auDA explains secretive new regime in bid to save chair

auDA has explained why it has refused to put controversial new policies to a vote, as it recommended that members vote to save the job of chairman Stuart Benjamin.
In a letter to members published this week, the .au ccTLD administrator said it was not legally obliged to allow members to vote on its directors’ decisions to stop publishing their meeting minutes and to gag members from bad-mouthing auDA in the press.
As we reported earlier in the week, a group of domainers and others had signed a petition calling for four resolutions to be put to a vote of auDA’s members (largely domainers and registrars), but auDA only accepted one of them.
That resolution was to fire Benjamin. Members will vote July 31.
The new letter (pdf) seeks to explain why the other three resolutions were rejected.
The campaigners, organized by domainer/blogger Ned O’Meara at Grumpy.com.au, had demanded that auDA reverse its new policy of not publishing the minutes of its board meetings.
In response, auDA stated that it is under no legal obligation under Aussie corporation law or its own constitution to publish minutes and therefore under no obligation to put this policy to a member vote.
It did, however, agree to reinstate previously published and deleted minutes of meetings up to February 2017.
The Grumpy gang also wanted auDA to put is new member code of conduct, apparently unilaterally imposed by its board this May, to a member vote.
The code of conduct contains some innocuous policies about having a zero tolerance for members who abuse and harass auDA staff, but it also prevents members from saying bad things about the organization in public.
Members must agree:

In any forum, including in the media, where acting as an auDA member or identifiable as an auDA member, I will conduct myself in a manner that will not bring the organisation, Directors or staff, into disrepute.

This basically would prevent any member from criticizing auDA when talking to a journalist, under pain of having their membership suspended or revoked. Clearly uncool.
In auDA’s new letter, CEO Cameron Boardman explains that the ability of the board to suspend memberships has been removed from the policy, in response to feedback. Memberships can still be revoked by the board, however.
This U-turn appears to be a legal technicality designed to ensure that the policy does not change the organization’s constitution — which allows the board to revoke but not suspend memberships — and therefore does not need to be put to a member vote.
Finally, the Grumpy coalition had asked for auDa’s decision to create its own in-house registry — and to stop outsourcing its back-end to Neustar — to be put to a vote.
Boardman’s letter says that this decision was “a matter of management exclusively vested in the directors” and therefore legally not something it has to put out for member approval.
O’Meara and company were given the chance to recant on their fourth resolution — that Benjamin be fired — and apparently had indicated initially that they wished to do so.
However, they were so appalled by Boardman’s letter than they decided to go ahead with it anyway.
auDA’s recommendation that Benjamin keeps his job can be read in full here.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, grumpy.com.au, neustar

Second-level .ke domains go on sale this month

Kenya has become the latest ccTLD to jump on the second-level domain bandwagon.
From this month, registrants will be able to purchase example.ke, rather than having to select from third-level domains such as example.co.ke or example.or.ke, according to the registry.

We have introduced Second Level .Ke Domain name space, Roll out date 23 rd July 2017. Secure yours early enough .Be part of #dotke #sldKe pic.twitter.com/6rFZrXIc2K

— KeNIC (@KenicTLD) June 29, 2017

KeNIC becomes the latest ccTLD registry to give customers the SLD option after the UK, New Zealand and Australia, which all backpedaled historic 3LD-only policies in order to remain relevant in an increasingly crowded TLD market.
Unlike previous launches, existing 3LD .ke registrants do not appear to have first right of refusal for the matching SLD, judging by the new policy (pdf).
The launch will begin July 23 with a 30-day sunrise period for trademark owners. This will be followed by a landrush period of 30 days.
Currently, pricing for co.ke domains in Kenyan shillings is in the same ballpark as the US dollar cost of a .com domain.
There are reportedly around 62,000 .ke domains currently registered.

5 Comments Tagged: .ke, cctlds, kenic, second-level

Billionaire Elon Musk reacquired x.com

Billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal founder Elon Musk has reacquired the domain name x.com for an undisclosed sum.
X.com was the domain he acquired in 1999 and originally used for PayPal, before its 2001 rebrand.
Musk, who currently runs private space travel trailblazer SpaceX, confirmed the purchase in a tweet today:

Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back https://t.co/bOUOejO16Y! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2017

The deal was first spotted by domainer/blogger Elliot Silver, who noticed the Whois change.
Musk also seemed to say in a subsequent tweet that he had originally bought x.com back from its original owner in 1999 for stock in the nascent company, which 18 years later would presumably be worth an absolute fortune.

It was a tough negotiation, but they seemed like good guys. I hope they kept the stock. Would be worth a lot today.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2017

While the price of the 2017 purchase was not disclosed, one has to assume it would be worth millions; pocket change to a man reportedly worth over $15 billion today.

2 Comments Tagged: elon musk, paypal, spacex, x.com

Domainers want the head of auDA’s chair

Disgruntled domainers have managed to arrange for a vote on whether auDA chair Stuart Benjamin should be fired.
auDA, the .au ccTLD administrator, has been under fire for many months from registrants who believe the organization is being managed in an increasingly erratic and secretive manner.
Now, a campaign and petition at Grumpy.com.au, run by Domainer.com.au publisher Ned O’Meara, has led to auDA calling a special meeting July 31 with a single resolution on the agenda:

That Stuart Benjamin be removed as a director of the Company with immediate effect.

Benjamin will therefore lose his job with simple majority votes of both classes of auDA members — “supply” class, meaning registrars, and “demand” class, meaning registrants.
O’Meara blogged yesterday that he believes there is “a slightly less than even chance” of the resolution being carried due to the possible lack of votes from supply class members.
But auDA rejected as legally “invalid” three additional resolutions that had been proposed.
Grumpy members had also wanted auDA to restore all of its board’s meeting minutes that were inexplicably deleted from the organization’s web site.
They’d wanted a recently instituted member code of conduct to be scrapped, rewritten, and then put to members for a vote.
The code of conduct bans “harassment” and “bullying” of auDA staff, but it also prevents members from talking to the media about auDA in disparaging terms.
Finally, they’d also wanted auDA to abandon its plan to build an in-house registry infrastructure (replacing current provider Neustar) without first putting the plan to a member vote.
But all of these resolutions have been taken off the table on the basis of unspecified “legal advice” provided to auDA.
According to O’Meara and others, dissatisfaction with the organization has been brewing for some time, ever since late 2015 when Benjamin was brought in as a “demand” class director and appointed chair, only to be quickly dismissed and immediately reinstated as an “independent” director and reappointed chair.
In March 2016, 16-year CEO Chris Disspain was fired and replaced by Cameron Boardman.
I’m told auDa has been hemorrhaging staff for months — 10 of its 13 employees have apparently left the organization this year.

3 Comments Tagged: .au, auda, cctlds, grumpy.com.au

ICANN expects to lose 750 registrars in the next year

ICANN is predicting that about 750 accredited registrars will close over the next 12 months due to the over-saturation of the drop-catching market.
ICANN VP Cyrus Namazi made the estimate while explaining ICANN’s fiscal 2018 budget, which is where the projection originated, at the organization’s public meeting in South Africa last week.
He said that ICANN ended its fiscal 2017 last week with 2,989 accredited registrars, but that ICANN expects to lose about 250 per quarter starting from October until this time next year.
These almost 3,000 registrars belong to about 400 registrar families, he said.
By my estimate, roughly two thirds of the registrars are shell accreditations under the ownership of just three companies — Web.com (Namejet and SnapNames), Pheenix, and TurnCommerce (DropCatch.com).
These companies lay out millions of dollars on accreditation fees in order to game ICANN rules and get more connections to registries — mainly Verisign’s .com.
More connections gives them a greater chance of quickly registering potentially valuable domains milliseconds after they are deleted. Drop-catching, in other words.
But Namazi indicated that ICANN’s cautious “best estimate” is that there’s not enough good stuff dropping to justify the number of accreditations these three companies own.
“With the model we have, I believe at the moment the total available market for these sought-after domains that these multifamily registrars are after is not able to withstand the thousands of accreditations that are there,” he said. “Each accreditation costs quite a bit of money.”
Having a registrar accreditation costs $4,000 a year, not including ICANN’s variable and transaction fees.
“We think the market has probably gone beyond what the available market is,” he said.
He cautioned that the situation was “fluid” and that ICANN was keeping an eye on it because these accreditations fees have become material to its budget in the last few years.
If the three drop-catchers do start dumping registrars, it would reveal an extremely short shelf life for their accreditations.
Pheenix upped its registrar count by 300 and DropCatch added 500 to its already huge stable as recently as December 2016.

6 Comments Tagged: drop catching, dropcatch.com, ICANN, namejet, pheenix, snapnames, turncommerce, web.com

.blog renewal prices will not go up, registry promises

Knock Knock Whois There, the .blog registry, has promised not to raise its wholesale fees on existing registrations.
The company, which is affiliated with WordPress, seems to have made the move in response to ongoing registrar discomfort following Uniregistry’s plan to significant raise the price of several of its new gTLDs (which has since been backpedaled).
The promise has been baked into the Registry-Registrar Agreement under which all of its registrars can sell .blog names.
The new RRA reads (with the new text in italics):

5.1.1. Registrar agrees to pay Registry Operator or its designee in accordance with the fee schedule set forth in Exhibit A for initial and renewal registrations and other services provided by Registry Operator to Registrar (collectively, “Fees”). Registry Operator reserves the right, from time to time, to modify the Fees in a manner consistent with ICANN policies and Registry Policies. However, once a domain is registered, Registry Operator will not modify the Renewal Fee of that domain.

This of course leaves the door open for KKWT to increase the price of a new registration, but it seems renewal prices are frozen.
I believe the current wholesale .blog fee starts at $16 per year.
The new RRA also adds ICANN-mandated language concerning the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy and a clarification about registrar legal indemnifications, KKWT said.

6 Comments Tagged: .blog, automattic, kkwt, knock knock whois there, prices, wordpress

ICANN shuffles regional bosses, drops “hub” concept

ICANN has made a couple of changes to its senior management team and abandoned the Chehade-era concept of “hub” offices.
Rather than having three offices it calls “hubs” in different parts of the world — Los Angeles, Istanbul and Singapore — it will now have five of what it calls “regional offices”.
As well as the three former hubs, one will be in Brussels, Belgium and the other in Montevideo, Uruguay.
A few vice presidents are being shuffled around to head up each of these offices.
Senior policy VP David Olive is being replaced as managing director of the Istanbul office by Nick Tomasso, who’s also VP in charge of ICANN’s public meetings. Olive will carry on in his VP role, but back in Washington DC, from August.
Fellow policy VP and veteran GAC relations guy Olof Nordling is retiring from ICANN at the end of the July. His role as MD of the Brussels office will be filled by Jean-Jacques Sahel, VP of stakeholder engagement for Europe.
Rodrigo de la Parra, VP of stakeholder engagement for the Latin America region, will be MD of the Montevideo office. Jia-Rong Low runs the Singapore office. ICANN CEO Goran Marby of course is top dog in LA.
The difference in nomenclature — “hub” versus “regional office” — looks to me like it’s quite minor.
Former CEO Fadi Chehade had early on in his stint at ICANN professed a desire to pursue a strategy of aggressive internationalization, with hub offices having equal importance, but I don’t think the idea ever really took off to the extent he expected and he didn’t stick around long enough to see it through.
In addition, the IANA transition last year, which separated ICANN from its US government oversight, pretty much carved ICANN’s California roots into stone for the time being.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

.net price increases approved

Verisign has been given the right to continue to raise the wholesale price of .net domains.
It now seems likely the price charged to registrars will top $15 by 2023.
ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend approved the renewal of the .net Registry Agreement, which gives Verisign the right increase its prices by 10% per year for the six years of the contract.
Assuming the company exercises all six options — and there’s no reason to assume it will not — the price of a .net would be $15.27 by the time the contract expires, $0.75 of which would be paid to ICANN in fees.
There was some negative public comment (pdf) about the increases, largely from domainers and those representing domainers, but the ICANN board saw nothing to persuade it to change the terms of the contract.
In notes appended to its resolution, the board stated:

the Board understands that the current price cap provisions in Verisign’s Registry Agreements, including in the .NET Registry Agreement, evolved historically to address various market factors in cooperation with constituencies beyond ICANN including the Department of Commerce. During the negotiations for the renewal, Verisign did not request to alter the pricing cap provisions, the parties did not negotiate these provisions and the provisions remain changed from the previous agreement. The historical 10% price cap was arguably included to allow the Registry Operator to increase prices to account for inflation and increased costs/investments and to take into account other market forces but were not dictated solely by ICANN.

(I assume the word “changed” in that quote should have read “unchanged”.)
Unlike contract renewals for other pre-2012 gTLDs, the .net contract does not include any of the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms, such as the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy.
ICANN explained this disparity by saying these mechanisms are not consensus policies and that it has no right to impose them on legacy gTLD registry operators.

1 Comment Tagged: .net, ICANN, pricing, verisign

India to have SIXTEEN ccTLDs

While most countries are content to operate using a single ccTLD, India is to up its count to an unprecedented 16.
It already has eight, but ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend approved the delegation of an additional eight.
The new ccTLDs, which have yet to hit the root, are .ಭಾರತ, .ഭാരതം, .ভাৰত, .ଭାରତ, .بارت, .भारतम्, .भारोत, and .ڀارت.
If Google Translate and Wikipedia can be trusted, these words all mean “India” in, respectively, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia, Arabic, Nepali, Hindi and Sindhi.
They were all approved under ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast Track program and will not operate under ICANN contract.
India already has seven internationalized domain name versions of its ccTLD in seven other scripts, along with its vanilla ASCII .in.
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) will be ccTLD manager for the whole lot.
India may have as many as 122 languages, according to Wikipedia, with 30 spoken by more than a million people.

6 Comments Tagged: .بارت, .ڀارت, .भारतम्, .भारोत, .ভাৰত, .ଭାରତ, .ಭಾರತ, .ഭാരതം, cctlds, ICANN, idns, nixi

ICANN heading to Japan and Canada in 2019

ICANN has named two of the host cities for its 2019 public meetings.
The community will descend upon Kobe, Japan in March 2019 for the first meeting of the year and will head to Montreal, Canada, for the annual general meeting in November.
Both locations were approved by the ICANN board of directors at a meeting this weekend.
The location of the middle “policy forum” meeting for 2019 has not yet been identified.
ICANN is currently meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. Later this year it will convene in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Spanish speakers can rejoice next year, when the locations, in order, are Barcelona, Panama City and San Juan (the Puerto Rican one).

Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 59, johannesburg, kobe, montreal