ICANN to crowd-source CEO search

Community members will get more input into ICANN’s leadership than they have for a decade, as the Org searches for its new CEO.

Chris Chapman, chair of the board’s newly reconstituted CEO Search Committee has laid out plans for a series of “listening sessions” that will give interested parties the chance to give their two cents into what an ICANN CEO should look like.

There’s going to be an open Zoom call for 90 minutes on May 16, along with at least a dozen other sessions with various interest groups.

The GAC, ccNSO, ALAC, RSSAC, GNSO, ISOC, IETF, ASO and former directors will all get bilateral sessions during the board’s April 27-28 workshop, and will meet with the SSAC in May.

Staff have also had two such sessions and will get one more before the June public meeting, where ICANN will publish its “candidate profile” for the gig.

The search process wasn’t nearly as inclusive last time around, when a CEO was hired in 2016, but there was a similar level of outreach in 2012, after Rod Beckstrom resigned.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

Verisign’s .net contract up for public comment

ICANN intends to renew Verisign’s contract to run the .net gTLD and has opened the revised deal for public comment.

At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be anything massively controversial about the proposed changes, so we probably shouldn’t expect the same kind of outrage similar contract renewals have solicited in the past.

A great deal of the changes relate to the sunsetting of the Whois protocol and its replacement with the functionally similar RDAP, something set to become part of all gTLD contracts, legacy and new, soon.

The only money-related change of note is the agreement that Verisign will pay pro-rated portions of the $0.75 annual ICANN transaction fee when it sells its Consolidate service, which allows registrants to synchronize their expiry dates for convenience.

That provision is already in the .com contract, and Verisign has agreed to back-date the payments to May 1, 2020, around about the same time the .com contract was signed.

The controversial side-deal under which Verisign agreed to pay ICANN $4 million a year for five years is also being amended, but the duration and amount of money do not appear to be changing.

The new Registry Agreement also includes Public Interest Commitments for the first time. Verisign has agreed to two PICs common to all new gTLD RAs governing prohibitions on abusive behaviors.

The deal would extend Verisign’s oversight for six years, to June 30, 2029. It’s open for public comment until May 25.

Comment Tagged: .net, ICANN, ra, renewal, verisign

About 6,000 .au domains remain contested

Australia’s .au ccTLD has added about 25,000 direct second-level domains since the start of the year, according to auDA.

The registry said this week that it had 740,000 2LD .au names as of March. In its annual report for 2022, published in February, it said it had 716,000 at the end of the year.

auDA also revealed some statistics on its Priority Allocation Process, including the fact that some 6,000 .au domains remain unallocated because more than one registrant has staked a claim.

The process allowed registrants of third-level domains to claim their matching 2LD, but in some cases there’s a conflict because on person owns the .com.au and another owns the .org.au or .net.au.

The 3LD owners have to renew their application for the matching 2LD every year or risk losing it to their rival applicant. The first renewal is due this September.

Over 450,000 contention sets have been resolved so far. There are 4.2 million .au domains registered overall.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, direct, second-level

New gTLDs — implementation talks to start next month

ICANN expects to kick off its implementation efforts for the next rounds of new gTLDs next month.

The Org is putting together its Implementation Review Team, a group of community members that will help shepherd staff into turning policy into reality.

Each supporting organization, advisory committee and constituency will get to nominate a representative (and an alt) and ICANN will put out an open call for volunteers for the team.

Members of the working group that came up with the policy recommendations in the first place are expected to be likely candidates.

The IRT’s main objective is to make sure that ICANN sticks to the letter and spirit of the recommendations, many of which were adopted by its board of directors last month, and prevent members re-litigating settled disputes.

ICANN expects to hold its first IRT meeting the week of May 14 or sooner.

ICANN spent millions of dollars and most of 2022 carrying out an Operational Design Assessment of new gTLDs policy recommendations, which was intended in part to relieve the IRT of some heavy lifting and speed it up.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, irt, new gTLDs, subpro

Epik sued over financial meltdown

Domain registrar Epik has been sued by a customer who says he is owed $327,000 over an aborted secondary market purchase.

Matthew Adkisson says he paid the sum to Epik to buy the domain nourish.com from a third-party seller, with Epik paid $27,000 for its escrow service.

However, Adkisson alleges, the sale fell through and when he asked Epik for his money back he was given the runaround for months.

His lawsuit describes a scheme whereby Epik, former CEO Rob Monster and current CEO Brian Royce were using supposedly escrowed funds for general corporate — and possibly even personal — purposes.

There are even alleged Ponzi-like elements, with funds from new customers being used to pay off debts to former customers.

The suit describes it as a “widespread and illegal fraudulent scheme — replete with misrepresentations, embezzlement, and misappropriation”.

Similar complaints of this nature have been made against Epik for months, with many buyers and sellers struggling to get paid.

The suit, which suggests it believes some of Epik’s actions may have been criminal, lists eight counts including breach of contract, fraud and racketeering. Adkisson wants his money back, as well as unspecified damages.

You can read the complaint here (pdf). Hat tip to John Berryhill.

Comment Tagged: epik, lawsuit

ChatGPT maker files UDRP on .com match

The registrant of chatgpt.com must have thought he’d hit the motherlode when he picked up the domain last December, almost a month after it launched and days after the wildly popular AI chatbot had already received rave reviews from the global press.

What he got instead was a UDRP complaint with WIPO, which ChatGPT maker OpenAI filed last week.

While you’d expect it to be an open-and-shut case, it appears OpenAI was almost as slow with its trademark applications as it was with its domain registration strategy.

The company uses a subdomain of openai.com for the chat service. It launched November 30 last year and received high praise in outlets including the New York Times over the following week.

The .com registrant picked up the previously unregistered name on December 13, but it was not until December 27 that OpenAI applied for a US trademark on the brand.

It wasn’t even the first to apply for a trademark. A company called BrandCentral applied for the mark on December 15, in various “merch” categories unrelated to AI or software, but has since withdrawn the application.

Fortunately for OpenAI, WIPO allows complainants to assert common law trademark rights if the brand is sufficiently famous, and ChatGPT had well over a million users by the time the domain in question was registered.

Comment Tagged: ai, brandcentral, chatgpt, openai, trademarks, udrp

Costerton drops rap album to attract Gen Z to ICANN

ICANN interim CEO Sally Costerton will today release an album of rap music, in an effort to attract more young people to the ICANN community.

Costerton told DI today that it’s become obvious in recent years that ICANN’s community is aging rapidly, and that attracting new, younger talent is vital to ensuring the Org’s longevity.

“Going to ICANN meetings used to be like walking into Rick’s Café, mingling with an international crowd of beautiful young rebels and dashing political hunks,” she said. “Now, it looks more like the Mos Eisley cantina.”

The solution is to modernize ICANN to embrace popular culture, making it more appealing to younger participants, she said.

“Rap is a new form of music from the streets of America, where performers speak over the music,” Costerton, who is releasing 13 all-new tracks and covers under the stage name “Lil Sally C”, explained. “They speak over the music.”

“We’re hoping that with this drop of dope joints, we can draw in the Gen Z chads and thots that we so desperately need,” she said. “We can explain boring ICANN policy concepts in a way that the kids can relate to.”

For example, C said, rather than explain the complex acronym “EBERO”, ICANN could simply direct a newcomer to stream the track “Baby Got Emergency Back-End Registry Operator”.

She expects other tracks, such as “Straight Outta Marina Del Rey”, “I Got 99 Problems (But Adhering To Our Bylaws Commitments To Openness And Transparency Ain’t One)”, and “My Name Is [redacted due to GDPR]”, to be popular singles.

Other tracks on the album include a cover of “Sucker For Pain”, which features guest vocals by DJ Jazzy John Jeffrey.

C lists her influences as Cardi B, NWA, A2M, and Vanilla Ice, but insists her sound is unique and “on fleek af”.

Fellow long-term community members and directors agree.

“She da OG Senior Advisor to President and SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement & Interim President and CEO,” said board chair Tripti Sinha. “Fo’ shizzle!”

But the release has not been without controversy. C defended her decision to use the n-word 38 times on the album, explaining she’s “keepin’ it real.”

“There’s an apostrophe instead of the letter G in keepin’,” she said.

Lil Sally C’s album, entitled “Drop Da C-Bomb!”, is available to download today, April 1, via Napster and Yahoo! Music.

Comment Tagged: april 1

.food registry to dump four dot-brand gTLDs

A company controlled by Warner Bros Discovery is dumping four of its dot-brand gTLDs, but keeping hold of .food, which it has been sitting on, unused for the better part of eight years.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .foodnetwork, .travelchannel, .hgtv and .cookingnetwork, which are four of its US cable TV channels.

Unusually, the termination notice contains a bit of color explaining its decision:

Despite efforts over the years to develop a marketing strategy for deployment of these assets, the company has determined there is not a current use for them and therefore requests early termination of the ICANN Registry Agreements and to wind down these assets

The gTLDs have never been used, something that can also be said for the remainder of Lifestyle’s original portfolio of 11 gTLDs.

The registry was originally owned by Scripps Networks, but following a series of M&A since last year it’s been majority owned by media giant Warner Bros Discovery.

It also has current contracts for .food, .diy, .cityeats, .living, .frontdoor, .lifestyle, and the mysterious .vana (presumably a brand that Scripps was planning to launch in 2012 that never materialized).

The registry’s back-end was Verisign and its new gTLD consultant was Jennifer Wolfe.

Comment Tagged: .cookingnetwork, .hgtv, .travelchannel, dot-brands, foodnetwork, ICANN, lifestyle domain holdings, new gTLDs, termination

Google to drop EIGHT new gTLDs

Google Registry has announced launch details for eight new gTLDs that it has been sitting on for almost a decade.

It plans to launch .foo, .zip, .mov, .nexus, .dad, .phd, .prof and .esq over the coming couple of months, with all eight following the same launch schedule.

Sunrise will begin this weekend, April 2, and run for a month. The Early Access Periods will run for a week up until May 10, when they’re all go into general availability.

The .zip and .mov spaces will be worth keeping an eye on, especially for those in the security space.

Both gTLDs match popular file extensions — for compressed data and video respectively — which could present opportunities for innovation among the internet’s more nefarious players, such as phishers and malware distributors.

.zip is for “tying things together or moving really fast”, Google said, while .mov is “for moving pictures and other things that move”.

All of the new spaces appear to be marketed at general audiences, with no registration restrictions.

Comment Tagged: .dad, .esq, .foo, .mov, .nexus, .phd, .prof, .zip, eap, ga, google, google registry, new gTLDs, sunrise

.org back-end contract up for grabs

Public Interest Registry has started vetting potential registry service provider replacements for Identity Digital, ahead of a formal request for proposals later this year.

The company said this week that in order to run .org’s back-end, which would have to support almost 11 million domains, an RSP would have to hit a list of high-end criteria.

Candidates will have to have seven years experience running an RSP across multiple TLDs, with at least three registry clients, over 500,000 domains, and at least 25 ICANN-accredited registrars on its books, among other items.

That narrows the field down to probably fewer than a dozen companies. The likes of GoDaddy, CentralNic, Verisign, ZDNS, Tucows and Nominet would all presumably qualify, along with Identity Digital itself.

If a transition to a new RSP were to happen, it would be the largest TLD back-end migration in history by a considerable margin. The largest to date was the 3.1 million names that moved from Neustar (now GoDaddy) to Afilias (now Identity Digital) in 2018.

The .org migration from Verisign to PIR in 2003 was when .org was substantially smaller, at 2.7 million names.

According to PIR’s most-recent tax return, Afilias was paid $15.6 million in 2021 for registry services.

PIR said in 2021 that it expects to issue the RFP in the second half of 2023.

Comment Tagged: .org, back-end, identity digital, pir, rfp, rsp