Response to sex harassment lawsuit “inadequate”, say ICANN vets

ICANN’s response to a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a former long-serving employee was “inadequate” and failed to address “pervasive and obvious problems” women experience in the community, some veteran community members have said.

In a letter to chair Tripti Sinha, 15 people, not exclusively female, also say that previous responses to reports of harassment have focused more on protecting ICANN’s reputation rather than protecting the affected party.

Tanzanica King, a former senior member of ICANN’s meetings team and the Org’s second-longest-serving employee, sued ICANN in August, complaining about specific instances of harassment and a broader “frat boy culture”.

In response, ICANN said many of King’s claims were “untrue”, saying it “strives to create a positive, safe, and inclusive work and community environment” and has “a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment”.

Sinha later announced a forthcoming “strengthening” of the Org’s anti-harassment policy and named its new Ombuds as Liz Field, a woman with experience overseeing anti-harassment policies in governmental and quasi-governmental settings.

Now, the 15 veteran community members, drawn from contracted and non-contracted parties but all writing in their personal capacity, have called ICANN’s initial response “profoundly disappointing”. They wrote (pdf).

It is time to acknowledge that ICANN Org and the Community must make the necessary changes to create a welcoming and professional Community and to protect and defend both Org staff and Community members against harassment and sexual abuse. Denial of this issue has gone on for too long, protecting ICANN’s reputation rather than protecting victims.

The September 24 letter goes on to specifically criticize the Office of the Ombuds, until about a year ago led exclusively by men and then on an interim basis by a woman who was also an Org staffer, for not having the power or willingness to act on harassment reports. They wrote:

An ombuds must have independence and the ability to act; ICANN’s Office of the Ombuds has neither. Typically when harassment has been raised with the Ombuds, the Office did not have the ability to protect the reporter and the impacted person. The Office has illustrated over and over that their function is to protect ICANN Org’s interests—reputation, financial interest, or damage to organizational integrity.

Sinha has since responded (pdf), saying the ICANN board takes the issue “very seriously” and asking permission to publish the letter as “a positive way to encourage dialogue”.

She added that the new Ombuds reports directly to the board and that she “is fully empowered to act as an independent, impartial dispute resolution provider, with autonomy and authority.”

ICANN has not retracted its statement in response to the King lawsuit as the letter-writers requested.

Five times ICANN deleted a ccTLD, and what it means for .io

With the future of .io coming into question this week, with the news that the UK will return sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, I thought it would be a good time to see how ICANN has treated disappearing countries and territories in the past.

As far as I can tell, ccTLDs have been removed from the DNS root on only five occasions since ICANN came into existence in 1998.

While the circumstances differ, in all but one case the trigger for the deletion was a change to the International Standards Organization’s ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, which ICANN uses to decide who gets a ccTLD and what ccTLD they get.

.yu — Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in 1992 due to a bloody civil war, but it wasn’t until 2010 that ICANN finally removed .yu from the root.

Splinter nations Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were all assigned their own new country codes — .si, .hr, .mk and .ba — in the 1990s, but the now independent and separate states of Serbia and Montenegro, initially known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, carried on using .yu.

When the country renamed itself the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, the ISO list was updated to assign it the new code .cs, but the corresponding ccTLD was never actually delegated before the country broke up again in 2006, getting the ccTLDs .rs and .me the following year.

RNIDS, the .rs registry, carried on running .yu for a few years while it transitioned registrants to the new ccTLD. The process was not entirely painless, and ICANN had to keep .yu live longer than planned, before eventually deleting it April 1, 2010.

.tp — Portuguese Timor

The country we now know as East Timor or Timor Leste started the 21st century as Portuguese Timor, under Indonesian occupation. Its ccTLD was .tp.

After the country gained its independence in 2002, it renamed itself Timor Leste and the ISO assigned it the new code TL, deleting TP from its list.

IANA delegated .tl to the local government in 2005 and encouraged .tp registrants to migrate, but it took a full decade before it followed through and removed .tp from the root, in February 2015.

.zr — Zaire

The first ccTLD to get deleted by IANA under ICANN’s watch was .zr, which was no longer needed after Zaire changed its name to Democratic Republic of the Congo, receiving the code CD from ISO, in 1997.

The pre-ICANN IANA delegated .cd to the newly named country in 1997 and the registry operator set about moving .zr names to .cd. By 2001, that process was completed and .zr was deleted from the root.

.an — Netherlands Antilles

The Netherlands Antilles was a collection of former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, until the territory split, with its component islands receiving new statuses under Dutch law, in 2010. The ccTLD was .an.

Curaçao got .cw, Sint Maarten (Dutch part) got the sexy-sounding .sx, and Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba got to share .bq. ISO removed AN from its list.

The transition was a bit more complicated than usual, as .an registrants had to transfer to a new ccTLD based on what island they were on, but the local authorities managed it and within five years .an went poof.

.um — United States Minor Outlying Islands

This one’s unique in that it was deleted apparently simply because the registry operator couldn’t be bothered with it any more.

The United States Minor Outlying Islands are pretty much unpopulated, but strategically well-located, islands belonging to the US. There’s eight in the Pacific and one in the Caribbean.

Its ccTLD was operated by the University of Southern California until 2006, when somebody at ICANN noticed it appeared to be broken. When it approached USC for an explanation, it was told “they were no longer interested in managing the .UM domain”.

It had no registered domains, so there was no need for a transition plan and IANA deleted it from the root the following year.

The islands and their code are still on the ISO list and are still eligible for their ccTLD. Presumably it’s only the fact that the US government has asserted its authority over .um that has prevented an opportunist Just Some Guy registry from snapping it up to market .um domains as the leading destination for indecisive people or something.

What does this mean for .io?

ICANN’s policy on ccTLDs is pretty straightforward — your territory has to be on the ISO 3166 list and the ccTLD has to match the code ISO gives you. If your code drops off the list, you have five years, extensible to 10, to conduct an orderly transition before the TLD is retired.

Much like Portuguese Timor changing its name to Timor Leste to shuck off its enforced colonial branding, it seems inconceivable that the Chagos Archipelago will continue to be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The key questions for .io registrants are: will the renamed BIOT keep the IO assignment on the ISO list, and will the archipelago continue to qualify as a distinct territory eligible for ccTLD status?

If BIOT simply becomes part of Mauritius, no longer recognized by the UN as a distinct territory, .io gains an existential threat. It would drop off ISO’s list and ICANN could issue it a retirement notice.

If BIOT remains a distinct territory and remains eligible for a ccTLD, the possibilities become a whole lot more interesting.

If Mauritius decides to change the territory’s name, there’s no problem. But if it asks ISO for a corresponding change of two-letter code to better reflect its new name, .io’s future is in doubt.

If the name is changed to something like “Chagos” and Mauritius wants a “C” code, only CB, CE and CJ are still available.

Theoretically, the government of Mauritius could unilaterally force an undesirable string change on Identity Digital, the American company that runs the .io registry, forcing a years-long migration to the newly chosen ccTLD.

I can’t imagine many of .io’s hundreds of thousands of registrants, particularly those using .io as a domain hack or to hitch themselves to a cool tech-startup bandwagon, being happy with a forced migration to, say, .cj.

The power to decoolify an entire TLD would be a compelling weapon in a redelegation fight. I’m deep into speculative territory here, but I can’t help but feel that Identity Digital is going to have to give Mauritius some money at some point.

Another possibility is that the registry, one of ICANN’s biggest funders, could lobby ICANN to change its policies and somehow grandfather .io in as a stateless ccTLD.

The fact that ICANN hasn’t acted to remove .su from the root, thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, could be seen as precedent.

The answers to .io’s future might be found in the proposed UK-Mauritius treaty, but that has yet to be published. As it has to be ratified by the UK Parliament we can expect it to enter the public domain before long.

Future of .io domains uncertain as UK hands over Chagos islands

The future of the .io ccTLD is up in the air today with the announcement that the UK is to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Archipelago, to Mauritius.

The two governments announced today that they will sign a treaty agreeing “that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago”. It’s being called the end of British colonialism in Africa.

Under the broad-ranging 99-year deal, native Chagossians, forcibly exiled since the late 1960s, will be free to return to the islands, apart from Diego Garcia, which is home to a strategically important UK-US military base.

There’s no talk yet of the future the ccTLD, of course — the governments have bigger fish to fry — but the change of sovereignty could have interesting implications for the .io registry and its registrants.

The positive spin is that owning a .io domain could now be seen as a less dubious ethical choice.

For almost a decade, largely unsuccessful boycotts of .io have been organized by tech bros upset with the treatment of the Chagossians. Now that they’re getting their land back, the queasiness of supporting “digital colonialism” might go away.

The bad news is that a change of sovereignty could ultimately lead to a change of registry, or the ccTLD disappearing entirely.

ICANN takes its lead from the International Standards Organization, specifically the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 list, when it comes to deciding whether a ccTLD deserves to exist and what two-letter code it gets.

If BIOT ceases to exist and is removed from the ISO list, as seems likely, there’s a strong case to be made that .io should cease to exist too.

Whether ICANN would actually remove .io from the DNS root is another matter, of course. While it has removed ccTLDs before when the associated country disappears, it has done so in a measured, managed fashion.

The Org also seems quite happy for .su to stay in the root, thirty-odd years after the Soviet Union fell apart.

But what of redelegation? There’s already a campaign to get .io redelegated to the Chagossians, and now that the UK is relinquishing its control of BIOT to Mauritius, the redelegation claim could be strengthened by the weight of a national government.

However, while .io is assigned to BIOT, the UK government says it has no formal relationship with the registry, so a change of ownership of the territory doesn’t necessarily mean the ccTLD changes owners.

The registry is run by a private UK company, Internet Computer Bureau, which nowadays is basically a shell owned by an Irish company that is in turn owned by US-based Identity Digital and its parent Beignet.

And ICANN typically doesn’t redelegate ccTLDs without the consent of the losing registry, which in many cases is Just Some Guy who spotted a business opportunity in the 1990s.

Niue, the Pacific island nation, has been fighting fruitlessly for control of .nu for two decades, for example, but the extant registry doesn’t want to hand it over so ICANN has not acted.

As I reported earlier this week, .io had turnover of almost $40 million last year, so it seems unlikely that Identity Digital would follow the UK’s lead and just hand it over.

While the registry does not disclose its registration numbers, the revenue suggests it’s possible over a million .io domains have been registered.

UK and Israel cut ICANN funding

The ccTLD registries for UK and Israel cut their funding to ICANN by the largest amounts in the Org’s last financial year, according to the latest numbers.

ICANN received mostly voluntary ccTLD contributions totaling $2,135,937 in its fiscal 2024, which ended June 30, according to its report, which was published (pdf) a couple weeks ago. That’s down $80,302 from the $2,216,240 it received in FY23.

The biggest single reason for the decline is that Nominet, the .uk registry, slashed its contribution from its usual $225,000 tribute by $75,000 to $150,000 in FY24.

Under ICANN guidelines (pdf) for ccTLDs, registries with over five million domains under management should contribute the maximum $225,000 a year. While .uk has been in decline for a while, it still has well over 10 million DUM.

But Nominet was the only ccTLD still paying the $225,000. All the other ccTLDs with over five million domains were already paying substantially less.

The Netherlands reduced its contribution from $225,000 to $180,000 in FY23. Germany has not given ICANN more than $130,000 a year in the last five years. China always pays $45,000. Brazil pays $100,000.

Nick Wenban-Smith, Nominet’s general counsel told us: “Our relationship with ICANN has not changed. We are a long-standing supporter of the organisation in many ways, lending our resources to policy work and other community efforts alongside our annual financial contribution.”

Israel is the second big funding-cutter in the latest report. It had been giving the recommended $15,000 for its 250,000+ domains, but reduced that to just $5,000 in FY24, despite its DUM being up slightly over the period.

Registries from nine territories that contributed $1,000 or less every year from FY20 to FY23 did not contribute at all in FY24. These include Nigeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Malawi, Guernsey, Jersey, Saint Lucia, Tokelau, and the US Virgin Islands.

The lack of any money from Tokelau’s .tk is expected given the death of the registry. Jersey and Guernsey are perhaps more surprising, given the registries are run by a former ICANN director.

A handful of other ccTLDs from small territories that have only sporadically given in the past did not contribute in FY24.

Fourteen registries contributed more in FY24 than they did in FY23, but the difference amounted to just $13,000 extra cash in ICANN’s coffers. South Africa, Slovenia, Vietnam, Tanzania, and Mongolia all paid $1,000 or more over FY23.

Russia, which stopped providing funding in FY23 despite its almost six million DUM, also did not give any money in FY24.

Twitter now up-to-date on linkification

Twitter appears to have dragged itself into the 2020s with the linkification function of its service, after years of complaints.

On the web version of its service at least, Twitter now correctly makes domains in all the newest TLDs into clickable links automatically, with no http:// prefix required.

This means users are able to share clickable domains in .spa, .kids and .music, the three gTLDs delegated after Twitter’s previous delegation cut-off point of around April 2020.

It’s not clear to me when the change was made, or whether the fix also applies to the Twitter app on Android or iOS devices.

It’s equally not clear whether the change is due to Twitter’s own engineering, or whether a third-party library somewhere in its software stack was updated independently.

Regardless, it’s good news for the registries and registrants concerned, particularly DotMusic, whose .music gTLD goes on sale today.

Twitter came in for criticism from an ICANN engineer earlier this year for ignoring outreach efforts on Universal Acceptance, the program that aims to get all TLDs functioning properly across all software platforms.

Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, is understood to have been far more responsive, following complaints last year from the .tube registry operator.

ICANN fixes embarrassing “What is a Domain Name?” mistake

Good news, everyone! ICANN knows what a domain name is!

The Org has quietly corrected a slide deck, designed as a high-level introduction to the new gTLD program’s Next Round, that seemed to mislabel the components of a domain name.

When it was first published in early September, the offending slide looked like this:

When I saw it, for a few moments I was genuinely worried I’d had another stroke or, worse, been wrong for a quarter century. Surely ICANN, the organization that oversees the global DNS, knew more about this stuff than I do?

Rather than call an ambulance immediately, I tweeted a screengrab on Twitter to get the reassurance of the four people still on that platform that I had not lost my mind.

Now, in the same ICANN deck (pdf), apparently updated September 19, the slide looks like this:

The deck is part of a “Champions Toolkit”, a bunch of freebie marketing materials made available for people who want to market the Next Round, particularly in under-served regions, on ICANN’s behalf.

After five years, “useless” TLD has two web sites

An IDN ccTLD criticized as “useless” by locals when it was approved five years ago has fewer domains today than it did at launch, and a portfolio of web sites even a Simpson could count on one hand (twice).

The Greek-script .ευ (.xn--qxa6a) is one of two internationalized domain name versions of the European Union’s .eu, operated by EURid. It was approved by ICANN in September 2019 and went live two months later.

Today, it has just 2,561 domains under management, about 200 fewer than it did at the end of 2019, just a month after launch, according to stats on EURid’s web site.

A quick google on Google for .ευ domains returns results for only two indexed web sites, while googling on Bing returns four, of which two are undeveloped placeholders.

It’s not much of a result for a TLD that ICANN spent nine years twisting itself in knots to approve over the concerns of evaluators who thought it was visually too confusing to other two-letter strings.

Greek domainers criticized .ευ upon its approval, with Konstantinos Zournas calling it the “worst extension ever”, due largely to the fact that “EU” in Greek is εε, not ευ.

Verisign agrees to .com takedown rules

Verisign has agreed to take down abusive .com domains under the next version of its registry contract with ICANN.

The proposed deal, published for public comment yesterday, could have financial implications for the entire domain industry, but it also contains a range of changes covering the technical management of .com.

Key among them is the addition of new rules on “DNS Abuse” that require Verisign to respond to abuse reports, either by referring the domain to its registrar or by taking direct action

Abuse is defined with the now industry-standard “malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam (when spam serves as a delivery mechanism for the other forms of DNS Abuse listed in this definition)”.

The language is virtually identical to the strengthened DNS abuse language in the base Registry Agreement that almost all other gTLD registries have been committed to since their contracts were updated this April. It reads:

Where Registry Operator reasonably determines, based on actionable evidence, that a registered domain name in the TLD is being used for DNS Abuse, Registry Operator must promptly take the appropriate mitigation action(s) that are reasonably necessary to contribute to stopping, or otherwise disrupting, the domain name from being used for DNS Abuse. Such action(s) shall, at a minimum, include: (i) the referral of the domains being used for the DNS Abuse, along with relevant evidence, to the sponsoring registrar; or (ii) the taking of direct action, by Registry Operator, where Registry Operator deems appropriate.

The current version of the .com contract only requires Verisign to publish an abuse contact on its web site. It doesn’t even oblige the company to respond to abuse reports.

In domain volume terms, .com is regularly judged one of the most-abused TLDs on the internet, though newer, cheaper gTLDs usually have worse numbers in terms of the percentage of registrations that are abusive.

Verisign will also get an obligation that other registries don’t have — to report to ICANN “any cyber incident, physical intrusion or infrastructure damages” that affects the .com registry.

ICANN won’t be able to reveal the details of such incidents publicly unless Verisign gives its permission, but in a side deal (pdf) the two parties promise to work together on a process for public disclosure.

Verisign will also have to implement two 20-year-old IETF standards on “Network Ingress Filtering” that describe methods of mitigating denial-of-service attacks by blocking traffic from forged IP addresses.

The contract is open for public comment.

New .com contract could see ALL domain prices go up

Verisign will retain its power to increase .com prices by 7% a year, and prices in other gTLDs could well go up too, under a new proposed registry contract designed to help patch up ICANN’s budget.

The proposed .com Registry Agreement was posted for public comment this evening, and the pricing terms within could have broad implications for all registrants of gTLD domains.

For starters, as usual the deal lets Verisign raise .com prices, currently $10.26 a year, by 7% in the final four years of the six years of its term. This is an option Verisign has never failed to exercise in the past.

But the deal would also give ICANN the power, in its sole discretion, to raise the per-transaction fees Verisign pays it for each added, renewed, or transferred .com domain, in line with the latest US inflation numbers.

The fee is currently $0.25 per transaction, and it hasn’t gone up ever, as far as I recall.

The proposed text on inflation is pretty much the same as found in all post-2012 gTLD Registry Agreements, but adds a clause saying that ICANN cannot raise the .com fees unless it also raises fees in “multiple other registry agreements”.

Yet another clause strongly suggests that ICANN intends to exercise its existing right to increase its fees, again according to the US Consumer Price Index, across other gTLDs — presumably all of them — rather soon:

ICANN and Registry Operator hereby agree that if ICANN delivers notice of a fee adjustment to other registry operators after November 1, 2024 and prior to the Effective Date, ICANN may concurrently deliver such fee adjustment notice to Registry Operator, in which case the provisions of Section 7.2(d) shall be deemed to have applied at the time such notice was sent.

Translated, this means that ICANN can put Verisign on notice that its fees are going up even before the contract is signed, but only if it also raises the fees on other registries at the same time.

It’s difficult to imagine why this language is there unless it’s describing something ICANN is actually planning to do.

Unlike Verisign, other gTLD operators do not have regulated pricing, so any ICANN fee increase on them could very well be passed on to registrars and ultimately registrants with increased wholesale prices.

The new contract is being proposed a few months after ICANN laid off staff because its budget was $10 million light, and CEO Sally Costerton said the Org was “evaluating ICANN’s fee structure to ensure it scales realistically with inflation”.

Verisign, and .com in particular, is ICANN’s biggest single source of funding, contributing $47.3 million of its $145.5 million in revenue in its last fiscal year.

The proposed new .com contract and public comment opportunity can be found here.

Plurals ban policy handed to ICANN board

The GNSO Council has approved a blanket ban on singular and plural versions of the same word being delegated as gTLDs in future and passed it to the ICANN board of directors for final consideration.

The proposed policy would prevent anyone applying for the singular/plural equivalent of an existing gTLD, and would put future applications for single/plural clashes into contention sets where only one would survive.

The ban would prevent a future .kitchens, for example, because there’s already a .kitchen, and there could be no .motorcycle gTLD because there’s already a .motorcycles.

It would also mean that if there are future applications in the same round for .podcast and .podcasts, for example, they would be placed in the same contention set, likely go to auction, and only one would be delegated.

Applicants would also be banned from applying for singular/plural variants of the few dozen strings found on a “limited blocked name list” that comprises mainly the names of internet policy organizations including ICANN, the IETF and the GNSO.

That list also includes dictionary words such as “onion”, “invalid”, “test”, “internal” and “local”, so there could never be a .onions or .locals gTLD under the policy.

ICANN would decide whether two strings are “the singular or plural version of the same word in the same language” by reference to a dictionary.

The idea behind the ban is mitigating abusive registrations that could be used in, for example, phishing attacks, as well as lazy gTLD applicants that might hope to piggyback on the success of their single/plural rival.

The policy recommendation was written by a “Small Team Plus” of 15 community volunteers after the ICANN board last year rejected the GNSO’s original singular/plural policy, which would have made exceptions to the ban based on the applicant’s “intended use” of the gTLD.

An example given was that if one applicant applied for .spring to represent the meteorological season and another applied for .springs to represent flexible coils of metal, the latter would not be judged a plural of the former.

But the board was worried that if ICANN had to make a call on “intended use”, ICANN would also have to monitor and enforce the use of the gTLD in future, breaking its bylaws promise not to regulate internet content.

Under the revised policy recommendation, .spring and .springs would be ruled as singular/plural equivalents of each other, regardless of how they were going to be marketed.

While the Small Team was not unanimous in its consensus recommendation, the GNSO Council was unanimous in approving it at its monthly meeting last week. The language will now be sent to the ICANN board for approval or rejection.