Americans and ICANNers avoid Kigali in droves

The number of North Americans and ICANN staffers turning up to the latest community meeting hit their lowest numbers since records began, according to newly published ICANN statistics.

In-person attendance plummeted compared to the same meeting last year, and the total number of North Americans collecting lanyards was the lowest since ICANN started tracking these things in 2016.

The number of staffers showing up to ICANN 80 in Kigali, Rwanda last month also tied as the lowest-ever turnout for Org employees.

There were 214 North Americans at Kigali, compared to 612 at the Washington DC meeting a year earlier and 262 at the meeting in The Hague in 2022, which was the first post-pandemic non-virtual meeting.

The previous low was 310, at the ICANN 65 meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.

It’s probably no surprise that many regular attendees stayed away. The shorter, mid-year Policy Forum meetings typically see the lowest in-person participation, and that’s particularly noticeable when the rotation has them held in Africa.

Flight web sites I checked show no direct flights from the US to Kigali. A connection at a European hub is required and you’re realistically looking at over 24 hours of travel time. Asian community members have it a little easier, with connecting hubs available in the Middle East.

For ICANN, the lower number of staff being sent may be indicative of the Org’s latest belt-tightening moves, which recently saw a number of staff laid off.

RDRS stats improve a little in June

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service saw a small improvement in usage and response times in June, but it did lose a registrar, according to statistics published today.

There were 170 requests for private Whois data in the month, up a little from May’s historic low of 153, and 20.88% were approved, compared to 20.29% in May.

The mean average response time for an approved request was down to 6.59 days, from 11.34 days in May and April’s huge 14.09 days. Since the RDRS project began last November, the median response time is two days.

Smaller registrar OwnRegistrar opted out of the program during the month, but the coverage in percentage terms held steady at 59%, with 90 registrars of various sizes still participating.

Four more gTLDs in emergency measures

ICANN has thrown four more gTLDs into the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, presumably as a prelude to terminating their registry’s contracts in a few weeks.

Asia Green IT System’s .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) are all going EBERO, meaning Nominet will take over their operation on ICANN’s behalf.

Not that they need much operation, given that all four, which all connect in some way to Iran and Iranian culture, were unlaunched and dormant, with no third-party registrations.

The four TLDs, along with AGIT’s .nowruz, which went into EBERO last week, had been running on CoCCA’s back-end, but it sounds rather like the registry forgot to pay its bills, causing CoCCA to disable its services.

That led to functions such as Whois going offline, triggering a breach of the ICANN Registry Agreement. A day of Whois downtime in one week gives ICANN grounds to get Nominet involved and move towards termination.

A breach notice issued a couple weeks ago gave AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk termination. That escalation now appears inevitable.

AGIT almost got to run .islam and .halal, but had its applications rejected after protests from governments of Muslim-majority country. Somehow, .shia did not receive the same outcry.

Unstoppable announces another new gTLD bid

In the run-up to the 2012 new gTLD application round, we were hard-pressed to find a company willing to announce an application. This time around, announcements are coming out of the blockchain world at the rate of about one a week.

Unstoppable Domains has announced that it’s working with Raiinmaker Network to operate .raiin, first as a blockchain-only namespace and later as a new gTLD hopeful.

Raiinmaker says it developers a blockchain protocol that “utilizes decentralized AI and scalable Web3 powered infrastructure to transform the distribution of value tied to authentic identity, data and behavior.”

No, me neither.

Unstoppable said it “will be planning and strategizing with Raiinmaker Network for the next ICANN gTLD application to further solidify its place in the digital landscape.”

It’s the tenth potential application the company has publicly revealed.

Blockchain naming firm gets ICANN accreditation

A company heavily involved in promoting blockchain-based domain name alternatives has received its ICANN registrar accreditation, allowing it to sell real domains as well.

Switzerland-based Freename’s London subsidiary seems to have obtained the accreditation in the last week or so. Accreditation means it gets the right to sell gTLD domains from any registry that it can sign a contract with.

Freename currently sells names in thousands of “TLDs”, some of which look very similar to existing ICANN gTLDs albeit with the addition of emojis, and which of course only work with special client software installed.

ICANN does not accept gTLD applications including emojis, so there’s no risk of collisions at the technical level, even if the text portion of the Freename suffix matches a DNS TLD.

Fellow blockchain naming company Unstoppable Domains already sells real .com domains, but I believe that’s as a reseller rather than a full-fat ICANN registrar.

Last year, it emerged that ICANN had turned down an offer of sponsorship from Freename.

This article was updated July 15, 2024 with additional information about Freename’s use of emojis.

ICANN takes over gTLD after Whois failures

ICANN has swooped to take over operation of a new gTLD after it missed its strict thresholds for Whois availability.

.nowruz, originally operated by Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System, is now in the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, meaning its essential functions will be carried out by Nominet.

The gTLD is the Latinized version of the word for the Persian new year holiday. It has barely a dozen domains under management and is the only one of AgitSys’s five gTLDs with any registrations.

The company’s other gTLDs — .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) — were also all found to have breached their registry agreements, but as they have no third-party domains where was no need for the EBERO, ICANN said.

The takeover follows a rapidly issued notice last week, in which ICANN Compliance accused AgitSys of a range of breaches of contract.

It seems AGIT went into breach with ICANN after its back-end provider, CoCCA, terminated its contract after a “breach” earlier this year. CoCCA said it had been turning off services ever since the contract ended.

.nowruz becomes the third gTLD from the 2012 round to go into emergency measures, the others being .desi and .wed, which went EBERO seven years ago.

ICANN said it planned to auction off .wed in 2021, but nothing has come of that plan yet.

Verisign: would-be .com contract killers are “wrong”

Verisign has responded to the campaign to have the US government cancel its contract to run .com and open the agreement to competitive bidding, saying it is “wrong” and “based on a fundamental misunderstanding” of the deal.

The American Economic Liberties Project, the Demand Progress Education Fund, and the Revolving Door Project put their names to letters last week calling the .com deal between ICANN and Verisign a “de facto cartel” that competition authorities should dismantle.

But, as others have also pointed out, Verisign says that removing the US government from the trilateral agreement would not have the effect the letter-writers believe it would.

In a regulatory filing, Verisign said:

The campaign, and the letters, assert that the 32-year-old Cooperative Agreement between the Department of Commerce (Department) and Verisign involving the .com top-level domain registry can be terminated by the Department on August 2, 2024, and, if it is, the management of .com can be transferred after a competitive bidding process. This assertion is wrong: If the Department chooses to sunset the Cooperative Agreement, which Verisign does not seek, the .com registry will continue to be managed pursuant to the terms of Verisign’s and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) valid, enforceable Registry Agreement

In other words, if the US government butts out, all that’s left to regulate .com pricing is ICANN, and ICANN is institutional averse to regulating pricing, believing it would open it up to genuine concerns about cartel-like behavior.

The Cooperative Agreement (pdf) states:

upon expiration or termination of the Cooperative Agreement, neither party shall have any further obligation to the other and nothing shall prevent Verisign from operating the .com TLD pursuant to an agreement with ICANN or its successor

Five gTLDs at risk as registry goes AWOL

The chance of five new gTLDs themed around the Middle East ever going live has substantially decreased after the registry seemed to disappear and got hit by a third ICANN breach notice.

The registry is Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System, which goes by AGIT or AgitSys, and the five gTLDs are .nowruz (Iranian New Year), .pars (refers to Persia/Iran), .shia (a branch of Islam), .tci (an outsourced dot-brand for the Telecommunication Company of Iran) and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd, means “comrade” in Persian).

According to ICANN, the company is failing to provide Whois, data escrow and has not filed its monthly transaction reports since February. It is also past due with its ICANN fees, according to the breach notice.

The turnaround for the breach notice was incredibly fast. ICANN appears to have noticed that the Whois failures met the “RDAP-RDDS emergency threshold” — which is 24 hours of downtime in a single week — on Friday, called the registry the same day, and issued the breach notice on Monday.

The technical breaches may or may not be related to the fact that the company appears to have disappeared from the internet. None of its NIC sites resolve for me today, and its agitsys.com company web site returns a 404.

These things were also true in 2019, when AGIT received its first breach notice, which was later resolved. It received a second notice a year ago, which it also later resolved.

Only .nowruz, the only one of the five to launch, appears to have any third-party registrations in its zone file, counting in the single figures and all apparently defensive. I could get one of them to resolve, so the DNS appears to be functional.

AGIT used CoCCA as its back-end. CoCCA said that it terminated its contract with AGIT after a “breach” earlier this year and has been turning off features ever since.

RDAP, WHOIS, Reporting and Escrow deposits have been disabled by CoCCA incrementally.

ICANN has given AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk having its contracts terminated.

This article was updated July 8 with comment from CoCCA.

Groups make flawed case that .com is a cartel

Three pressure groups in the US have called on the government to strip Verisign of its .com contract, saying the company is operating as a “de facto cartel” with ICANN that has allowed its shareholders to milk the public for billions.

But their argument has a pretty significant hole in it, based on an apparent misunderstanding of how Verisign funds ICANN.

The American Economic Liberties Project, the Demand Progress Education Fund, and the Revolving Door Project have written to the Department of Justice and National Telecommunications and Information Administration to demand that they “cut off” Verisign.

The NTIA is the third party in the triumvirate with ICANN and Verisign that controls who gets to run the immensely powerful .com TLD. It’s the NTIA that gets to decide whether Verisign is able to raise its registry fees, how often and by how much.

The Obama administration froze the fee for its last six-year run, but the caps were lifted under Trump, giving Verisign four 7% increase options over the current six-year deal, all of which it has chosen to exercise.

The price of a .com registration or renewal has gone up from $7.85 in 2018 to $10.26 later this year. Verisign enjoys some of the highest profit margins of any public company in the US as a result, with much of its cashflow diverted into share buybacks.

This has to stop, and the .com contract should be open for bidders, the three groups said in their letters:

Ending this contract will force the initiation of a competitive open-bidding process, ultimately bringing down costs for those who must register a domain name. ICANN and VeriSign function as a de facto cartel and the NTIA should stop sanctioning the “incestuous legal triangle” that serves as a shield to deflect overdue antitrust scrutiny into their otherwise likely illegal collusive relationship.

While the letters raise many good points, they’re the same good points that have been raised every few years for the last quarter century. The US government response seems to depend entirely on whether the current occupant of the White House wears a blue tie or a red tie.

Where the argument is flawed is in the statement: “ICANN has a vested interest in VeriSign making as much money as possible, as VeriSign pays ICANN for each annual domain name registration.”

This is not quite correct, as ICANN’s current financial problems can attest.

In reality, while it is true that Verisign is by far the biggest contributor to ICANN’s budget, the dollar value is tied not to how much money Verisign makes, but to how many registrations and renewals it processes.

ICANN gets a quarter for every domain-year, basically, regardless of whether Verisign charges $7.85 or $10.26, so ICANN’s vested interest is in Verisign selling as many domain-years as possible, not its bottom line. If .com shrinks, so does ICANN’s budget.

And that’s exactly what has happened over the last couple of years. As Verisign’s prices have gone up, volume has started to go down, first in China and more recently in the US.

While I don’t believe the company has explicitly linked its volume decline to its price hikes, it’s said that a solution to the problem is new promotional activities later this year, so draw your own conclusions.

ICANN’s budget has taken a hit as a result. The Org said in April that it was looking at an $8 million shortfall and last month said it was laying off 7% of its staff to try to save $10 million.

The fact that it’s just canned 33 staff is pretty decent argument against the cartel claim, and I expect it to form part of ICANN’s response.

The three groups’ letters may be on more solid ground with its claim that ICANN has enjoyed a “$20 million cash bonus” that they describe as a share of Verisign’s “ill-gotten rent to maintain its market power.”

That’s a reference to the $5 million a year for five years additional payment that Verisign agreed to when it renegotiated its registry contract with ICANN in 2020.

Nominally to help fund ICANN’s DNS “security and stability” efforts, the optics of this side deal have always been terrible, the granularity of the accounting transparency has been criticized as lacking, and I’ve frequently referred to the payment as a “bung”.

But that payment is strictly bilateral and not part of Verisign’s deal with NTIA.

The NTIA arrangement has presumptive renewal of six-year terms, but NTIA can revoke it with 120 days notice. That means it will have to act before August 2 if it decides to terminate Verisign’s contract.

You can read the letters in full here.

RDRS usage hits all-time low

Usage of ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service, which lets people submit Whois queries to registrars, hit a new low in May, six months after its launch.

RDRS was used to submit 156 requests for private Whois data in the period, the lowest number to date. In December, there were 173 requests; the peak was 290 the following month.

While requests from law enforcement held at 46, requests from IP holders, which had peaked at 117 in February, dipped a little between April and May, going from 43 to 37.

The mix between approved and denied requests was pretty much unchanged — about 20% of requests get approved and about 70% get denied.

The number of RDRS queries (domain lookups that don’t necessarily result in a request) was also at at all-time monthly low, at 1,393, from a December peak of 2,349 and April’s 1,435. Only a quarter of queries were for supported domains, down from 30% in April.

The wait time for approval shortened a little, having topped out at a massive 14 days in April, to an average of 11.34 days. Denials took on average 9.77 days.

Three more registrars joined the voluntary service in May, and none left. One of the newcomers was a second Alibaba accreditation, which brought in 3.5 million domains and raised the overall service coverage from 57% to 59% of all gTLD domains.

One way of spinning the numbers would be to say that RDRS users have become disillusioned with the service, another would be to say they are done kicking the tires and seeing what they can get away with, have discovered its limitations, and are now using it as intended.