Oops! Cock-up reveals ICANN survey respondent emails

An ICANN contractor accidentally revealed the email addresses of almost 100 people who responded to a survey related to a review of the Generic Names Supporting Organization.
An invitation to participate in a follow-up survey was sent out to respondents today with all the email addresses in the To:, rather than BCC:, field.
Westlake Governance, which is conducting the survey for ICANN, quickly sent an apology:

We have been sending invitations in batches, and regret that we included your address in the only set of invitations that was copied inadvertently in the “To” line as addressee, rather than as a “Bcc.”
We sincerely apologise for this breach of our internal protocols and potentially of your privacy.

The misfire revealed that 15 out of the 98 listed respondents have @icann.org email addresses, suggesting roughly 15% of the responses came from ICANN staffers.
While the survey certainly anticipated responses from within the organization — one question gives “staff” as an option for the respondent to state their affiliation — some are not happy anyway.
Neustar vice president Jeff Neuman tweeted:

Should #ICANN staff be providing feedback on GNSO review? I see value in that; but results should not be grouped in with other responses.

— Jeff Neuman (@jintlaw) November 1, 2014

The massive, 93-question survey (pdf) was designed to kick-start the next cycle in ICANN’s interminable reviews of its policy-making bodies, in this case the GNSO.
The results of the survey will be used to inform a review of the GNSO’s structure, which could potentially re-balance power within the organization.

Comment Tagged: gnso, ICANN

ICANN board bill tops $2 million

ICANN’s board of directors cost the organization over $2 million in pay and expenses in its fiscal 2014, a document released last night shows.
The total bill for the year ended June 30 was $2,000,609, up 16% on FY13’s $1,721,191 and up 27% on the FY12 figure.
The majority of the expenditure went on travel and other expenses. Just $538,983 went on compensation.
ICANN directors get $35,000 per year basic, plus another $5,000 for each board committee they chair. Board chair Steve Crocker gets $75,000 and accumulated $149,000 in FY2014 expenses.
Six directors chose to receive no compensation whatsoever, though they all racked up travel expenses.
The $2 million total does not include any contribution from CEO Fadi Chehade.
Chehade’s salary was $559,999. He also received $253,826 in bonuses and accumulated expenses totaling $519,421.
FY14 was of course the year in which Chehade and members of the board traveled extensively for outreach related to the IANA stewardship transition process and the NetMundial initiative.

1 Comment Tagged: budget, ICANN

Nominet hires venture capitalist as new CEO

Nominet has named Lesley Cowley’s replacement as CEO as Russell Haworth, a Thomson Reuters alum who’s spent much of 2014 working as a venture capitalist.
Russell was previously managing director of Thomson Reuters’ Middle East & Africa division.
Since January, he’s been a co-founder and partner at Saya Ventures, an investment company focused on early-stage technology companies.
“Russell will lead the organisation as it develops its core registry business, explores the potential of new technologies, and delivers on its commitment to ensuring the internet is a force for good,” Nominet said.
He’s set to join the .uk registry in January 2015.
He replaces Cowley, who resigned in May and earlier this month revealed several new jobs.

1 Comment Tagged: .uk, nominet

Quitted ICANN director gets old job back

Olga Madruga-Forti, who quit ICANN’s board of directors earlier this month, has gone back to work for the US Federal Communications Commission.
I gather that while ICANN was aware of her new job, it was unable to announce the move at the time of her resignation.
The FCC said Madruga-Forti will be chief of Strategic Analysis and Negotiations Division at its International Bureau.
She worked for the FCC for nine years until 1997 as special counsel with responsibility for satellite policy. She’s spent the intervening years working for satellite companies in the US and Argentina.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

Former pop star is .uk’s 10,000th cybersquatting case

Nominet has processed its 10,000th cybersquatting dispute, according to the company.
Conveniently for the .uk registry’s public relations department, the complainant in the case was Aston Merrygold, a well-known former member of the pop group JLS.
He won astonmerrygold.co.uk, which was registered to London-based Martyn O’Brien, using Nominet’s 12-year-old Dispute Resolution Service.
Merrygold does not have a trademark covering his name, but the DRS panelist found that he had rights anyway, due to his relative fame and numerous TV appearances.
O’Brien registered the name in 2008, along with the names of Merrygold’s band-mates, after JLS appeared in the final of TV talent show The X Factor.
JLS had a brief but successful pop career before breaking up last year. Merrygold currently intends to go solo, which presumably inspired the DRS complaint.
Nominet also announced today that Tony Willoughby, who has been chair of the DRS panel since 2002, has stepped aside and will be replaced by DRS appeals panelist Nick Gardner.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, drs, nominet

gTLD auctions net ICANN another $13m

ICANN has raised another $12.9 million from new gTLD auctions.
A small batch of three contention sets — .realty, .salon and .spot — were resolved last Wednesday in the third so-called “last resort” auction.
.realty went to Fegistry for $5,588,888, .salon to Donuts for $5,100,575 and .spot to Amazon for $2.2 million.
ICANN now has accumulated new gTLD auction sales totaling $27.8 million.
It raised $14.3 million selling off .buy, .tech and .vip in September. The auction for .信息 fetched $600,000 in June.
ICANN’s share — after auctioneer Power Auctions is paid off — is being put into a special fund, rather that ICANN’s current account. The community will one day have to decide what to spend it on.

Comment Tagged: .realty, .salon, .spot, amazon, auctions, donuts, Fegistry, ICANN, last resort

Is the free ride over for Verisign’s .net?

Verisign’s .net is on the rocks due to new gTLDs, executives have confirmed.
Speaking to investors and analysts on the company’s third-quarter earnings call last week, CFO George Kilguss said that .net “is experiencing some headwinds from the launch of the new gTLD program”.
Further comments from Kilguss and CEO Jim Bidzos seem to confirm what DI reported a month ago: .net is in trouble.
Latest stats collated by DI show that the .net zone file shrunk by over 121,000 domains in the seven months between March 26 and October 26 this year.
Executives said on the call that .net stood at 15.1 million names at the end of September. That compares to 15.2 million at the end of the previous quarter.
“It’s been relatively flat,” Kilguss said. “I actually think .net has held up pretty well over the year with all these new names coming on… So I don’t view .net’s performance as anything negative.”
Bidzos told analysts that “confusion” around the new gTLDs was to blame.
“I think generally, .net may be more susceptible to that confusion that swirls around new gTLDs,” he said.
He characterized .net as being like new gTLDs, falling into “that category of ‘different'”.
In my view, this is an implicit acknowledgement that .net has been getting a free ride for the last 20 years.
Asked whether the .net weakness could spill over to .com, Bidzos said that .com is a “trusted brand” because it’s almost 30 years old and has a 17-year record of uninterrupted up-time.
While there’s no doubt that .com is a trusted brand, it’s not because of its up-time or longevity, in my view — .net has the same stability record and is actually fractionally older than .com.
The reason .net is suffering now is that that for the last two decades it’s been essentially a defensive play.
People buy the .net when they buy the .com because they’ve been marketed as a bundle — the only two truly generic TLDs out there. Unlike .org, .net lost its semantic differentiation a long time ago.
As .com buyers start to see more and more options for duplicative or defensive registrations in their shopping carts, they’re going to be less likely to grab the .net to match their .com, in my opinion.
And it’s likely to get worse.
“It’s going to continue,” Bidzos said. “We’re seeing hundreds of more new gTLDs coming, and they’re coming at the rate of many every single week. So that confusion is likely to get worse.”

3 Comments Tagged: .net, new gTLDs, verisign

ICANN terminates deadbeat registrar

ICANN has started termination proceedings on Domain Services Rotterdam, a Dutch registrar, for failure to pay accreditation fees.
The company owes ICANN $5,118.83 in dues but has failed to pay up despite breach notices dating back to May, according to an ICANN termination notice (pdf)
Domain Services does not have any gTLD domains under management, so no registrants will be affected by the termination, which is due to kick in November 21.
The registrar was accredited in March this year.

Comment Tagged: compliance, domain services rotterdam, ICANN, termination

ICANN may cancel Morocco meeting over Ebola fear

ICANN may cancel its forthcoming meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, due to fears about the spread of Ebola in Africa.
The organization issued a statement last night, after local reports said the decision to cancel had already been made:

Following Morocco’s recent request to postpone the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament because of possible African travel restrictions, ICANN is in active and ongoing discussions with our ICANN 52 Marrakech hosts.
ICANN is considering postponing the meeting in Marrakech scheduled for 8-12 February, 2015 as the likelihood of travel restrictions being imposed on nationals from African countries would reduce participation in the meeting. ICANN’s multistakeholder, bottom up model relies on the broad, active participation of communities across geography and society.
ICANN staff is working closely with the ICANN Board and its Community representatives.
No decision has been taken yet, however ICANN understands the importance of providing timely updates and path forward on the status and location of ICANN 52.

Citing an unnamed ICANN source, Le360 reported on Saturday that ICANN 52 had been canceled due to the Moroccan government’s reluctance to host large international gatherings.
While Morocco is not affected by the current Ebola outbreak — which has infected over 10,000 people thousands of kilometers away, mainly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia — there are fears that major international events could bring the virus into the country.
The government has been urging the Confederation of African Football to postpone the Africa Cup of Nations, a football tournament due to take place January 17 to February 8.
The ICANN meeting in Marrakech is scheduled for February 8 to 12.

Comment Tagged: ebola, ICANN, icann 53, marrakech

Why kicking out the .gay “community” was right

Since Dotgay’s application for a Community Priority Evaluation on .gay failed last week, there’s been some unrest among its supporters and in the media.
An effort to get #ICANNisBroken trending hasn’t exactly set the Twittersphere alight, but there have been a handful of news stories that attack the CPE decision for failing to represent the gay community.
I think the criticisms are misplaced.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, which conducts the CPEs for ICANN, got it right in this case, in my view.
Dotgay scored 10 points out of 16 on the CPE. It needed 14 to pass. A pass would have given it exclusive rights to .gay, forcing the three other applicants to withdraw.
It could have scored 14 had it managed to get 4 points out of the available 4 on the “Nexus” criteria — the strength of the relationship between the string “gay” and the community Dotgay said it wanted to represent.
The EIU scored Dotgay zero.
The reason was that Dotgay, in its application, defined its community like this:

The Gay Community includes individuals who identify themselves as male or female homosexuals, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, ally and many other terminology – in a variety of languages – that has been used at various points to refer most simply to those individuals who do not participate in mainstream cultural practices pertaining to gender identity, expression and adult consensual sexual relationships. The Gay Community has also been referred to using the acronym LGBT, and sometimes the more inclusive LGBTQIA. The most common and globally understood term – used both by members of the Gay Community and in the world at large – is however “Gay”.

Dotgay lost the 4 points it needed to pass the CPE almost entirely because of this paragraph.
It overstretched, and it doing so it failed to play by the ICANN rules.
Remember, the EIU was asked to determine the “nexus”, or correlation, between the gTLD string — the word “gay” — and the people Dotgay said it was trying to represent.
By trying to be as inclusive as possible to as many different sexuality/gender identities as it could, Dotgay lost sight of the fact that the gTLD string it wants only describes a subsection of those people.
LGBTQIA isn’t even a particularly well-understood acronym. The “A” could mean “Ally”, as Dotgay said in its application, or “Asexual”, as it is often (but not in Dotgay’s application) interpreted.
Dotgay tried to define “intersex” people — humans whose genitalia or other sexual characteristics do not conform to the standard male/female norms — as “gay”. Are they “gay”?
It tried to define “allies” of gay rights as “gay”. Are we?
The majority of the straight people reading this post, myself included, would characterize themselves as an “ally” of the gay community — we’re supporters of equal rights — but we would not call ourselves “gay”.
The fact that we wouldn’t is an important part of the EIU’s logic, the reason it found Dotgay had overstretched in its community definition, and as hard as I try I can’t figure out why that logic is faulty.
“Membership in the Gay Community is not restricted by any geographical boundaries and is united by a common interest in human rights,” the Dotgay application reads.
Is that not an implicit admission that the “gay community” defined in the application actually includes the majority of the populations of most right-thinking democracies?
Regardless of the EIU’s logic, there has been a moderate amount of outrage online about its decision.
The article getting the most link love appears to be this one at Slate, written by “LGBTQ activist” Marc Naimark.
First, note the acronym Naimark uses in his bio at the bottom of the piece. There are two letters missing when compared to the Dotgay application — “I” and “A”, for “Intersex” and “Ally” or “Asexual”.
Would Dotgay have won its CPE if it had limited itself to the same five letters? Maybe, maybe not. GLAAD defines “gay” as only those people attracted to the same gender. Transsexuals may not count. I and A almost certainly don’t.
Is this just nit-picking?
Not really. The point of the CPE, taken as a whole, was to allow genuine communities to avoid expensive auctions whilst preventing gaming by unscrupulous registries that would seek to claim a valuable string without a genuine community behind them.
In a previous new gTLD round, ICM Registry defined its .xxx “community” as essentially ‘anyone who wants to be a member of the community’. The .mobi registry defined its community as basically ‘anyone with a mobile phone’.
These were both attempts, in my view, to game the rules ICANN had put in place for that particularly new gTLD application round. They were both successful.
What Dotgay tried to do with its .gay application was to define its community as basically everyone. I don’t think I would call it gaming, but I might call it a failure to follow the community rules closely enough.
So is it a bad thing that Dotgay’s CPE got rejected?
I don’t think so.
Remember, Dotgay has not been ruled out of the process. It can still compete at auction with the other applicants.
If that’s too rich for it, there may even be an opportunity for the company to combine in another way with a rival applicant, rather like DotGreen did with Afilias for .green.
In Salon, Naimark wrote that a non-Community .gay — one manged by Top Level Design, Minds + Machines or Rightside, the other three applicants — will likely be awash with pornography or homophobia:

Now, instead, .gay is up for auction, with dotgay LLC facing off against three much larger rivals whose sole aim is to make as much money as possible from .gay names. That means no oversight over who gets a name or what it’s used for. Gay bashers will be able to buy .gay domains. More significantly, the largest market is likely to be among porn sites. Any legitimate use of the name by individuals, businesses, and organizations associated with the LGBTQ community will likely be drowned in a sea of sex: On the Internet, everyone will be .gay for pay.

On the face of it, that seems like a compelling argument. Wouldn’t it be nicer if .gay was devoted to worthy causes rather than gay porn? I would probably agree with that argument.
But none of the four applicants for .gay — not even Dotgay — have any prohibitions or restrictions on porn in their applications.
There’s no reason on the new gTLD program record to believe Dotgay won’t sell .gay domains to porn sites too.
Where Dotgay does have a moral advantage against its competitors is in its explicit prohibitions against homophobic speech in the domain names it sells.
One of the policies it proposes in its application is that domain names should not be “words or phrases that incite or promote discrimination or violent behavior, including anti-gay hate speech.”
The other three applicants don’t have anything nearly as specific in their applications.
But by applying as a formal, big-C “Community” applicant, Dotgay also had to promise to restrict its gTLD to a limited number of people who were members of its self-defined “community”.
This is where I struggle.
Dotgay proposes to restrict .gay to people who obtain a special code via a number of as-yet unspecified, approved “Authentication Providers” — organizations that represent sections of the LGBTQIA community.
This process has clearly been created by the applicant, in my opinion, in order to get the required number of points in the CPE’s “Registration Policies” criteria, where you have to be restrictive to win.
What Dotgay is proposing is a system whereby in order to express your homosexuality (or membership of another LGBTQIA community, including “ally”) you need to apply to an approved gay-related organization for a special code.
That just seems wrong to me.
Whatever happened to the “self-identified” gay person? I thought that “self-identification”, in the sexual and gender identity world, was a bit of a big deal.
You need a password to “come out” online? Really?
I don’t want to be accused of “straightsplaining”, so it’s a genuine question: is it okay for a registry to need to authenticate your sexual/gender identity before you can register a .gay domain?

11 Comments Tagged: .gay, community priority evaluation, cpe, dotgay, eiu, ICANN