Roundup: domain industry starts to respond to coronavirus pandemic

With much of the world already laboring under coronavirus-related movement and assembly restrictions, many domain industry companies have started to publicly outline their business continuity plans.
Some companies have already implemented blanket home-working rules, while others are ready to pull the trigger on such regimes just as soon as local government policy or other circumstances require it.
Here’s a roundup of what some of these companies have said over the last few days.
It’s not an exhaustive list — I’m sure many companies have unannounced contingencies in place — and it should be noted that some of these announcements may well be out of date already, due to the speed at which the virus risk, and government responses to it, are changing.

• In Italy, the nation hardest-hit by the virus outside of China, local ccTLD registry Registro.it said: “Due to the current health emergency, there may be delays in the processing of legal and administrative procedures in the coming days. Activities related to the registration and maintenance of domains will be carried out as usual”.
• NIC Chile, the .cl registry, has imposed a ban on outsiders attending its offices, effective today, “in order to safeguard the health of its clients and officials”.
• Portugal’s Associação DNS.PT, the .pt registry, has gone a step further, saying Friday that it has already adopted remote working. It added that it was not aware of any confirmed cases and that it expected business to continue as normal.
• An undated notice on DNS Belgium’s web site states: “To guarantee maximum business continuity, we temporarily close our office and all work from home.”
• Dutch ccTLD registry SIDN said Friday that “most” of its employees are working from home, and it will minimize in-person contacts to “strictly necessary” meetings. It does not expect disruption to services.
• Austrian Nic.at said that employees “who are not tied to the Vienna or Salzburg office locations due to their work can work from home by telework”, adding “strict hygiene measures apply in the offices”.
• In Denmark, DK-Hostmaster said that customer support will now be conducted purely via email, with phone support suspended until March 27.
• It’s the same story in Poland for .pl domains, according to a notice on the NASK web site.
• Afilias said Thursday that it has contingency plans in place to keep its registry business ticking over even if staff fall ill or office closures are mandated. It’s also stepped up office cleaning and made hand sanitizer available to staff. Employees will be able to home-work should the need arise, the company said.
• Corporate registrar family Com Laude said that it’s updated its business continuity and disaster recovery plans to account for the pandemic threat, including providing remote-working solutions for its staff.
• Network Solutions, part of Web.com, told customers Friday that its workforce is geared up to work from home too, and that customer service should be unaffected during the crisis.
• British registrar Astutium said it won’t book any in-person meetings with clients for the next 90 days, and that if anyone shows up for an already-booked meeting they will be required wash thoroughly before they’re let through the door.

I’ve not heard any reports yet of members of the industry with confirmed infections. So that’s good.

Chinese registrars ask ICANN to waive fees due to Coronavirus

Almost 50 registries and registrars based in China have asked ICANN to temporarily waive its fees due to the economic impact they say Covid-19 — the new Coronavirus — is having on them.
They’ve all put their names to a February 21 letter (pdf) that ICANN published over the weekend, saying they “believe that it’s essential that ICANN provides immediate fee waiver to registries and registrars in China”.
The letter, signed by more than half of the currently accredited registrars in China, notes the cancellation of the Cancun public meeting, adding:

We highly respect and welcome ICANN’s approach to keep our community safe. Meanwhile, the contracted parties in China, including their staff, suppliers, and relevant business counterparts, are being hit and suffered by the 2019-nCoV in a much greater scale than in other countries and regions combined since January 2020. Many of the staff members have been restrained to perform sales and support functions at the level they are required to. There are significant delays in collections, payments and wire transfers. While we expect that the scale of 2019-nCoV could not go greater, the business growth estimate in 2020 has been jeopardized and the time of recovery can be very long.
While domestic aid on tax, rentals, etc. are being discussed and confirmed, we believe that it’s essential that ICANN provides immediate fee waiver to registries and registrars in China. The waiver of 2020 fees, including annual fees and transaction fees, will greatly help stabilize our business in the difficult time.

This is not a small ask. ICANN collects fees based on transaction volume, and many millions of transactions originate in China. That’s particularly true in the new gTLD space, where China dominates.
The Chinese companies say that ICANN could afford to waive the fees due to the money they say ICANN will save by cancelling Cancun and other international travel.
My hunch is that ICANN won’t agree to these demands. While China is currently undoubtedly disproportionately affected by Covid-19, that situation is rapidly changing.
In the coming weeks and months it’s quite possible — worst-case scenario — the rest of the world could be similarly affected. Is ICANN prepared to set a precedent that could see it sacrifice its entire annual budget? I doubt it.
All previous requests for ICANN to waive its fees for various other reasons have been denied.

ICANN might cancel Spring Break over Covid-19 fears

ICANN’s next public meeting, which is due to kick off in Cancun, Mexico less than three weeks from now, is in peril of being canceled due to fears about Covid-19, aka Coronavirus.
CEO Göran Marby is to host a call with community leaders in a few hours to discuss the issue. ICANN has assembled a “crisis management team” to monitor the spread of the disease.
The fear isn’t that attendees could pick up the virus from Mexican locals — there’s not a single confirmed case in Mexico yet — but rather that an already-infected person might show up and transmit the disease to others, who might then take it back home with them.
Or — even worse — ICANN is considering the possibility of “a ‘cruise ship’ scenario in which a suspected or confirmed case is identified during the meeting, necessitating the mass-quarantine of all attendees and locals”.
That’s a reference to the cruise ship currently anchored off Japan, where 3,400 people have been quarantined for the last couple of weeks.
Imagine that. Trapped at an ICANN meeting for weeks. The boredom might kill more people than the virus.
Given that the vast majority of Covid-19 cases so far — over 70,000 — have been in China, ICANN is also worried about Chinese attendees getting racially profiled and hassled by others.
ICANN notes that the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been cancelled, and Cisco has cancelled a conference that had been slated to go ahead in Australia around the same time.
Could ICANN follow suit? It wouldn’t be the first time ICANN has changed is meeting plans due to a virus outbreak. Could ICANN 67 be the first remote-only ICANN meeting? It certainly seems like a possibility.

As Cancun looms, ICANN bans China travel because of Coronavirus

ICANN has banned its staff from travelling to China because of Coronavirus.
The organization said at the weekend that it has implemented the ban, which includes connecting flights of “an abundance of caution”. The ban includes the mainland as well as Hong Kong and Macau.
The move matches travel bans imposed on staff by other multi-national technology outfits, and comes as countries including the US place precautionary restrictions on flights from China.
ICANN has in the recent past changed the venues of public meetings twice due to worries about the unrelated Zika virus, but it has no meetings lined up in China any time soon.
Next month, the community will meet in Cancun, Mexico. According to the European Centre for Disease Control, there are currently no reported cases of the disease in that country.
There are usually plenty of Chinese nationals at ICANN meetings, of course, which could put ICANN in a tricky ethical/practical position as 67 draws closer, depending on how the global spread of the disease progresses.
ICANN said: “As of now, we fully intend to move forward with ICANN67 in Cancún, Mexico.”
The ECDC says there have been 20,626 confirmed cases of the virus since it was identified in December, almost all in China, and 427 deaths, all Chinese.

Q3 industry growth driven by .tk, .com and .icu

The domain name industry grew by 5.1 million names in the third quarter, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign.
September ended with 359.8 million names across the board, the DNIB (pdf) shows.
Half of the growth came from Tokelau’s .tk, which is handed out for free by Freenom and is where domains never delete. It grew by 2.6 million names to 25.1 million in the quarter.
Next biggest grower was Verisign’s own .com, which grew by 1.5 million names to end September with an even 144 million. Its red-headed sibling, .net, lost 200,000 names over the same period and ended the quarter on 13.4 million.
Excluding .com and .tk leaves just one million names worth of net growth across the remainder of the industry, which comprises another 1,515 TLDs.
Taiwan’s .tw, which has been going through a bit of a spurt over the last year or so, added 300,000 domains, but .uk, which was a driver in Q2, was flat at 13.3 million.
New gTLDs grew by one million during the quarter, ending at 24 million, according to the DNIB.
That appears to have been driven almost entirely by ShortDot’s cheapo .icu, which has been flying off the shelves in China all year. Zone file records show it added over a million domains in Q3. It currently has 4.2 million names in its zone.
When these domains start to drop, it will likely be on a scale to materially affect the overall industry numbers in future DNIBs.

Three more dot-brands fizzle out. Total now 69, dudes

Three more dot-brand registries have opted to kill off their own gTLDs, bringing the total to date to 69.
The three self-terminating gTLDs, which all informed ICANN of their intentions in October and November, are: .工行 (.xn--estv75g), .nadex and .vistaprint.
The .vistaprint termination is perhaps of note, given that online printing company Vistaprint was one of the bidders in the 2016 auction of .web, due to its application for .webs being ruled confusingly similar.
It wound up paying just a dollar for that gTLD, due to the complexity of the .web contention set, but even that appears to have been a defensive move.
Since then, Vistaprint has also terminated its .vista contract, and my records show that it has been “in contracting” with ICANN for .webs since August 2016. Clearly, it’s in no rush to ever actually use the thing.
Also noteworthy, .工行 becomes only the second internationalized domain name gTLD to self-terminate, after Walmart called it quits on its pre-delegation contract for .一号店.
.工行 was owned by the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which by many measures is the largest bank in the world. It had revenue of over $105 billion last year, so whatever factors drove its decision to dump its dot-brand, cost was not one of them.
Finally, Nadex, an online stock-trading platform, evidently couldn’t find a use for .nadex, so it’s jumped ship too.
Hundreds of dot-brands remain, collectively managing thousands of domains and web sites.

America has Amazon’s back in gTLD fight at ICANN 66

The United States looks set to stand in the way of government attempts to further delay Amazon’s application for .amazon.
The US Governmental Advisory Committee representative, Vernita Harris, said today that the US “does not support further GAC advice on the .amazon issue” and that ICANN is well within its rights to move forward with Amazon’s controversial gTLD applications.
She spoke after a lengthy intervention from Brazilian rep Ambassador Achilles Zaluar Neto, who said South American nations view the contested string as their “birthright” and said ICANN is allowing Amazon “to run roughshod over the concerns and the cultural heritage of eight nations and tens of millions of people”.
It was the opening exchange in would could prove to be a fractious war of words at ICANN 66 in Montreal, which formally opens tomorrow.
The .amazon applications have been controversial because the eight countries in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization believe their unwritten cultural rights to the word outweigh Amazon’s trademark rights.
Forced to the negotiating table by ICANN last year, the two sides each posed their own sets of ideas about how the gTLD could be managed in such a way as to protect culturally sensitive terms at the second-level, and taking ACTO’s views into account.
But an ICANN-imposed deadline for talks to conclude in April was missed, largely as a result of the ongoing Venezuela crisis, which caused friction between the ACTO governments.
But today, Brazil said that ACTO is ready and willing to get back to the negotiating table asked that ICANN reopen these talks with an impartial mediator at the helm.
As things stand, Amazon is poised to get .amazon approved with a bunch of Public Interest Commitments in its registry contract that were written by Amazon without ACTO’s input.
Neto said that he believed a “win-win” deal could be found, which “would provide a positive impetus for internet governance instead of discrediting it”. He threatened to raise the issue at the Internet Governance Forum next month.
ICANN’s failure to reopen talks “would set a bad precedent and reflect badly on the current state of internet governance, including its ability to establish a balance between private interests and public policy concerns”, he said
But the US rallied to Amazon’s defense. Harris said:

The United States does not support further GAC advice on the .amazon issue. Any further questions from the GAC to the Board on this matter we believe is unwarranted… We are unaware of any international consensus that recognizes inherent governmental rights and geographic names. Discussions regarding protections of geographic names is the responsibility of other forums and therefore should be discussed and those relevant and appropriate forums. Contrary to statements made by others, it is the position of the United States that the Board’s various decisions authorizing ICANN to move forward with processing the.application are consistent with all relevant GAC advice. The United States therefore does not support further intervention that effectively works to prevent or delay the delegation of .amazon and we believe we are not supportive and we do not believe that it’s required.

This is a bit of a reversal from the US position in 2013.
Back then, the GAC wanted to issue consensus advice that ICANN should reject .amazon, but the US, protecting one of its largest companies, stood in the way of full consensus until, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, the US decided instead to abstain, apparently to appease an increasingly angry Brazil.
It was that decision that opened the door to the six more years of legal wrangling and delay that .amazon has been subject to.
With the US statement today, it seems that the GAC will be unlikely to be able to issue strong, full-consensus advice that will delay .amazon further, when it drafts its Montreal communique later in the week.
The only other GAC member speaking today to support the US position was Israel, whose rep said “since it is an ongoing issue for seven years, we don’t believe that there is a need for further delay”.
Several government reps — from China, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium and the European Commission — spoke in favor of Brazil’s view that ICANN should allow ACTO and Amazon back to the negotiating table.
The GAC is almost certain to say something about .amazon in its communique, due to drop Wednesday, but the ICANN board of directors does not currently have an Amazon-related item on its Montreal agenda.
UPDATE: The originally published version of this story incorrectly identified the US GAC representative as Ashley Heineman, who is listed on the GAC’s web site as the US representative. In fact, the speaker was Vernita Harris, acting associate administrator at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Had I been watching the meeting, rather that just listening to it, this would have been readily apparent to me. My apologies to Ms Heineman and Ms Harris for the error.

Paranoid ICANN opens another root server in China

ICANN has announced the creation of another root server instance in China, which definitely, DEFINITELY won’t let the Chinese government mess with the interwebs.
ICANN said this week that it’s opened an instance of the L-root that it manages in Shanghai.
It’s the third L-root in China but only the first outside of Beijing.
In a press release announcing the installation, which was carried out with technical support from CNNIC and Shanghai Telecom, ICANN decided to preemptively head off any concerns that putting an important piece of internet infrastructure in China comes with added security risk:

Contrary to common misconception, root servers do not control the Internet. The operation of an instance also does not provide any mechanism to alter content of the DNS. Any modification of root zone content will be mitigated by a part of the DNS protocol known as the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and if an instance fail to respond to a query, resolvers will ask the same question to another instance or root server.

It’s merely the latest of 168 L-root installations and 1,015 copies of the 13 logical root servers, which all use IP Anycast to more quickly serve DNS answers to their local users.
Given how big and populous China is, there are surprisingly few root server instances in the country, according to root-servers.org.
In addition to ICANN’s three boxes, Verisign’s J-root and Internet Systems Consortium’s F-root have three in Beijing and two in Hangzhou between them. The K, I and F roots each have one instance in Beijing.
That’s eight nodes in China proper, which has 800 million internet users. Cross the border into semi-autonomous Hong Kong, which has a population of under eight million people, and there are nine root instances.
The city of Bucharest, Romania (pop. 1.8 million) has the same number of root instances as China.

China’s MySpace trainwreck sells its gTLD

A once-hot Chinese social networking company that now sells used cars instead has offloaded its gTLD.
The registry contract for .ren, the Pinyin for the Chinese “人”, meaning “people”, has been transferred from Beijing Qianxiang Wangjing Technology Development Co to ZDNS International.
The original registry is better known by the name Renren.
At the time the new gTLD was applied for in 2012, Renren was at the peak of its powers, discussed in the same breath as Facebook.
A social networking site with close to 60 million active monthly users in China, it had recently raised $800 million by floating on the New York Stock Exchange.
But it has fallen on hard times since, and the site was sold for just $20 million in cash and $40 million of stock last November.
A number of articles around the same time chart its downfall, calling it a “trainwreck”, a “digital ghost town” and, even more embarrassingly, “China’s answer to MySpace”
You get the idea.
Renren the company is still a going concern due to its now-core business of selling used cars in China, but the NYSE threatened to delist its stock a couple of weeks ago because its share price had been below $1 for more than 30 days.
Now, it seems it’s getting rid of its gTLD too.
.ren has been bought (presumably) by ZDNS International, the Hong Kong-based arm of DNS service provider ZDNS.
It’s not a dot-brand. The space is open to all-comers and is currently priced competitively with .com.
The gTLD’s fortunes tracked the site’s declining popularity. It’s been on the slide, volume-wise, for years.
It peaked at around 320,000 zone file domains in November 2016, comparable to other TLDs popular in China, but today stands at around 17,000.
It’s the second registry contract ZDNS has taken over recently. A month ago, I reported it has taken over .fans from CentralNic.
ZDNS was already providing back-end services for .ren.

Three-letter .com owned by hospital “hijacked”

A California hospital has seen its three-letter .com domain reportedly hijacked and transferred to a registrar in China.
Sonoma Valley Hospital, a 75-bed facility north of San Francisco, was using svh.com as its primary domain until earlier this month, when it abruptly stopped working.
The Sonoma Index-Tribune reports that the domain was “maliciously acquired”, according to a hospital spokesperson.
It does not seem to be a case of a lapsed registration.
Historical Whois records archived by DomainTools show that svh.com, which had been registered with Network Solutions, had over a year left on its registration when it was transferred to BizCN in early August.
BizCN is based in China and has around 711,000 gTLD domains under management, having shrunk by about 300,000 names over the 12 months to April.
The Sonoma newspaper speculates that the domain may have been hijacked via a phishing attack. It’s not clear whether the hospital or NetSol, part of the Web.com group, was the target.
Three-letter .com names are highly prized, usually selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
Domain investors should obviously steer clear of svh.com, which will is probably already up for sale.
Not only is there a possibility of attracting unwelcome legal attention, but there’s also the moral implications of paying somebody who would steal from a hospital.
The hospital in question has now changed its name to sonomavalleyhospital.org. This transition, which includes migrating the email addresses of all of its staff, seems to have taken several days.
Anyone sending personal medical information to the old svh.com email addresses may find that information in the wrong hands.