ICANN dodges bullet as American elected to ITU top job

The International Telecommunications Union has elected Doreen Bogdan-Martin as Secretary-General, comfortably defeating a Russian candidate who could have caused serious problems for ICANN’s legitimacy.

She won 139 votes out of 172 cast at the agency’s plenipotentiary in Bucharest, the ITU said.​​ She only needed 83. Rashid Ismailov of the Russian Federation, the only other candidate, received 25 votes.

A couple of weeks ago, ICANN CEO Göran Marby took a rare political stance against the Russian’s platform, warning that it could lead to a fragmented internet and the death of ICANN.

Ismailov would have pushed for multilateral internet governance, with the ITU absorbing the functions of ICANN and other multistakeholder organizations.

Bogdan-Martin is American and much more amenable to the status quo.

Comment Tagged: election, ICANN, itu

Identity Digital publishes treasure trove of abuse data

Identity Digital, the old Donuts, has started publishing quarterly reports containing a wealth of data on reported abuse and the actions it takes in response.

The data for the second quarter, released (pdf) at the weekend, shows that the registry receives thousands of reports and suspends hundreds of domains for DNS abuse, but the number of domains it takes down for copyright infringement is quite small.

ID said that it received 3,007 reports covering 3,816 unique domains in the quarter, almost 93% of which related to phishing. The company said the complaints amounted to 0.024% of its total registered domains.

Most cases were resolved by third parties such as the registrar, hosting provider, or registrant, but ID said it suspended (put on “protective hold”) 746 domains during the period. In only 11% of cases was no action taken.

The company’s hitherto opaque “Trusted Notifier” program, which allows the Motion Picture Association and Recording Industry Association of America to request takedowns of prolific piracy sites resulted in six domain suspensions, all as a result of MPA requests.

The Internet Watch Foundation, which has similar privileges, resulted in 26 domains being reported for child sexual abuse material. Three of these were suspended, and the remainder were “remediated” by the associated registrar, according to ID.

The report also breaks down how many requests for private Whois data the company received, and how it processed them. Again, the numbers are quite low. Of requests for data on 44 domains, 18 were tossed for incompleteness, 23 were refused, and only three resulted in data being handed over.

Perhaps surprisingly, only two of the requests related to intellectual property. The biggest category was people trying to buy the domain in question.

This is a pretty cool level of transparency from ID and it’ll be interesting to see if its rivals follow suit.

3 Comments Tagged: abuse, identity digital, iwf, mpa, new gTLDs, privacy, riaa, trusted notifier, whois

Paraguay to chair the GAC

Paraguayan government official Nicolas Caballero has been elected as the next chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

He ran unopposed, in an election that had to extend its nomination period because nobody put themselves forward in time for the original August deadline.

He will replace Egypt’s Manal Ismail, who will leave the chair following ICANN’s meeting in Cancun next March.

The role comes with a non-voting liaison position on ICANN’s board of directors.

Caballero, a technical advisor in Paraguay’s Office of the President, has been on the GAC for about 10 years.

He’s the first GAC chair from South America.

1 Comment Tagged: election, gac, ICANN

Nominet may owe its members millions, top lawyer says

Nominet has been charging its thousands of members annual subscription fees unlawfully for the last quarter-century, it has been claimed.

Ian Mitchell KC, who you may recall was hired by a handful of members to opine that Nominet’s voting system may be illegal, has now delivered a follow-up opinion saying that any subscription fees it has collected since 1997 should not have been paid.

Nominet non-executive director election candidate Jim Davies, one of the members who obtained the opinions, is now calling for Nominet to postpone its Annual General Meeting and the election, scheduled to take place next week, while these legal issues are addressed.

Mitchell’s opinion states that Nominet’s Articles allowed it to set a membership fee for members prior to August 29, 1997, barely a year after the company was founded, but that subsequent fees had to be set with a bylaws change approved by 75% of the membership.

That never happened, he says, meaning:

there has been no basis within the terms of the articles for subscriptions to be set and collected from and after 31st August, 1997. It follows, therefore, that the subscriptions which were collected ought not to have been paid.

Nominet has about 2,500 members, each of whom pay a £400 application fee and a £100 per year subscription. Clearly, over 25 years, that could amount to many millions of pounds.

But Mitchell also suspects Nominet could be protected by the UK’s statute of limitations, reducing its exposure to just the last six years and around £1.5 million.

Mitchell’s opinion was paid for by member Dulwich Storage, owned by former director Angus Hanton, as part of the Davies-led WeightedVoting.uk campaign, which is calling for Nominet to scrap its system that gives its members more votes depending on how many .uk domains they have registered.

Davies says he informed Nominet’s board about Mitchell’s latest opinion last week but has not received a response. So he’s now also written to Civica, the election services company that oversees Nominet ballots, to “to step in and adjourn the AGM”.

Postponing the AGM would also postpone the NED election in which Davies, former reporter Kieren McCarthy and CentralNic lawyer Volker Greimann are vying for an opening seat on the board. Voting closes in a couple of days.

While Mitchell called the subscriptions situation a “recipe for litigation”, Davies says he has no intention of suing Nominet. He says he wants, in Mitchell’s words, for “members [to] come together to see if it is possible to find a consensual way out of the mess which has undoubtedly been created”.

It’s not entirely clear what a solution would look like.

Scrapping the voting system in favor of one-member-one-vote would likely disadvantage candidates relying on winning with the backing of a small number of large registrars, which Davies believes is Greimann’s strategy.

Davies’ headline policy has been to slash .uk registration fees back to £2.50, while McCarthy and Greimann have platforms focused on transparency and member engagement.

Nominet has said that it believes its weighted voting system is lawful. The company has been contacted for comment on the latest legal drama.

Comment Tagged: .uk, elections, nominet, weightedvoting.uk

ICANN approves ccTLD-killer policy

ICANN has formally adopted a policy that would enable it to remove ccTLDs from the DNS root when their associated countries cease to exist, raising the possibility of the Soviet Union’s .su being deleted.

Last Thursday at ICANN 75 in Kuala Lumpur, the board of directors rubber-stamped the ccNSO Retirement of ccTLDs Policy, which sets out how ccTLDs can be deleted in an orderly fashion over the course of several years.

The policy calls for ICANN and the ccTLD registry to form a “Retirement Plan” when the ccTLD’s string is removed from the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 standard, which defines which two-letter strings are reserved for which countries.

Strings are typically removed from this list when a country changes its name (such as Timor-Leste) or breaks up into smaller countries (such as the Netherlands Antilles).

The Retirement Plan would see the ccTLD removed from the root five years after ISO made the change, though this could be extended if the registry asks and ICANN agrees.

In February, I set out the case for why the policy may allow ICANN to retire .su, the thriving ccTLD for the Soviet Union, three decades after that nation was dismantled.

2 Comments Tagged: .su, ccnso, cctlds, iana, ICANN, retirement, root

.br tops five million names

Brazil’s .br ccTLD has topped five million registered domains for the first time.

Stats provided by registry NIC.br show that the milestone was passed around September 14.

The last million names have been added in just the last few years — .br hit four million in late March 2019 and started a steep climb when the pandemic began a year later.

Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief has .br as the sixth-largest ccTLD, but the most up-to-date statistics have .br actually passing .ru, which has been bleeding regs for the last six months and now has fewer than five million, into fifth place.

NIC.br says that surveys show that seven out of every eight domains registered by Brazilians are .br names.

Comment Tagged: .br, nic.br

ICANN returning to Puerto Rico

ICANN has put Puerto Rico back on its list of future meeting venues after cancelling this year’s trip to San Juan due to the pandemic.

The Org will summon the true believers to the Puerto Rico Convention Center from March 2 to March 7, 2024, for ICANN 79, it announced this week.

That’s two years after the cancelled meeting from this March, which ultimately went ahead online only.

It will be six years after ICANN last visited the island, in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

It will be ICANN’s third visit to the country, a US territory. It first held a meeting there in 2007.

ICANN was forced to cancel a Puerto Rico visit in 2016 due to an outbreak of the Zika virus (remember that?).

Of the in-person meetings canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, now all have been rescheduled or have already taken place.

Comment Tagged: covid-19, ICANN, icann 79, pandemic, san juan

Ukrainians urged to “de-Russify” their domains

There’s reportedly a push in Ukraine to get registrants of Russian-transliterated TLDs to switch to their matching Ukrainian versions.

Ukraine’s .ua offers domains in dozens of second-level domains, many of which correspond to the names of cities, such as kyiv.ua and .kharkiv.ua.

But while pretty much everyone in the Anglophone world and elsewhere has started using the Ukrainian transliterations as standard in the six months since Russia invaded, Ukrainian domain registrants have been slow to follow.

According to local registry Hostmaster, today there are 38,564 names registered in the Russian .kiev.ua, but only 1,965 in the Ukrainian .kyiv.ua.

Now local hosting company and registrar HOSTiQ is now reportedly offering customers the chance to swap their Russian domains for the Ukrainian equivalents for free.

.ua as a whole has over 580,000 registered names.

Comment Tagged: .ua, hostiq, hostmaster, war

.au passes four million names as 2LDs surge

Australia’s .au domains has surpassed four million registered names for the first time, boosted by second-level regs.

The milestone appears to have been hit in the last 24 hours, with the total count at 4,001,440 right now, according to the registry’s web site.

The ccTLD has added just shy of 300,000 registrations in the last month. On August 28, it had just over 3.7 million domains.

While auDA does not break down third-level versus second-level domains, the spike no doubt was caused by last-minutes claims of 2LDs under the Priority Allocation Process.

About 240,000 of the names registered in the last month were registered before the September 20 cut-off date for .com.au registrants to buy their matching second-level .au names.

Unclaimed names will be released into the available pool at 2100 UTC October 3, next Monday, which could potentially lead to another surge.

Comment

.com and .net are the drag factor on domain industry growth

Verisign’s own gTLDs .com and .net slowed overall domain industry volume growth in the second quarter, according to its latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

June ended with 351.5 million registrations across all TLDs, up 1 million sequentially and 10.4 million year-over-year.

Growth would have been slightly better without the drag factor of .com and .net, which were down 200,000 domains each sequentially, as Verisign previously reported in its Q2 financial results. There were 161.1 million names in .com and 13.2 million in .net.

The ccTLD world grew by 700,000 names sequentially and 2.6 million compared to a year earlier, the DNIB states.

New gTLD names were up by the same amount sequentially and 4.1 million year over year, ending the quarter at 27 million.

1 Comment Tagged: .com, .net, dnib, verisign