Agentic AI has ICANN in a pickle

Imagine you’re in a Zoom meeting, discussing policy that will govern the future of the domain name industry, when you suddenly realize not everyone in the room is human.

Some are AI agents.

That’s the certainly intriguing, and possibly worrying, scenario under discussion in recent correspondence between ICANN and a leading community member.

ICANN currently bans, as a matter of practice rather than policy, AI agents from participating in Zoom calls. But consultant Michael Palage, a seasoned veteran ICANN tire-kicker, recently requested a waiver.

Revealing that he is living with hearing loss, Palage said (pdf) that AI agents could enable him to “participate more meaningfully” in ICANN and that the current de facto ban “places an unreasonable burden” on him and others.

General counsel John Jeffrey, responding (pdf), did not rule out carving out an exception to the current ban for community members with disabilities, but requested clarity on what specific tools Palage has in mind.

ICANN’s Zoom sessions already include one AI-based tool, the regularly incorrect and frequently hilarious transcription feature, which is useful to a limited degree for getting the gist of a conversation without having to actually go to the trouble of listening to it.

But ICANN is hesitant about allowing participants to bring their own agents to the party, judging by Jeffrey’s response, because it could quite easily bring the integrity of the entire multistakeholder policy-making process into question.

Jeffrey wrote that the agent ban is to “ensure the transparency, accountability, and integrity of discussions”, but:

ICANN’s concern is not with accessibility tools used by individuals to support their own participation, but with AI tools that may independently appear, record, transcribe, summarize, or contribute in ways that create uncertainty about identity, consent, data use, or accountability.

ICANN has for a couple of years seen its public comment periods stuffed with responses that — to this observer at least — appear to be AI-generated. Sometimes, I suspect, such comments have been generated to tick a box that secures future travel funding for a participant.

That’s one thing — emailed comments are part of an asynchronous discussion — but what if an AI agent participates in a live chat as part of a policy development process? Who would be responsible for its contributions?

As Jeffrey puts it:

Unmanaged or insufficiently governed third-party AI tools, including those that independently attend meetings, generate or submit interventions, appear as participants, or create recordings or transcripts outside ICANN-approved systems, may raise legal, privacy, and ethical concerns. This includes the processing of personal data without appropriate safeguards, lack of transparency in data use, risks related to accuracy, uncertainty regarding participant identity, concerns regarding accountability for contributions, and risks related to the preservation of meaningful human participation in ICANN’s decision-making processes.

Or, as I put it:

What if the agent misunderstood its brief and directed the conversation in completely unintended directions, either wasting everybody’s time or steering policy-making onto dangerous or idiotic paths?

What if the agent went batshit and started espousing Nazi ideology, calling the host a bitch, doxxing its opponents, or ranting about goblins? We all know how much AI loves goblins…

.ai hits seven figures, raises prices

The .ai ccTLD recently crossed over the one million domain milestone and has raised its already substantial registration fee.

According to a social media post from the Government of Anguilla, .ai went into seven figures January 20.

For comparison, roughly a year earlier, .ai was at about 587,000 names. The growth is strong in this TLD.

The registry — technically the Government of Anguilla but outsourced to Identity Digital — has also raised the wholesale fee for .ai domains by 14.3%, according to TLDPriceChanges.com.

That means an extra 10 bucks a year. But .ai still has a two-year minimum commitment, so the price of a hand-reg has gone up $20.

Anguilla says the domain is now one of its primary sources of income and that the money is being channelled into local infrastructure projects.

UK launches “police.ai”, but does it own the domain?

The UK’s increasingly authoritarian government this afternoon announced extensive policing reforms, including what it called “Police.ai”.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood, speaking in Parliament in the last couple of hours, announced a new National Police Service and a substantial ramping up of live facial recognition technology for law enforcement in England and Wales.

“At the same time, we will launch Police.ai, investing a record £115 million in AI and automation to make policing more effective and efficient, stripping admin away to ensure officer time can be devoted to the human factor,” she added.

Police.ai appears to be the brand for a new “National Centre for AI in Policing”. But does the UK government actually own the domain police.ai? It appears not.

The domain NX’s for me, and registry Whois reveals it is registered to blockeddomains@gov.ai — that is, the Government of Anguilla, which still owns the .ai ccTLD even if Identity Digital manages it.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the UK government could obtain the domain, but it seems that so far it has not.

Announcing a broad, expensive, liberties-threatening, technology-driven program of policing reform while making such a basic branding error looks at face value like a worrying lack of technical nous.

The police press release announcing the project appears to have been yanked, but a Home Office white paper (pdf) goes into more detail about the plan.

.ai rival lines up gTLD bid

The increasingly popular .ai top-level domain looks like it could have its first full competitor before long.

An organization called 0G Foundation, which says it has made a “decentralized AI operating system”, has announced plans to apply to ICANN for the new gTLD .agi next year.

AGI stands for “artificial general intelligence”, considered by many to be the end goal of AI technology development, where software possesses intelligence equivalent to or better than a human.

0G made the announcement via Unstoppable Domains, its application partner.

The organization plans to make .agi names available on its own proprietary blockchain first, with a “limited-time pre-sale” before launch “in the coming months”.

Unstoppable is selling .agi “reservations”, with prices starting at $5 for gibberish and potentially valuable dictionary words carrying premium price tags.

.ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month

.ai saw over $600,000 in expired domain auction sales last month, according to new registry operator Identity Digital.

The company took over management of Anguilla’s ccTLD February 25 and it announced the auctions revenue number in a March 27 blog post.

The previous registry held monthly auctions using Dynadot, but Identity Digital switched to Namecheap and went daily.

It’s also put .ai into its DropZone system, so domains that don’t sell at auction can be bid on by registrars through a centralized registry-managed process rather than dropping immediately,

Identity Digital also said that its regular registration revenue has increased 60% compared to last year.

.ai channel doubles under new management

.ai has twice as many registrars selling it since Identity Digital took over management of the registry in January, according to the company.

The company said over the weekend that its channel has doubled since it announced its partnership with the Government of Anguilla. That seems to mean it now has about 80 registrars, based on an archived list published by the old registry.

That’s a tiny chunk of the hundreds of registrars that already plug in to Identity Digital’s other TLDs — .org has about 2,150 registrars and .live has over 1,600, for examples — meaning there’s a lot more room for growth.

Identity Digital also said that .ai saw a 46% year-over-year increase in the number of new domain creates in January. A graph it published shows creates around 23,000 to 24,000 in the month.

We can’t work out what .ai’s domains under management is, because we don’t know what the renewal rate was or how many domains were deleted, but the previous administrator had said there was just shy of 600,000 names at the end of 2024.

It’s also emerged that Identity Digital might have inked a pretty sweet deal with Anguilla. According to a recent video from former manager Vince Cate, the company is taking 10% of the revenues from .ai’s sales

While that might not be a huge slice of the pie, it’s a pretty big pie — bog standard .ai names sell for $70 a year and auctioned expired names regularly sell for thousands.

A $7 per-domain payment is very high for a back-end registry services deal, where providers are believed to usually get a buck or two, but it seems Identity Digital might be providing more than just a dumb platform to .ai.

Another 40,000 .ai domains registered

Anguilla’s .ai grew by almost 40,000 domains in the last two months, according to the registry, as the ccTLD continues to benefit from the growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

Total registered domains was 572,575 domains on November 27, according to the registry web site. That’s up 39,507 from the 533,068 it reported on October 1. On December 20, 2023 the total was 353,928 domains.

.ai is in the process of a migration, which will see Identity Digital take over the functions of the registry. The TLD’s IANA record was recently updated to replace as technical contact the long-time manager Vince Cate with the Government of Anguilla.

Unlike other rapidly growing TLDs, which tend to sell cheap and rapidly fill up with junk, .ai still commands a mid-range price of $70 a year with a two-year minimum.

Identity Digital to take over .ai

Identity Digital is to take over the running of .ai, following a deal with the Government of Anguilla announced today.

The two parties said they “plan to build a world-class registry management program that prioritizes quality domains and instills trust in .AI domain names for years to come”.

It looks like a back-end deal. There’s no suggestion of any kind of redelegation.

Currently, .ai is run by a small local outfit called DataHaven.Net, on a fairly basic web site that gives off all the vibes of being a one-man show and perhaps a little bit slapdash.

Identity Digital, by contrast, runs its huge portfolio of TLDs on the Amazon cloud and has pretty much blanket coverage of ICANN-accredited registrars. Only 40 registrars are listed on the current .ai registry site.

The ccTLD has grown to be a significant player in the last two years, growing from about 150,000 domains mid-2022, prior to generative AI entering the popular imagination, to 533,068 at the start of this month.

Identity Digital said that .ai already accounts for 20% of Anguilla’s revenue, and that this new deal should help increase that amount.

.ai now has over half a million names

Anguilla’s .ai ccTLD added 54,372 domain names in the last quarter, according to the registry’s web site.

The total today is 533,068 domains, compared to 478,696 on July 1, according to an update posted this afternoon. The .ai domains under management number was 306,861 about a year ago.

.ai now has about as many registered domains as Finland’s .fi or Identity Digital’s .live.

The impressive growth is of course due to the string matching the abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence.

.ai up to 425,000 domains

The .ai registry has provided its latest, sporadic update to its registration numbers, showing that Anguilla’s ccTLD continues to be wildly popular compared to the country’s size.

It’s grown from 353,928 domains on December 20 to 425,060 domains on April 12, according to the registry’s web site.

That’s an increase of 71,132 since the last update, or about 620 a day. The zone is on track to have doubled in size over 12 months by the middle of the year.

.ai has a relatively high price point — about $70 a year but with a two-year minimum initial registration — suggesting that registrants either intend to use their domains or are fairly confident they can turn a profit by selling them to somebody who will.