ICANN director slammed vertical integration

ICANN really shook up the domain name industry last month when it said it was dropping rules that prevent registrars and registries from owning each other.
But two of its directors voted against the decision and one, George Sadowsky, entered a lengthy dissenting opinion in which he said the benefits of so-called “vertical integration” are “largely illusory”.
Vertical integration would allow existing registrars to apply to run new top-level domains. It would enable companies to more easily apply for “.brand” or small niche TLDs.
This has been banned in previous registry contracts, due in part to the potential for abuse of registry data and anti-competitive behaviour by registrars.
Sadowsky delivered a four-point objection to the VI resolution, which was passed in early November, according to minutes published this week.
He said that introducing VI at the same time as the new TLD program would create unpredictable and irreversible consequences for the industry, and questioned ICANN’s ability to enforce compliance with data-sharing rules.

in spite of the measures to be taken to ensure “good conduct,” the resolution has the potential to commingle all of the data, public and private, regarding a registry in one place, providing the possibility of easy and invisible sharing of data within a merged or co-owned entity regardless of the scope of any agreement with ICANN.
Such sharing is likely to be undetectable given the close affiliations among the entities. Data now forbidden to be shared between registries and registrars will be shared. Both auditing and enforcement by ICANN are unlikely to be effective, all the more so as we move from 20+ to hundreds of new gTLDs.

Data sharing would give registrars greater insight into valuable domains, potentially facilitating registrant-unfriendly activities such as warehousing.
Those companies which opposed VI, including Afilias and Go Daddy, have previously said that the potential for registrar abuse, harming registrars, was too great.
Sadowsky said:

Assuming that each gTLD registry must continue to treat all registrars equally, the real benefits of vertical integration are largely illusory, but those that can be easily obtained by the officially forbidden sharing of data are real

The minutes also show that Mike Silber voted against the resolution, saying he “believes there will be very unpleasant, unintended consequences”.
Harald Alvestrand, Ram Mohan, Thomas Narten, Jonne Soininen and Bruce Tonkin had conflicts of interest and were not in the room for the debate. The two voting directors, Tonkin and Alvestrand, officially abstained from the vote.
The minutes also contain this mysterious entry:

Confidential Issue
Pursuant to Article V, Section 5.4 of the ICANN Bylaws, the Board of Directors, by unanimous vote, determimed that, to protect the interests of ICANN, the matter under discussion should not be included in the minutes until such time as the Board designated the item should be published.

Anybody with any ideas what this might be, please feel free to theorize in the comments.

1 Comment Tagged: applicant guidebook, ICANN, mike silber, new TLDs, vertical integration

Go Daddy proposes fake pharma site shutdown body

A cross-industry body that will make it easier for web sites selling fake drugs to be shut down is forming in the US, led by Google and Go Daddy.
The idea for the currently nameless organization was announced yesterday following a series of meetings between the internet industry and White House officials.
The group will “start taking voluntary action against illegal Internet pharmacies” which will include stopping payment processing and shutting down web sites.
The domain name business is represented by the three biggest US registrars – Go Daddy, eNom and Network Solutions – as well as Neustar (.biz, .us, etc) on the registry side.
Surprisingly, VeriSign (.com) does not appear to be involved currently.
Other members include the major credit card companies – American Express, Visa and Mastercard – as well as PayPal and search engines Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
According to a statement provided by Neustar:

GoDaddy and Google took the lead on proposing the formation of a private sector 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that would be dedicated to promoting information sharing, education, and more efficient law enforcement of rogue internet pharmacies.

It’s early days, so there are no specifics as yet as to how the organization will function, such as under what circumstances it will take down sites.
There’s no specific mention of domain names being turned off or seized, although reading between the lines that may be part of the plan.
There’s substantial debate in the US as to what kinds of pharmaceuticals sites constitute a risk to health and consumer protection.
While many sites do sell worthless or potentially harmful medications, others are overseas companies selling genuine pharma cheaply to Americans, who often pay a stiff premium for their drugs.
The organization will do more than just shut down sites, however.
It also proposes an expansion to white lists of genuine pharmacies such as the National Association of Boards of Pharmacies’ Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS).
And it will promote consumer education about the “dangers” of shopping for drugs online, as well as sharing information to stop the genuine bad guys “forum shopping” for places to host their sites.
This is what the statement says about enforcement:

The organization’s members agree to share information with law enforcement about unlawful Internet pharmacies where appropriate, accept information about Internet pharmacies operating illegally, and take voluntary enforcement action (stop payment, shut down the site, etc.) where appropriate.

While taking down sites that are selling genuinely harmful pills is undoubtedly a Good Thing, I suspect it is unlikely to go down well in that sector of the internet community concerned with the US government’s increasing role in removing content from the internet.

1 Comment Tagged: enom, go daddy, google, network solutions, neustar, pharma, white house

What next for new TLDs? Part 4 – GAC Concerns

Like or loathe the decision, ICANN’s new top-level domains program appears to have been delayed again.
But for how long? And what has to happen now before ICANN starts accepting applications?
In short, what the heck happened in Cartagena last week?
In this four-part post, I will attempt an analysis of the various things I think need to happen before the Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is approved.
In this fourth post, I will look at areas of the AGB that the Governmental Advisory Committee is still concerned about.
GAC Concerns
The GAC’s laundry list of objections and concerns has grown with every official Communique it has released during an ICANN public meeting over the last few years.
While it has not yet published its official “scorecard” of demands for the home-stretch negotiations, it has released a list of 11 points (pdf) it wants to discuss with the board.
These 11 points can be grouped into a smaller number of buckets: objections and disputes procedures, trademark protection, registry-registrar separation, and the treatment of geographical names.
I wrote about the trademark issue in part one of this post.
The GAC appears to have adopted many of the arguments of the IP lobby – it thinks the AGB does not currently do enough to ensure the costs to business of new TLDs will be minimized – so we might expect that to be a major topic of discussion at the GAC-Board retreat in February.
I’ll be interested to hear what it has to say about registry-registrar separation.
The GAC has been pushing for some looser cross-ownership restrictions, in order to foster competition, since 2007, and most recently in September.
It has previously been in favor of restrictions on “insider” companies with market power, but for a more relaxed environment for new entrants (such as “community” TLDs that may largely operate under agreements with their local governments).
This position looks quite compatible with ICANN’s new vertical integration policy, to me, so I’m not sure where the GAC’s concerns currently lie.
The issue of disputes and objections may be the trickiest one.
The GAC basically wants a way for its members to block “controversial” TLD applications on public policy grounds, without having to pay fees.
The “Rec6” policy, previously known as “morality and public order objections” is one of the issues the ICANN board has specifically acknowledged is Not Closed.
This is from its Cartagena resolution:

Discussions will continue on (1) the roles of the Board, GAC, and ALAC in the objection process, (2) the incitement to discrimination criterion, and (3) fees for GAC and ALAC-instigated objections. ICANN will take into account public comment including the advice of the GAC, and looks forward to receiving further input from the working group in an attempt to close this issue.

GAC members on the Rec6 working group repeatedly highlighted objection fees as a deal-breaker – governments don’t want to have to pay to object to TLD applications.
This appears to been cast as some kind of sovereignty-based matter of principle, although I suppose it could just as easily be an “in this economic climate” budgeting concern.
ICANN’s position is that the GAC as a whole can object for free, but that individual governments have to pay. Fees for some objection procedures will run into tens of thousands of dollars.
The GAC also has beef with the AGB’s treatment of geographic strings.
This is an area where ICANN says the AGB already “substantially reflects the views of the ICANN community” but intends to take GAC comments into account.
ICANN has already made substantial concessions on the geographic names issue, but there may still be a few loopholes through which territory names could slip through the net and be approved without the endorsement of their local governments.
Finally, the GAC wants to include amendments to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, previously recommended by law enforcement agencies, in the AGB discussion.
The appears to have come completely out of the blue, without any direct relevance to the new TLD program.
It’s a long list covering a lot of issues, and it could get longer when the GAC publishes its official “scorecard”. We’ll have to wait and see.

3 Comments Tagged: agb, applicant guidebook, cartagena, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, mopo, new TLDs, rec6, san francisco

What next for new TLDs? Part 3 – The .xxx Factor

Like or loathe the decision, ICANN’s new top-level domains program appears to have been delayed again.
But for how long? And what has to happen now before ICANN starts accepting applications?
In short, what the heck happened in Cartagena last week?
In this four-part post, I will attempt an analysis of the various things I think need to happen before the Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is approved.
In this third post, I will look at the state of play with the .xxx TLD application, and what that means for the new TLD process.
The .xxx Factor
At some time in February, the ICANN board and its Governmental Advisory Committee plan to meet (possibly in Geneva) to discuss both the AGB and the .xxx TLD proposal.
While these are two separate issues, how .xxx is being handled may have an impact on the timetable for the AGB’s approval.
Let’s first look at what’s happening with .xxx.
As you will have almost certainly already read, the ICANN board resolved on Friday that it “intends to approve” .xxx, despite GAC advice that may be to the contrary.
The ICANN-GAC power structure is governed by an 11-point charter in ICANN’s bylaws. The last two points, J and K, deal with what happens when the two parties disagree.
Under what, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to call “GAC-J” (instead of “ICANN Bylaws section Article XI, Section 2, Paragraph 1(j)”), ICANN has to call a meeting with the GAC when it plans to disregard GAC advice.
Specifically, if the ICANN board “determines to take an action” that is not consistent with GAC advice, it has to “inform” the GAC, stating why it decided to not follow the advice, then “try, in good faith and in a timely and efficient manner, to find a mutually acceptable solution”.
GAC-J has, to the best of my knowledge, never been invoked before. There isn’t even a procedure in place for handling this kind of official consultation.
But on Friday, the board stated that it intends to not follow the GAC’s advice on the .xxx application and “hereby invokes the consultation as provided for in ICANN Bylaws section Article XI, Section 2, Paragraph 1(j).”
Now that GAC-J has been invoked, the GAC and board will meet to find their “mutually acceptable solution”.
Should such a solution prove elusive, the ICANN board has to make a final decision, stating why it has disregarded the GAC’s advice. That’s handled by what I’ll call GAC-K.
What does all this have to do with new TLDs and the timetable for the publication and approval of the final Applicant Guidebook?
As ICM Registry president Stuart Lawley pointed out in a comment on CircleID, the procedures being created to resolve the .xxx dispute could very well soon be applied to the AGB.
As Lawley points out, ICANN has not yet put the GAC on notice that it plans to disagree with any of the 11 concerns outlined in the Cartagena GAC Communique.
While the Communique “assumes” ICANN has invoked GAC-J with regards new TLDs, the board has not explicitly done so.
This is uncharted territory, but I think it’s possible that this oversight (if it is an oversight) has the potential to add latency to the new AGB approval timetable.
ICANN might be well-advised to pass a resolution officially invoking GAC-J before the February bilateral meeting, in order to turn it into a bylaws-compatible consultation.
As long as it invokes the bylaws before March, the San Francisco meeting will be able to host a GAC-Board consultation under the terms of GAC-J, enabling the AGB to be approved that week.
If ICANN does not take either of these options, the GAC will be able (if it wants to be a pain) to further delay the process by demanding another inter-sessional consultation, like it just did in Cartagena.
I’ll discuss the GAC’s actual concerns in the fourth part of this post.

3 Comments Tagged: applicant guidebook, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, icm registry, new TLDs, xxx

What next for new TLDs? Part 2 – The GAC Bottleneck

Like or loathe the decision, ICANN’s new top-level domains program appears to have been delayed again.
But for how long? And what has to happen now before ICANN starts accepting applications?
In short, what the heck happened in Cartagena last week?
In this four-part post, I will attempt an analysis of the various things I think need to happen before the Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is approved.
In this second post I will look at the process problems presented by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
The GAC Bottleneck
The main meta-story of Cartagena was ICANN’s turbulent relationship with its Governmental Advisory Committee, which is either maturing or (less likely) heading to towards a shattering collision.
The two big proposals that were widely expected to get the ICANN board’s nod last Friday – the new TLD final Applicant Guidebook and the .xxx TLD – were both delayed in whole or part by the GAC.
It’s become abundantly clear that the overall ICANN decision-making process has become subject to what I’m going to call the GAC Bottleneck.
If ICANN is serious about getting things done to its desired timetable in future, it will need to start paying attention to the GAC much earlier and much more seriously.
There’s been a failure to communicate over the last several years, the inherently problematic results of which were clearly embodied in sessions last Monday in which the GAC and the ICANN board discussed the definition of “advice”.
If there’s an “advisory” committee, and neither the committee nor the body its “advises” knows what “advice” means, that’s a pretty big stumbling block to constructive dialogue, which helps nobody.
The GAC believes that this historic uncertainty is the main reason why the new TLD program has hit an impasse at this late stage in the process.
The official Cartagena GAC Communique said:

the GAC considers that these [unresolved GAC concerns with the AGB] result primarily from the fact that the Board adopted the GNSO recommendations on new gTLDs without taking due account of GAC advice at that time, thereby creating a flawed process.

That’s pretty strong stuff – the GAC is basically saying that all the thousands of discussions the community has endured since 2007 have been carried out under faulty assumptions, because ICANN failed to pay heed to GAC advice when it was writing the rules of engagement for developing new TLD policy.
It’s also the reason we’re looking at the need for a GAC-Board retreat next February, at which ICANN will attempt to address the GAC’s outstanding concerns, before the AGB can be approved.
More on that in part three of this post.

1 Comment Tagged: applicant guidebook, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, new TLDs

What next for new TLDs? Part 1 – Unresolved Issues

Like or loathe the decision, ICANN’s new top-level domains program appears to have been delayed again.
But for how long? And what has to happen now before ICANN starts accepting applications?
In short, what the heck happened in Cartagena last week?
In this four-part post, I will attempt an analysis of the various things I think need to happen before the Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is approved.
In this first post I will look at the issues that ICANN has explicitly tagged as unresolved, with special reference to trademarks.
Unresolved Issues
ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, explaining the board’s resolution on new TLDs on Friday, said:

The intention has been, as much as possible, to indicate those areas where the board feels that the work that has been done is sufficient to move to closure… What we’ve also tried to do is indicate which areas are still clearly open for consideration.

The resolution names only two issues that are explicitly still open for further policy development: geographic strings and “morality and public order” objections. I’ll discuss these in a future post.
Issues considered already reflecting “the negotiated position of the ICANN community” include “trademark protection, mitigating malicious conduct, and root-zone scaling”.
But does this mean that the trademark issue, easily the most contentious of these three “overarching issues” is really sufficiently “closed” that we’ll see no more changes to those parts of the AGB?
I don’t think so. While the Cartagena resolutions say trademark protection has been addressed, it also says “ICANN will take into account public comment including the advice of the GAC.”
It may be too late for the IP community to affect changes directly, beyond the comments they’ve already filed, but the GAC, which has already aligned itself with the trademark lobby, may be able to.
Beyond the text of the resolution, ICANN chair Peter Dengate Thrush said in an interview with ICANN head of media relations Brad White:

We’ve spent a lot of time with the trademark community and come up with three new independent mechanisms for protecting trademark rights on the internet. So the sense of board and the sense of the community is that that’s probably a sufficient effort in developing mechanisms. What we now might look at is how we might enhance, tweak and improve those processes, but we’re not going to convene another process to look at yet another kind of solution for intellectual property rights.

In other words, according to Dengate Thrush, ICANN isn’t planning to create any new IP rights protection mechanisms in the AGB, but these mechanisms, such as Uniform Rapid Suspension and the Trademark Clearinghouse, could be still be modified based on comments received from the trademark lobby over the last week or so.
Most of the outcry from the IP lobby recently has called for the specifics of these two mechanisms to be tilted more in favor of trademark interests; there’s been little call for any new mechanisms.
Trademark rights protections also account for two of the 11 issues that the Governmental Advisory Committee has tagged “outstanding” which “require additional discussion”, by my reading.
More on the GAC bottleneck in part two of this post.

1 Comment Tagged: applicant guidebook, cybersquatting, ICANN, intellectual property, new TLDs, trademarks

ICANN chief gets bonus

ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom is to be paid a bonus potentially as high as $195,000 this year.
Did you know that there were two ICANN board meetings held in Cartagena last week?
I didn’t, but I just spotted that resolutions from a December 8 meeting have been posted on the ICANN web site.
There are only two resolutions. They grant bonuses to Beckstrom and to outgoing ombudsman Frank Fowlie.
The board approved “a proportion” of both men’s “at-risk component”, which basically means their performance-related bonuses.
The resolutions do not specify how big a proportion was approved for either, but it is known that the maximum Beckstrom could have been awarded is $195,000.
His base salary is $750,000.

5 Comments Tagged: cartagena, Frank fowlie, ICANN, Ombudsman, rod beckstrom

Want a premium .xxx domain? Now’s your chance

ICM Registry, despite suffering another setback at the Cartagena ICANN meeting last week, has set the wheels in motion for the launch of .xxx with the announcement of a Founders Program.
If you want to get your hands on a “premium” .xxx domain without having to pay a tonne at auction, this is your chance.
ICM said it will license premium domains to organizations willing to develop and market their sites for at least two years, raising awareness of the TLD.
.CO Internet did a similar thing with .co, issuing one-character names to the likes of Go Daddy and Twitter. Other registries have had founder programs for super-short domains.
The program will be open to newcomers, as well as those who own “matching” domains in other TLDs.
The .xxx application is currently on hold, pending ICANN’s consultation with its Governmental Advisory Committee in February, but ICANN has said that it “intends” to approve it.
It will be interesting to see how many members of the adult community currently opposed to .xxx, if any, will attempt to participate as a Founder.
(Hat tip: Michele Neylon)

2 Comments Tagged: founders program, ICANN, icm registry, xxx

Go Daddy plans Premium DNS service

Go Daddy is to launch a Premium DNS service that will include managed DNSSEC security, the company revealed during sessions at the ICANN meeting in Cartagena last week.
Go Daddy customers can currently get a brief overview of the forthcoming service by logging into their domain manager and finding the Premium DNS “Coming Soon” link, or looking here.
During a session on DNSSEC in Colombia last week, Go Daddy’s James Bladel laid out more detail on the service in a presentation (PDF) which contains screenshots of the interface.
The company started supporting DNSSEC for free on certain TLDs in the summer – it currently supports .net, .biz, .eu, org and .us – but it requires users to manually generate and manage cryptographic keys.
That’s beyond the ken of most domain name owners, so the registrar is adding a premium “set it and forget it” service which will see Go Daddy manage the complexities of DNSSEC.
Bladel said of the service:

it’s as simple as having a DNSSEC on/off switch. So customers who have no particular interest in the behind- the-scenes technology of DNSSEC can simply flip that switch and then enjoy the benefits of a secured domain name.

The DNSSEC standard helps prevent domains being hijacked through cache poisoning attacks by signing each domain’s zone with a validatable cryptographic key. The technology will be available for .com domains early next year.
It’s by no means free or easy for registrars to implement, and there’s been little demand for the technology among registrants, so I’ve been wondering how registrars planned to monetize it.
Now we know how Go Daddy at least plans to do so – the Premium DNS service will have other benefits beyond DNSSEC, which could spur adoption through osmosis.
The service will also include DNS up-time guarantees of 99.999%, vanity name servers, log tracking, and several other perks.
The company has not officially announced the service to customers yet, so I expect we’ll find out more details in due course.

3 Comments Tagged: DNSSEC, go daddy, premium dns, verisign

Drunk domain blogger gets mugged in Cartagena

ICANN people love defining things, and a few people at the meeting here in Cartagena have disputed whether this anecdote meets the strict definition of “mugging”.
Okay, I didn’t wind up with a knife in my ribs, they weren’t carrying firearms, and they didn’t get my wallet.
But they were going to beat me up (at the very least) if I didn’t give them what they wanted and it’s really just blind luck that I managed to blag my way out of it.
I often find that these kinds of stories are better related in first-person present tense.
So it’s 4am, and I’m blatantly flouting ICANN’s security advice by walking, rather than getting a taxi, back from .CO Internet’s rather nice afterparty to my considerably less-nice hotel.
But it’s only two or three short blocks, and I’m inside the walled city, so I reckon I’m safe.
Wrong.
Two thuggish-looking blokes quickly appear beside me and one of them starts mouthing off in unusually good English about how I owe him money for a coke deal I’m apparently somehow implicated in.
I’m not kidding.
I forget the details, but the gist of it is that I need to give them both an unspecified large amount of money for some drugs that I stole or something and that Bad Things will happen to my face if I refuse.
Unfortunately for the Escobar brothers, it turns out that at 4am, with half a bottle of Colombian fire-water in my belly, I’m invincible.
Or believe myself to be, anyway.
So I decide to play dumb, and just carry on walking. I figure I’ll pretend for as long as possible that I’m simple, or don’t speak English. My hotel is in sight by this point.
“Okay,” I say, confused look on my face, after he finishes his story.
“So you give us money?” he says.
“Okay,” I say, not giving him money.
“You give us money now.” he’s not asking this time.
“Okay,” I say. Walking a bit faster.
This goes on for two blocks. As dumb luck would have it, by the time he starts to loses his patience we’ve already reached my hotel.
Of course, at 4am, my two-star dive has its doors locked, and I have to ring the buzzer to get in.
Normally, the young girl on the desk buzzes me through two seconds later. Of course, normally I don’t show up in the dead of night accompanied by two burly Colombian guys yelling about drug money.
So she understandably doesn’t want to let me in.
Trying to buy time, and unsure whether this is a violent scam or a genuine case of mistaken identity, I tell the guy he can have his money in the morning. Just drop by, pick it up, no worries.
I buzz again, but she still doesn’t want to let me in.
“You give me money now.”
I usually carry a bunch of small-denomination bills in my pocket when I’m on unfamiliar turf, for precisely this kind of scenario, so I grab a wad of notes and stuff them into his hand.
“Okay, here’s your money.”
Buzz again. Still no response.
I’m trying not to notice that the money I’ve just given him amounts to about two US dollars, but he clearly has noticed and is quite angry.
I’m told I now owe him 57,000 pesos, which strikes me as unusually specific.
Fortunately, I never get to find out why he settled on that amount. The girl buzzes me through and, after a brief struggle, Scarface eats door.
End of anecdote.
To me, it sounds like a mugging. Drug guys threatened to beat me up and I gave them $2 – that fits the definition, right? It may be the lamest mugging in Colombian history, but it’s still a mugging.
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Next time, I’ll try to get stabbed or something.

17 Comments Tagged: cartagena, colombia, ICANN