ICANN bloat to continue as new gTLD program begins

ICANN expects to hire so many new staffers over the next few years that it’ll need to rent a second office in Los Angeles to store them all in, according to a newly published new gTLD program planning document.

We’re looking at about 100 more people on the payroll, about 25% above the current level, judging by ICANN figures.

The Org said in the Operational Design Assessment published last night that the next new gTLD round will need it to hire another 25 to 30 dedicated staff during implementation of the program, along with 10 to 15 contractors, and then an additional 50 to 60 permanent staff to help manage the program going forward.

The number could be even higher if the board of directors and community encourage ICANN to speed up the roll-out of the round by reducing automation and relying more on the manual processing of applications.

The ODA says that ICANN has already identified an option to lease more office space close to its LA headquarters, to house the newcomers.

The budget for ICANN’s current fiscal year expects the Org to average 423 operational staff and another 25 employees dedicated to the new gTLD program.

ICANN reckons that the next round will require 125 full-time equivalents (FTE) during the implementation phase, reduced to 114 after the application phase kicks off.

For comparison, in May 2012, shortly after ICANN closed the application window for the last round, the whole organization comprised just 143 people. A year later, it had grown to 239.

The ODA does not break down how many additional staffers it will need to hire if the community plumps for the low-automation “Option 2”.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, oda, subpro

ICANN spunks a year, $9 million, on new gTLD plans destined for trashcan

ICANN has published the Operational Design Assessment for the next round of the new gTLD program, a weighty tome of 400 pages, most of which are likely destined to be torn up, burned, or used as toilet paper.

The ODA is the document, prepared by staff for board consideration, that lays out how the Org could implement the community’s policy recommendations for the next application round, how much it would cost, and how long it would take.

As I wrote last week, the paper outlines two options, the more expensive of which would take five years and cost $125 million before a single application fee is collected.

This option “reflects the goal of delivering on all outputs of the SubPro Final Report [the community’s 300-odd policy recommendations] to the maximum extent possible”.

This would see the clock ticking the moment ICANN gets the board’s nod and begins the implementation work — best case scenario, probably the first half of next year — and the first applications accepted at least five years later.

So, no new gTLD applications would be received until the first half of 2028 at the earliest. The first registry go-live would not happen until the 2030s, three decades after the first application window closed.

The second option, which was discussed on a webinar last week, would take about 18 months to roll out and cost half as much in up-front costs, but would not necessarily give the community every last thing it has asked for.

In this scenario, the next application window could open as early as 2025, followed by windows in 2026, 2027 and 2028. There’d be no per-window limit on applications, but ICANN would only start to process 450 each year, with the lucky applications selected by lottery.

What’s surprising about the ODA is how little airtime is given to the second option — known as the “cyclical” or “batching” option — which doesn’t really get a serious look-in until page 354.

The large majority of the document is devoted to the single-round, long-runway, more-expensive option, which Org surely knows will prove repellent to most community members and would, if approved, surely confirm that ICANN is mortally unfit for purpose.

Yet ICANN has nevertheless spunked over a year and $9 million of domain buyers’ money assessing an operational design it surely knows has no chance of ever going operational. It’s pure, maddening, bureaucratic wheel-spinning.

ICANN will hold two webinars tomorrow to discuss the document, so if you’re interested in the debate, best settle in for a night of tedious and rather frustrating reading.

The ODA itself is here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: gnso, ICANN, new gTLDs, oda, subpro

Crawford QUITS as CentralNic CEO

Ben Crawford is leaving CentralNic, the domain registry/registrar that he has led for the last 13 years.

The company announced this morning that he is “retiring” from the board with immediate effect and that Michael Riedl will replace him as CEO.

“I have made the difficult decision to make my 14th year at CentralNic PLC my last, and to take retirement. I wish to thank everybody who played a role in the extraordinary success of the company,” Crawford said on Twitter.

I have made the difficult decision to make my 14th year at CentralNic PLC my last, and to take retirement. I wish to thank everybody who played a role in the extraordinary success of the company.

— Ben Crawford (@_BenCrawford_) December 12, 2022

Crawford oversaw the growth of the company, through countless acquisitions, from a provider of niche pseudo-TLDs into a leading back-end registry, registrar and, lately, domain monetization provider.

Riedl was CFO of KeyDrive before its acquisition by CentralNic and has held the role at CentralNic since 2019.

William “Billy” Green, financial director, will replace Riedl as CFO, the company said.

CentralNic said its business is “robust” and that it expects to deliver Q4 results at the top end of analysts’ expectations.

Comment Tagged: centralnic

Drop-catcher adds 100 more registrars after rapid growth

Drop-catcher Gname has added 100 new ICANN shell registrar accreditations, according to ICANN records.

The Singapore-based company has created companies with the names Gname 051 through Gname 150 for the new accreditations, which are used to increase its number of concurrent EPP connections to the .com registry and therefore its chance of catching a valuable deleting domain.

Each accreditation costs a minimum of $4,000 in ICANN fees per year.

The latest ICANN registry reports show that the parent Gname accreditation had 1,864,283 .com domains under management at the end of August, when it had only 50 active accreditations.

That was a huge increase on the 354,644 domains it had a year earlier, when it had just 10 active registrars. It seems the company is testing how far this up-scaling strategy can go.

The move means ICANN now has 2,655 accredited registrars on its books, far ahead of the 2,447 predicted for the end of June 2023 by ICANN’s current fiscal-year budget.

Comment Tagged: .com, accreditation, drop catching, gname, ICANN

Domain universe shrinks again: .com and .cn down, .au up

The number of registered domain names in the world shrank again in the third quarter, with mixed results across various TLDs, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

There were 349.9 million names across all TLDs at the end of September, down 1.6 million sequentially but up 11.5 million compared to Q3 2021, the DNIB states.

The industry has downsized in every quarter this year, judging by Verisign’s numbers.

The company’s own .com, suffering from post-Covid blues, macroeconomic factors and (possibly) pricing issues, dragged the overall number down in Q3 by 200,000 domains, ending with 160.9 million.

But China’s .cn was hit harder, ending the period down from 20.6 million to 18 million. As I pondered in September, this may be due to how Verisign sources data.

Australia’s .au benefited from the launch of second-level availability, which boosted its number by 400,000 domains, ending with 4 million and overtaking .fr and .eu to become the seventh-largest ccTLD.

The ccTLD world overall shrunk sequentially by 1.7 million names but grew by 5.7 million on the year to end the quarter with 132.4 million.

New gTLDs ended with 27.3 million names, up 300,000 sequentially and 3.8 million year over year.

3 Comments Tagged: .au, .cn, .com, dnib, verisign

New gTLD applications to cost about $250,000

Getting hold of a new gTLD could cost applicants well north of a quarter million dollars in base application fees alone in the next round, according to ICANN.

Presenting the results of its year-long Operational Design Phase to the GNSO Council via Zoom last night, staffers said application fees are likely to be either around $240,600 or $270,000 next time, higher than the $185,000 it charged in 2012.

Those would be the base fees, not including any additional evaluations or contention-related fees.

The Org next week is set to present its board and the community with a stark choice — one big expensive round along the lines of 2012, with a potential five-year wait for the next application window to open, or a cheaper, staggered four-stage round with maybe only 18 months of development time.

The Operational Design Assessment — a 400-page tome the Org has spent the last 14 months developing — is set to be published early next week, outlining two options for how ICANN should proceed on the next round.

One option is to build a highly automated system that fully implements all of the GNSO’s policy recommendations but costs up to $125 million up-front to build and roll out over five years. Application fees would be about $270,000.

The other would cut some bells and whistles and require more human intervention, but would be cheaper at up to $67 million up-front and could be rolled out within 18 months. Application fees would be about $240,600.

ICANN CFO Xavier Calvez, responding to exclamations of surprise via Zoom chat, said that a decade of inflation alone would lead to a 28% price increase to $237,000 if the next round were opened today, but in two or three years the price could be even higher if current economic trends continue.

While many expected the fact that technical evaluations will be conducted on a registry service provider basis rather than a per-application basis would wipe tens of thousands from the application fee, ICANN pointed out that building and executing this RSP pre-evaluation process will also cost it money.

ICANN wants to operate the program on a “cost-recovery basis”, so it neither makes a profit nor has to dig into its operational budget. It expects “more than three dozen vendors will be required” to help run the round.

It seems that the portion of the fee set aside to deal with “risks” — basically, anticipated litigation — is expected to be around a fifth of the total, compared to about a third in the 2012 round.

ICANN is asking its board and the community to decide between what it calls “Option 1 — One Big Round” and “Option 2 — Four Annual Cycles”.

Option 1 would essentially be a replay of 2012, where there’s a single unlimited application window, maybe a couple thousand applications, and then ICANN processes them all in a highly automated fashion using custom-built software.

Option 2 would allow unlimited applications once a year for four years, but it would cap the number processed per year at 450 and there’d be a greater degree of manual processing, which ICANN, apparently unfamiliar with its own history of software development, thinks poses additional risk.

My hot take is that the Org is presenting a false choice here, much like it did in January with its ODA on Whois reform, where one option was so unpalatably time-consuming and expensive that it had most of the community retching into their soy-based lattes.

There’s also an implicit criticism in both ODAs that the community-driven policy-making process has a tendency to make big asks without adequately considering the resources required to actually get them done.

I might be wrong, but I can’t at this early stage see much support emerging for the “One Big Round” option, except perhaps from the most ardent opponents of the new gTLD program.

ICANN expects to deliver the ODA — 100 pages with 300 pages of appendices — to its board on Monday, with wider publication not long after that. It will hold two webinars for the community to discuss the document on Wednesday.

6 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, oda, odp, subpro

Macy’s scraps .macys gTLD

US retailer Macy’s has dumped its dot-brand gTLD .macys.

The company told ICANN recently that it no longer wishes to hold a registry contract, noting that it never used the gTLD.

ICANN last week agreed that as a dot-brand with no third-party users, the domain will not be redelegated to another registry.

It’s the seventh gTLD to scrap its contract this year, lower than ICANN’s budget estimates.

Comment Tagged: dot-brands, ICANN, macys, new gTLDs, termination

Elon Musk chaos credited with surge in .social regs

Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter has been credited with leading to a surge in .social domain registrations last month, according to registry Identity Digital.

.social leaped into the top 10 of the company’s most-registered TLDs at number five internationally and number two in North America, second only to legacy .info, the company reported this week.

ID said that month-over-month .social regs increased 435% in the first two weeks of November.

It’s a pretty small TLD, so the boost only equated to an increase of about 5,000 domains in November, according to zone files, which put the current count at about 35,000.

Musk closed his acquisition in late October, and he started Trussing it into the ground the following week, laying off thousands of employees and cack-handedly attempting to monetize the “blue check mark”.

ID reckons this is behind the increase in .social sales, with CEO Akram Atallah saying in a press release: “Volatility in social platforms that people rely on leads users to take action to own their digital identity and content, which often starts with finding a domain name.”

He pointed to Twitter alternative Mastadon, which is a decentralized, open-source platform and uses a .social domain, as a driver for the growth. Some of the new .social regs point to Mastadon installs, ID said.

ID also sold premium names arts.social, lol.social and justice.social during the month, but no .social domains appear on its top 20 sales in its most-recent monthly report.

Comment Tagged: .social, elon musk, identity digital, mastadon, new gTLDs, twitter

InternetNZ says sorry for “institutional racism”

New Zealand ccTLD registry InternetNZ has apologized for its “institutional racism” following a probe instigated by its reaction to a YouTube video last year that incited violence against Māori citizens.

“We acknowledge that InternetNZ has institutional racism built into our culture and structures. These systems, and the way people have acted within them, have caused harm to Te Ao Māori,” the company said in a statement last week.

“We unreservedly apologise for the harm to Te Ao Māori [the Māori world],” it added. “We know that from here, it is our actions that will right these wrongs.”

The apology follows the publication of a report into current and historical structural racism at the company by Māori language advocate Hana O’Regan, commissioned by the InternetNZ Council last year.

The review was ordered after two council members, both Māori women, resigned in protest at InternetNZ’s inaction when a masked individual reportedly uploaded a video to YouTube encouraging the massacre of Māori people.

It seems many believed InternetNZ should have publicly condemned the video, which stayed online for more than a day, as well as used its political clout to encourage YouTube to delete it.

The company apologized a few days later, saying it had not wanted to inadvertently draw attention to the video, perhaps inflaming matters, but said that was with hindsight the wrong call.

O’Regan’s report is more wide-ranging than the 2021 incident, however, delving back into InternetNZ’s roots in the mid-1990s and finding long-term resistance to the asks of the Māori people.

Māori had to struggle to get the second-level domain maori.nz created, while geek.nz sailed through approval, the report says. There was also resistance to enabling internationalized domain names, which would allow the macro diacritic used in the Māori language, it says.

The report also criticized InternetNZ’s decision-making structure as failing to embrace Māori cultural practices, and its membership for failing to be sufficiently diverse.

The company says it has in the last year or so appointed a C-level Māori cultural advisor and created a committee to advise on Māori matters. It is also working on a “comprehensive action plan” it intends to publish early next year.

The 35-page report can be found here (pdf). It’s written for a domestic audience, so if you’re not Kiwi, you’ll probably need Google Translate to follow it. And if you’re an American conservative, it’ll probably pop all your aneurysms at once.

Comment Tagged: .nz, internetnz, racism

Melbourne IT to relaunch, return to roots, after $3.4 million acquisition

Australian registrar Webcentral.au is to revive its Melbourne IT brand with a renewed focus on the corporate domains market, following the AUD 5 million ($3.4 million) acquisition of a smaller rival.

The company said today it’s buying registrar New Domain Services and bringing its CEO, Jonathan Horne, on board as the new boss of Melbourne IT, which divested its corporate domains arm to CSCGlobal in 2013.

Webcentral now says it plans to “relaunch the Melbourne IT brand and business and pursue growth opportunities in the corporate domains services sector”, returning the company to its roots.

New Domain has revenue of AUD 2 million and EBITDA of AUD 1.2 million, with 25,000 customers, the company said.

Melbourne IT was among the first handful of registrars to be accredited by ICANN when it broke up Network Solutions’ monopoly in the late 1990s.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, melbourne it, new domain services, webcentral