The end of “do-nothing” ICANN?

ICANN’s new gTLD program hit a remarkable milestone earlier this month. Measured from the 2012 application window, on March 6 it officially overtook NASA’s Apollo Program, which put a dozen humans on the moon, in terms of duration.

But some in the community coming out of ICANN 76 last week appear to be cautiously optimistic that the days of the “do-nothing” ICANN, entirely too wrapped up in pointless bureaucracy and navel-gazing, may be coming to a close under its new leadership.

As I reported in January 2022, at that point ICANN hadn’t implemented a policy in over five years and didn’t seem to be close to actually getting stuff done.

That sentiment was reflected at a Cancun open-mic session last week, when 20-year community member Jordyn Buchanan, who works for Google and said he’d taken a five-year break from the ICANN process, spoke up.

“It’s not so great when I look at the substantive progress that has been made — or rather that hasn’t been made — in the past few years, or really over the past decade or so,” he told the board.

He gave several examples, not least the new gTLD program, where ICANN has been procrastinating for years.

“Consistently across the board, I think we see examples of where we’re just not living up to the vision of ICANN as being an entity that could be more responsive and more rapid looking at technological changes,” he said.

The only area where progress has been made is Whois, and that’s only because ICANN’s hand was forced by European Union legislation, he said.

Board member Chris Chapman, at his first full ICANN meeting in the role, responded positively to the feedback, stating: “There’s a real realization internally within the board that there have got to be more efficient, effective, and timely deliverables.”

Directors including interim CEO Sally Costerton and chair Tripti Sinha, made similar noises throughout the week, repeatedly invoking the idea of an “inflection point” for the institution, which faces increasing pressures from governments and other external forces.

The noises were encouraging to some.

The GNSO Council decided as the Cancun meeting closed to send a letter to Sinha and Costerton, both relatively recent appointments, observing “there seems to be a noticeable change, maybe even a cultural change, towards ‘getting things done’.”

The Council will express its support for “this spirit of pragmatism and delivery” and encourage ICANN to continue along the same lines.

Council’s spirits appear to have been raised by the ICANN’s board’s touring stakeholder bilaterals last week with questions about how ICANN can be more “agile”, particularly through the use of “small teams” to answer narrow policy problems.

Such a practice has been used in areas such as DNS abuse, and its arguably in use today answering the closed generics question.

Community members also used these sessions to express dissatisfaction with the lumbering Operational Design Assessments that have delayed Whois reform and the new gTLD program, suggesting that ODA work in future could run in parallel with the Policy Development Processes they seek to assess.

So, it seems pretty clear that ICANN’s new leadership used ICANN 76 send the signals they needed to send to get the community on board with their program.

Whether this honeymoon-period energy will lead to real change or gradually wither away under 25 years of accumulated labyrinthine bureaucracy, institutional lethargy, and personal beefs remains to be seen.

But this isn’t rocket science.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, icann 76

Governments backtracking on closed generics ban

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee appears to be backpedaling on its commitment to permitting so-called “closed generic” gTLDs in the next application round.

The GAC’s output from ICANN 76, which took place in Cancun last week, contains a paragraph that suggests that governments are reverting to their decade-old position that maybe closed generics are not a good idea.

The GAC, GNSO and At-Large have been engaging in a “facilitated dialogue” for the past few months in an attempt to figure out whether closed generics should be allowed and under what terms.

The GAC is now saying “no policy option, including the prohibition of Closed Generics, should be excluded if no satisfactory solution is found”. It had agreed to the dialogue on the condition that prohibition would not be an outcome.

A closed generic is a single-registrant gTLD matching a dictionary word that is not a trademark. Think McDonald’s controlling all the names in .burger or Jack Daniels controlling the whole .whiskey zone.

These types of TLDs had not been banned in the 2012 application round, resulting over 180 gTLD applications, including the likes of L’Oreal applying for .makeup and Symantec’s .antivirus.

But the GAC took a disliking to these applications, issuing advice in 2013 that stated: “For strings representing generic terms, exclusive registry access should serve a public interest goal.”

This caused ICANN to implement what amounted to a retroactive ban on closed generics. Many applicants withdrew their bids; other tried to fudge their way around the issue or simply sat on their gTLDs defensively.

When the GNSO came around to developing policy in 2020 for the next new gTLD round, it failed to come to a consensus on whether closed generics should be allowed. It couldn’t even agree on what the default, status quo position was — the 2012 round by policy permitted them, but in practice did not. The matter was punted to ICANN.

A year ago, ICANN said the GAC and GNSO should get their heads together in a small group, the “facilitated dialogue”, to resolve the matter, but the framing paper outlining the rules of engagement for the talks explicitly ruled out two “edge outcomes” that, ICANN said, were “unlikely to achieve consensus”.

Those outcomes were:

1. allowing closed generics without restrictions or limitations OR

2. prohibiting closed generics under any circumstance.

The GAC explicitly agreed to these terms, with then-chair Manal Ismail (who vacated the seat last week) writing (pdf):

The GAC generally agrees with the proposed parameters for dialogue, noting that discussion should focus on a compromise to allow closed generics only if they serve a public interest goal and that the two “edge outcomes” (i.e. allowing closed generics without restrictions/limitations, and prohibiting closed generics under any circumstance) are unlikely to achieve consensus, and should therefore be considered out of scope for this dialogue.

Now, after days of closed-door facilitated dialogue have so far failed to reach a consensus on stuff like what the “public interest” is, the GAC has evidently had a change of heart.

Its new Cancun communique states:

In view of the initial outputs from the facilitated dialogue group on closed generics, involving representatives from the GAC, GNSO and At-Large, the GAC acknowledges the importance of this work, which needs to address multiple challenges. While the GAC continues to be committed to the facilitated dialogue, no policy option, including the prohibition of Closed Generics, should be excluded if no satisfactory solution is found. In any event, any potential solution would be subject to the GAC’s consensus agreement.

In other words, the GAC is going back on its word and explicitly ruling-in one of the two edge outcomes it less than a year ago had explicitly ruled out.

It’s noteworthy — and was noted by several governments during the drafting of the communique — that the other edge outcome, allowing closed generics without restriction, is not mentioned.

It’s tempting to read this as a negotiating tactic — the GAC publicly indicating that a failure to reach a deal with the GNSO will mean a closed generics ban by default, but since the facilitated dialogue is being held entirely in secret it’s impossible to know for sure.

Comment Tagged: closed generics, gac, ICANN, icann 76, new gTLDs

Radix sold almost $8 million of premiums last year

New gTLD portfolio Radix made $7.8 million from the sale of $100+ premium domains in 2022, over $5 million of which came from premium renewals.

The company this week released its second-half premiums roundup, showing $4 million in total premium retail revenue, $2.7 million of which came from renewals.

That follows first-half numbers of $3.8 million total and $2.5 million from renewals.

It made $1.3 million selling 1,458 first-year premiums, and $2.7 million renewing 2,483 names.

First year renewals were at 61%, second year at 79% and subsequent years, as we revealed in January, at a whopping 90%.

The best-performing TLDs were .tech, .store and .space.

The dollar values are at the retail level; Radix’s own share will be about 30% lighter.

Comment Tagged: new gTLDs, premiums, radix

.com was a drag on the industry in Q4

The .com gTLD was a growth drag on domain name registrations in the fourth quarter, if the latest figures in Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief are to be believed.

The industry closed out 2022 with 350.4 million domains all TLDs that the DNIB tracks (which excludes Freenom’s free ccTLDs), up half a million in the quarter and 8.7 million over the year.

But that was despite Verisign’s own .com, rather than due to it. The DNIB has .com down from 160.9 million to 160.5 million. Sister TLD .net was flat at 13.2 million.

It was left to new gTLDs and ccTLDs to pick up the slack.

ccTLDs accounted for 133.1 million names, up 700,000 sequentially and 5.7 million over the year. New gTLD registrations were up 100,000 sequentially and 2.7 million over the year.

A big driver in ccTLDs was Australia’s .au, where the launch of direct second-level registrations added hundreds of thousands of domains and let the ccTLD kick .xyz out of the top 10 TLDs by volume.

But the report has a pretty big discrepancy that could throw out the ccTLDs number, I believe. For some reason the DNIB has .eu increasing by 300,000 names to 4 million in Q4, which flies in the face of the registry’s own numbers, which have it basically flat at 3.7 million.

Comment Tagged: .com, .eu, dnib, eurid, verisign

Identity Digital hit by failure of Silicon Valley Bank

Identity Digital, which runs hundreds of gTLDs, has warned its network of registrars not to send payments to its Silicon Valley Bank account.

SVB, America’s 16th-largest bank, was shut down on Friday by US financial regulators after a run on deposits. The failure has been described as the largest since the 2008 financial crisis.

Identity Digital told registrars yesterday that it was an SVB customer, but said “our exposure is very limited and we remain committed to serving our customers, employees, and vendors without interruption.”

Nevertheless, it asked partners to direct payments instead to its HSBC bank account.

SVB also provided ID, then Donuts, with a $110 million credit facility in 2017, which it used to fund its $213 million acquisition of Rightside.

The failure of SVB was so worrying that US President Joe Biden yesterday morning took to the airwaves to reassure customers that their deposits were safe and the banking system stable.

Comment Tagged: donuts, identity digital, silicon valley bank

.art links DNS and alt-root ENS

UK Creative Ideas, the .art gTLD registry, has started offering its registrants the ability to register names on the blockchain-based alt-root Ethereum Name Service that exactly match their DNS names, for a one-time fee.

CMO Jeff Sass said that for $20, paid in Ethereum coin, registrants can secure their exact-match on the ENS, with no renewal fees.

There’s an authentication system using DNS TXT records to make sure only .art DNS registrants can obtain their matching ENS names, he said.

“We’ve married the two together, so there can’t be any confusion or collisions,” he said.

The benefit of this is that registrants will be able use their .art domains to address their cryptocurrency wallets. Web browsers that support ENS obviously already support DNS, so there’s no real benefit in that context.

.ART is also selling ENS .art names without matching DNS names — and these can include ICANN-prohibited characters such as emojis — but these are priced from $5 to $650, based on character count, and have annual renewal fees.

.art current has about 230,000 registered names, a pretty respectable number for a new gTLD, and Sass said about 60% of them are in the form of firstnamelastname.art, suggesting usage by professional and amateur artists.

gTLD registries selling matches in alt-roots has been a cause of concern at ICANN over recent years, due to legal concerns. Uniregistry’s sale of its portfolio was held up for months because of this.

Comment Tagged: .art, alt-roots, blockchain, crypto, ens, ICANN, new gTLDs, uk creative ideas

Brands want new gTLD fast track

The Brand Registry Group is to propose a set of principles for the next round of ICANN’s new gTLD program that it thinks would see the initial application fee slashed by more than half and some evaluations starting as early as this October.

Under the proposals, TLD-curious applicants could get into the system for as little as $100,000 per string, about $150,000 lower than ICANN’s current estimate, and could see ICANN accepting applications as early as April 2025.

The recommendations, drafted by GoDaddy’s Tony Kirsch and Pharos Global’s Michael Palage, will be presented at a session on Saturday, the first day of ICANN’s 76th public meeting, in Cancun, Mexico.

They’re calling the proposals “Option 2a”, a reference to the two options laid out in ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment of the next round, which was completed in December.

The plan would allow applicants to pay $100,000 to submit a bare-bones application and test the waters in terms of contention, objections and similarity. They could then choose to withdraw before submitting the financial and technical portions of their bid.

Applicants with straightforward applications (presumably including most dot-brands) would have a lower overall cost than those who need additional reviews, contention resolution and objection processing.

The paper also criticizes the “astonishing” estimate of a $400 million program development cost, suggesting instead that ICANN repurpose its existing tools such as Salesforce to roll out the application submission system.

It reckons ICANN could start its Registry Service Provider Pre-Evaluation Program, based on the process it already uses when registries switch back-ends, in October this year.

If ICANN adopts the proposals, the BRG reckons a final Applicant Guidebook could be approved in October 2024, with applications accepted from April 2025.

Comment Tagged: brand registry group, cancun, ICANN, icann 76, new gTLDs, oda, odp, subpro

Facebook sues free domains registry for cybersquatting

Facebook parent Meta has sued Freenom, the registry behind multiple free-to-register ccTLDs including .tk, claiming the company engages in cybersquatting.

Meta alleges that Freenom infringes its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trademarks over 5,000 domain names in the TLDs it operates.

While best-known for Tokelau’s .tk, which had almost 25 million registrations when Verisign stopped counting them a year ago, Freenom also operates .gq for Equatorial Guinea, .cf for the Central African Republic, .ml for Mali, and .ga for Gabon.

Apart from some reserved “premiums”, the company gives domains away for free then monetizes, with parking, residual traffic when the domains expire or, one suspects more commonly, are suspended for engaging in abuse.

Naturally enough, it therefore has registered, to itself, a great many domains previously used for phishing.

Meta lists these names as examples of infringers: faceb00k.ga, fb-lnstagram.cf, facebook-applogin.ga, instagrams-help.cf, instaqram.ml, chat-whatsaap.gq, chat-whatsaap-com.tk, and supportservice-lnstagram.cf, though these do not appear to be monetized right now.

It accuses the registry of cybersquatting, phishing and trademark infringement and seeks over half a billion dollars in damages (at $100,000 domain).

Today, Freenom is not accepting new registrations, but it’s blaming “technical issues” and says it hopes to resume operations “shortly”.

Facebook is one of the most prolific and aggressive enforcers of its trademarks in the domain space, having previously sued OnlineNIC, Namecheap and Web.com. OnlineNIC had to shut up shop due to its lawsuit.

(Via Krebs on Security)

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, facebook, freenon, lawsuit, meta, opentld, phishing

Whois disclosure system coming this year?

ICANN has approved the creation of a Whois Disclosure System, almost six years after Europe’s GDPR rules tore up the rule book on Whois access.

The system is likely to face a name change before going live, due to the fact that it does not guarantee, nor process, the disclosure of private Whois data.

The board of directors passed a resolution February 27, a month later than expected, “to develop and launch the WHOIS Disclosure System (System) as requested by the GNSO Council within 11 months from the date of this resolution.”

That’s two months longer than earlier anticipated, but we’re still looking potentially at a live system that people can sign up for and use a year from now.

The system is expected to be based on the Centralized Zone Data Service that many of us have been using to request and download gTLD zone files for the last decade. While not perfect, CZDS gets the job done and has improved over the years.

The technology will be adapted to create what essentially amounts to a ticketing system, allowing the likes of IP lawyers to request unredacted Whois records. The requests would then be forwarded to the relevant registrar.

It’s an incredibly trimmed-down version of what Whois users had been asking for. Participation is voluntary on both sides of the transaction, and registrars are under no new obligations to approve requests.

If nobody uses the system, it could be turned off. ICANN Org has only been directed to run it for “for up to two years”. ICANN will collect and publish usage data to figure out whether it’s worth the quite substantial number of hours and dollars that have already gone into its development.

The actual cost of development and operation had been pegged at $3.3 million, but the board’s resolution states that most of the cost will be existing staff and excess costs will come from the Supplemental Fund for Implementation of Community Recommendations (SFICR).

Comment Tagged: gdpr, ICANN, privacy, ssad, whois, whois disclosure system

Euro registrars merge to form Your.Online

French registrar Gandi and Dutch registrar holding group Total Webhosting Solutions have announced they have merged to form a new company, Your.Online.

The combined entity says it has a million customers, revenue of €175 million ($183 million), and 600 employees.

Your.Online will operate eight brands, mostly in hosting. Gandi will remain as an independent brand under the new corporate umbrella. The TWS brand appears to have been retired.

Financial terms of the deal between the two private companies were not disclosed.

Gandi founder Stephan Ramoin will become the group’s non-executive chairman of the firm’s advisory board. Your.Online is helmed by Abe Bakker

I think today might be the first time in 25 years of reporting that I’ve seen the word “bullshit” in a press release.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, gandi, merger, tws, your.online