ICANN director quits, no reason given

Judith Vazquez has resigned from ICANN’s board of directors, a year before her term was due to expire, but ICANN has provided no explanation.
Vazquez joined the board in 2011, when she was appointed by the Nominating Committee. She had served two years of her three-year ICANN term and had one year left.
This week ICANN said, in a notice from general counsel John Jeffrey:

Judith Duavit Vasquez has formally notified me, as Secretary, that she has resigned from the ICANN Board. She has indicated that the effective date of her resignation will be Monday, 7 October 2013.

ICANN didn’t say why Vazquez, who was recruited by the Nominating Committee in 2011, had resigned.
Vazquez is a Filipino businesswomen with, according to her ICANN resume, experience developing the internet in her native country.
Vasquez was on the New gTLD Program Committee, which makes decisions for the board about new gTLDs.
Her company had originally applied for a new gTLD, which excluded her from the committee on conflict of interest grounds, but the the application was withdrawn before Reveal Day.
It will be up to this year’s Nominating Committee to find a replacement to fill in for the remainder of her term.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN

Jones distances herself from racy Go Daddy ads

Former Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones has said she “didn’t particularly like” the company’s wildly successful, if sexually provocative, TV advertising.
Jones is one of several candidates for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the company’s home state of Arizona.
She began her campaign officially this week, having come out on Twitter in August, and spoke to The Republic.
Asked about the “racy” TV spots, which were often focused on a large-chested woman with the Go Daddy logo emblazoned on her skimpy attire, Jones told the paper:

A lot of people have asked me about the Go Daddy ads, and to be candid, I didn’t particularly like those ads, either. If I had been running marketing, the ads would’ve been very different. But in the grand scheme of things, the ads ended up being pretty harmless. The ads really made that company successful, and that success allowed me to focus my personal time on developing policy, which made the Internet a better and safer place for users, especially children. Once people get to know me and they differentiate the marketing spin, which is this kind of edgy, Go Daddy-esque style, from my role there — which was running a place that had a lot of serious people doing a lot of serious work — they’ll understand there is a difference.

Some locals seem to be assuming that Go Daddy will support Jones’ campaign, with the paper reporting that “Jones’ entry into the race has political insiders — and opponents — intrigued and even unsettled by her resume and potentially hefty financial backing.”
There’s not a great deal of information about Jones’ positions in the interview, however.

5 Comments Tagged: christine jones, go daddy

First-come, first-served sunrise periods on the cards

New gTLD registries will be able to offer first-come, first-served sunrise periods under a shake-up of the program’s rights protection mechanisms announced a week ago.
The new Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements (pdf) contains a number of concessions to registries that may make gTLD launches easier but worry some trademark owners.
But it also contains a concession, I believe unprecedented, to the Intellectual Property Constituency that appears to give it a special veto over launch programs in geographic gTLDs.
Sunrise Periods
Under the old rules, which came about following the controversial “strawman” meetings late last year, new gTLD registries would have to give a 30-day notice period before launching their sunrise periods.
That was to give trademark owners enough time to consider their defensive registration strategies and to register their marks in the Trademark Clearinghouse.
The new rules give registries more flexibility. The 30-day notice requirement is still there, but only for registries that decide to offer a “Start Date” sunrise period as opposed to an “End Date” sunrise.
These are new concepts that require a bit of explanation.
An End Date sunrise is the kind of sunrise we’re already familiar with — the registry collects applications for domains from trademark owners but doesn’t actually allocate them until the end of the period. This may involve an auction when there are multiple applications for the same string.
A Start Date sunrise is a relative rarity — where registrations are actually processed and domains allocated while the sunrise period is still running. First-come, first-served, in other words.
This gives more flexibility to registries in their launch plans. They’ll be able to showcase mark-owning anchor tenants during sunrise, for example.
But it gives less certainty to trademark owners, which in many cases won’t be able to guarantee they’ll get the domain matching their mark no matter how wealthy they are.
Under the new ICANN rules, only registries operating a Start Date Sunrise need to give the 30 days notice. These sunrise periods have to run for a minimum of 30 days.
It seems that registries running End Date Sunrises will be able to give notice the same day they start accepting sunrise applications, but will have to run their sunrise period for at least 60 days.
Launch Programs
There was some criticism of the old RPM rules for potentially limiting registries’ ability to run things such as “Founders Programs”, getting anchor tenants through the door early to help promote their gTLDs.
The old rules said that the registry could allocate up to 100 names to itself, making them essentially exempt from sunrise periods, for promotional purposes.
New gTLD applicants had proposed that this should be expanded to enable these 100 names to go to third parties (ie, “founders”) but ICANN has not yet given this the green light.
In the new rules, the 100 names still must be allocated to the registry itself, but ICANN said it might relax this requirement in future. In the legalese of the Registry Agreement, it said:

Subject to further review and analysis regarding feasibility, implementation and protection of intellectual property rights, if a process for permitting registry operators to Allocate or register some or all of such one hundred (100) domain names (plus their IDN variants, where applicable) (each a “Launch Name”) to third parties prior to or during the Sunrise Period for the purposes of promoting the TLD (a “Qualified Launch Program”) is approved by ICANN, ICANN will prepare an addendum to these TMCH Requirements providing for the implementation of such Qualified Launch Program, which will be automatically incorporated into these TMCH Requirements without any further action of ICANN or any registry operator.

ICANN will also allow registries to request the ability to offer launch programs that diverge from the TMCH RPM rules.
If the launch program requested was detailed in the new gTLD application itself, it would carry a presumption of being approved, unless ICANN “reasonably determines that such requested registration program could contribute to consumer confusion or the infringement of intellectual property rights.”
If the registry had not detailed the program in its application, but ICANN had approved a similar program for another similar registry, there’d be the same presumption of approval.
Together, these provisions seems to give registries a great deal of flexibility in designing launch programs whilst making ICANN the guardian of intellectual property rights.
Geo gTLDs
For officially designated “geographic” gTLDs, it’s a bit more complicated.
Some geographic gTLD applicants had worried about their ability to reserve names for the governments backing their applications before the trademark owners wade in.
How can the .london registry make sure that the Metropolitan Police obtains police.london before the Sting-fronted pop group (or more likely its publisher) snaps up the name at sunrise, for example?
The new rules again punt a firm decision, instead giving the Intellectual Property Constituency, with ICANN oversight, the ability to come up with a list of names or categories of names that geographic registries will be allowed to reserve from their sunrise periods.
It’s very unusual — I can’t think of another example of this happening — for ICANN to hand decision-making power like this to a single constituency of the Generic Names Supporting Organization.
When GNSO Councillors also questioned the move, ICANN VP of DNS industry engagement Cyrus Namazi wrote:

In response to community input, the TMCH Requirements were revised to allow registry operators the ability to submit applications to conduct launch programs. In response to the large number of Geo TLDs who voiced similar concerns, the IPC publicly stated that it would be willing to work with Geo TLDs to develop mutually acceptable language for Geo TLD launch programs. We viewed this proposal as a way for community members to work collectively to propose to ICANN a possible solution for an issue specifically affecting intellectual property rights-holders and Geo TLDs. Any such proposal will be subject to ICANN’s review and ICANN has expressly stated that any such proposal may be subject to public comment in which other interested community members may participate.

While ICANN is calling the RPM rules “final”, it seems that in reality there’s still a lot of work to be done before new gTLD registries, geo or otherwise, will have a clear picture of what they can and cannot offer at launch.

10 Comments Tagged: founders programs, ICANN, new gTLDs, rpms, sunrise, tmch, trademark clearinghouse, trademarks

Mockapetris hired as ICANN security advisor

DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris has been recruited by ICANN to act as senior security advisor to the Generic Domains Division under its president, Akram Atallah.
It’s not clear precisely what Mockapetris’ role will be, though it doesn’t appear to be a full-time position. He is still chairman and chief scientist of DNS software vendor Nominum.
ICANN recently recorded an interview with Mockapetris in which he pooh-poohed Verisign’s campaign against new gTLDs on security grounds, saying name collisions were not a new phenomenon.
It’s not the first time ICANN has hired a “name” as a security advisory.
One of the inventors of public key cryptography, Whitfield Diffie, became VP of information security under former CEO Rod Beckstom but quietly disappeared not too long after Fadi Chehade took over last year.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN, name collisions

Registrars given access to Trademark Clearinghouse

Accredited registrars on older contracts can now get access to the Trademark Clearinghouse for testing purposes, ICANN announced last night.
Previously, ICANN was only handing out credentials to registrars on the new 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, but many registrars complained that this didn’t give them time to evaluate the TMCH and the RAA at the same time.
ICANN had originally argued that the restriction made sense because the TMCH is used only for new gTLDs, and registrars must have signed the 2013 RAA to sell new gTLD domains.
But feedback from registrars has helped it change its mind. ICANN said:

all ICANN accredited Registrars, not just those that have signed the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), will be able to request registration tokens and start testing their systems with the Trademark Clearinghouse database before it must begin its authenticating and verifying services for trademark data.

Instruction for signing up for TMCH testing can be found here.

1 Comment Tagged: 2013 raa, ICANN, new gTLDs, tmch, trademark clearinghouse

First gTLD Extended Evaluation results published

ICANN has delivered the first three results of Extended Evaluation for new gTLD applications, all passes.
Dot Registry, which has applied for five corporate-themed gTLDs, flunked its Initial Evaluation on .ltd and .llc back in June on financial grounds, but complained a few days later that ICANN’s evaluators had screwed up.
The company told DI at the time that the two bids used the same Continuing Operation Instrument as applications that had passed IE, and was baffled as to why they failed their financial evaluation.
Both applications have now passed through Extended Evaluation with passing scores, the COI-related score going up from 0 (no COI) to 3 (a perfect score).
Both .ltd and .lcc and still contested, and both also face the uncertainty of Governmental Advisory Committee advice and “uncalculated risk” scores, so the time impact of EE on other applicants is zero.
Also passing through EE this week was Express LLC’s dot-brand bid for .express.
The company had failed on technical grounds in Initial Evaluation, having scored an unacceptable 0 on “Abuse Prevention and Mitigation”. Under EE, this has increased to 2, a pass.
Express is still in contention with Donuts.
This week we also see eight applications, seven of them dot-brands, finally making it through Initial Evaluation: .boehringer, .deloitte, .abbvie, .lamer, .abc, .rogers, .fido and the generic .bar.
The DI PRO Application Tracker and associated tools have now been updated to take account of Extended Evaluation results.

Comment Tagged: dot registry, extended evaluation, ICANN, new gTLDs

Eleven TLDs get removed from the DNS

ICANN will soon remove 11 experimental internationalized domain name TLDs from the domain name system.
The TLDs, which represent “.test” in nine scripts and 10 languages, were added to the root almost exactly six years ago in preparation for ICANN’s IDN ccTLDs program.
Now that the program is quite mature, with a few dozen IDN ccTLDs live on the internet with no major reported problems, ICANN has decided that the test TLDs are no longer required.
They will be removed from the DNS root zone on October 31, ICANN said.

Comment Tagged: cctlds, ICANN, idns

.pink and two other gTLDs get contracts

ICANN has signed Registry Agreements this week with three new gTLD applicants, covering the strings .wed, .ruhr and .pink.
I would characterize these strings as a generic, a geographic and a post-generic.
regiodot GmbH wants to use .ruhr as a geographic for the Ruhr region of western Germany while Atgron wants to providing marrying couples with .wed for their wedding-related web sites.
Afilias’ .pink belongs to that unusual category of applied-for gTLDs that I’m becoming increasingly interested in: the non-SEO generic.
The vast majority of generic, open gTLDs that have been applied for (mostly by domainer-driven portfolio applicants) in the current round are essentially “keyword” strings — stuff that’s very likely going to prove useful in search engine optimization.
I’m talking here about stuff like .music, .video, .football and .porn. These may prove popular with small business web site owners and domainers.
But there’s another category of generic gTLDs I believe have little SEO value but offer a certain quirky-cool branding opportunity that may prove attractive to regular, non-commercial registrants.
I’d put strings such as .ninja, .bom, .wow, .hot, .love and .pink into this category.
I’m very curious to see how these kinds of strings fare over the next few years, as I suspect we may see many more such applications in future gTLD rounds.

1 Comment Tagged: .pink, .ruhr, .wed, afilias, atgron, ICANN, new gTLDs, regiodot

dotShabaka Diary — Day 15, Iran and Name Collisions

The fifteenth installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Thursday 3 October 2013
At a time when ICANN has hit the ‘pause’ button on the new gTLD program in order to assess the impact of “name collisions” on the security and stability of the DNS, we were surprised to see the ICANN Board approve the delegation of ایران., the IDN ccTLD for the Islamic Republic of Iran. While we understand the many distinctions between a ccTLD and a gTLD, the DNS does not make any such distinction.
As we’ve heard from Paul Mockapetris and John Crain recently in their interviews posted on the ICANN website, name collisions (or, more accurately, NX Domain responses) is not a new phenomenon; they have been evident with the introduction of any TLD and with existing TLDs in the root. Experience has shown that steps have been taken to successfully resolve the issues. We understand that ICANN is concerned that the use of NX Domain responses has the potential to create confusion with the introduction of new TLDs into the DNS.
As a contracted party with ICANN, شبكة. (an IDN gTLD) is unable to be delegated as we wait the outcomes of ICANN’s deliberations on name collisions. We have paid our $185,000 application fee, we have undertaken a very resource intensive exercise to ensure a compliant application, we have passed Initial Evaluation, we have signed a registry agreement with ICANN, we have passed pre-delegation testing and yet we sit and wait.
Our understanding of the IDN ccTLD fast track process is that it is much less rigorous, the application fee is voluntary, there is no requirement to enter into a contract with ICANN, the TLD can develop a launch strategy that is not restricted by ICANN mandated rights protection mechanisms, and any contribution to ICANN’s budget is voluntary. But because this is a ccTLD and not a new gTLD, the Board has seen fit to approve this delegation request at this time despite the serious conversation going on in the community about name collisions.
As we said previously, the DNS does not distinguish between a ccTLD or a gTLD, or for that matter an IDN ccTLD or an IDN gTLD. We would appreciate an explanation as to why we sit and wait for delegation while the IDN ccTLD is approved.

Read previous and future diary entries here.

1 Comment Tagged: cctlds, dotshabaka diary, fast track, idns, iran, name collisions

Angry gTLD applicants lay into ANA and Verisign “bullshit”

They’re as mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.
New gTLD applicants yesterday laid into the Association of National Advertisers and Verisign with gusto, accusing them of seeking to delay the program for commercial reasons using security as a smokescreen.
The second TLD Security Forum in Washington DC was marked by a heated public argument between applicants and their back-end providers and the ANA’s representatives at the event.
The question was, of course, name collisions: will new gTLDs cause unacceptable security risks — maybe even threatening life — when they are delegated?
ANA vice president Dan Jaffe and outside counsel Amy Mushahwar had walked into the lion’s den, to their credit, to put forth the view that enterprises may face catastrophic IT failures if new gTLDs show up in the in DNS root.
What they got instead was a predictably hostile audience and a barrage of criticism from event organizer Alex Stamos, CTO of .secure applicant Artemis Internet, and Neustar VP Jeff Neuman.
Stamos was evidently already having a Bad Day before the ANA showed up for the afternoon sessions.
During his morning presentation, he laid the blame for certain types of name collision risks squarely with the “dumb” enterprises that are configuring their internal name servers in insecure ways. He said:

Any company that is using any of these domains, they’re all screwing up. Anyone who’s admitting these collisions is making a mistake. It’s a bad mistake, it’s a common mistake, but that doesn’t make it right. They’re opening themselves up to possible horrible security flaws that have nothing to do with the new gTLD program.
…
There is a mechanism by which you can split DNS resolution in a secure manner on Windows. But unless you do that, you’re in trouble, you’re creating a security hole for yourself. So stop complaining and delaying the whole new gTLD program, because you’re dumb, honestly. These are people who are going to have a problem whether new gTLDs exist or not. Let’s be realistic about this: it’s not about security, it’s about other commercial interests.

That’s of course a reference to Verisign, which is suspected of pressing the name collisions issue in order to prevent or delay competition to .com, and the ANA, which tried to get the program delayed on trademark grounds before it discovered collisions earlier this year.
Executives from Verisign, which put the ANA onto the name collision scent in the first place, apparently lacked the cojones to show up and defend the company’s position in person.
Stamos was preaching mainly to the choir at this point. The fireworks didn’t start until Jaffe and Mushahwar arrived for their panel a few hours later.
The ANA’s point of view, which they both made pretty clearly, is that there seems to be a risk that things could go badly wrong for enterprises if they’re running internal names that clash with applied-for gTLDs.
They’ve got beef with ICANN for running a “not long enough” comment period on the topic primarily during the vacation month of August, which didn’t give big companies enough time to figure out whether they’re at risk and obtain the necessary sign-off on disclosing this fact.
In short, the ANA wants more time — many more months — for its members and others to look at the issue before new gTLDs are delegated.
Mushahwar dismissed the argument that the event-free launches of .asia, .xxx and others showed that gTLD delegations don’t cause any problems, saying:

Let me admit right now: DNS collision is not new, it’s been around since the beginning of the internet… what is new is the velocity of change expected within the next year to 18 months.
I really dismiss the arguments that people are making on the public record saying we’ve dealt with this issue before, we’ve dealt with these issues, view the past TLDs as your test runs. We have never had this velocity of change happening.

The ANA seems to believe that the risk and the consequences are substantial, talking about people dying because their voice over IP fails or electricity supply gets cut off.
But other speakers weren’t buying it.
Stamos was first to the mic to challenge Mushahwar and Jaffe, saying their concerns are “mostly about IP and other commercial interests”, rather than sound technical analysis.
He pointed to letters sent to ICANN’s comment periods in support of the ANA’s position that were largely signed by IP lawyers. Security guys at these companies were not even aware of the letters, he said.

The internet is this crazy messy place where all kinds of weird things happen… if this is the mode that the internet goes forward — you have to prove everything you do has absolutely no risk of impacting anyone connected to the internet — then that’s it, we might as well call it done. We might as well freeze the internet as it is right now.
…
If you want to stall the program because you have a problem with IP rights or whatever I think that’s fine, but don’t try to grab hold of this thing and blow it up under a microscope and say “needs more study, needs more study”. For anything we do on the internet we can make that argument.
…
Any call for “we need to study every single possible impact for all several billion devices connected to the internet” is honestly kinda bullshit… it really smacks to me of lawyers coming in and telling engineers how to do their job.

Mushahwar pointed out in response that she’s a “security attorney, not an IP attorney” and that her primary concern is business continuity for large business, not trademark protection.
A few minutes later Neustar’s Neuman was equally passionate at the mic, clashing with Mushahwar more than once.
It all got a bit Fox News, with frequent crosstalk and “if you’d let me continue” and “I’ll let you finish” raising tempers. Neuman at one point accused Mushahwar of “condescending to the entire audience”.
His position, like Stamos before him, was that new gTLD applicants have looked at the same data as Interisle Consulting in its original report, and found that with the exception of .home, .corp and .mail, the risks posed by new gTLDs are minor and can be easily mitigated.
He asked the ANA to present some concrete examples of things that could go wrong.
“You guys have come to the table with a bunch of rhetoric, not supported by facts,” Neuman said.
He pointed to Neustar’s own research into the name collisions, which used the same data (more or less) as Interisle and Verisign and concluded that the risk of damaging effects is low.
The two sides of the debate were never going to come to any agreements yesterday, and they didn’t. But in many respects the ANA and applicants are on the same page.
Stamos, Neuman and others demanded examples of real-world problems that will be encountered when specific gTLDs are delegated and the ANA said basically: “Sure, but we need more time to do that”.
But more time means more delay, of course, which isn’t what the domain name industry wants to hear.

14 Comments