WhatsApp now linkifying new gTLDs, but…

All URLs using new gTLD domains are now being automatically linkified by WhatsApp, according to the registry manager who’s been pushing for greater support from the major social networks.

Rami Schwartz of Latin American Telecom, the .tube registry, says that WhatsApp on Android devices is now making all new gTLD domains clickable even without the http:// prefix, but that the app on Apple devices has not yet caught up.

Schwartz discovered last year that WhatsApp did not support any gTLD delegated after November 2015, apparently due to the app relying an outdated hard-coded list of gTLDs in Android.

While the list was quickly updated, it’s taken a while for support to trickle down to devices.

Schwartz credited the WhatsApp team at Meta in the UK and ICANN technology specialist Arnt Gulbrandsen with getting the linkification support accomplished. He said he hopes iOS support will come soon.

4 Comments Tagged: .tube, ICANN, latin american telecom, linkification, meta, new gTLDs, universal acceptance, whatsapp

Outrage over ICANN’s new gTLD fees

Is ICANN stifling competition and pricing out the Global South by setting its new gTLD evaluation fees too high? A great many community volunteers seem to think so, judging by recent conversations.

The Org last week revealed that it plans to charge registry service providers that want to participate in the next application round $92,000 for their technical evaluation, on top of the estimated $250,000 fee that it will charge for each applied-for string.

Critics have pointed out that a roughly equivalent evaluation, used when a 2012-round gTLD switches to an unknown back-end, currently costs about $14,300, and they’re baffled as to why ICANN plans to up its fees so much.

The Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program was intended to cut a lot of waste and duplication from the new gTLD program. Instead of doing a technical evaluation on an RSP for each gTLD application, the RSP is evaluated once and each applicant simply selects an RSP from a list of approved companies.

ICANN says the program will cost $4.1 million overall, with $2 million of that already mostly spent on the design and implementation phase. It’s expecting all of the existing 40-ish back-end providers to submit to evaluation, along with an unknown number of newcomers.

Assuming fewer than 50 participating RSPs, ICANN will charge $92,000 per RSP. The program is designed to be run on a cost-recovery basis. ICANN says it will lower the price and issue refunds if there are significantly more participants.

Despite that caveat, ICANN staffers running the new gTLD program have faced a barrage of criticism over the last week from members of the SubPro Implementation Review Team, the community volunteers tasked with making sure staff implementation sticks to community policy.

The high-end of the fee scale is high enough that it will essentially “kill off” the RSP market in the Global South, according to Rubens Kuhl of Brazilian ccTLD registry Nic.br, which currently runs the back-end for a handful of 2012-round strings.

The term “Global South” refers to less-wealthy countries largely in the southern hemisphere, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where $92,000 goes a lot further than it does in North America or Europe.

“What ICANN is suggesting right now simply kills off all Global South RSPs,” Kuhl said during a call yesterday. “Those RSPs could have the technical capability to run gTLDs, and they run very large ccTLDs… It simply seems like a system designed to keep the Global South out.”

Gustavo Lozano Ibarra, director of technical services projects at ICANN and former NIC Mexico employee, responded first by saying that gTLD applicants in the next round from the Global South do necessarily have to chose an RSP from their own region.

“I completely understand that there could be some RSPs in the Global South with capabilities for which the fee could be an issue,” he said. “I think that we get that, and I think that maybe the lack of an Applicant Support Program for the RSPs is something that we need to take into consideration for the next round.”

“So, this round, no Global South. Okay, thank you,” said Kuhl.

“I don’t think this proposed US$92,000 RSP pre-evaluation fee is going to encourage diverse participation in the next nTLD round, especially from developing regions,” Neil Dundas of South African RSP DNS Africa said on the IRT’s mailing list.

“It’s a new financial barrier to entry that previously was not there and it will almost certainly hamper participation from developing regions,” he said.

Mailing list chatter suggests that this potential barrier to entry is something that ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee may take a dim view of when the community convenes in Rwanda for ICANN 80 next month.

ICANN is also taking flak for how it is calculating the total cost of the RSP program. Consultant and registry operator Jeff Neuman accused the Org of “double-dipping” by charging for staffers’ work on the program, which he said should already be covered by the fees registries, registrars and ultimately registrants pay into ICANN’s budget.

Responding to criticism that ICANN has over-spent, Ibarra pointed out on yesterday’s call that $4.1 million is a fraction of the $22 million he said ICANN spent on technical evaluations in the 2012 application round.

In addition, RSPs that are attached to potentially dozens of gTLD applications will save a lot of money by only paying to be evaluated once, he said.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, rsp evaluation program

Barrett gets second term on ICANN board

ICANN’s Address Supporting Organization has elected Alan Barrett to fill one of its two seats on the ICANN board of directors for the second time.

Barrett, an ISP pioneer from South Africa, was first elected in 2021 and will re-take his seat at ICANN’s AGM this November, assuming the Empowered Community gives him the nod.

He fought off four other candidates from Africa, Asia-Pacific and North America for the job. Europeans were barred from standing because the ASO’s other sitting director is from that region.

Comment Tagged: aso, ICANN

DotMusic delays gTLD launch again

DotMusic has pushed it general availability launch date out by more than three months, as it tries to recruit anchor tenants from the music industry.

The registry says GA is now planned for October 8, versus a previous date of June 25.

The gTLD is currently in its “community organization phase”, during which musicians and industry entities can claim their matching .music domains after completing a rigorous identity verification process.

DotMusic has offered up to a million domains for free via participating partner organizations.

The registry announced this week that it has partnered with a company called Shufti Pro on registrant ID verification.

Comment Tagged: .music, dotmusic

.tm prices to skyrocket next week

Already-expensive ccTLD .tm is set to see its prices rocket by hundreds of dollars next week, with an annual registration set to cost $1,000 or more.

.TM Domain Registry says a one-year registration or renewal will cost registrars $400, which can be reduced as far as $200 if they register more than 100 domains. Currently, the price is $80, according to tldpricechanges.com.

The recommended retail price will be $1,000, the registry says. The increases come into effect June 1.

The registry is also scrapping its practice of requiring all registrations to be for 10 years, adopting the industry standard of one to 10 years instead.

Today, the cheapest retail price I was able to find was $1,200 for a 10-year reg. After the increase, we could be looking at closer to $12,000 for the same service.

.tm is the ccTLD for Turkmenistan, but the registry has been run from the UK and owned by Paul Kane, the same person who ran .io before selling it to Identity Digital a few years back, since the 1990s.

1 Comment Tagged: .tm, .tm domain registry

Bitcoin gTLD gets launch dates

Orange Domains has announced the launch schedule for .locker, a real gTLD that nevertheless has support for the Bitcoin protocol built in.

Sunrise is set to kick off next month, running from June 19 to August 20, shortly followed by a “Pioneer Program” in which the registry will seek out anchor tenants for marketing purposes.

General availability is set for September 26, following a week-long Early Access Period. Prices have not yet been published.

.locker is a proper DNS gTLD, but Orange Domains intends it to be compatible with apps, such as cryptocurrency wallets, that run on the Bitcoin Name System protocol.

The registry is a joint venture of Trust Machines, Tucows, and Hiro Systems.

.locker was originally owned by the satellite TV company Dish DBS, which it had intended to use as a dot-brand, but it was never used and sold off to Orange last year.

Comment Tagged: .locker, bitcoin, bns, new gTLDs, orange domains, sunrise

First metaverse gTLD is announced

Unstoppable Domains has announced plans to apply for the first gTLD devoted to a metaverse.

The company has partnered with Metropolis, a “a 360° curated universe that blends commerce, gaming, and experiences that span both digital & physical worlds” to launch .metropolis names on Unstoppable’s blockchain.

“Metropolis plans to explore future ICANN gTLD applications in order for .Metropolis to become even more integrated in the digital landscape,” Unstoppable said.

In the meantime, Metropolis expects its users to use the blockchain version of the names to address “virtual real estate within the metaverse”.

I checked out the Metropolis web site, clicked on everything, and have to confess I don’t understand any of it. I feel about a thousand years old.

1 Comment Tagged: .metropolis, ICANN, new gTLDs, unstoppable

Alibaba off the naughty step

Chinese registrar Alibaba is no longer at risk of losing one of its ICANN accreditations, according to a notice on the Org’s web site.

Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba’s four registrars, failed to respond to abuse reports and missed ICANN payments, according to its March breach notice.

But the company has now provided ICANN with documents sufficient to bring it back into compliance with its contract, according to the notice.

Alibaba has over six million domains under management across its three active accreditations, making it one of the largest registrars to come under the scrutiny of ICANN Compliance.

Comment Tagged: alibaba, compliance, ICANN

ICANN to kill auction fund bylaws change

A controversial proposed amendment to ICANN’s bylaws is set to be killed off after the community flexed its muscles over the board of directors.

The amendment, which sought to give ICANN a switch to turn off its accountability mechanisms under certain circumstances, is now likely to be replaced by one that limits accountability only when it comes to ICANN’s $220 million Grant Program.

News of the board’s change of heart came during a Monday call between the GNSO Council and the two GNSO appointees on the board.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the bylaw that was put together and circulated is not going to pass the Empowered Community,” board member Becky Burr told the Council “So we need to go back and and revisit that.”

The community had wanted an amendment that makes the Independent Review Process and Request for Reconsideration mechanisms unavailable to organizations applying for grants and those that oppose them, to avoid splurging money on lawyers rather than good causes, but the board had floated text that would have made it easier to turn these mechanisms off in future scenarios too.

ICANN’s amendment was supported by the At-Large Advisory Committee, but every other community group, in a rare example of across-the-aisles agreement, reckoned it was overly broad and risked weakening ICANN’s accountability.

The board’s decision to revert to what the community originally wanted appears to be a reluctant one. Burr said that the IRP needs to be looked at in future because the way the bylaws are written now invites over-use.

“As they are currently written, a disappointed bidder, an engineering firm in response to an RFP, could use those, could bring an IRP,” she said. “At some point we’re going to have to look at this more holistically.”

The were also calls from the Council to take a look at the RfR process, or at least how RfRs are handled by ICANN’s legal team. RfRs are too often seen as an adversarial exercise where ICANN lawyers are simply try to “win” against the requester rather than solve the problem at hand, they said. This has led to a situation where dozens of RfRs have been filed over the year, almost all of which are dismissed.

Comment Tagged: icann. accountability, irp, rfr

The people have spoken on RDRS and they said “Meh”

Users of ICANN’s new Whois data request service appear to be overwhelmingly apathetic about it, if the results of the first quarterly user survey are to be believed.

ICANN sent surveys to 861 users of the Registration Data Request Service and 29 of the registrars that support it. Only 17 requesters and 15 registrars responded, and not every respondent answered every question.

With such a small sample size, it’s debatable whether the results can tell ICANN or anyone else whether RDRS is any good or not.

Asked whether having RDRS was better or worse than not having RDRS, only seven requester respondents answered. Two thought it was “much worse”, one thought it was “somewhat worse”, two thought it was “about the same” and two thought it was “somewhat better”.

Nobody clicked the button for “much better”, a fact that would be quite easy to seize upon as a headline if not for the fact that this is a survey of seven people and therefore pretty much worthless.

Responses to free-text questions perhaps shed a little light on the user experience: some people think it’s too slow, they’re not happy that they didn’t get the data they wanted, and the level of registrar support is too low.

Asked the same question about whether RDRS has made handling Whois requests better or worse, 11 registrars responded. The mix was heavily towards the “worse” end of the scale, which is probably not what ICANN wanted to hear.

In free-text responses, some registrars said they found the interface and workflow lacking, making the process of handling requests take more time and effort than doing the same outside RDRS. Pretty much the diametrical opposite of RDRS’s raison d’etre.

RDRS is a two-year pilot that has data-gathering as one of its primary purposes, but with such a lackluster response to the first survey ICANN is surely hoping the seven remaining surveys may produce some more meaningful stats.

The full survey results are available to read here (pdf), if you can be bothered.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, rdrs, whois