuit (unrelated to accreditation) in Germany.
Anyway, now that ICANN has published its own starting point proposal, it is now expected that the community will start to discuss the draft in a more formal ICANN setting. There are several sessions devoted to GDPR and Whois in Panama.
ICANN also expects to take the proposal to the European Data Protection Board, the EU committee of data protection authorities that replaced the Article 29 Working Party when GDPR kicked in last month.
However, in order for any of this to become binding on registries and registrars it will have to be baked into their contracts, which will mean it going through the regular ICANN policy development process, and it’s still not clear how much enthusiasm there is for that step happening soon.

Comment Tagged: gdpr, ICANN, privacy, tucows, whois