One in three women say they have seen sexism at ICANN

Almost a third of female members of the ICANN community say they have witnessed sexism in the community, according to the results of a recent survey.
Asked “Have you ever experienced or witnessed what you perceive to be sexism or gender bias within the ICANN community?”, 30% of women respondents said “Yes”.
Only 17% of men answered in the affirmative. Overall, 75% of respondents said they had not seen such biases in action.
The broad survey into gender balance at ICANN was carried out over a month in June and July with a web-based tool and got 584 responses.
Participants were self-selecting, and there were slightly more female respondents than male (going against the grain of usual participation data), so the results should probably not be considered completely scientific.
The survey did not offer its own definition of sexism, so respondents were able to use their own judgement.
Of those who said they’d seen sexism in the community, most said they’d seen it at ICANN’s regular public meetings. Over a third said they’d witnessed it on mailing lists.
The older the participant, the more likely it was that they had seen behavior they considered sexist.
ICANN suggests that this could be because behaviors have changed as ICANN has matured, or that younger people have different definitions of sexism than their older peers.
Of those who said they had witnessed sexism, only four people chose to report it through ICANN channels such as the Ombudsman. Three of those people were men.
Almost half said they “chose” not to report the behavior, while 41% said they were unsure how to go about reporting it.
Some people who chose to add additional color to their responses said that they had only heard about the reportable incident second-hand.
The survey also found that almost 60% of respondents believe that there are barriers to participating in the ICANN community.
Those people were given the opportunity to rank factors that could act as barriers. Cost came out in a strong lead, but gender was found to be just as much a barrier as language.
That may be not so much a critique of the community itself, but rather of the backwards attitudes to women in some of the countries in which ICANN hosts its meetings.
Only 9% of women respondents said they have personally experienced a gender-related barrier to participation. Cost, lack of time, knowledge and geography all came out ahead.
When it came to solutions, the survey found that almost three quarters of respondents supported voluntary targets to promote gender balance in the community.
However, fewer than half of respondents — still a rather high 41% — said there should be “mandatory” quotas of women.
Unsurprisingly, support for affirmative action along mandatory lines was much higher among women than men, and much higher among the younger crowd than the old-timers.
The full report and a rather pretty infographic can be downloaded in the UN language of your choosing from here.

3 Comments Tagged: gender, ICANN, sexism

Double-charging claims as registries ramp up new gTLD refund demands

Registry operators have stepped up demands for ICANN to dip into its $100 million new gTLD cash pile to temporarily lower their “burdensome” accreditation fees.
A new missive from the Registries Stakeholder Group to ICANN this week also introduces a remarkable claim that ICANN may have “double charged” new gTLD applications to the tune of potentially about $6 million.
The RySG wants ICANN to reduce the quarterly fixed fees new gTLD registries must pay by 75% from the current $6,250, for a year, at a cost to ICANN of $16.87 million.
ICANN still has roughly $96 million in leftover money from the $185,000 per-TLD application fees paid in 2012, roughly a third of which had been earmarked for unexpected expenses.
When Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah refused this request in August, he listed some of the previously unexpected items ICANN has had to pay for related to the program, one of which was “implementation of the Trademark Clearinghouse”.
But in last week’s letter (pdf), the RySG points out that each registry was already billed an additional $5,000 fee specifically to set up the TMCH.

Your letter states that registry operators knew about the fee structure from the start and implies that changes of circumstance should be irrelevant. The TMCH charge, however, was not detailed in the applicant guidebook. ICANN added it on its own after all applications were accepted and without community input. Therefore, ICANN is very much in a position to refund registry operators for this overcharge, and we request that ICANN do so. Essentially, you would be refunding the amounts we paid with our own application fees, which should have been used to set up the TMCH in the first place.

These additional fees could have easily topped $6 million, given that there are over 1,200 live new gTLDs.
Was this a case of double-charging, as the RySG says?
My gut feeling is that Atallah probably just forgot about the extra TMCH fee and misspoke in his August letter. The alternative would be a significant accounting balls-up that would need rectifying.
RySG has asked ICANN for a “detailed accounting” of its new gTLD program expenses to date. If produced, that could clear up any confusion.
Group chair Paul Diaz, who signed the letter, has also asked for a meeting with Atallah at the Abu Dhabi public meeting later this month, to discuss the issue.
The letter also accuses ICANN of costing applicants lost revenue by introducing policies such as the ban on two-letter domains, increased trademark protections, and other government-requested restrictions that were introduced after application fees had already been paid.
The tone of the letter is polite, but seems to mask an underlying resentment among registries that ICANN has not been giving them a fair chance to grow their businesses.
UPDATE: This story was updated October 12 to correct the estimate of the total amount of TMCH setup fees collected.

4 Comments Tagged: fees, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, rebate, rysg, tmch

Who should have rights to direct .au names?

Australian ccTLD registry auDA wants to know what you think about its plans to open up .au to direct second-level domain registrations.
It’s no longer a question of if the change should happen, but how it should be implemented.
A public consultation launched yesterday poses a series of questions about issues such as grandfathering, trademark rights and banning certain strings from registration.
It’s already been decided that existing third-level .au registrants should get first dibs on the matching second-level, but auDA has yet to decide what the eligibility cut-off date should be and for how long the names should be reserved before being released for registration by others.
The cut-off date is important because auDA has already seen some data suggesting possible domain investor gaming.
There were 193,645 strings that were registered as third-level domains in two zones at April 18, 2016, when the direct registration policy was announced, but that had risen to 255,909 as of September 1 this year.
That could be indicative of speculators obtaining low-value domains in .net.au or .org.au in the hope of beating the matching .com.au registrant to the possibly more valuable direct second-level .au domain.
If the April 2016 date is used, up to 14% of .au registrations will be subject to competing claims. The data shows that 90% of the conflicts are between .net.au and .com.au domains.
auDA has declined to draw any conclusions about gaming, however, saying that many of the conflicts could be defensive registrations made by the same registrant.
Where there are conflicts, a number of solutions have been posed. Among them: the longest continuous registration, priority for .com.au registrants, auction or lottery.
The consultation paper spends little time discussing the rights of trademark owners, something submissions from the IP lobby will no doubt seek to rectify.
Many of the questions auDA is posing are similar to those posed by the likes of .uk’s Nominet in previous ccTLD consultations.
There’s an additional wrinkle in the .au system as many state government and educational entities are required to register fourth-level names. So auDA wants to know what kind of rights these guys should have too.
The consultation is open until November 10 and all the relevant information can be found here.

3 Comments Tagged: .au, auda, second-level

Election season at ICANN

Two significant votes are coming up soon in the ICANN community, with the GNSO Council looking for a new chair and the ccNSO ready to select a new appointee for the ICANN board of directors.
The ccNSO election will see an actual contest for what is believed to be the first time, with at least two candidates fighting it out.
The GNSO vote is rather less exciting, with only one candidate running unopposed.
It seems Heather Forrest, an intellectual property lawyer, occasional new gTLD consultant, and professor at the University of Tasmania, will replace GoDaddy VP of policy James Bladel as Council chair a month from now.
Forrest, currently a vice-chair, was nominated by the Non-Contracted Parties House.
The Contracted Parties House (registries and registrars), evidently fine with Forrest taking over, decided not to field a candidate, so the November 1 vote will be a formality.
In the ccNSO world, the country-codes are electing somebody to take over from Mike Silber on the ICANN board, a rather more powerful position, when his term ends a year from now.
Nominations don’t close until a week from now, but so far there are two candidates: Nigel Roberts and Pierre Ouedraogo.
Roberts, nominated for the job by Puerto Rico, runs a collection of ccTLDs for the British Channel Islands.
Ouedraogo is from Burkina Faso but does not work for its ccTLD. He is a director of the Francophone Institute for Information and New Technologies. He was nominated by Kenya.
Both men are long-time participants in ICANN and the ccNSO.
Roberts, who currently sits on the ccNSO Council, tells me he believes it’s the first time there’s been a contested election for a ccNSO-appointed ICANN board seat since the current system of elections started in 2003.
Silber has been in the job for eight years and is term-limited so cannot stand again. The other ccNSO appointee, Chris Disspain, will occupy the other seat for another two years.

1 Comment Tagged: ccnso, election, gnso, ICANN

Nine registries fighting for .au contract

Nine domain name companies are battling it out for the right to run Australia’s .au ccTLD.
That’s according to auDA, the .au registry, providing an update on the latest stage of its “registry transformation” project today.
A decision on which company to select could be made as soon as a month from now, though the process does seem to be running a week behind schedule due to contenders asking for more time to write their tenders.
One company that will certainly have applied for the job is incumbent Neustar, which has been running .au for the last 15 years (through its relatively AusRegistry acquisition).
Having earlier indicated that it was looking for somebody to build an in-house registry, auDA later clarified (or U-turned) that it wanted to stick with an outsourced back-end provider.
The apparent decision to bring the service in-house came in for some criticism from some auDA members, which waned when it emerged outsourcing was the only solution on the table.
There are about 3.1 million .au domains today, and the back-end gets roughly $5 a year (USD) per name.

1 Comment Tagged: .au, auda, rfp

Telco billed $2.7 million for failing to renew domain

A US telecommunications provider has agreed to pay $2.7 million after an emergency service went offline because it forgot to renew a domain name.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, Utah-based Sorenson Communications saw its “video relay service” go offline for two days in June 2016 after a domain was not renewed.
The service is basically a 911 emergency calls replaced designed for people with hearing or speech problems.
The settlement (pdf) describes the scenario like this:

Sorenson.com is a domain name Sorenson uses to provide access to SVRS. On the morning of June 6, 2016, Sorenson experienced a VRS Service Interruption that resulted from a preventable, internal operational failure.10 This failure led the domain registration for Sorenson.com to expire and be deactivated. After the deactivation occurred and before Sorenson could correct the situation, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) updated their records to reflect that the domain was expired. If a user’s ISP updated its records while the domain was shown as expired, that user could not make or receive calls routed through Sorenson.com — including VRS, 911, Dial-Around, and Point-to-Point calls — during at least part of the outage.
Upon discovery of the VRS Service Interruption, Sorenson took immediate steps to correct the problem and notify callers. Once the domain name was reactivated, each caller’s ISP had to take certain steps to ensure that calls were routed through Sorenson.com. To expedite this process, Sorenson reached out to multiple large ISPs, such as Verizon and Comcast, and posted information about the VRS Service Interruption on its website11 and social media outlets. The VRS Service Interruption continued for some callers through the morning of June 8, 2016.

The $2.7 million charge is a repayment of a reimbursement of the same amount paid out by the nation Telecommunications Relay Service Fund.
Sorenson has agreed to pay a more modest $252,000 in formal penalties to the FCC for its indiscretion.
Still, as domain renewal fumbles go, it’s got to be one of the biggest facepalms we’ve seen for a while.

2 Comments Tagged: fcc, renewal, sorenson

In harsh tones, ccNSO rejects NomCom appointee

ICANN’s Country Code Names Supporting Organization has rejected the appointment to its Council of a Canadian registry director.
Saying NomCom ignored long-standing guidance to avoid appointing registry employees, the ccNSO Council has said the recent naming of Marita Moll to the role is “unacceptable”.
Moll will have to choose between sitting on the Council and being a director of .ca registry CIRA, the Council said in a letter to NomCom and the ICANN board.
Three of the Council’s 18 voting members are selected by NomCom. The rest are elected from ccTLD registries, three from each of ICANN’s five geographic regions.
To maintain balance, and promote independent views, the Council told NomCom most recently back in 2012 that it should refrain from appointing people connected to ccTLD registries.
The new Council letter (pdf) reads:

Council’s view (none dissenting) is that your Committee’s proposed selection directly contravenes this requirement, notwithstanding the clear and explicit assurance we received in 2012 from the then Chair of Nominating Committee that the Committee would be “avoiding any member already belonging to the ccTLD management participating in the ccNSO”.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that CIRA already has representation on the Council in the form of CEO Byron Holland.
The letter concludes that the conflict is “irreconcilable” and the appointment “unacceptable”.
As the ccNSO does not appear to have refusal powers on NomCom appointees, it will presumably be up to Moll to decline the appointment.

3 Comments Tagged: ccnso, cctlds, cira, ICANN, nomcom

New gTLDs still a crappy choice for email — study

New gTLDs may not be the best choice of domain for a primary email address, judging by new research.
Over 20% of the most-popular web sites do not fully understand email addresses containing long TLDs, and Arabic email addresses are supported by fewer than one in 10 sites, a study by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group has found.
Twitter, IBM and the Financial Times are among those sites highlighted as having only partial support for today’s wide variety of possible email addresses.
Only 7% of the sites tested were able to support all types of email address.
The study, carried out by Donuts and ICANN staff, looked at 749 websites (in the top 1,000 or so as ranked by Alexa) that have forms for filling in email addresses.
On each site, seven different email addresses were input, to see whether the site would accept them as valid.
The emails used different combinations of ASCII and Unicode before the dot and mixes of internationalized domain name and ASCII at the second and top levels.
These were the results (click to enlarge or download the PDF of the report here):

The problem with these numbers, it seems to me, is the lack of a control. There’s no real baseline to judge the numbers against.
There’s no mention in the paper about testing addresses that use .com or decades-old ccTLDs, which would have highlighted web sites that with broken scripts that reject all emails.
But if we assume, as the paper appears to, that all the tested web sites were 100% compliant for .com domains, the scores for new gTLDs are not great.
There are currently over 800 TLDs over four characters in length, but according to the UASG research 22% of web sites will not recognize them.
There are 150 IDN TLDs, but a maximum of 30% of sites will accept them in email addresses.
When it comes to right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, the vast majority of sites are totally hopeless.
UASG dug into the code of the tested sites when it could and found that most of them use client-side code — JavaScript processing a regular expression — to verify addresses.
A regular expression is complex bit of code that can look something like this: /^.+@(?:[^.]+\.)+(?:[^.]{2,})$
It’s not every coder’s cup of tea, but it can get the job done with minimal client-side resource overheads. Most coders, the UASG concludes, copy regex they found on a forum and maybe tweak it a bit.
This should not be shocking news to anyone. I’ve known about it since 2009 or earlier when I first started ripping code from StackOverflow.
However, the UASG seems to be have been working on the assumption that more sites are using off-the-shelf software libraries, which would have allowed the problem to be fixed in a more centralized fashion.
It concludes in its paper that much greater “awareness raising” needs to happen before universal acceptance comes closer to reality.

8 Comments Tagged: donuts, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, uasg, universal acceptance

ICANN just came thiiis close to breaking the internet

ICANN has decided to postpone an unprecedented change at the DNS root after discovering it could break internet for potentially millions of users.
The so-called KSK Rollover was due to go ahead on October 11, but it’s now been pushed back to — tentatively — some time in the first quarter 2018.
The delay was decided after ICANN realized that there were still plenty of ISPs and network operators that weren’t ready for the change.
Had ICANN gone ahead anyway with the change anyway, it could have seen subscribers of affected ISPs lose access to millions of DNSSEC-supporting domain names.
So the postponement is a good thing.
A KSK or Key Signing Key is a public-private cryptographic key pair used to sign other keys called Zone Signing Keys. The root KSK signs the root ZSK and is in effect the apex of the DNSSEC hierarchy.
The same KSK has been in operation at the root since 2010, when the root was first signed, but it’s considered good practice to change it every so often to mitigate the risk of brute-force attacks against the public key.
While it’s important enough to get dramatized in US spy shows, in practice it only affects ISPs and domain names that voluntarily support DNSSEC.
ICANN estimates that 750 million people use DNSSEC, which is designed to prevent problems such as man-in-the-middle attacks against domain names.
That’s a hell of a lot of people, but it’s still a minority of the world’s internet-using population. It’s not been revealed how many of those would have been affected by a premature rollover.
When DNSSEC fails, people whose DNS resolvers have DNSSEC turned on (Comcast and Google are two of the largest such providers) can’t access domain names that have DNSSEC turned on (such as domainincite.com).
Preventing the internet breaking is pretty much ICANN’s only job, so it first flagged up its intention to roll the root KSK back in July last year.
In July this year, the new public KSK was uploaded as part of a transition phase that is seeing the 2010 keys and 2017 keys online simultaneously.
Last year, CTO David Conrad told us the long lead time and cautious approach was necessary to get the word out that ISPs needed to test their resolvers to make sure they would work with the new keys.
In June, ICANN CEO Goran Marby spammed the telecommunications regulators in every country in the world with a letter (pdf) asking them to coordinate their home ISPs to be ready for the change.
The organization’s comms teams has also been doing a pretty good job getting word of the rollover into the tech press over the last few months.
But, with a flashback to the new gTLD program, that outreach doesn’t seem to have reached out as far as it needed to.
ICANN said last night that a “significant number” of ISPs are still not ready for the rollover.
It seems ICANN only became aware of this problem due to a new feature of DNS that reports back to the root which keys it is configured to use.
Without being able to collate that data, it’s possible it could have been assumed that the situation was hunky-dory and the rollover might have gone ahead.
ICANN still isn’t sure why so many resolvers are not yet ready for the 2017 KSK. It said in a statement:

There may be multiple reasons why operators do not have the new key installed in their systems: some may not have their resolver software properly configured and a recently discovered issue in one widely used resolver program appears to not be automatically updating the key as it should, for reasons that are still being explored.

It’s not clear why the broken resolver software has not been named — one would assume that getting the word out would be a priority unless issues of responsible disclosure were in play.
ICANN said it is “reaching out to its community, including its Security and Stability Advisory Committee, the Regional Internet Registries, Network Operator Groups and others to help explore and resolve the issues.”
The organization is hopeful that it will be able to go ahead with the rollover in Q1 2018, but noted that would be dependent on “more fully understanding the new information and mitigating as many potential failures as possible.”
While it’s excellent news that ICANN is on top of the situation, the delay is unlikely to do anything to help the perception that DNSSEC is mainly just an administrative ball-ache and far more trouble than it’s worth.

3 Comments Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover

Chalaby named next ICANN chair

Cherine Chalaby is to be the next chair of ICANN.
In a case of burying the lede extreme even by ICANN standards, current chair Steve Crocker announced the news in the 11th paragraph of a blog post entitled “Chairman’s Blog: The Montevideo Workshop Wrap-Up” this evening.
Crocker wrote: “the Board had an opportunity to participate in the discussion of the Board’s future leadership, and have indicated unanimous support for the future election of Cherine Chalaby as the next Chair of the ICANN Board.”
No formal election has happened yet, but the board decided to come to a consensus on which way they will vote anyway.
Chris Disspain has been selected future vice-chair using the same informal process, Crocker wrote.
The actual raising of hands will take place during the board’s Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi at ICANN 60 in early November.
Chalaby was born in Egypt, also holds British citizenship, and lives in ICANN’s home town of Los Angeles.
He’s the first ICANN chair to come from the financial services world, having served a career at Accenture before joining Rasmala Investments.
He’s been a member of the ICANN board since the Nominating Committee selected him in December 2010 and was elected vice-chair a few years back.
His stint as chair will not be long. I believe he’s term-limited and will have to step aside at the end of 2019.
Crocker, an early internet pioneer, has been chair since 2011. No doubt ICANN is planning a big send-off for him at ICANN 60.

Comment Tagged: abu dhabi, ICANN, icann 60