Amazon and Google to fight over .kids at auction

Amazon, Google and a third applicant are scheduled to fight for control of the new gTLDs .kid or .kids at auction.
It’s the first ICANN gTLD auction to be scheduled since a Verisign puppet paid $135 million for .web in July 2016.
According to ICANN documentation, .kid and .kids will go to auction January 25, 2018.
The winning bid will be added to ICANN’s quarter-billion-dollar stash of auction proceeds, rather than shared out between the applicants.
Even though two different strings are at stake, it will be a so-called “direct contention” auction, meaning only .kids or .kid will ultimately go live.
Google, the sole applicant for .kid, had filed String Confusion Objections against .kids applications from Amazon and DotKids Foundation and won both, meaning the three applications were lumped into the same contention set.
Unless DotKids has a secret sugar daddy, it seems probable that the internet will next year either get a .kid gTLD operated by Google or a .kids gTLD operated by Amazon.
DotKids had applied as a “community” application and attempted to shut out both rivals and avoid an auction by requesting a Community Priority Evaluation.
However, it comprehensively lost the CPE.
Child-friendly domain spaces have a poor track record, partly due to the extra restrictions registrants must agree to, and are unlikely to be high-volume gTLDS no matter who wins.
Neustar operated .kids.us for 10 years, following US legislation, but turned it off in 2012 after fewer than 100 web sites used the domain. It made the decision not to reintroduce it in 2015.
The Russian-language equivalent, .дети, has been live for over three years but has only around 1,000 domains in its zone file.
The .kids/.kid auction may not go ahead if the three applicants privately negotiate a deal soon, but they’ve had over a year to do so already and have apparently failed to come to an agreement.

2 Comments Tagged: .kid, .kids, amazon, auction, cpe, dotkids foundation, google, ICANN, new gTLDs, sco

ICANN chief tells industry to lawyer up as privacy law looms

The domain name industry should not rely on ICANN to protect it from incoming EU privacy law.
That’s the strong message that came out of ICANN 60 in Abu Dhabi last week, with the organization’s CEO repeatedly advising companies to seek their own legal advice on compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation.
The organization also said that it will “defer taking action” against any registrar or registry that does not live up its contractual Whois commitments, within certain limits.
“GDPR is a law. I didn’t come up with it, it didn’t come from ICANN policy, it’s the law,” Marby said during ICANN 60 in Abu Dhabi last week.
“This is the first time we’ve seen any legislation that has a direct impact on our ability to make policies,” he said.
GDPR is the EU law governing how companies treat the private information of individuals. While in force now, from May next year companies in any industry found in breach of GDPR could face millions of euros in fines.
For the domain industry, it is expected to force potentially big changes on the current Whois system. The days of all Whois contact information published freely for all to see may well be numbered.
But nobody — not even ICANN — yet knows precisely how registries and registrars are going to be able to comply with the law whilst still publishing Whois data as required by their ICANN contracts.
The latest official line from ICANN is:

At this point, we know that the GDPR will have an impact on open, publicly available WHOIS. We have no indication that abandoning existing WHOIS requirements is necessary to comply with the GDPR, but we don’t know the extent to which personal domain registration data of residents of the European Union should continue to be publicly available.

Marby told ICANNers last week that it might not be definitively known how the law applies until some EU case law has been established in the highest European courts, which could take years.
A GNSO working group and ICANN org have both commissioned legal studies by European law experts. The ICANN one, by Swedish law firm Hamilton, is rather more comprehensive and can be read here (pdf).
Even after this report, Marby said ICANN is still in “discovery” mode.
Marby encouraged the industry to not only submit their questions to ICANN, to be referred on to Hamilton for follow-up studies, but also to share whatever legal advice they have been given and are able to share.
He and others pointed out that Whois is not the only point of friction with GDPR — it’s a privacy law, not a Whois law — so registries and registrars should be studying all of their personal data collection processes for potential conflicts.
Because there is very likely going to be a clash between GDPR compliance and ICANN contract compliance, ICANN has suspended all enforcement actions against Whois violations, within certain parameters.
It said last week that: “ICANN Contractual Compliance will defer taking action against any registry or registrar for noncompliance with contractual obligations related to the handling of registration data.”
This is not ICANN saying that registries and registrars can abandon Whois altogether, the statement stresses, but they might be able to adjust their data-handling models.
Domain firms will have to show “a reasonable accommodation of existing contractual obligations and the GDPR” and will have to submit their models to ICANN for review by Hamilton.
ICANN also stressed that registries may have to undergo a Registry Services Evaluation Process review before they can deploy their new model.
The organization has already told two Dutch new gTLD registries that they must submit to an RSEP, after .amsterdam and .frl abruptly stopped publishing Whois data for private registrants recently.
General counsel John Jeffrey wrote to the registries’ lawyer (pdf) to state that an RSEP is required regardless of whether the “new registry service” was introduced to comply with local law.
“One of the underlying purposes of this policy is to ensure that a new registry service does not create and security, stability or competition concerns,” he wrote.
Jeffrey said that while Whois privacy was offered at the registry level, registrars were still publishing full contact details for the same registrants.
ICANN said last week that it will publish more detailed guidance advising registries and registrars how to avoid breach notices will be published “shortly”.

2 Comments Tagged: .amsterdam, .eu, .frl, gdpr, hamilton, ICANN, icann 69, privacy, rdap, rds, whois

Up to 20 million people could get broken internet in domain security rollover

Twenty million people losing access to parts of the internet is considered an acceptable level of collateral damage for ICANN’s forthcoming DNS root security update.
That’s one of a number of facts and figures to emerge from recent updates from the organization, explaining its decision to delay the so-called “KSK rollover” from October 11 to some time in the first quarter next year.
The rollover will see a new Key Signing Key, used as the trust anchor for all DNSSEC-signed domains, replace the seven-year-old original.
DNSSEC protects internet users and registrants from domain-based man-in-the-middle attacks. It’s considered good practice to roll keys at each level of the DNS hierarchy periodically, to reduce the risk of successful brute-force attacks.
The root KSK update will affect hundreds of millions of people who currently use DNSSEC-compatible resolvers, such as Google DNS.
ICANN delayed the rollover after it, rather fortuitously, spotted that not all of these resolvers are configured to correctly handle the change.
The number of known incompatible servers is quite small — only about 500 of the 11,982 DNSSEC-using recursive servers initially surveyed (pdf). That represents only a very small minority of the world’s internet users, as most are not currently using DNSSEC.
Subsequent ICANN research, presented by principal researcher Roy Arends at ICANN 60 last week, showed that:

• There are currently about 4.2 million DNS resolvers in the world.
• Of those, 27,084 are configured to tell the root servers which KSKs they support (currently either the KSK-2011 or KSK-2017).
• Of those, 1,631 or 6.02% do not support KSK-2017

It was only possible to survey servers that have turned on a recent update to DNS software such as BIND and Unbound, so the true number of misconfigured servers could be much higher.
Matt Larson, ICANN’s VP of research, told DI that ICANN has identified 176 organizations in 41 countries that are currently not prepared to handle the new KSK. These organizations are fairly evenly spread geographically, he said.
Since making the decision to delay the rollover, ICANN has hired a contractor to reach out to these network operators to alert them to potential problems.
ICANN’s CEO Goran Marby has also been writing to telecommunications regulators in all countries to ask for assistance.
After the rollover, people using an incompatible resolver would be unable to access DNSSEC-signed domains. Again, that’s still quite a small minority of domains — there are only about 750,000 in .com by some accounts and apparently none of the top 25 site support it.
ICANN could roll back the change if it detects that a sufficiently large number of people are negatively affected, but that number turns out to be around 20 million.
According to its published rollover plan:

Rollback of any step in the key roll process should be initiated if the measurement program indicated that a minimum of 0.5% of the estimated Internet end-user population has been negatively impacted by the change 72 hours after each change has been deployed into the root zone.

According to InternetWorldStats, there were around 3,885,567,619 internet users in the world this June. It’s very likely more people now.
So a 0.5% threshold works out to about 19 million to 20 million people worldwide.
Larson agreed that in absolute terms, it’s a big number.
“The overall message to take away from that number, I suggest, is that a problem would have to be pretty serious for us to consider rolling back,” Larson, who was not on the team that came up with the threshold, said.
“I think that’s a reasonable position considering that, in the immediate aftermath of the rollover, there are two near-immediate fixes available to any operator experiencing problems: update their systems’ trust anchors with the new key or (less desirable from my perspective but still effective) simply disable DNSSEC validation,” he said.
He added that the 0.5% level is not a hard and fast rule, and that ICANN could be flexible in the moment.
“For example, if when we roll the key, we find out there’s some critical system with a literal life or death impact that is negatively affected by the KSK roll, I think I can pretty confidently state that we wouldn’t require the 0.5% of Internet user threshold to be met before rolling back if it looked like there would be a significant health and safety risk not easily mitigated,” he said.
The chances of such an impact are very slim, but not impossible, he suggested.
It’s not ICANN’s intention to put anyone’s internet access at risk, of course, which is why there’s a delay.
ICANN’s plan calls for any rollover to happen on the eleventh day of a given calendar quarter, so the soonest it could happen would be January 11.
Given the complexity of the outreach task in hand, the relative lack of data, and the holiday periods approaching in many countries, and ICANN’s generally cautious nature, I’d hazard a guess we might be looking at April 11 at the earliest instead.

Comment Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, icann 60, ksk, rollover

59,000% revenue growth at Donuts leads to Deloitte award

Deloitte has placed new gTLD registry Donuts at the top of its 2017 Technology Fast 500, a league table of the fastest-growing North American technology firms.
Donuts won by growing its revenue by 59,093% over three years.
Given that Donuts didn’t have its first revenue-generating gTLD delegated until the final quarter of 2013, the three-year judging period basically covers almost the entire period of its existence as a trading company.
The runners up were ClassPass (46,556%, founded 2013), which gives fitness junkies a centralized way to book from multiple classes, and Toast (31,250%, founded 2012), which makes point-of-sale software for restaurants.
Companies could submit themselves for consideration on the 500-strong table. They only needed 135% growth over three years to make it to the list.
The rankings are based on revenue, not profit, so it does not necessarily mean that gTLDs are a way to get rich quick.
Still, it’s impressive that something as dated as domain names could top the rankings, given the number of transformational technologies hitting the market every year.

1 Comment Tagged: deloitte, donuts, new gTLDs

CentralNic and .CLUB reveal premium sales

CentralNic and .CLUB Domains have both revealed sales of premium domain names over the last several days.
CentralNic said yesterday that it has sold “a number” of premiums for $3.4 million.
The names are believed to be from its own portfolio, rather than registry-reserved names in any of the TLDs it manages. The company did not disclose which names, in which TLDs, it had sold.
The sale smooths out potential lumpiness in CentralNic’s revenue, and the company noted that the sales means that recurring revenue from its registrar and registry business will become an increasing proportion of its revenue as its premium portfolio diminishes.
Last week, .CLUB announced that it sold $380,793 of premium .club domains in the third quarter. That was spread over 452 domains.
The big-ticket domains were porn.club and basketball.club, sold by the registry for $85,000 together.
The Q3 headline number was a sharp decline from the Q2 spike of $2.7 million, which was boosted by auctions in China.
The company published a lot more data on its sales on its blog, here.

Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, auctions, centralnic, premiums

XYZ relaunches .storage with $2,200 price tag

XYZ.com has reopened .storage to registrations with a new, much higher price tag.
A confusingly named “Trademark Holder Landrush” started yesterday and will run for three weeks.
It’s not a sunrise period — .storage already had its ICANN-mandated sunrise under its previous management — and it appears that it’s not actually restricted to trademark holders.
The .storage web site states that “neither registrars nor XYZ will validate trademarks during this period”. The registry says that all strings, including generic words, are available.
It basically appears to be just a way to squeeze a little extra cash out of larger companies and anyone else desperate for a good name.
There are not many registrars carrying the TLD right now, just five brand protection registrars and 101domain.
101domain prices the names at $699.99 with a $1,500 application fee during the trademark landrush.
XYZ says that the regular suggested retail price for .storage will be $79.99 per month which seems to be a roundabout way of saying $948 per year. There’s no option to register for less than a year.
.storage is designed for companies in the data storage and physical storage industries, so adopting a high-price, low-volume business model is probably a smart move by the registry.
It’s a similar model to that XYZ employs in its car-related gTLDs operated in partnership with Uniregistry.
XYZ does not appear to be relying entirely on defensive registrations to make its coin, however.
It’s offering a “complimentary” web site migration service, usually priced at $10,000, that it says can help early registrants switch to .storage in as little as 72 hours with no loss of search engine juice.
.storage was originally owned by Extra Storage Space, a physical storage company, but XYZ acquired the contract for an undisclosed sum in May.
The trademark landrush will be immediately followed by an Early Access Period, during which there will also be a sliding-scale fee (day one will be a whopping $55,000 at 101domain!), before general available starts a month from now.

Comment Tagged: .storage, landrush, sunrise, trademarks, xyz.com

Corwin joins Verisign

Phil Corwin, the face of the Internet Commerce Association for over a decade, today quit to join Verisign’s legal team.
He’s now “policy counsel” at the .com giant, he said in a statement emailed to industry bloggers.
He’s also closed down the consulting company Virtualaw, resigned from ICANN’s Business Constituency and from his BC seat on the GNSO Council.
But he said he would continue as co-chair of two ICANN working groups — one looking at rights protection for intergovernmental organizations (which is kinda winding down anyway) and the other on general rights protection measures.
“I have no further statement at this time and shall not respond to questions,” Corwin concluded his email.
He’s been with ICA, which represents the interests of big domain investors, for 11 years.
As well as being an ICANN working group volunteer, he’s produced innumerable public comments and op-eds fighting for the interests of ICA members.
One of his major focuses over the years has been UDRP, which ICA believes should be more balanced towards registrant rights.
He’s also fought a losing battle against ICANN “imposing” the Uniform Rapid Suspension process on pre-2012 gTLDs, due to the fear that it one day may be forced upon Verisign’s .com and .net, where most domain investment is tied up.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, internet commerce association, verisign

ICANN terminates 450 drop-catch registrars

Almost 450 registrars have lost their ICANN accreditations in recent days, fulfilling predictions of a downturn in the domain name drop-catch market.
By my reckoning, 448 registrars have been terminated in the last week, all of them apparently shells operated by Pheenix, one of the big three drop-catching firms.
Basically, Pheenix has dumped about 90% of its portfolio of accreditations, about 300 of which are less than a year old.
It also means ICANN has lost about 15% of its fee-paying registrars.
Pheenix has saved itself at least $1.2 million in ICANN’s fixed accreditation fees, not including the variable and transaction-based fees.
It has about 50 registrars left in its stable.
The terminated registrars are all either numbered LLCs — “Everest [1-100] LLC” for example — or named after random historical or fictional characters or magic swords.
The move is not unexpected. ICANN predicted it would lose 750 registrars when it compiled its fiscal 2018 budget.
VP Cyrus Namazi said back in July that the drop-catching market is not big enough to support the many hundreds of shell registrars that Pheenix, along with rivals SnapNames/Namejet and DropCatch.com, have created over the last few years.
The downturn, Namazi said back then, is material to ICANN’s budget. I estimated at the time that roughly two thirds of ICANN’s accredited registrar base belonged to the three main drop-catch firms.
Another theory doing the rounds, after Domain Name Wire spotted a Verisign patent filing covering a system for detecting and mitigating “registrar collusion” in the space, is that Verisign is due to shake up the .com drop-catch market with some kind of centralized service.
ICANN reckoned it would start losing registrars in October at a rate of about 250 per quarter, which seems to be playing out as predicted, so the purge has likely only just begun.

16 Comments Tagged: aftermarket, drop catching, ICANN, pheenix, verisign

ICANN heading back to Morocco in 2019

ICANN has picked Morocco for its mid-year meeting in 2019.
The June 24-27 meeting, ICANN 65, will be hosted by the Mediterranean Federation of Internet Associations at the Palmeraie Resort in Marrakech. That’s the same venue as ICANN 55 in March 2016.
It’s a Policy Forum meeting, meaning it has an abridged agenda, an expected lower attendance, and a tighter focus on policy work than the other two annual meetings.
It will be sandwiched between the March meeting in Kobe, Japan and the November meeting in Montreal, Canada.
More pressingly, it now seems all but certain that ICANN is heading to Puerto Rico in March 2018 for ICANN 61, despite the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Maria in September.
During the public forum at ICANN 60 in Abu Dhabi last week, the customary spot where the next meeting’s hosts get five minutes to plug their city or nation was notably different.
Shots of landscapes, sunsets and cultural attractions were instead replaced by a series of government and local tourism officials encouraging ICANNers to visit. The message was basically: everything’s okay, it’s safe for you to come.

The convention center venue for ICANN 61 was so lightly damaged by Maria that it was actually used as the headquarters of the recovery effort immediately after the storm. You may have seen news footage of it when President Trump showed up.
ICANN said October 7 that it was monitoring the situation but that it still intended to have the March meeting in San Juan as planned.
The city would no doubt welcome the modest economic boost that a few thousand tech professionals and lawyers showing up for a week will provide.
I’m planning on attending.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 61, icann 65, marrakech, san juan

Refund “options” for in-limbo gTLD applicants?

ICANN may just be a matter of weeks away from giving applicants for the .mail, .corp and .home gTLDs an exit strategy from their four years in limbo.
Its board of directors on Thursday passed a resolution calling for staff to “provide options for the Board to consider to address the New gTLD Program applications for .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL by the first available meeting of the Board following the ICANN60 meeting in Abu Dhabi”.
It’s possible this means the board could consider the matter before the end of the year.
Twenty remaining applications for the three strings have been on hold since they were identified as particularly risky in August 2013.
A study showed that all three — .home and .corp in particular — already experience vast amounts of erroneous DNS traffic on a daily basis.
This is due to so-called “name collisions”, which come about when a newly delegated TLD is actually already in use on corporate or public networks.
Many companies use .corp and .mail already behind their firewalls, a practice sometimes historically encouraged by commercial technical documentation, and .home is known to be used by some ISPs in residential and business routers.
Both of these scenarios and others can lead to DNS queries spilling out onto the public internet, which could cause breakage or data leakage.
The solution for all new gTLDs delegated to date has been to wildcard the entire zone with the message “Your DNS needs immediate attention” for a period before registrations are accepted.
This has led to some new gTLDs with far less collision traffic seeing small but notable pockets of outrage when delegated — Google’s .prod (used by some as an internal shorthand for “production”) in 2014.
Studies to date have concentrated on the volume of error traffic to applied-for gTLDs, but last Thursday the ICANN board kicked off a study that will look at what the real-world impact of name collisions in .mail, .corp and .home could be.
It’s tasked the Security and Stability Advisory Committee with carrying out the study in conjunction with related groups such as the IETF.
But this is likely to take quite a long time, so the board also resolved to think up “options” for the 20 affected applications.
Could the applicants be offered a full refund, as opposed to the partial one they currently qualify for? Could there be some kind of deferment option, such as that offered to unsuccessful 2000-round applicants? Either seems possible.

Comment Tagged: .corp, .home, .mail, abu dhabi, ICANN, icann 60, name collisions