Country names to finally be released in new gTLDs

It looks like hundreds of domain names matching the names of countries are to finally get released from ICANN limbo.
The ICANN board last week passed a resolution calling for the organization to clear a backlog of over 60 registry requests to start selling or using country and territory names in their gTLDs.
Some of the requests date back to 2014. They’ve all been stuck in red tape while ICANN tried to make sure members of the Governmental Advisory Committee was cool with the names being released.
The result of these three years of pondering is scrappy, but will actually allow some names to hit the market this year.
The new resolution calls for ICANN to “take all steps necessary to grant ICANN approvals for the release of country and territory names at the second-level”, but only “to the extent the relevant government has indicated its approval”.
And that’s the catch.
Some governments, such as the US and UK, don’t care who registers matching names. Dozens of others want to vet each registry request on a case-by-case basis.
The wishes of each government are record in a GAC database.
The only territories to so far give a blanket waiver over their names are: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Guernsey and Pitcairn.
Almost 70 other countries have said they need to be told when a registry wants to sell a domain matching their name. Ten others give carte blanche to closed dot-brands, but require notification in the case of open gTLDs.
The majority of countries in the world have yet to officially express a preference one way or the other.
Of the roughly 60 new gTLD registries to request country name releases over the last few years, the vast majority are dot-brands. The number of open gTLDs with such requests appears to be in the single figures, and the only ones with mass-market appeal appear to be .xyz and .global.

Iran reported to Ombudsman after new gTLD conspiracy theory

ICANN’s Ombudsman has stepped in to resolve a complaint from the Iranian government that it was being “excluded” from discussions about the next phase of the new gTLD program.
Kavouss Arasteh, Iran’s Governmental Advisory Committee representative, earlier this month accused the leadership of the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Working Group of deliberately scheduling teleconferences to make them difficult for him to attend.
He said the 0300 UTC timing of a meeting made it “painful” for European volunteers to participate (though it’s 0730 in Tehran).
When WG co-chair Avri Doria said that the time had been selected to avoid clashes with other working groups and declined his request, Arasteh said in an email: “If you insist, I interpret that this is an effort to EXCLUDE GAC TO ATTEND THE PDP.”
In other words, he was accusing the WG leaders of trying to exclude governments from helping to develop the rules of the new gTLD program.
Doria responded that she took the tone of the remarks as “abusive”, adding:

since my motives have been attacked and since I have been accused of trying to prevent GAC participation, I have no choice other than to turn this issue over to the Ombudsman.
The only other alternative I can think of is to accept the fact that I am incapable of co-chairing this group and step down.

Fellow co-chair Jeff Neuman chipped in with a detailed explanation of how, in the global ICANN community, there usually isn’t a time of day that is not inconvenient to at least some volunteers.
(It’s sometimes possible to hear snoring on these calls, but that’s not always due to the time of day.)
Today, Ombudsman Herb Weye responded to Doria’s complaint, saying that it has been “resolved” between the two parties. He wrote:

Without going into detail I am pleased to advise the working group that this complaint has been resolved and that I can bear witness to a unanimous demonstration of support for the leadership of the working group.
I would like to highlight the professional, “human” approach taken by all involved and their willingness to communicate in a clear, respectful and objective manner. This cooperative atmosphere allowed for a timely discussion and quick resolution.

Aratesh has for some time been one of the most vocal and combative GAC reps, noticeably unafraid to raise his voice when he needs to make his point.
He recently publicly threatened to take his concerns about ICANN’s policy on two-character domains to the International Telecommunications Union if his demands were not met.

ICANN loosens Whois privacy rules for registrars

ICANN has made it easier for registries and registrars to opt-out of Whois-related contractual provisions when they clash with local laws.
From this week, accredited domain firms will not have to show that they are being investigated by local privacy or law enforcement authorities before they can request a waiver from ICANN.
Instead, they’ll be also be able to request a waiver preemptively with a statement from said authorities to the effect that the ICANN contracts contradict local privacy laws.
In both cases, the opt-out request will trigger a community consultation — which would include the Governmental Advisory Committee — and a review by ICANN’s general counsel, before coming into effect.
The rules are mainly designed for European companies, as the EU states generally enjoy stricter privacy legislation than their North American counterparts.
European registrars and registries have so far been held to a contract that may force them to break the law, and the only way to comply with the law would be to wait for a law enforcement proceeding.
ICANN already allows registrars to request waivers from the data retention provisions of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement — which require the registrar to hold customer data for two years after the customer is no longer a customer.
Dozens of European registrars have applied for and obtained this RAA opt-out.

Government anger over two-letter domains

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has clashed with its board of directors over the lack of protections for two-letter domain names that match country codes.
The board has now formally been urged to reconsider its policy to allow registries to sell these names, after angry comments and threats from some GAC members.
Governments from Brazil, Iran, China and the European Union are among at least 10 angered that the names are either not adequately protected or only available for exorbitant prices,
The debate got very heated at ICANN 58 here in Copenhagen on Wednesday morning, during a public session between the GAC and the board, with Iran’s outspoken GAC rep, Kavous Arasteh, almost yelling at Chris Disspain, the board’s point man on the topic.
Arasteh even threatened to take his concerns, if not addressed, to the International Telecommunications Union when it convenes for a plenipotentiary next year.
“Your position is not acceptable. Rejected categorically,” he said.
“The multistakeholder process was not easily accepted by many countries. Still people have difficulty with that,” he said. “We have a plenipotentiary coming in 2018, and we will raise the issue if the matter is not resolved… It is not always commercial, government also has some powers, and we exercise our powers.”
Invoking the ITU is a way to turn a relatively trivial disagreement into an existential threat to ICANN, a typical negotiating tactic of governments that don’t get what they want from ICANN.
The relatively trivial disagreement in this case is ICANN’s decision to allow gTLD registries to release all previously reserved two-letter strings.
In November, ICANN approved a policy that released all two-letter strings on the proviso that registrants have to assert that they will not pass themselves off as affiliated with the countries concerned.
Registries also were given a duty to investigate — but not necessarily act upon — governmental complaints about confusion.
ICANN thinks that this policy is perfectly compliant with the GAC’s latest official advice, supplied following the Helsinki meeting last June, which asked ICANN to:

urge the relevant Registry or the Registrar to engage with the relevant GAC members when a risk is identified in order to come to an agreement on how to manage it or to have a third-party assessment of the situation if the name is already registered.

Disspain patiently pointed out during Wednesday’s session that governments have no legal rights to their ccTLD strings at the second level, and that most of the complaining governments don’t even protect two-letter strings in their own ccTLDs.
But some GAC reps disagreed.
China stated (via the official interpreter): “We believe the board doesn’t have the right or the mandate to decide whether GAC members have the right over two-character domain names.”
While no government spoke in favor of the ICANN policy on Wednesday, the complaining governments do appear to be in a minority of the GAC.
Despite this, they seem to have been effective in swaying fellow committee members to issue some stern new advice. The Copenhagen communique, published last night (pdf), reads:

a. The GAC advises the ICANN Board to:
I. Take into account the serious concerns expressed by some GAC Members as contained in previous GAC Advice
II. Engage with concerned governments by the next ICANN meeting to resolve those concerns.
III. Immediately explore measures to find a satisfactory solution of the matter to meet the concerns of these countries before being further aggravated.
IV. Provide clarification of the decision-making process and of the rationale for the November 2016 resolution, particularly in regard to consideration of the GAC advice, timing and level of support for this resolution.

ICANN is being compelled to retroactively revisit a policy that was issued in compliance with previous GAC advice, it seems.
The next ICANN meeting is being held in Johannesburg in June, so the clock is ticking.
Two-letter domains are valuable properties even in new gTLDs. With each expected to sell for thousands, two-letter names are likely to be a multimillion dollar windfall for even moderately sized portfolio registries.

Schneider quits as chair of GAC

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is looking for a new chair.
Incumbent Thomas Schneider intends to leave the role before his current two-year term expires, he told GAC members assembled here at the ICANN 58 public meeting in Copenhagen this afternoon.
Schneider said that his boss at the Swiss government agency at which he works recently retired and that he has been appointed his successor.
From April, he’ll become vice director of the Federal Office of Communication, responsible for international affairs, he said.
The increased workload, including organizing the next Internet Governance Forum in Geneva, means he will no longer be able to devote his time to chairing the GAC, he said.
Schneider’s first two-year term as GAC chair started at the beginning of 2015. He was reelected to the position for a second term last November.
His replacement will be elected at the ICANN 60 meeting in Abu Dhabi this coming October, at which point Schneider will hand over the reins.

Get ready for thousands of new two-letter domains

New gTLD registry operators have been given the right to start selling two-letter domains that match country codes.
Potentially thousands of names could start being released next year, resulting in a windfall for registries and possible opportunities for investors.
Some governments, however, appear to be unhappy with the move and how ICANN’s board of directors reached its decision.
The ICANN board yesterday passed a resolution that will unblock all two-letter domains that match country codes appearing on the ISO 3166 list, most of which are also ccTLDs.
While the resolution gives some protection to governments worried about abuse of “their” strings, it’s been watered down to virtually nothing.
In the first draft of the rules, published in July, ICANN said registries “must” offer an “Exclusive Availability Pre-registration Period” — a kind of mini-sunrise period limited to governments and ccTLD operators.
In the version approved by ICANN yesterday, the word “must” has been replaced by “may” and the word “voluntary” has been added.
In other words, registries won’t have to give any special privileges to governments when they start selling two-character names.
They will, however, have to get registrants to agree that they won’t pass themselves off as having affiliations with the relevant government. It looks like registries probably could get away with simply adding a paragraph to their terms of service to satisfy this requirement.
Registries will also have to “take reasonable steps to investigate and respond to any reports from governmental agencies and ccTLD operators of conduct that causes confusion with the corresponding country code in connection with the use of a letter/letter two-character ACSCII domain.”
This too is worded vaguely enough that it could wind up being worthless to governments, many of which are worried about domains matching their ccTLDs being passed off as government-approved.
The Governmental Advisory Committee is split on how worrisome this kind of thing is.
For examples, governments such as Spain and Italy have fought for the right to get to pre-approve the release of “es” and “it” domains, whereas the governments of the US and UK really could not care less.
The most-recent formal GAC advice on the subject, coming out of the July meeting in Helsinki, merely said ICANN should:

urge the relevant Registry or the Registrar to engage with the relevant GAC members when a risk is identified in order to come to an agreement on how to manage it or to have a third-party assessment of the situation if the name is already registered

“It is our belief that that our resolution is consistent with GAC advice,” outgoing ICANN board member Bruce Tonkin said yesterday, noting that nobody can claim exclusive rights over any string, regardless of length.
Before and after the resolution passed, the GAC expressed “serious concern” that the board had not formally responded to the Helsinki communique.
In its Hyderabad communique, issued after yesterday’s vote, the GAC advised the board to:

• Clearly indicate whether the actions taken by the Board as referred to in the resolution adopted on 8 November 2016 are fully consistent with the GAC advice given in the Helsinki Communiqué.
• Always communicate in future the position of the Board regarding GAC advice on any matter in due time before adopting any measure directly related to that advice.

ICANN staff are now tasked with coming up with a way to implement the two-character release.
My sense is that some kind of amendment to Registry Agreements might be required, so we’re probably looking at months before we start seeing two-letter domains being released.

Governments mull greater geo gTLD powers

Governments are toying with the idea of asking ICANN for greater powers over gTLDs that match their geographic features.
The names of rivers, mountains, forests and towns could be protected under ideas bandied around at the ICANN 57 meeting in India today.
The Governmental Advisory Committee held a session this morning to discuss expanding the list of strings that already enjoy extra ICANN protections on grounds of geography.
In the 2012 application round, gTLDs matching the names or ISO acronyms of countries were banned outright.
For capital city names and non-capital names where the gTLD was meant to represent the city in question, government approval was required.
For regions on the ISO 3166 list, formal government non-objection was required whether or not the gTLD was intended to represent the region.
That led to gTLDs such as .tata, a dot-brand for Tata Group, being held up indefinitely because it matches the name of a small region of Morocco.
One applicant wound up agreeing to fund a school to the tune of $100,000 in order to get Montenegro’s support for .bar.
But other names were not protected.
Notably, the string “Amazon” was not on any of the protected lists, largely because while it’s a river and a forest it doesn’t match the name of a formal administrative region of any country.
While GAC objections ultimately killed off Amazon’s bid for .amazon (at least for now), the GAC wants to close the Amazon loophole in time for the next new gTLD application round.
The GAC basically is thinking about the power to write its own list of protected terms. It would build on the existing list to also encompass names of “geographic significance”.
GAC members would be able to submit names to the list; applicants for those names would then require non-objection letters from the relevant government(s).
Some governments, including the UK and Peru, expressed concern that “geographic significance” is a little vague.
Truly, without a narrow definition of “significance” it could turn out to be a bloody big list. The UK alone has over 48,000 towns, not to mention all the named forests, rivers and such.
Peru, one of the nations that had beef with Amazon, said it intended to send ICANN a list of all the geographic names it wants protecting, regardless of whether the GAC decides to create a new list.
Other GAC members, including Iran and Denmark, pressed how important it was for the GAC to coordinate with other parts of the ICANN community, mainly the GNSO, on geo names, to avoid overlap and conflict further down the line.
The GAC has a working group looking at the issue. It hopes to have something to recommend to the ICANN board by the Copenhagen meeting next March.

RANT: Governments raise yet another UN threat to ICANN

ICANN’s transition away from US government oversight is not even a month old and the same old bullshit power struggles and existential threats appear to be in play as strongly as ever.
Governments, via the chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee, last week yet again threatened that they could withdraw from ICANN and seek refuge within the UN’s International Telecommunications Union if they don’t get what they want from the rest of the community.
It’s the kind of thing the IANA transition was supposed to minimize, but just weeks later it appears that little has really changed in the rarefied world of ICANN politicking.
Thomas Schneider, GAC chair, said this on a conference call between the ICANN board and the Generic Names Supporting Organization on Thursday:

I’m just urging you about considering what happens if many governments consider that this system does not work. They go to other institutions. If we are not able to defend public interest in this institution we need to go elsewhere, and this is exactly what is happening currently at the ITU Standardization Assembly.

This is a quite explicit threat — if governments don’t like the decisions ICANN makes, they go to the ITU instead.
It’s the same threat that has been made every year or two for pretty much ICANN’s entire history, but it’s also something that the US government removing its formal oversight of ICANN was supposed to help prevent.
So what’s this “public interest” the GAC wants to defend this time around?
It’s protections for the acronyms of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in gTLDs, which we blogged about a few weeks ago.
IGOs are bodies ranging from the relatively well-known, such as the World Health Organization or World Intellectual Property Organization, to the obscure, such as the European Conference of Ministers of Transport or the International Tropical Timber Organization.
According to governments, the public interest would be served if the string “itto”, for example, is reserved in every new gTLD, in other words. It’s not known if any government has passed laws protecting this and other IGO strings in their own ccTLDs, but I suspect it’s very unlikely any have.
There are about 230 such IGOs, all of which have acronyms new gTLD registries are currently temporarily banned from selling as domains.
The multi-stakeholder GNSO community is on the verge of coming up with some policy recommendations that would unblock these acronyms from sale and grant the IGOs access to the UDRP and URS mechanisms, allowing them to reclaim or suspend domains maliciously exploiting their “brands”.
The responsible GNSO working group has been coming up with these recommendations for over two years.
While the GAC and IGOs were invited to participate in the WG, and may have even attended a couple of meetings, they decided they’d have a better shot at getting what they wanted by talking directly to the ICANN board outside of the usual workflow.
The WG chair, Phil Corwin of the Internet Commerce Association, recently described IGO/GAC participation as a “near boycott”.
This reluctance to participate in formal ICANN policy-making led to the creation of the so-called “small group”, a secretive ad hoc committee that has come up with an opposing set of recommendations to tackle the same IGO acronym “problem”.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to call the the small group “secretive”. While the GNSO WG’s every member is publicly identified, their every email publicly archived, their every word transcribed and published, ICANN won’t even say who is in the small group.
I asked ICANN for list of its members a couple of weeks ago and this is what I got:

The group is made up of Board representatives from the New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC), primarily, Chris Disspain; the GAC Chair; and representatives from the IGO coalition that first raised the issue with ICANN and some of whom participated in the original PDP on IGO-INGO-Red Cross-IOC protections – these would include the OECD, the UN, UPU, and WIPO.

With the publication two weeks ago of the small group’s recommendations (pdf) — which conflict with the expect GNSO recommendations — the battle lines were drawn for a fight at ICANN 57, which kicks off this week in Hyderabad, India.
Last Thursday, members of the GNSO Council, including WG chair Corwin, met telephonically with GAC chair Schneider, ICANN chair Steve Crocker and board small group lead Disspain to discuss possible ways forward.
What emerged is what Crocker would probably describe as a “knotty” situation. I’d describe it as a “process clusterfuck”, in which almost all the relevant parties appear to believe their hands are tied.
The GNSO Council feels its hands are tied for various reasons.
Council chair James Bladel explained that the GNSO Council doesn’t have the power to even enter substantive talks.
“[The GNSO Council is] not in a position to, or even authorized to, negotiate or compromise PDP recommendations that have been presented to use by a PDP working group and adopted by Council,” he said.
He went on to say that while the GNSO does have the ability to revisit PDPs, to do so would take years and undermine earlier hard-fought consensus and dissuade volunteers from participating in policy making. He said on the call:

By going back and revisiting PDPs we both undermine the work of the community and potentially could create an environment where folks are reluctant to participate in PDPs and just wait until a PDP is concluded and then get engaged at a later stage when they feel that the recommendations are more likely adopted either by the board or reconciled with GAC advice.

He added that contracted parties — registries and registrars — are only obliged to follow consensus policies that have gone through the PDP process.
Crocker and Disspain agreed that the the GAC and the GNSO appear to have their hands tied until the ICANN board makes a decision.
But its hands are also currently tied, because it only has the power to accept or reject GNSO recommendations and/or GAC advice, and it currently has neither before it.
Chair Crocker explained that the board is not able to simply impose any policy it likes — such as the small group recommendations, which have no real legitimacy — it’s limited to either rejecting whatever advice the GAC comes up with, rejecting whatever the GNSO Council approves, or rejecting both.
The GNSO WG hasn’t finished its work, though the GNSO Council is likely to approve it, and the GAC hasn’t considered the small group paper yet, though it is likely to endorse it it.
Crocker suggested that rejecting both might be the best way to get everyone around a table to try to reach consensus.
Indeed, it appears that there is no way, under ICANN’s processes, for these conflicting views to be reconciled formally at this late stage.
WG chair Corwin said that any attempt to start negotiating the issue before the WG has even finished its work should be “rejected out of hand”.
With the GNSO appearing to be putting up complex process barriers to an amicable way forward, GAC chair Schneider repeatedly stated that he was attempting to reach a pragmatic solution to the impasse.
He expressed frustration frequently throughout the call that there does not appear to be a way that the GAC’s wishes can be negotiated into a reality. It’s not even clear who the GAC should be talking to about this, he complained.
He sounds like he’s the sensible one, but remember he’s representing people who stubbornly refused to negotiate in the WG over the last two years.
Finally, he raised the specter of governments running off to the UN/ITU, something that historically has been able to put the willies up those who fully support (and in many cases make their careers out of) the ICANN multistakeholder model.
Here’s a lengthier chunk of what he said, taken from the official meeting transcript:

If it turns out that there’s no way to change something that has come out of the Policy Development Process, because formally this is not possible unless the same people would agree to get together and do the same thing over again, so maybe this is what it takes, that we need to get back or that the same thing needs to be redone with the guidance from the board.
But if then nobody takes responsibility to — in case that everybody agrees that there’s a public interest at stake here that has not been fully, adequately considered, what — so what’s the point of this institution asking governments for advice if there’s no way to actually follow up on that advice in the end?
So I’m asking quite a fundamental question, and I’m just urging you about considering what happens if many governments consider that the system does not work. They go to other institutions. They think we are not able to defend public interest in this institution. We need to go elsewhere. And this is exactly what is happening currently at the ITU Standardization Assembly, where we have discussions about protection of geographic names because — and I’m not saying this is legitimate or not — but because some governments have the feeling that this hasn’t been adequately addressed in the ICANN structure.
…
I’m really serious about this urge that we all work together to find solutions within ICANN, because the alternative is not necessarily better. And the world is watching what signals we give, and please be aware of that.

The “geographic names” issue that Schneider alludes to here seems to be a proposal (Word .doc) put forward by African countries and under discussion at the ITU’s WTSA 2016 meeting this week.
The proposal calls for governments to get more rights to oppose geographic new gTLD applications more or less arbitrarily.
It emerged not from any failure of ICANN policy — geographic names are already protected at the request of the GAC — but from Africa governments being pissed off that .africa is still on hold because DotConnectAfrica is suing ICANN in a California court and some batty judge granted DCA a restraining order.
It’s not really relevant to the IGO issue, nor especially relevant to the issue of governments failing to influence ICANN policy.
The key takeaway from Schneider’s remarks for me is that, despite assurances that the IANA transition was a way to bring more governments into the ICANN fold rather than seeking solace at the UN, that change of heart is yet to manifest itself.
The “I’m taking my ball and going home” threat seems to be alive and well for now.
If you made it this far but want more, the transcript of the call is here (pdf) and the audio is here (mp3). Good luck.

ICANN faces first post-transition test of UN power (for real this time)

The ICANN community and United Nations agencies are heading for a clash, with governments accused this morning of trying to bypass the ICANN policy-making process.
According to the leader of an ICANN volunteer working group, governments and UN-affilated intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have circumvented the usual ICANN consensus-building process in order to extract the policies they want directly from the ICANN board of directors and staff.
It’s the first time since the IANA transition, which happened less than a week ago, that governments have been accused of exploiting their special access to the board, and it may become a hot topic at next month’s ICANN 57 meeting in India.
Governments and UN agencies now stand accused of “bypassing the ICANN community” in order to achieve their policy goals.
But the policy being debated is not directly linked to the IANA transition, nor to the thoroughly debunked notion that the UN has taken over ICANN.
Indeed, the issue in question — the permanent protection of IGO acronyms in gTLDs — is almost embarrassingly narrow and predates the announcement of the IANA transition by at least three years, going back to at least 2011.
Basically, the policy questions that look set to cause even more conflict between governments and others are: should IGO acronyms be protected, and if so, how?
IGO acronyms are strings such as WIPO, UNESCO and OECD.
The ICANN board punted this question in May 2014, when it received conflicting advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee and Generic Names Supporting Organization.
Since then, a GNSO Policy Development Process working group has been working on recommendations. It has not yet issued its initial findings, but is close.
Simultaneously and separately, members of ICANN’s board and staff have been quietly talking to a handful of GAC members and IGOs about the same issue in what has become known as the “small group”.
Because it’s small. And a group.
Yesterday, ICANN divulged the consensus of the small group in a letter (pdf) to the leaders of the GNSO Council.
Its recommendations conflict in almost every respect with what the GNSO working group intends to recommend.
The small group wants ICANN to create IGOs-acronyms-only versions of the Trademark Clearinghouse database, Trademark Claims service and UDRP and URS dispute resolution mechanisms — basically “functionally equivalent” mirrors of almost all of the rights protection mechanisms currently only available to trademark owners.
They would be administered at least partially by the GAC and at no cost to the IGOs themselves (presumably meaning ICANN would pick up the tab).
It seems like a disproportionate amount of faff considering the problem ICANN is trying to solve is the vanishingly small possibility that somebody attempts to cybersquat the United Nations Entity For Gender Equality And The Empowerment Of Women (UNWOMEN) or the Postal Union Of The Americas Spain And Portugal (PUASP).
A lot of it is also in direct opposition to what the GNSO WG plans to recommend, according to chair Phil Corwin and the current draft of the WG’s recommendations.
The WG currently plans to recommend that IGOs should be allowed to use the existing URS and UDRP mechanisms to take down or take over domains that use their acronyms in bad faith. It does not currently seem to recommend anything related to Trademark Claims.
A foundational disagreement relates to the status of IGOs under the law. While IGOs in the small group seem to think they are in a special category of entity that is not subject to regular trademark law, the WG hired expert legal counsel that determined the contrary.
Corwin, in his initial response to the small group letter, said that the implications of the debate go beyond how IGO acronyms should be protected.
IGOs carried out a “near boycott” of the GNSO PDP discussions, he wrote, preferring instead to talk to the small group “behind closed doors”. He wrote:

we continually urged members of the GAC, and IGOs, to participate in our WG. That participation was so sporadic that it amounted to a near-boycott, and when IGO representatives did provide any input they stressed that they were speaking solely as individuals and were not providing the official views of the organizations that employed them.
Of course, why should they participate in the GNSO policy processes when they are permitted to pursue their goals in extended closed door discussions with the Board, and when the Board seeks no input from the GNSO in the course of those talks?

He directly linked the timing of the small group report to the expiration last Friday of ICANN’s IANA functions contract with the US Department of Commerce, and suggested that the IGO acronym issue could be a litmus test for how ICANN and governments function together under the new oversight regime.

I note that transmission of the letter has been delayed until after the completion of the IANA transition, and that the post-transition role of governments within ICANN was a central controversy surrounding the transition.
…
What is at stake in this matter goes far beyond the relatively rare instance in which a domain registrant infringes upon the name or acronym of an IGO and the IGO seeks relief through a CRP [Curative Rights Protection mechanism]. The larger issue is whether, in a post-transition ICANN, the GAC and the UN agencies that comprise a large portion of IGOs, will participate meaningfully in GNSO policy activities, or will seek their policy aims by bypassing the ICANN community and engaging in direct, closed door discussions with the Board.

The financial effects of this seemingly interminable debate on the gTLD industry are probably pretty minor.
Currently, all new gTLDs have temporarily blocked, from launch, all of the IGO acronyms in question. That’s roughly 200 domains per gTLD that could otherwise be sold.
Many of the strings are three, four and five-letter acronyms that could fetch “premium” prices in the open market (though, in my judgement, not much more than a couple hundreds bucks in most cases).
A small number of the acronyms, such as WHO and IDEA, are potentially more valuable.
Off the top of my head and the back of an envelope, I’d put the cost to the industry as a whole of the IGO acronym blocks probably somewhere in the very low millions.
The harms being prevented are also very minor, in my view. With a small handful of exceptions, the IGOs in question are not attractive cybersquatting targets.
But, as is so often the case in ICANN matters, the arguments in this case boil down to matters of law, principle and process much more than practical impact.

Buy it or lose it? Governments could get first dibs on two-letter domains

Governments and ccTLD registries would get new rights to own two-letter domains in new gTLDs under a proposed ICANN policy.
These highly-prized domains, many of which are likely worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, would be subject to a mini sunrise period, under the proposal.
The so-called Exclusive Availability Pre-registration Period would be limited to those companies or government entities in charge of matching ccTLDs.
The measures are outlined in “Proposed Measures for Letter/Letter Two-Character ASCII Labels to Avoid Confusion with Corresponding Country Codes” (pdf), published by ICANN late last week.
The surprisingly succinct document outlines three things new gTLD registries must do if they want to start selling two-letter domains matching ccTLDs, which are currently restricted.
The key measure is:

Registry Operator must implement a 30-day period in which registration of letter/letter two-character ASCII labels that are country codes, as specified in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard, will be made exclusively available to the applicable country-code manager or government.

In other words, if you’re a government or company listed as the ccTLD manager here, you get 30 days of exclusive opportunity to buy the LL.example matching your ccTLD.
Until now, governments have been able to block the release of LL new gTLD domains matching their ccTLDs.
The new proposal, introduced in an attempt to settle a long-running debate about the most appropriate way to enable the release of two-character strings, appears to add a “buy it or lose it” component to existing policy.
Under the base New gTLD Registry Agreement, all two-character domains were initially reserved.
Then, in late 2014, ICANN said registries could release all letter-number, number-letter and number-number combinations.
Many registries have already released such names, some selling for thousands at auction. When Rightside released its LN/NL/NN names, some carried price tags as high as $50,000.
Letter-letter domains could also be released following a formal registry request to ICANN, but were subject to a 60-day period during which governments could object.
Almost 1,000 new gTLDs have submitted such requests, and almost all have been “partially approved”.
That means some governments objected to the release of ccTLD-matching domains. Over 16,000 unique domain names have been objected to and therefore blocked over the last year or so.
The new proposal would add an extra process under which these blocked domains could be released, with ccTLD concerns getting first rights.
Interestingly, it appears to bring ccTLD managers into the mix, rather than restricting the names simply to governments.
The Governmental Advisory Committee has been the main driving force behind demands for restrictions on LL domains, but the proposed policy appears to also extend rights to private entities.
Remember, many ccTLDs are operated independently by private companies, without local government oversight.
For example, .uk is managed by Nominet, a non-governmental entity. The UK government has blocked many uk.example domains from being registered. The new policy appears to allow either Nominet or the government to register these names.
The one-page proposal is light on some details. It does not say, for example, what happens when the government and the ccTLD manager both want the name.
In keeping with ICANN’s habit of staying out of pricing, it does not specify price caps either.
It does, however, oblige registries to ban registrants from pretending to be affiliated with the relevant government when they are not.
Governments also get to complain, and registries have to investigate, if the relevant domains are causing “confusion”, though registries do not appear to be under a strict obligation to delete or suspend domains.
The policy is open for public comment until August here.