Bye-bye .boomer! Blockchain players abandon new gTLD plans

A dozen organizations that were planning to apply to ICANN for a new gTLD next year have abandoned their ambitions.

Unstoppable Domains said recently that 12 partners offering blockchain-based alt-TLDs have confirmed they no longer expect to apply for a matching gTLD when the Next Round opens next year.

The affected blockchain extensions are: .bald, .basenji (formerly .benji), .bay, .boomer, .calicoin, .caw, .cgai, .donut, .mery, .mumu, .nibi and .pendle.

Because some buyers may have hoped to grab the matching DNS domain if and when the matching gTLD got delegated, Unstoppable said it will offer refunds to anyone who registered a name in any of these extensions.

It’s also added “Applying to ICANN 2026” and “Not applying to ICANN 2026” tags to search results on its storefront.

The refunds don’t apply to alt-TLDs that could never have applied to ICANN because the string breaks the rules in some way (for example being numeric or too short).

Decades-old US registrar gets a spanking

ICANN Compliance has filed a wide-ranging breach notice against an American registrar that’s been accredited for over 20 years.

Cincinnati-based Netdorm, which does business as DnsExit.com, has been handed a long list of alleged contract violations and an October 16 deadline to fix things or risk termination.

As we’ve seen regularly recently, the registrar’s apparent failures to carry out the technical migrations from Whois to RDAP and from NCC Group to DENIC for escrow services are the biggest of ICANN’s concerns.

Netdorm is also past-due on its fees and has a long checklist of administrative and transparency failures, according to the Compliance breach notice.

Despite being accredited since 2004, the company has been chugging along with fewer than 6,000 gTLD domains under management for many years. It gives away third-level subdomains for free and claims to run over a million of them.

Bogus harassment complaints could get you an ICANN ban

ICANN has made it a lot easier for its community members to file spurious harassment complaints against each other, but has also made it clear it will not put up with such complaints.

A new version of the Community Anti-Harassment Policy has been approved and is now in effect, with some new text arguably creating a chilling social minefield where a simple cultural faux pas could lead to formal disciplinary action.

But it also warns against “submitting vexatious and/or spurious complaints”, saying such complainants could wind up with the same penalties as those found to have actually engaged in harassment.

Punishments include everything from a demand for a verbal apology to a lifetime ban from the ICANN community.

The core definition of harassment has been updated to add the word “discriminatory”. It is now: “Harassment is unwelcome, non-consensual, hostile, discriminatory, and/or intimidating conduct.”

The policy continues to state, unchanged: “Conduct does not have to intend to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents in order for it to be deemed harassment.”

The list of examples of prohibited conduct has been clarified and updated, with some surprising changes.

The new policy (pdf), an update to the original 2017 policy (pdf) prohibits “physical assault, or threats” for — bafflingly — the first time. It gives the Ombuds the ability help the recipient of any criminal action coordinate with local police if necessary.

It also now bans “offensive comments”, with “offensive” defined as “any language, actions, or imagery that cause hurt, discomfort, or distress to an individual or group, particularly when demeaning, disrespectful, or discriminatory”.

The new policy also makes it clear that its jurisdiction extends outside the windowless walls of ICANN meeting venues, in particular to “dinners or social gatherings in connection with an ICANN Public Meeting”.

It now also bans “micro-aggressive or passive-aggressive remarks that reinforce stereotypes”. This could be worrying, given that ICANN, in typically humorless Californian fashion, considers things like weak handshakes or smiles “microaggressions”.

But the new policy does have a safeguard against overzealous culture warriors filing nonsense complaints for nefarious reasons. It says:

this Policy is not itself to be used for the purposes of retaliation. Persons who abuse this Policy by submitting vexatious and/or spurious complaints or reports shall be dealt with in an appropriate fashion…

A vexatious complaint is one made maliciously, knowingly false, or with the intent to harass, intimidate, or retaliate against another individual.

In all cases, complaints under the policy are handled by the Ombuds, who will attempt to resolve the situation informally between the parties concerned before escalating to any formal punitive actions.

Confidentiality is expected at all stages, but the policy says ICANN Org will be informed if ICANN staff are involved.

ICANN slaps open-mic ban on conflicted lawyers

Lawyers who refuse to disclose the identities of their clients should no longer be able to take the mic at ICANN’s regular Public Forum sessions, under a new ban.

The Org’s board has approved a new code of conduct covering people who get involved in policy-making processes or contribute to public discussions, which essentially tells them to reveal their paymasters or go away.

The new code says that “withholding relevant information about the interests involved” could “impair the legitimacy of ICANN’s processes” and that when “disclosure cannot be made, the participant must not participate in ICANN processes or make interventions at ICANN sessions on that issue.”

The new rules mean that if a lawyer working on new gTLD policy is secretly on the payroll of a potential new gTLD applicant, or if a client is working on a patent that could be affected by policy, they should either disclose that relationship or recuse themselves.

The policy has been under development for about a year and a half, following advice from ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee. It was open for public discussion and comment and some suggested changes have been adopted.

Opponents said that sometimes lawyers in private practice are ethically prohibited from revealing their clients’ names, but this was pooh-poohed by others who pointed out that jurisdictions such as the US require similar disclosures from lobbyists.

ICANN already had a code of conduct for volunteers, but it included a carve-out for people claiming professional ethical immunity.

Anyone found to have violated the new code of conduct could find themselves banned from participating in ICANN policy-making processes.

Number of subsidized gTLD bidders far lower than thought

A huge number of organizations that started applying to ICANN for subsidized new gTLD applications have apparently pulled out of the program, judging by newly released stats.

As of September 19, 42 would-be applicants had joined the Applicant Support Program, with ICANN stats published yesterday revealing that 30 have been removed compared to last month’s stats because they are “deemed inactive, with 90 or more days of inactivity.”

Last month, there were over 70 reported applicants.

To date, only three have received provisional approval and of those only one has fully progressed through the system. Only one has formally withdrawn from the process.

ASP promises applicants — only non-profits and/or charities so far, though small businesses from the developing world can apply too — 75% to 85% off the expected $227,000 application fee when the next application opens in Q2 next year.

ICANN has faced some criticisms from governments at the lack of applicants so far from under-serviced regions such as South America.

Another registrar goes AWOL

ICANN has started takedown procedures against another registrar that appears to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

The registrar is 0101 Internet, based in Hong Kong, not to be confused with 101 Domain, which is based in Ireland and California and a completely different company.

0101 has been around for 15 years and had a little over 1,000 domains under management at the last count, mostly .com. Its DUM peaked at over 10,000 over a decade ago but has been declining since.

Currently, its web site doesn’t reliably resolve, which may be the reason ICANN can’t find contractually required information there. Archives show the place on its site where you would usually expect to see a company name or logo, it has just said “Your Brand” for the last few years.

The main problem outlined in ICANN Compliance’s breach notice is that 0101 has not been escrowing its registrant data with DENIC, which could cause problems when its customers’ domains are migrated to a new registrar.

It also hasn’t been paying its ICANN fees, according to the notice.

0101 has until October 3 to come into compliance or risk losing its contract.

gTLD loses its second-largest registrar after breach

ICANN has terminated another registrar’s accreditation, this time putting about 10,000 domains at risk.

The registrar in question is Dubai-based Intracom Middle East, which does business at domains.gdn.

As the domain suggests, the company specialized in .gdn domain names. It had about 10,000 of them under management at the last count, sold for under a dollar each for the first year.

It was the .gdn registry’s second-biggest registrar after Dynadot.

ICANN Compliance is terminating its contract for not paying its fees, not implementing RDAP, and generally not publishing required transparency information on its web site.

As I noted in May, its web site appeared to be down, and archived versions of the site suggested it had been hacked at least once recently.

ICANN, which had been chasing Intracom for a little over a year, said it will follow the De-Accredited Registrar Transition Procedure to move the company’s remaining domain names to a new registrar.

Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end

Unstoppable Domains has applied to ICANN to become a back-end registry services provider, according to the company’s CEO.

Matt Gould told DI that the company is currently going through the Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program, which pre-approves RSPs prior to next year’s next round of applications.

There are 27 companies with applications submitted to the program, according to ICANN’s latest stats, but Unstoppable is the first confirmed market newcomer.

The company is a recently accredited registrar, but is best-known for selling names on non-DNS blockchain naming systems.

Gould said Unstoppable plans to use its RSP accreditation for its own gTLD applications and those of its crypto-company clients. It doesn’t sound like it will be aggressively competing for customers in the traditional DNS space.

The accreditation is necessary because Unstoppable intends to vertically integrate, marrying traditional DNS with on-chain names in its gTLDs, so extra technical work is needed, Gould said.

Unstoppable is building its registry infrastructure using Google’s open-source Nomulus software, he said.

Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad

ICANN’s board of directors has an unusually bumper crop of non-trivial resolutions on its agenda for next week, including the fate of the .ly TLD, new anti-harassment rules, and killing off as many as 16 applications from the 2012 new gTLD application round.

Of the nine items on the agenda, published overnight, four stand out as noteworthy:

Termination Procedure for Remaining 2012 Round Applications that were not Successful

With ICANN spooling up to start accepting new gTLD applications in the second quarter next year, it appears to be ready to clear the decks of the last application round by killing off lingering applications.

While details of the proposed procedure are not yet available, it could apply to as many as 15 applications that are currently marked as “Will Not Proceed” or other failure states in ICANN’s application database.

Perhaps the most obviously affected application is Nameshop’s bid for .idn, which was rejected because the string matches a protected country-code for Indonesia. ICANN has been begging Nameshop to withdraw its application for many years, but the requests have fallen on deaf ears.

If ICANN’s search engine is to be believed, major companies such as Tata (.tata, blocked on geographic grounds) and L’Oréal (.salon, lost at last-resort auction to Identity Digital) still have failed, unwithdrawn applications.

Applications for contested, legally challenged, as-yet-undelegated gTLDs, including .web and .hotel, are also apparently still live in the system.

Transfer of the .LY (Libya) top-level domain to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics

Libya’s .ly ccTLD is notable because it’s somewhat popular as a domain hack for words that end in “ly”. It’s been delegated to Libyan state-owned General Post and Telecommunication Company for 20 years.

While the transition from GPTC to GACI, the government regulator, may just be a formality, there’s an added wrinkle that Libya, tormented by civil unrest since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, currently has two governments and GACI is reportedly aligned with just one of them.

Community Anti-Harassment Policy and Retirement of Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment

ICANN has been sitting on this one for longer than expected. The Org proposed revisions to its Community Anti-Harassment Policy a year ago and quickly putting them to public comment, but there’s been scant movement on the issue since January.

The proposed changes would further regulate personal and professional interactions between ICANN community members.

Some commenters complained that the changes do not go far enough, suggesting that situations where no offence was intended and none was taken should also be disciplinary infractions.

Others said that the changes would have a chilling effect and fail to sufficiently take into account cultural differences among ICANN’s global community.

The proposals came shortly after the latest in a series of sexual harassment lawsuits against the Org was revealed. That suit was settled after ICANN failed to get it thrown out of court.

Some relevant developments over the last eight months include the appointment of a new Ombuds and CEO, allegations (denied by ICANN) that it retaliated against friends of the latest harassment plaintiff by firing them, and ICANN’s capitulation to the Trump administration by easing itself away from public commitments to diversity, inclusion and equity.

New ICANN funding rules will cost smaller ccTLDs more

The way ccTLDs fund ICANN is being reformed, with some registries set to pay thousands of dollars more to the Org’s annual budget.

The new rules, adopted by the ccNSO late last week, won’t affect the largest ccTLDs like .de and .uk, but they could drag mid-tier and the smallest registries into higher tax bands.

The funding model, last adjusted in 2013, is based on each registry’s number of domains under management. The suggested contribution is fixed, rather than per-domain, and depends on which DUM range a ccTLD falls into.

The newly approved bands see the top two tiers unchanged — with over five million names the due is $225,000, and over 2.5 million it’s $150,000.

The third tier, which captures at least 14 ccTLDs from the likes of Denmark, Japan and Mexico, starts at 1.2 million names (a change from one million in the 2013 guidelines) and continues to suggest a $75,000 donation.

Moving the threshold from a million to 1.2 million doesn’t seem to affect many registries. Of the ccTLDs I have up-to-date stats for, only South Korea and possibly Montenegro appear to benefit from the change.

Band D, which affects about a dozen ccTLDs from the likes of Malaysia, Norway and New Zealand, is seeing its contributions go up from $25,000 to $35,000, but the threshold is rising from 500,000 domains to 600,000.

This means that .ai would have to pay the higher rate, but historically Anguilla has not contributed to ICANN at all.

As the ccNSO is at pains to point out, ccTLD contributions are all voluntary, and the bands are suggestions rather than binding.

Fees for the smaller ccTLDs seem to have seen the most rejiggering, with three new low-end tax bands being introduced for registries with the lowest DUM counts. There are now 10 bands in total rather than seven.

Under the 2013 guidelines, any ccTLD with under 50,000 names was only asked to pay $500 a year. That lowest threshold has now been reduced to 10,000 names, raising dozens of registries into higher bands.

Countries such as Ecuador, Azerbaijan and Algeria, and the French department of Réunion, will now be asked to asked to pay $2,500, up two grand a year.

The contributions are designed to pay for the services ICANN provides ccTLDs, but the overall amount is pretty small compared to the Org’s overall budget.

The ccNSO has calculated that the 2013 model affected 255 ccTLDs and would raise as much as $4 million for ICANN a year. That would change to $4.7 million from 306 ccTLDs under the 2025 model.

But that’s only if everyone plays ball. In reality, only 109 ccTLDs gave ICANN anything at all in its last-reported year, and the total take was $2.1 million. Some registries, from the UK, Israel and Russia, cut or eliminated their funding.

Since its start of the voluntary contribution model, fewer than half of all ccTLD registries have ever given ICANN any money.