Nominet admits membership fees mistake

Nominet has told DI it made an honest mistake when it made claims about its historical membership fees, after a pressure campaign accused the .uk registry of “misleading” its members.

The company is currently holding a public consultation on sweeping revisions to its Articles of Association, but the WeightedVoting.uk campaign, led by lawyer Jim Davies, reckons that Nominet has been violating its current Articles for years.

WeightedVoting supporters believe Nominet has been unlawfully receiving millions of pounds of membership fees for the last 25 years. This week, Davies accused the company’s leadership of either being ignorant of Nominet’s own history or “deliberately misleading” members by claiming it “has always had a flat membership fee for all Members”.

Today, about 2,500 members pay a £500 joining fee and annual renewals of £100. Their voting rights are calculated based on how many domains under management they have, using a formula so complex even Nominet sometimes gets it wrong.

The system, while it caps the amount of influence any one member may have, means that the larger registrars such as GoDaddy and Tucows have more votes when it comes to things like electing directors.

Last year, Davies, with the backing of a KC and other members, claimed that this system was not envisaged under Nominet’s Articles of Association, which date back to 1996, and that collecting a flat membership fee was therefore illegal, which Nominet has denied.

WeightedVoting claims Nominet is instead supposed to have a tiered membership system where members get more votes by paying higher membership fees. An archived page from Nominet’s web site seems to support this, but Nominet chair Andy Green allegedly told members recently that this system was never actually implememnted.

“Tiered subscriptions were clearly intended by those who established Nominet and that is reflected in the Articles,” Davies wrote yesterday. “Those Articles have not been followed since 1997. Nominet is breaking the law by doing so. It also has no power to charge subscriptions at present”

Now Davies says members have found an old Usenet* post from 1996 in which a member of the fledgling registry explains how his company, pioneering dial-up ISP Demon Internet, had just paid the maximum £5,000 for 10 votes.

Presented with this new evidence, a Nominet spokesperson told DI:

Members pointed out that we made a mistake in a document supporting the consultation to update our articles of association, as we bring them in line with current practice.

We initially believed that tiered membership fees had never been implemented by Nominet. It has been our long-standing practice to charge a flat fee for all members regardless of their size. Having been made aware that some members paid more in the very early days – from incorporation in 1996 to 1997 – we are correcting the document. Our data retention policies mean that we do not have records of invoices from so long ago. This was an error, and not an attempt to mislead anybody.

We recognise our articles of association are complex and in need of updating, hence the very process to get members involved in this consultation.

Iain Mitchell KC, who wrote a legal opinion for WeightedVoting, reckons Nominet could be on the hook for £1.5 million if it is forced to refund fees, with statutes of limitations limiting liability to the last six years.

(*For the kids… Usenet is a decentralized system of text discussion groups that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Think Reddit, but made of glowing green text on monochrome Unix terminals like in The Matrix or something. It still exists, but the learning curve required to use it probably isn’t worth the effort.)

Comment Tagged: .uk, nominet, weightedvoting.uk

Government to regulate UK-related domain names

The UK government is to trigger a law that would allow it to take control of .uk, .wales, .cymru, .scot and .london if their registries get thoroughly abused and they fail to do anything about it.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said today it is to activate (or “commence”) the parts of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 that give it the power to appoint a new manager for any “UK-related” TLDs.

DSIT would only be able to exercise these powers if the registry in question had let DNS abuse or cybersquatting run amok and failed to follow government orders to fix it. I don’t believe any of the affected registries are currently in such a state.

The government has now launched a consultation, running until the end of August, to get industry and public feedback on its definitions of abuse and what it called “unfair domain use”, meaning cybersquatting.

Nominet, which runs .uk, .wales and .cymru, said in a statement:

The proposed prescribed requirements are consistent with Nominet’s current voluntary procedures, which Government has made clear it believes Nominet operates in a perfectly satisfactory manner. As the Government has had a reserve power to “step in” ever since the DEA was introduced, the purpose of the new provisions is to give Government a formal mechanism to do so, should it ever be required. Our understanding is that Government is enacting these provisions now to ensure the UK meets international best practice on governance of country code top-level domains in line with key global trading partners and future global trading commitments.

Based on my first read, I expect registries and registrars will think it looks generally pretty palatable. It seems DSIT has followed ICANN and the industry’s lead in terms of what qualifies as abuse, and Nominet said in a statement tonight that all three affected registries have been meeting with DSIT to craft the consultation.

Domain investors may take issue with the precise wording of the cybersquatting definition, however.

The definitions of abuse cover the industry standard five bases: malware, phishing, botnets, pharming and spam (insofar as it facilitates any of the other four) and cybersquatting is defined thus:

the pre-emptive, bad faith registration of trade marks as domain names by third parties who do not possess rights in such names. This includes ‘typosquatting’, when an end user takes advantage of common misspellings made by Internet users who are looking for a particular site or a particular provider of goods or services, in order to obtain some benefit.

Domainers will notice the document talks about “bad faith registration”, whereas UDRP talks about bad faith “registration and use”, which is sometimes an important edge-case distinction in cybersquatting disputes. Nominet’s DRS uses bad faith registration “or” use.

Where the consultation gets vague, and the potential for debate arises, is when it talks in general, high-level terms about how dispute resolution procedures should be designed.

Failure to deal with child sexual abuse material, as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in an affected TLD could also result in the government appointing a new registry.

The four gTLDs affected by the legislation all are considered geographic under ICANN rules and had to secure local government support when they applied for their strings. ICANN has a contractual right to terminate them if that government says so.

After the consultation is complete, DSIT intends to make its definitions law through secondary legislation.

This post was updated shortly after publication to add Nominet comments.

Comment Tagged: .cymru, .london, .wales, abuse, cybersquatting, dsit, nominet

Domainer objects to Epik’s acquisition over Masterbucks collapse

A Los Angeles film production company and its domainer CEO have objected to Epik’s request to transfer its ICANN accreditation from the discredited former registrar Epik Inc to mystery new registrar Epik LLC.

Todd Ryan, CEO of American Business Capital Corporation and a domain investor, has written to ICANN to say that the transfer should be blocked until “all outstanding debts” are paid.

He’s particularly concerned with customers that may have been left out of pocket by Masterbucks, the payments service that has been described as a PayPal clone or simply a jumped-up Epik store credit system.

“The financial losses incurred by customers who utilized Masterbucks, a payment method provided by Epik registrar, are a matter of significant importance,” Ryan wrote.

“It is crucial that ICANN, as the governing body responsible for overseeing the domain registration industry, takes decisive action to ensure that all debts owed to these affected customers are satisfactorily resolved prior to any transfer of registrar accreditation,” he wrote.

Masterbucks was at the center of the old Epik’s financial mismanagement woes, with domainers beginning to complain that they couldn’t withdraw their funds almost a year ago.

Ryan says he’s a member of ICANN’s Business Constituency but does not say in his letter whether he’s owed money.

It’s not clear who currently owns the Masterbucks liabilities. The service was not believed to be part of the deal that saw the Epik registrar acquired from the Inc to the LLC last month.

ICANN’s head of compliance has written that it could take months for the Epik accreditation transfer to be approved (or otherwise).

Ryan also demands that ICANN disclose the identity of Epik LLC’s owners, which is still a bit of a mystery.

Comment Tagged: epik, ICANN, masterbucks

Freenom is losing another ccTLD after collecting military emails

Controversial free domains provider is reportedly losing its contract to manage Mali’s ccTLD, its second loss in as many months.

The Financial Times quoted Freenom CEO Joost Zuurbier as saying a 10-year-deal with Mali’s government to run .ml was due to expire yesterday. I reported last month that the deal looked like it was ending.

Gabon has also cancelled its contract with Freenom, saying it was bringing the country into disrepute due to the high levels of spam and abuse associated with .ga domains.

And now it seems that along with running a stable of spam-friendly ccTLDs for a decade, Freenom has also vacuumed up over a hundred thousand emails destined for the US military, which uses the highly restricted .mil TLD.

Zuurbier told the FT that he set up email accounts at navy.ml and army.ml domains shortly after taking over .ml in 2013, and quickly started receiving emails intended for American military personnel, before shutting the accounts down.

While he said nothing was marked confidential, the extensive list of documents he reportedly received, according to the FT, appears to frequently include things you wouldn’t want your enemy to read, such as medical data and financial records.

Now that .ml is reverting to Mali government control, there’s a risk this kind of information could fall into enemy hands, the FT reported. Mali is allied to Russia, which at this point in history is no friend of the US.

Zuurbier said he’s been pestering the US government and military for the last 10 years to get them to do something about the problem. The military told the FT it blocks outgoing emails to .ml domains from its own network. There’s presumably little it can do about emails sent from other domains.

Freenom got its ICANN registrar accreditation suspended in 2015 for cybersquatting its competitors. The company is also being sued for cybersquatting by Facebook owner Meta.

It’s not been possible to register new domains in any of the company’s ccTLD since last year.

Comment Tagged: .mil, .ml, freenom, ga

DENIC kicks out NCC as ICANN’s sole escrow agent

DENIC has won the contract to be the sole supplier of registrar data escrow services for ICANN, the Org has announced.

The German registry is replacing NCC Group, which acquired Iron Mountain’s escrow business two years ago. Iron Mountain has been ICANN’s chosen escrow agent since it started requiring registrars to escrow registrant data in 2007 in the wake of the RegisterFly scandal.

Under ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars have to deposit this data either daily or weekly, depending on how many domains under management they have, to mitigate the risk of domains being lost.

Registrars can choose to use ICANN’s chosen escrow agent, in which case ICANN pays, or they can choose another from an approved list, in which case the registrar pays.

Naturally enough, the vast majority of registrars choose to go with the free option. DENIC has been on the approved list since 2017. There are also one Russian and three Chinese companies approved to provide these services.

The change of contractor means escrow will now be provided by a EU-based company for the first time. UK-based NCC’s contract was via its US subsidiary, NCC Group Software Resilience (NA) LLC. ICANN said DENIC has opened up facilities in North America.

ICANN said NCC “will no longer be accepting new registrars with immediate effect and will no longer provide [Registrar Data Escrow] services starting 1 November 2024”, so registrars have some breathing space to migrate.

The deal was worth $800,000 a year to NCC, according to ICANN’s latest tax forms. One assumes DENIC is doing it cheaper.

1 Comment Tagged: denic, escrow, ICANN, iron mountain, ncc

ICANN takes over country’s ccTLD after Hall of Famer’s death

ICANN has assumed temporary ownership of .lb, the ccTLD for Lebanon, after the death of the man who founded the registry and managed it for 30 years.

IANA, in an unprecedented move, has made itself the “caretaker” sponsor and admin contact for .lb, according to the official record, which changed on Thursday.

The Org replaces the American University in Beirut, which as the name suggests is an American-owned university in Beirut, as sponsor and Lebanese Domain Registry as the admin.

It appears that AUB has not been involved with running .lb for a few years, having terminated its relationship with LBDR in 2020, and has told IANA that it is no longer the ccTLD’s sponsor.

AUB’s disassociation with LBDR, which appears to have been quite acrimonious, forced the registry to move onto CoCCA’s managed registry platform, where it still sits today.

Nabil Bukhalid, LBDR’s founder and a member of ISOC’s Internet Hall of Fame, had been trying to secure a permanent home for .lb for years, according to a history of the domain on the registry’s web site.

But he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while on vacation in January this year, leaving Lebanon’s domain in a bit of a limbo.

Kim Davies, head of IANA, revealed in a letter posted today (pdf) that .lb has been managed by Bukhalid’s “associates” for the last six months.

He said ICANN has approved a new “caretaker” role for IANA, and that the designation “will signal that there is an extraordinary and temporary operational situation”.

“IANA will continue to work with Bukhalid’s known associates to ensure the ongoing operation of the domain, until such time as a qualified successor is identified through a normal ccTLD transfer request process, at which time the caretaker designation will be removed,” he wrote.

.lb is believed to have fewer than 5,000 domains under management.

Bukhalid’s struggle to secure a successor played out against the backdrop of a Lebanese government that has far more important things to worry about. The country has been in a deep financial crisis since 2019, a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a revolution, and one of the largest accidental non-nuclear explosions in human history.

The economic crisis was such that Bukhalid was forced to incorporate LBDR in Delaware a couple years back.

“We are establishing this designation out of an operational necessity. There appear to be no specific policies that govern a situation where the existing designated ccTLD manager no longer performs its role but there is no obvious successor,” Davies wrote.

He suggested that the ccNSO may want to consider creating a policy for this kind of scenario.

Similar situations could occur in future, I reckon, if increasingly grey and wrinkly Postel-era “Just Some Guy” ccTLD sponsors don’t make arrangements for their heirs.

Davies said in his letter that the “caretaker” designation has been used once before, for Libya’s .ly in 2004. But it’s the first time IANA has been a caretaker, and the Libya experiment went spectacularly badly.

Comment Tagged: .lb, aub, cctlds, iana, ICANN, lbdr, ly, redelegation

ICANN Ombudsman quits

Herb Waye has quit as ICANN’s independent Ombudsman, according to ICANN.

His last day will be September 30 and ICANN is already looking for his replacement, the Org said in a statement.

While the announcement includes a glowing quote from board chair Tripti Sinha it does not contain a quote from Waye and no reason was given for his departure.

Waye has been in the Ombudsman’s office for 16 years, the last seven as the Ombudsman itself.

The Ombudsman is a structurally independent office that deals with issues of fairness within the ICANN community. It’s one way community members can complain about each other and ICANN itself.

Most the work is handled confidentially, so it’s difficult to say exactly what it is the Ombudsman does for their money, but the last few years’ Ombudsman annual reports show the office typically receives a couple hundred complaints a year, maybe a couple dozen of which are actually within its jurisdiction.

Complaints cover issues such as abusive discourse, harassment, and contractual compliance.

Some of the most visible Ombudsman work has related to sexual harassment complaints at ICANN public meetings. Some female community members have stated that they would feel uncomfortable reporting sexual harassment to a male Ombudsman.

I’d be very surprised if the next Ombudsman is not a woman.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, Ombudsman

ICA baffled by plan to outlaw domaining in India

The Internet Commerce Association isn’t happy about a plan to ban domain investing in India’s .in domain, saying it will “destroy a valuable and thriving secondary market”.

NIXI, the government-overseen ccTLD registry, already has a policy in its Registrar Accreditation Agreement that bans registrars from “squatting, grabbing, hoarding, infringement, auctioning, drop catch or selling of the .IN domain names at a exceptionally higher price than the published MRP”.

The registry says that registrars are using registrants as proxies to get around this rule, and is now proposing to extend the ban from registrars to registrants as well.

It’s the latest in a series of strange, Draconian policy pronouncements from NIXI, which increasingly gives the impression of being ruled by fiat. Last year, it banned people from buying more than two domains at once.

The ICA, which represents the interests of domainers, has responded to the policy proposal with 10 arguments against it, largely designed to shame NIXI for acting against the Indian government’s pro-market stance, suggesting the change may well be illegal, and pointing out it is probably shooting itself in both feet at once, financially speaking.

On that last point, ICA general counsel Zak Muscovitch wrote:

NIXI will potentially face a dramatic loss of revenue as a result of its purported policy change as affected registrants will be compelled to drop their domain names and thereby not remit any renewal fees or fees for new registrations. In effect, NIXI will be going backwards in time by greatly reducing the number of registrations and its associated revenue thereby possibly having to rely upon new government funding for its operations

The number of affected registrations could potentially be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. You would be well advised to conduct a study to determine the volume of affected registrations prior to making such a monumental decision. After changing the policy, you will likely no longer be “one of the Fastest Growing Domain in the Asia Pacific”, but rather the opposite.

While NIXI does not regularly publish its numbers, it is believed to have well over three million domains under management. It’s a big ccTLD, but relatively small compared to India’s population of 1.4 billion. The only other country with a comparable population, China, has about 20 million .cn domains.

Comment Tagged: ica, nixi

No $8 million discount for dot-brands, says ICANN

ICANN has rejected a request for a 80% discount on registry fees paid by dot-brand gTLD operators.

The Brand Registry Group had asked ICANN in May for a reduction in the annual fixed fee from $25,000 to $5,000, largely on the basis that they have essentially no abuse and require very little Compliance oversight.

But interim CEO Sally Costerton has now responded to “respectfully decline” the request, which would have wiped out about $8 million of ICANN’s annual budget, about 5% of its total revenue.

“The cost to support New gTLDs is not merely based on the number of domains under management or the level of abuse. Regardless of the size of the TLD, registry operators must still comply with the Registry Agreement and associated policies, and ICANN must monitor that compliance,” Costerton wrote.

Dot-brands already have lower fees because they uniformly don’t pass the 50,000 domains limit at which transactional fees kick in, she said.

There are mechanisms in the Base Registry Agreement that all amendments to be made, she said.

1 Comment Tagged: brand registry group, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs

Epik lost 125,000 domains in Q1

Epik’s domains under management total fell by over 125,000 in the first quarter, March registry transaction reports reveal.

The company had 607,891 domains in its stable at the end of March, down from 732,914 at the start of the year. The number was down 40,000 in the month, almost double the decrease of February.

Most of the decline can be blamed on transfers — it had 27,721 names go to rival registrars in March and a net transfer loss of 26,658.

Epik had its worst month for newly registered domains too. Having regularly added 10,000 to 20,000 names a month last year, in March that had dwindled to about 2,000.

The company is known to have had troubles paying the largest gTLD registries, but it’s not clear whether this had an impact on its March numbers.

Epik peaked at over 800,000 domains under management before its financial troubles started to emerge last September. Last month it was sold to a mystery buyer which has vowed to turn its fortunes around.

Comment Tagged: epik