Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours

A screwup by MarkMonitor and GoDaddy was responsible for a two-hour outage affecting Zoom’s videoconferencing services yesterday, according to the company.

The widely used services were offline between 1825 and 2012 UTC yesterday because GoDaddy Registry, apparently acting under MarkMonitor’s instructions, shut down the zoom.us domain.

Screenshots posted to social media show zoom.us returning an NXDOMAIN error in web browsers. In-progress conference calls were reportedly shut off mid-stream.

Zoom said in a statement:

On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, network failure or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

It’s not entirely clear what is meant by “server block”, but it sounds consistent with a serverHold EPP status, where a registry prevents a domain from resolving in the DNS.

GoDaddy is the registry for .us domains. MarkMonitor is a hands-on corporate registrar dealing primarily with high-value brand clients.

Zoom is the incredibly popular conferencing service that grew to such popularity during the pandemic one could almost argue that it could be considered critical infrastructure.

While two hours downtime is hardly the end of the world, it’s still one hell of a screwup.

Comment Tagged: .us, godaddy, markmonitor, zoom

The Soviet Union might be safe after all

The ccTLD from the defunct Soviet Union may be safe from deletion, judging by the ccNSO’s latest pronouncement on the issue.

It seems like, following a bit of a kerfuffle at ICANN 82 in Seattle last month, IANA has been sniffing around behind the scenes trying to figure out whether its own policy on ccTLD retirements applies to .su.

Responding to an unpublished email from IANA chief Kim Davies, the ccNSO seems to have clarified that .su, which has over 100,000 registrations despite its associated territory ceasing to exist 30-odd years ago, is not covered by the policy.

IANA can put a ccTLD into the root if the International Organization for Standardization adds it to its ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list of two-letter country codes.

SU is not on the main list of codes under 3166 but, along with UK, AC (Ascension Islands) and EU, it is on an “exceptionally reserved” sub-list.

ICANN’s policy on deleting ccTLDs was until quite recently not fully codified, but ICANN in 2022 approved a formal Retirement Policy (PDF, from page 13).

That policy allows ICANN to to set the wheels in motion for a deletion whenever a “triggering event” occurs, and:

For 2 letter ccTLDs which corresponded to an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 Code Element – The Trigger is the deletion of that corresponding Alpha-2 Code Element from the ISO 3166-1 Standard by the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency (“ISO 3166/MA”)

IANA seems to have wanted clarification on whether “Alpha-2 Code Element” also means “exceptionally reserved” codes. If it does, then .su probably enjoys the same protected status as .uk.

The policy specifically says that .uk, .ac and .eu are eligible as ccTLDs, but ignores .su entirely for reasons unknown.

The ccNSO told Davies in its April 10 letter (pdf):

it is our view that the Policy is relevant only in circumstances where, as a result of action taken by the ISO, a delegated 2-letter code is no longer on the list of country names or an exceptionally reserved code element.

My read of this is that the ccNSO is saying that, unless ISO removes SU from its “exceptionally reserved” list, there’s no “triggering event” that would compel IANA to delete .su from the DNS root zone.

SU has been removed from the 3166 list once before, back in the 1990s, but it might be a stretch to retroactively accept that as a triggering event, given that it’s been “exceptionally reserved”, apparently at the .su registry’s request, since 2008.

So… is .su safe? It’s certainly looking safer now than it did a few weeks ago, in my view.

This could be seen as good news for ICANN, which might now be able to avoid a damaging confrontation with Russia while also dodging accusations that it’s ignoring its own policies in an embarrassing capitulation to Moscow.

Comment Tagged: .su, iana, ICANN, iso 3166, retirement

Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”

Google is going to stop using country-code TLDs for its web sites around the world.

The company said today that “country-level domains are no longer necessary” because it’s become so good at localization that it doesn’t need to have search users visit their local ccTLD domain to figure out where they are.

All of its ccTLD sites will start redirecting to google.com over the coming months, Google said in a blog post. The only impact users will see is having to re-enter search preferences, it said.

The move is a bit of a blow, albeit a bearable one, to ccTLD registries, which will no longer have their brand associated with the internet’s most-popular web service. Google.com is already the most-visited domain in the world.

6 Comments Tagged: google

Facebook thinks ICANN is a bit rubbish

Facebook owner Meta came away from the recent ICANN 82 public meeting unimpressed and wondering why the community doesn’t actually seem to be doing much, according to the company’s representative.

Writing to ICANN’s CEO and chair last week, head of IP and DNS Mia Brickhouse praised ICANN’s organizational skills but said she was “concerned regarding the lack of tangible outcomes relative to the significant community investment of nearly one week in Seattle.”

“While there were pockets of progress, it was challenging to identify concrete policy-oriented outcomes that I would use to mark participation in the Seattle meeting as a productive success,” she said.

“Many participants I spoke with felt the experience was more focused on policy status updates and remaining entrenched in legacy positions, rather than making measurable progress,” she said.

Welcome to ICANN, Mia!

She goes on to criticize the amount of navel-gazing at the meeting and said the current review into ICANN’s meetings strategy should not only focus on cutting ICANN’s costs but also on making meetings produce results.

Meta’s pet issues are Whois and DNS abuse. Its social media sites get a tonne of phishing attacks using maliciously registered domains and the company is not above taking registrars to court if they fail to play along with its enforcement efforts.

The company is fairly influential in policy-making circles, and arguably may become increasingly so over the next few years, depending on how deeply Donald Trump can reach into Mark Zuckerberg’s trousers.

But the Brickhouse letter is just the latest critique of what I and other time-haggard ICANN observers have been banging on about for years — the “Do Nothing” ICANN. I first pointed out in January 2022 that ICANN hadn’t actually done anything in about five years, something ICANN acknowledged a few months later.

To be fair, the Org has actually started producing tangible output since then. The Registration Data Request System is, whatever its flaws, a thing that the ICANN community came up with and the ICANN Org delivered.

But RDRS, ICANN’s response to the General Data Protection Regulation, took longer to create and deploy than the GDRP itself. ICANN’s multistakeholder model was slower than the notoriously lumbering EU legislative process.

The next round of the new gTLD program is another deliverable that also seems to be hitting its deadlines ahead of a Q2 2026 launch. But it has still taken longer than NASA’s Apollo Program to get off the ground.

One of the most on-point things I’ve read this year came from GoDaddy policy veep James Bladel, who wrote in his board election candidacy statement that “ICANN must stop telling the world why its role is important and start showing clear examples of multistakeholder successes.”

While Bladel did not get elected, Brickhouse’s letter points to an exchange in Seattle between one current and one former ICANN director, in which both parties agreed that “the current process is not working”.

Michael Palage, a freelance consultant who served a term on the board two decades ago, took to the Public Forum mic to complain that ICANN and its contracted parties are increasingly turning to bilateral contract amendments to address issues of concern, rather that having the whole community come up with formal consensus policies.

Becky Burr, approaching the end of her nine-year directorship, concurred that the “policy development process is not efficient and it’s not working as it should”, but disagreed that bilateral deals were not appropriate for addressing pressing issues.

You’re got two people, both who’ve served on the ICANN board and have over half a century of ICANN experience between them, agreeing that the current multistakeholder policy-making model isn’t working.

I’m certain there are other recent examples of long-serving community members criticising the process that are not readily springing to mind.

Sadly, ICANN’s usual response to broad community concerns is to launch a consultation or working group or comment period or somesuch, which often adds to the bloat and drains already jaded volunteers’ available work hours.

I can’t see anything changing any time soon, but there is a public comment period on the meetings strategy still open here.

6 Comments Tagged: do nothing, facebook, ICANN, icann 82, meta

ICANN spending $365,000 a year on coffee and booze

Scrapping coffee breaks and cocktail receptions is among a raft of proposals ICANN has floated in an effort to cut the cost of its public meetings and get its budget under control.

The Org is also thinking about making some meetings shorter or going online-only in order to cut costs, which were estimated to come in at around $14 million in ICANN’s current fiscal year.

But ICANN has shelved the idea of starting to charge community members to attend, after many pointed out that it could disenfranchise less well-funded would-be attendees.

The proposals, which were developed from seeds put forward by Org and refined with a small group of community volunteers and public sessions at recent meetings, have now been put out for formal public comment

One eyebrow-raising stat, new to me, was that the “current estimated cost of networking receptions and coffee breaks is approximately $365,000 annually”. Meetings typically have two coffee breaks per day and two scheduled evening receptions per meeting.

While $365,000 may seem like a lot, consider that it’s spread over three meetings and about 2,000 attendees per meeting. If each attendee on average has a couple of coffees and a couple of glasses of wine at each event, one could easily argue it’s not really that expensive per head.

But the proposals out for comment suggest that any networking event that does not have an external sponsor could be scrapped.

ICANN’s also talking about shortening its Community Forum — the first of the year’s three meetings, typically held in March — by one day by shifting the Public Forum from Thursday to Monday, so the venue’s main ballroom only has to be rented for one day.

Org reckons it could save $460,000 a year by dropping the last day altogether, also eliminating one hotel night for each funded traveller. It turns out the Thursday sessions are lightly attended anyway, with room utilization rates at 20% to 30%, compared to the 60% to 80% earlier in the meeting.

ICANN reckons it could also save money — 10% to 20% per meeting, which works out to many hundreds of thousands of dollars — by switching to an online-only or hybrid model for one meeting a year. Such meetings were the standard during the recent pandemic.

It is also considering whether to reduce the variety of cities it holds its meetings in. It reckons it could cut costs by picking more economical locations and signing multi-year bulk deals with venues.

The proposals come almost a year after ICANN announced it was looking to slash its budget in response to stagnating revenue.

The proposals are now open for comment until May 19.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, meetings

Regulator going after suicide site that even Epik banned

UK communications regulator Ofcom has opened its first public investigation under the new Online Safety Act, targeting a notorious forum that has been linked to dozens of suicides globally.

The probe demands that the site in question provide evidence that it protects its UK users from illegal or harmful content — in this case “encouraging or assisting suicide”.

Failure to do so could lead to Ofcom fining the site’s owners millions, or seeking court orders to have other companies, such as advertisers or internet service providers, disrupt its business, Ofcom said.

The law is often talked about in the context of large social media companies such as Facebook and TikTok, which are often accused of algorithmically instilling suicide ideation in children, but it applies to any service that allows user-to-user content.

This apparently extends to web forums. Some non-controversial sites have already closed down rather than bear the expense of complying.

The Act doesn’t specifically mention domain registrars and registries as being covered by its provisions, but GoDaddy, for example, certainly seems to think it does. It even reckons its domain search feature might be covered.

Ofcom isn’t naming the suicide site, so I won’t either, but it’s not hard to identify by connecting a few dots.

It uses a domain in Verisign’s .net, currently registered with Cloudflare’s registrar. Both registry and registrar are US companies.

The site in question lost its original .com name in 2021 when Epik — yes, even the controversial, free-speech-loving old Epik under Rob Monster — reportedly thought it was too hot to handle.

The site’s administrators have today called the probe “blatant overreach” and accused Ofcom of a “censorship agenda”. They’re currently begging users for cryptocurrency donations.

Media investigations have linked the site to more than 50 suicide deaths. In some cases, the site’s users reportedly goaded their victims, including some children, to take their own lives.

The admins, knowing the site is a target, have previously said they have back-up domains that they could switch to within minutes if they get shut down.

2 Comments Tagged: .net, cloudflare, epik, ofcom, online safety act, verisign

.ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital.

The company took over management of Anguilla’s ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post.

The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Namecheap and went daily.

It’s also put .ai into its DropZone system, so domains that don’t sell at auction can be bid on by registrars through a centralized registry-managed process rather than dropping immediately,

Identity Digital also said that its regular registration revenue has increased 60% compared to last year.

Comment Tagged: ai, identity digital

Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio

Financial services company Prudential Financial has dumped one of its three dot-brand gTLDs, which it was not using.

The company has asked ICANN to terminate its contract to run .pramerica, which, despite the name, provides investment services to the Indian market. The subsidiary uses a .in domain for its web site.

While .pramerica has never had a registered domain in the eight years it’s been active, Prudential has two other gTLDs — .pru and .prudential — which are in active use.

Neither is used as the primary domains for their respective brands — both use exact-match .com names — but both have live corporate sites under domains such as pr.pru and stock.pru.

Prudential’s gTLDs all run on GoDaddy’s back-end registry.

Comment Tagged: .pramerica, .pru, dot-brands, prudential, termination

UK’s Nigel Hickson has died

Long-serving ICANN community member and UK government representative Nigel Hickson has died, according to friends and colleagues.

He’s said to have died at the weekend following a battle with cancer.

While the loss will be felt most keenly by his family, Hickson’s absence will also be felt by the ICANN community and wider domain name industry.

Hickson was most recently head of internet governance policy at the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, but he might be better known to the domains community as the country’s representative on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

He was until a few weeks ago one of the GAC’s vice-chairs and as such often a prominent and vocal presence during governmental discussions of ICANN’s policies at public meetings.

But he also engaged with the domain investor community, showing up to deliver the UK government’s perspectives at conferences such as the London Domains Summit.

Prior to joining the government, Hickson spent eight years working for ICANN as a vice president with a government engagement portfolio.

I only met Nigel on a handful of occasions, but he always came across as a thoroughly pleasant chap with a surprising sense of humor.

Hickson is said to be survived by his wife and daughter, who have our condolences.

1 Comment Tagged: gac, ICANN

.blog registry ordered to change name to Knock Knock RDAP There

Hilariously named .blog registry operator Knock Knock Whois There has been ordered to change its name to “Knock Knock RDAP There” or risk the wrath of ICANN Compliance.

The company has been told it has 30 days to file papers requesting the name change with the California Secretary of State, or ICANN will initiate termination proceedings against it, putting about 300,000 .blog domains at risk.

The surprising move comes a couple of months after ICANN’s contracted parties finished their mandatory migration from the old Whois protocol to the newer Registration Data Access Protocol.

ICANN Compliance is taking the migration deadline incredibly seriously, according to a KKWT source.

“They started calling us up almost immediately,” she said. “When we got the first warning fax, we thought it was a joke so we just ignored it. But then we started getting menacing voicemails every day, then every hour. It’s gotten really frightening.”

“They even somehow found out my 90-year-old mom’s cell number and started calling her at her retirement home, telling her ‘the kid complies, or we escalate’,” the source said. “She has no idea what that means and she’s terrified.”

Compliance’s increasing belligerence is believed to be linked to boredom. The department, having successfully eliminated all DNS abuse, is now scrounging around for other things to enforce.

“Damn right we’ll escalate,” Compliance chief Ronnie Smanks told us. “Those Knock Knock wankers better get their house in order, or I’ll send the boys around.”

That’s believed to be a reference to ICANN’s recently created Physical Compliance department, a collection of rough lads often seen loitering around ICANN headquarters brandishing tire irons, pickaxe handles, and bicycle chains.

But KKWT says it will not be cowed, and is seeking out legal advice. It’s also recruited a creative agency to try to come up with a new company name that is just as funny as the original, which is, as everyone agrees, very, very funny indeed.

3 Comments Tagged: april 1