Ombudsman steps in after harassment claims in Whois group

ICANN Ombudsman Herb Waye has started monitoring an ICANN mailing list after multiple complaints of disrespectful behavior.
Waye this week told participants in the Registration Data Services working group that he is to trawl through their list archives and proactively monitor the group following “multiple complaints regarding behavior that contravenes the ICANN Expected Standards of Behavior and possibly the Community Anti-Harassment Policy”.
The RDS working group is exploring the possibility of replacing the current Whois system, in which all data is completely open, with something “gated”, restricting access to authenticated individuals based on their role.
Law enforcement agencies, for example, may be able to get a greater level of access to personal contact information than schmucks like me and you.
Privacy advocates are in favor of giving registrants more control over their data, while anti-abuse researchers hate anything that will limit their ability to stop spam, phishing and the like.
It’s controversial stuff, and arguments on the RDS WG list have been been very heated recently, sometimes spilling over into ad hominem attacks.
The Expected Standards of Behavior requires all ICANN community members to treat each other with civility.
I haven’t seen anything especially egregious, but apparently the disrespect on display has been sufficiently upsetting that the Ombudsman has had to step in.
It’s the first time, that I’m aware of, that the ICANN Ombudsman has proactively monitored a list rather than simply responding to complaints.
Waye said that he plans to deliver his verdict before ICANN 59, which kicks off in a little over a week.

Comment Tagged: harassment, ICANN, Ombudsman, rds, whois

US “threatens” Costa Rica over Pirate Bay domains

The US government has been threatening to “close down” Costa Rica’s .cr registry over its refusal to take down a Pirate Bay domain name, according to the registry.
Representatives of the US embassy in Costa Rica have been badgering NIC.cr to take down thepiratebay.cr since 2015, according to a letter from Pedro León Azofeifa, president of Academia Nacional de Ciencias, which runs the registry.
The letter claims:

These interactions with the United States Embassy have escalated with time and include great pressure since 2016 that is exemplified by several phone calls, emails and meetings urging our ccTLD to take down the domain, even though this would go against our domain name policies

According to the letter, a US official “has mentioned threats to close our registry, with repeated harassment regarding our practices and operation policies and even personal negative comments directed to our Executive Director”.
The letter was sent to the chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee 10 days ago, CC’d to senior ICANN, Costa Rican and US governmental figures, and has been circulated this week in the Latin American domain name community.
The form of the alleged threats to close the registry is not clear, but it should be noted that prior to October 1 last year the US Department of Commerce, via its now-relinquished oversight of ICANN, played a key role in the administration of the DNS root zone.
The Pirate Bay is of course a popular directory of BitTorrent links largely used to disseminate pirated copies of movies and music, much of it American-made.
The site has been TLD-hopping for years, as registries around the world shut down its domains for violations of their own local rules. It has been live on thepiratebay.cr since December 2014, when its Swedish operation was shut down by authorities.
The NIC.cr letter says that its own policies follow international “best practices” and allow it to take down domains when presented with a Costa Rican court order, but that “the pressure and harassment [from the US] to take down the domain name without its proper process and local court order persists”.
The US Department of Commerce even pressured its Costa Rican counterpart to investigate NIC.cr, but that probe concluded that the registry was acting within its procedures, according to the letter.
It’s not the first attempt to get rid of the Pirate Bay this year.
Public Interest Registry in February announced a “UDRP for copyright” proposal that would allow copyright holders to have piracy disputes heard by independent arbitrators. It looked like a way to get unloved thepiratebay.org domain taken down without PIR having to take unilateral action.
That proposal was shelved after an outcry from the industry and civil rights watchdogs.
In April, one of the Pirate Bay’s founders launched a piracy-friendly domain registration service.
Just this week, the European Court of Justice ruled, after seven years of legal fights, that the Pirate Bay infringes copyright, raising the possibility of the site being blocked in more European countries.
The NIC.cr letter is dated June 6. It has not yet been published by ICANN or the GAC.

1 Comment Tagged: .cr, commerce, copyright, gac, iana, ICANN, nic.cr, ntia, piracy, the pirate bay

Forget emojis, you can buy Egyptian hieroglyph .com domains

Call them the Emojis of the Ancient World.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were once the cutting edge of written communication, and it turns out Verisign lets you register .com domains using them.
Internationalized domain names expert Andre Schapp discovered a couple months ago that the Unicode code points for the ancient script have been approved in 16 Verisign gTLDs, and apparently no others.
This means that domains such as should resolve.
Unfortunately, DI’s database does not support these characters, so I’m having to use images.
But at least one domain investor seems have snapped up a few dozen single-pictograph Egyptian hieroglyph names about a month ago, and his page has clickable links.
Whether you see the hieroglyph or the Punycode, prefixed “xn--“, seems to depend on your browser configuration.
Ancient Egyptian is apparently not the only dead script that Verisign supports.
According to IANA, you can also get .com domains in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, which went out of fashion in the second century CE, as well Phoenician, the world’s oldest known script.
Then there’s Imperial Aramaic, Meitei, Kharosthi, ‘Phags-pa, Sylheti Nagari and goodness knows how many other extinct writing systems.
It seems .com has been approved for 237 IDN scripts, in total. Let it not be said that Verisign does not offer domainers ample opportunity to spunk their cash on gibberish.
No Klingon, though.

12 Comments Tagged: .com, emojis, hieroglyphs, idns, verisign

Donuts to pay $213 million for Rightside

Donuts is to acquire Rightside for $213 million, the companies have just announced.
The $10.60 per share cash offer represents a 12% premium over Rightside’s average closing share price over the last 30 days. Rightside’s 52-week high is over $12.
Just one year ago, Donuts offered $70 million for Rightside’s portfolio of gTLDs, but was shot down.
Rightside also turned down a $5 million offer for four gTLDs from XYZ.com in April 2016.
The $213 million offer is funded at least partly by Silicon Valley Bank, which is providing a credit facility to Donuts.
Assuming the deal closes — which will require the holders of more than half its shares to agree to the price — it will make Rightside a private company once more, as a wholly owned Donuts subsidiary.
The two gTLD registries are already partners, with Rightside providing domain registry services for Donuts’ roughly 200 new gTLDs.
There was talk of a split last year, with Donuts apparent endorsement of Google’s Nomulus platform, but the two companies reaffirmed their relationship earlier this year.
Rightside itself has a portfolio of 40 gTLDs, but it’s faced criticism from shareholders over the last year or so over their relatively poor performance.
Activist investor J Carlo Cannell, who owns almost 9% of Rightside, has been pressuring the company’s board to take radical action for the last 15 months.
Earlier this year, Rightside got out of the once-core wholesale registrar game by selling eNom to rival Tucows for $83.5 million.

11 Comments Tagged: acquisition, donuts, rightside

Bladel quits as Council chair as GoDaddy ruled “ineligible” for election

GNSO Council Chair James Bladel has resigned, after it emerged that GoDaddy, his employer, is not eligible for office under registrar rules.
He will continue to occupy the post on an interim basis until a new election is held.
Bladel was elected to represent the Registrars Stakeholder Group on the Council back in 2013 and was elected by the Council as chair in late 2015.
However, the RrSG has just discovered that he’s actually ineligible for elected office under its charter because GoDaddy is also a dot-brand registry.
The RrSG charter states that in order to avoid conflicts of interest, a registrar that also has a Specification 9 exemption from the registry Code of Conduct in an ICANN registry conduct may not hold office.
GoDaddy signed its .godaddy registry agreement, which includes the Spec 9 exemption, in July 2015. The gTLD is not currently being used.
GoDaddy is of course the largest registrar in the industry, but it appears its ability to wield power in ICANN’s policy-making bodies now appears to be hamstrung by its foray into new gTLDs.
Bladel’s resignation is not expected to have any significant impact on GNSO Council work.
He’s been reappointed by the RrSG executive committee on an interim basis until elections can be held for a replacement. His term is due to expire in November anyway.

3 Comments Tagged: dot-brands, gnso, godaddy, ICANN

Should ICANN get breastfeeding areas? Have your say!

ICANN has launched a survey of community members’ views on gender, apparently trying to figure out whether it has a sexism problem.
The short, anonymous quiz, published today, asks a bunch of reasonable questions about gender diversity at ICANN’s physical meetings and online interactions.
The organization wants to know if you think your gender has had any influence on your participation at ICANN, and whether you think it could in your future in the community.
It wants to know if you think ICANN is too male-dominated, whether gender is a barrier to progression, and whether you feel represented by current leadership.
The survey also throws up a few questions I found a little surprising.
Should ICANN be holding “educational” sessions on gender diversity? Should it have “mandatory” diversity “quotas”? Should its meetings have breastfeeding areas? Would people who don’t identify as either gender have difficulty ascending to leadership positions?
Founded in 1998, ICANN is the organization tasked with coordinating certain of the internet’s unique technical identifiers.

1 Comment Tagged: gender, ICANN

Domain President? Dicker fallout continues as Schwartz unleashes tweetstorm

“Domain King” domain investor Rick Schwartz has twunleashed a twirade of Twitter twabuse about deleted podcasts that would put Donald Trump to shame.
Starting late Sunday night and apparently still ongoing at time of publication, Schwartz has been haranguing Michael Cyger, publisher of the DomainSherpa and DNAcademy investor sites, about dozens of deleted DomainSherpa podcasts.
So far, he’s hit send on scores of tweets. A very small sample:

Mike, I think you should stop ignoring Mike Berkens @thedomains & myself before this gets out of control and spills over all over the place.

— Rick Schwartz (@DomainKing) June 11, 2017

Exactly right! So @DomainSherpa should stop being a COWARD and clean this MESS up that HE ALONE CREATED. NOW!!!! SELF-DESTRUCTION! #Domains

— Rick Schwartz (@DomainKing) June 11, 2017

No idea why @DomainSherpa jumped on the thread other day & opened up this GIANT CAN OF WORMS?? Then ignored everything. BAD MOVE! #Domains

— Rick Schwartz (@DomainKing) June 11, 2017

Cyger was the host of the DomainSherpa video podcast, which regularly featured Schwartz and TheDomains publisher Mike Berkens as guests.
Also a regular guest was industry pariah Adam Dicker, who many domainers believe has used shady business practices in his dealings with others in the community.
After stories began to emerge of Dicker’s alleged wrongdoings, Cyger decided to stop using him as a guest. He subsequently removed all previous shows featuring Dicker from the DomainSherpa web site.
Now, Schwartz and Berkens are pissed that the hundreds of hours they volunteered into appearing on the show were wasted, and that hundreds of social media links they used to promote the shows are useless.
The three parties chatted by phone back in March, all seem to agree, about how to resolve this issue.
Cyger says it was agreed that the deleted shows would be replaced by an explanation that the show had been removed.
But Berkens and Schwartz claim that Cyger has in fact been ignoring their requests to reinstate the shows — hence the tweetstorm over the last 24 hours. Cyger denies that claim, and says he believes he did the right thing by removing the shows.
I, for the record, have no opinion on the matter.

17 Comments Tagged: domain king, domainsherpa, thedomains

InternetNZ wants to fire two of its three (!) CEOs

InternetNZ, the .nz ccTLD operator, is proposing a radical simplification of the organization in order to stay relevant in the age of new gTLDs.
A proposal put forward late last week would see the non-profit organization fold its two subsidiaries back into the parent and consolidate management under a single CEO.
Currently, InternetNZ owns Domain Name Commission Limited (DNCL), the .nz policy oversight body, and NZRS Limited, which actually runs the registry. Each of the three entities has its own CEO.
The new proposal describes the situation like this:

Our governance and management structures are cumbersome and a lack of single point of accountability makes it difficult to progress work across the group. The size of governance groups and management resource is out of proportion to the size of the organisation and the size of the issues it is dealing with. There are 20 governors, three chief executives and around 10 senior executives for the 35 FTE [Full Time Employees] across the three organisations.

The New Zealand organization needs to streamline, according to the working group that came up with the paper, in order to more effectively compete with the influx of new TLDs, which has seen ccTLDs see slowing growth.
.nz is one of the few ccTLDs that has a direct new gTLD competitor — .kiwi.
It also wants to diversify its revenue streams outside of domain registration fees, according to the paper, with a target of NZD 1 million ($720,000) from alternate sources by 2020.
As a member-based organization, InternetNZ has put the proposal out for public comment until June 30. It will make a decision in August.

1 Comment Tagged: .kiwi, .nz, cctlds, internetnz, new gTLDs

CIRA and Nominum offering DNS firewall

Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA has started offering DNS-based security services to Canadian companies.
The company has partnered with DNS security services provider Nominum to develop D-Zone DNS Firewall, which it said lets customers “block access to malicious content before it can reach their network”.
It’s basically a recursive DNS service with a layer of filterware that blocks access to lists of domains, such as those used by command and control servers, known to be connected to malware and phishing.
It’s a timely offering, given the high-profile WannaCry ransomware which infected hundreds of thousands of unpatched Windows boxes worldwide last month (though I’m not sure this kind of service would have actually prevented its spread).
The CIRA service uses Nominum’s technology but operates at Canadian internet exchange points and appears to be marketed at Canadian customers.
It’s the latest effort by CIRA to expand outside of its core .ca registry business. Earlier this year, it became ICANN’s newest approved gTLD back-end provider after a deal with .kiwi.
Many ccTLD registries are looking outside of their traditional businesses as the increasingly cluttered TLD market puts a squeeze on registration growth.

Comment Tagged: .ca, cira, nominum, security, wannacry

DENIC gets approved for registry escrow

DENIC is now able to offer data escrow services to gTLD registries, in addition to registrars.
The non-profit company, which runs Germany’s .de, said it gained ICANN approval for the registry escrow function June 6.
Back in March, ICANN approved it for the registrar escrow services.
All ICANN-accredited registries and registrars are contractually obliged to deposit their registrant data with escrow agents in case they go out of business, go rogue, suffer catastrophic data loss, or otherwise screw up.
Nine companies have been approved by ICANN for registry data escrow so far.
Two of others are based in Europe, but DENIC claims to be the only one that offers full compliance with the more stringent German and European Union data protection regulations.

Comment Tagged: .de, denic, escrow, ICANN, new gTLDs