I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan

The registry for the former Soviet Union’s .su ccTLD has denied that ICANN plans to kick it off the internet, giving three reasons why its over 100,000 domains are safe.

RosNIIROS pointed to Russian law, ICANN ccTLD policy, and the lack of any formal retirement notice as reasons why the ccTLD isn’t going anywhere. The registry said in a post on its web site:

In connection with the media reports about the possible closure of the .SU domain zone, we inform you that this information periodically appears in the public domain, but does not correspond to reality. The registry (RosNIIROS) does not plan to liquidate the .SU domain and no formal actions have been taken by ICANN

The registry said that .su has been formally recognised under Russian law, via a ruling of the telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor, alongside .ru and .рф, as part of the “Russian national domain zone”.

It added that ICANN policy does not permit the Org to retire .su:

According to the procedure approved in 2022 by ICANN, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) can be removed from the DNS root zone only if the corresponding two-letter code is excluded from the ISO 3166 standard. Currently, the code “SU” is included in the ISO 3166 list with the status of “exclusively reserved”

The machine translation may be a bit wonky there, as the term used in English is “exceptionally reserved”. That’s the ISO 3166 status also enjoyed by the UK (.uk), Ascension Islands (.ac) and European Union (.eu).

But the ICANN policy on retiring ccTLDs specifically calls out .uk, .ac and .eu as being “grandfathered” in. It doesn’t mention .su at all, and it’s not at all clear from my reading whether being “exceptionally reserved” offers .su blanket protection.

ICANN’s former chair didn’t seem to think so in 2022 when he said, “the Soviet Union is no longer assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard and therefore is no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD.”

RosNIIROS also referred its customers to the recent comments of ICANN director Becky Burr, who on March 12 had denied that ICANN had kicked off formal retirement proceedings.

I hadn’t listened to this session live, but I caught up with the recording today and have to say it’s a bit of an eye-opener. Burr said:

Let me just take the elephant in the room. We all saw the Domain Incite report on .su. I just want to say to everybody, there has been no formal letter kicking off any process on there, that’s clear. We are looking at the ccNSO policy, and I don’t want to say anything more about that other than to say whatever was in the Domain Incite article, there has been no formal initiation of a retirement process

I’m not sure whether to be irritated or flattered.

On the one hand, I seem to have received a public dressing down with the clear implication that there was some inaccuracy in my reporting, which is never nice. On the other hand, I didn’t write the damned article she’s referring to.

Burr seems to have read Domain Name Wire’s wonderful scoop on “plans to retire the [.su] domain” and just assumed it was my work. I’ll have to take it as a compliment, I guess. Cheers Becky!

The DNW article reported from the outset that a planned notice of retirement had not yet been sent, but that informal outreach had occurred, so I don’t even think there’s a clear allegation of inaccuracy here. For what it’s worth, I trust the reporting.

The day after Burr’s comment, ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist also said publicly that there had not yet been a “formal” notice of retirement.

Four deadbeat registrars get terminated

ICANN has terminated the contracts of four registrars that haven’t paid their accreditation fees in years.

US-based Zoo Hosting, UK-based Nerd Origins, and China-based Mixun and Mixun Network Technology have all been canned, following public breach notices in January.

Judging by the termination notices, the registrars all stopped paying their quarterly fees between 2022 and early 2024. None of them had implemented recent ICANN policies such as RDAP adoption, the notices added.

It’s not a huge problem, as none of the four companies had ever sold a single gTLD domain name, so there are no customers to be affected.

“No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS

There is currently “no timeline” to remove the Soviet Union’s ccTLD from the internet, according to ICANN’s new CEO.

Asked by yours truly during the Public Forum at ICANN 82 whether retirement proceedings had been initiated against .su, Kurt Lindqvist responded, according to the real-time transcript:

ICANN has been in discussions with the managers of .su regarding retirement of the ccTLD for many, many years. There has not been sent a formal notice of removal to the ccTLD manager and no timeline for sending one, discussions will be keep on going and following the ccNSO retirement policy.

The words “formal notice of removal” might be doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Domain Name Wire scooped earlier this week that on February 8 ICANN had privately told Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS), the .su registry, that it planned to retire the ccTLD by 2030.

DNW noted that a formal notice of removal had been due to be sent and published February 13, but had not.

With Lindqvist today saying that there is “no timeline for sending one”, it seems the matter might have been put to bed for now.

It would have been an incredibly ballsy move to start the process of taking down .su — beloved by Russians and groups in Russian-occupied Ukraine — at this particular point in history.

At the time DNW reported ICANN’s letter to ROSNIIROS was sent, US president Donald Trump had yet to publicly begin peace talks with Russia and Ukraine, but his openly pro-Russian statements on the conflict since his February 12 phone call with Vladimir Putin have alarmed many.

Trump probably isn’t an FSB asset, but he certainly plays one on TV.

Would ICANN want to risk pissing off the unpredictable leader of the country whose jurisdiction it lies within? Or Russia, which might try to make its life difficult in other internet governance fora?

Three years ago, at ICANN 73, ICANN’s then-chair said that the Soviet Union, which disbanded over 30 years ago, is “no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD”.

I first floated the idea of ICANN taking down .su the day after the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

ICANN to kill off 60-day domain transfer lock

ICANN is set to kill off its unpopular 60-day transfer lock policy, following a vote at ICANN 82 in Seattle this week.

The GNSO Council yesterday voted to accept the final report of its Transfer Policy working group, a mammoth 163-page document that contains 47 recommendations affecting all areas of domain transfers.

The removal of the transfer lock is perhaps the biggest change to the 20-year-old policy for domain registrants.

Under the current policy, when you buy a domain name from another registrant or change your name, organization or email address, you trigger a lock that prevents you transferring your domain to another registrar for 60 days.

It was designed as an anti-fraud measure, stopping domain thieves bouncing their stolen names to sleazy registrars to avoid them being recovered by their victims.

But is has proved unpopular over the years with registrants that want to consolidate their portfolios under their preferred registrar and the new policy would remove the lock entirely.

It would also remove the requirement for both gaining and losing registrants (ie buyer and seller) to be notified when a change of registrant occurs, on the basis that notifications don’t provide much protection when the losing registrant’s email has already been compromised.

The whole process governing changes to registrant data is going to be spun out into a separate Change of Registrant Data Policy, because maybe it didn’t belong in the Transfer Policy in the first place.

The newly approved changes will also introduce two new locks that registrars currently may, but are not required to, impose — there’s going to be mandatory 720-hour (30-day) locks on domains that have just been created or just transferred in.

Any registrars that currently impose a longer lock will have to reduce it to 720 hours and any registrar that does not have such a lock will be required to implement one.

The GNSO says these month-long locks will help reduce credit card fraud and help comply with trademark complaints such as UDRP.

There are dozens of other changes coming that do not relate to locks.

For example, the list of reasons a registrar may deny a transfer has been updated to include a reference to DNS abuse, as currently defined in the ICANN registry and registrar contracts.

There are numerous changes of terminology, required notifications, and instructions for handling Transfer Authorization Codes, all of which registrars and registrars will have to implement if they want to stay compliant with their ICANN contracts.

There are also changes to bulk portfolio transfers, limiting registries to a charge of $50,000 for portfolios over 50,000 domains.

The changes would also incorporate an updated Bulk Transfer After Partial Portfolio Acquisition (BTAPPA) directly into the Transfer Policy, meaning registries no longer have to request it from ICANN via the Registry Services Evaluation Process.

The recommendations, unanimously approved by the GNSO Council yesterday, will now go to ICANN’s board of directors for final approval. The final updated Transfer Policy will then be written by an ICANN/GNSO team.

Registries and registrars will then presumably be given time to implement the policy before it becomes law and Compliance comes sniffing around for infractions. We’re talking about at least 18 months before the changes go live, I reckon.

If you have a high tolerance for boredom, the full list of recommendations can be read in this PDF.

Lancaster bags up its dot-brand

A French leather goods company is trashing its lightly-used dot-brand gTLD.

Lancaster has told ICANN that it wants to terminate its Registry Agreement for .lancaster.

The company added half a dozen names to the gTLD in 2016 — things like bag.lancaster and fashion.lancaster — but they always just redirected to its primary web site at lancaster.com.

Lancaster used AFNIC as its back-end registry services provider.

The string “Lancaster” has many uses, from other brands to geographic locations, so it’s not impossible .lancaster might return in another guise in a future new gTLD application round.

NomCom confirms Americans rejected from ICANN board

North American candidates for ICANN’s board of directors are having their applications politely rejected, the Nominating Committee has confirmed.

Speaking to the GNSO Council at ICANN 82 in Seattle yesterday, NomCom chair-elect Tom Barrett said ICANN’s rules forbid the committee from now considering candidates from the region.

“When we opened the application window, January 15, there were no geographic restrictions for these three positions,” he said. “As you know, that has now changed…. We’ll be maxed out terms of the geographic limitation for North America.”

The specific changes of circumstance are the recent elections of Canadian Byron Holland by the ccNSO and American Greg DiBiase by the GNSO.

ICANN’s bylaws state that no more than five voting members of the board, excluding the CEO, may be from the same region. The board already has three other North Americans.

Candidates from North America who had already applied for the three open board seats will be emailed to inform them they are no longer eligible, Barrett said.

Candidates that had identified as North American but have dual citizenship with a country in a different region are eligible to reapply under their other affiliation, he said.

Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications

Nova Registry, which runs .link, has announced it plans to apply for 200 new gTLDs when ICANN opens up the next application window about a year from now.

It’s the first time in this round a company has announced plans to build a huge TLD portfolio. It would cost around $45.4 million in application fees alone, if ICANN’s guide price of $227,000 stays true.

It would make Nova the second-largest applicant by gTLD count to date, dwarfed only by the over 300 Donuts applied for in 2012. It would be about twice as large as the 101 Google applied for last time.

In the 2026 round, only Unstoppable Domains has announced a large number of applications — more than 50 — but those are all with partners that would presumably eventually become the contracted registry.

It’s not entirely clear from today’s announcement whether Nova is financing this project, which it calls SuperNova200, alone, or whether it’s looking for business partners.

“We will apply for 200 new Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs),” the registry says. “A new breed of gTLDs to drive innovation, competition, and consumer choice while enhancing the utility of the DNS.”

Nova entered the market in 2022 when it acquired .link from UNR. It appears to be ultimately owned by domainer Yonatan Belousov and is managed by ICM Registry alum Vaughn Liley.

ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program

ICANN says it will use a combination of AI and crowdsourcing to translate new gTLD program materials on the cheap.

Org said in a blog post that when a community member trying to drum up interest in new gTLDs in their local community needs some official ICANN documents in an unsupported language, ICANN will prepare a translation on demand.

The first run will be done with AI machine translation, and the draft will be posted on a community wiki for review by volunteers who can read the relevant language before ICANN finalizes and publishes a final PDF.

ICANN seems ready to post drafts of documents such as FAQs and info sheets in languages such as Hindi, Italian and Portuguese after next week’s ICANN 82 public meeting.

Program documents are usually only available in the six official UN languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian — so this project should bring the new gTLD program to a much wider audience.

Using AI and volunteers should mean it costs almost nothing beyond the work hours ICANN staff put in to administer it.

ChatGPT tells me that there are 195 to 200 official national languages in the world and 3,500 to 4,000 written languages altogether, but I didn’t check whether those numbers are correct.

If the AI is wrong, let me know in the comments.

Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board

Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon, has been elected to serve on ICANN’s board of directors, representing registries and registrars.

He beat Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows, in the two-horse second round of voting, and five other candidates overall, to become the Contracted Parties House selection for Seat 13 on the board.

He will replace Becky Burr, an ICANN community lifer formerly with Neustar, who is term-limited and will leave the board after nine years at the Org’s Annual General Meeting in Muscat, Oman, this October.

DiBiase is currently chair of the GNSO Council and identifies as a registrar rather than a registry (Amazon is both).

He said in his candidate statement (pdf) late last year that ICANN today is too “risk-averse”, focussing too much on its fear of lawsuits, and that it should be more accountable when responding to community complaints.

DiBiase told DI:

I look forward to serving the Contracted Parties in this role and am honored by their trust in me. During the course of the election, my fellow candidates articulated a wealth of ideas on how to improve ICANN and multi-stakeholder model. These perspectives will guide me as a member of the ICANN Board.

The election result needs to be given the nod by the GNSO Council and the ICANN Empowered Community, both of which are usually pretty much formalities, before he can formally take on his board role.

Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot

Tucows has dramatically dropped out of ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service pilot.

The company said that RDRS provides a poor user experience that harms user privacy and causes ICANN to produce misleading usage statistics that show an artificially high request denial rate.

RDRS is a bit more than half way through a two-year pilot designed to gather data that will help ICANN decide whether to deploy a more permanent and probably more expensive long-term solution.

The service is essentially a clearinghouse that connects people who want to request private Whois data with the registrars that manage domains of interest.

Tucows said in a blog post:

Given that the RDRS Standing Committee has enough data to complete its report, as well as the customer experience challenges and data privacy concerns we’ve outlined above, Tucows Domains has decided to end our participation in the RDRS.

The move makes Tucows the highest-profile registrar to pull out of the service to date. Across its various brands (such as Ascio, Enom, EPAG, and OpenSRS) it has around 10 million domains under management.

As of the end of January, RDRS had 94 registrars on board, covering 60% of all registered gTLD domains.

Tucows said it will continue to offer its TACO service, which also allows entities such as intellectual property interests to request private Whois data but charges requesters at least $3,000 a year, which it calls a “cost recovery fee”.

The TACO fee can be waived for “single-use and non-commercial requestors”, Tucows noted. It has updated its terms accordingly.