GoDaddy’s next .xxx contract may not be a done deal
ICANN has published what could be the next version of GoDaddy’s .xxx registry contract, and is framing it as very much open to challenge.
The proposed Registry Agreement would scrap the “sponsored” designation from .xxx, substantially reduce GoDaddy’s ICANN fees, and implement the strictest child-protection measures of any gTLD, as well as make ICANN Compliance’s job a lot easier by standardizing terms on the new gTLD program’s Base RA.
But, as eager as ICANN usually is to shift legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs to the Base RA, this time it’s published the contract for public comment as if it’s something GoDaddy is unilaterally proposing.
It’s “ICM’s proposal”, according to ICANN’s public comment announcement, referring to GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry, and “ICM has requested to use the Base Registry Agreement form, as well as to remove the sponsorship designation of the .XXX TLD”.
This is not the language ICANN usually uses when it publishes RA renewals for public comment. Normally, the proposed contracts are presented as the result of bilateral negotiations. In this case, ICANN and ICM have been in renewal discussions for at least three years, but the contract is being presented as something GoDaddy alone has asked for.
The new RA would remove almost all references to sponsorship and to IFFOR, the pretty much toothless “sponsor” organization ICM created to get its .xxx application over the line under the rules of the Sponsored TLD application round that kicked off back in 2003.
Instead, it loads a bunch of Public Interest Commitments, aimed at replicating some of the safeguards IFFOR oversight was supposed to provide, into the Base RA.
GoDaddy would have to ban and proactively seek out and report child sexual abuse material. It would also prohibit practices that suggest the presence of CSAM, such as the inclusion of certain unspecified keywords in .xxx domains or in the corresponding web site’s content or meta-content.
(ICANN notes that these PICs may become unenforceable, depending on the outcome of current discussions about its ability to enforce content-related terms of its contracts).
GoDaddy and IFFOR have both submitted letters arguing that sponsorship is no longer required. The existence of sister gTLDs .adult, .sex, and .porn as unsponsored gTLDs, also in the GoDaddy Registry stable, proves the extra oversight is not needed, they say. Registrants polled do not object to the changes, they say.
GoDaddy’s cost structure would also change under the new deal. Not only would it save $100,000 a year by cutting off IFFOR, but it would also inherit the Base RA’s 50,000-domain threshold for paying ICANN transaction fees.
This likely means it won’t pay the $0.25 transaction fee for a while — .xxx was at about 47,500 domains under management and shrinking at the last count. It hasn’t reported DUM over 50,000 since January 2023.
While the renewal terms may seem pragmatic and not especially unreasonable, they’ve already received at least one public objection.
Consultant Michael Palage, who was on the ICANN board for the first three years of .xxx’s agonizing eight-year path to approval, took to the mic at the ICANN 79 Public Forum earlier this month to urge the board to reject GoDaddy’s request.
Palage said there have been “material violations of the Registry Agreement” that he planned to inform ICANN Compliance about. He added that approving the new deal would set a bad precedent for all the other “community” registries ICANN has contracts with.
The situation has some things in common with the controversy over the proposed acquisition of Public Internet Registry and .org a few years ago, in that the proposal entails ignoring promises made by a registry two decades ago.
Whether .xxx will attract the same level of outrage is debatable — this deal doesn’t involve nearly as many domains and does not talk to the price registrants pay — but it could attract noise from those who believe ICANN should not throw out its principles for the sake of a quieter life.
One place we might look for comment is the Governmental Advisory Committee, which was the biggest reason .xxx took so long to get approved in the first place.
But the timing of the comment period opening is interesting, coming a week after ICANN 79 closed. It will end April 29, about six weeks before the full GAC next meets en masse, at ICANN 80.
It’s not impossible that the new contract could be approved and signed before the governments get a chance to publicly haul ICANN’s board over the coals.
ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
Transparency, an ICANN watchword since day one, was a noticeable thematic undercurrent at the community’s 79th public meeting in Puerto Rico last week.
The problem of lawyers representing unnamed clients in policy-making groups was raised in several fora, while another section of the community seems to have separately been infiltrated by the same kind of anonymous trolls that plagued ICANN during its infancy.
Governments were especially keen that the GNSO clean house by tightening up its disclosure rules, following an abortive attempt at reform at the Hamburg meeting last October, and they found allies in the Contracted Parties House, which had killed off the reform after deciding it did not go far enough.
Under the current GNSO rules of engagement, everyone who volunteers to participate in policy-making has to file a Statement of Interest, disclosing information such as their employer, community group affiliations, and so on. Among other things, volunteers are asked:
Do you believe you are participating in the GNSO policy process as a representative of any individual or entity, whether paid or unpaid? Please answer “yes” or “no.” If the answer is “yes,” please provide the name of the represented individual or entity. If professional ethical obligations prevent you from disclosing this information, please so state.
The exemption is believed to be designed primarily for American lawyers in private practice, some of whom say they may sometimes be ethically prevented from disclosing the identity of their clients.
But this creates problems for community volunteers, and for the rest of us.
For policy-makers: sometimes, in a working group, you won’t know who you’re really arguing with. The guy opposite, in the expensive suit who keeps inexplicably rubbing her nostrils, could be a mouthpiece for almost any corporation, industry association, or government.
For the rest of us: we don’t know who is really making the policies that impact how domain names are sold, managed, and regulated. Those may seem trivial issues in the grand scheme of things, but they touch on issues such as free speech, data privacy, and how much money comes out of your pocket when you buy a domain.
An attempt last year by the GNSO to update its SOI rules was shot down by the Contracted Parties House because the proposed changes kept the lawyer disclosure exemption.
The Non-Contracted Parties House gave the changes their unanimous approval.
The GNSO Council Committee for Overseeing and Implementing Continuous Improvement, which came up with the changes, looked at 351 SOIs from two recent large policy working groups and found that “a maximum of 0.03% members were making use of the exemption.”
I think that means just one person.
But the scale of the issue is irrelevant compared to the principle, according to some.
Swiss GAC rep Jorge Cancio noted during a session with the CPH last week, “even if there’s a very small number of cases where people use some exceptions for not explaining whom they are working for, even if it’s just 10 people out of 1,000 participants, this already tarnishes the whole of the system”.
Registries Stakeholder Group chair Sam Demetriou concurred: “We believe in and we are strong supporters of the multistakeholder model, but in order for a model to be multistakeholder, you need to know who those stakeholders are. It is inherent in the entire system and the definition.”
The GAC’s position is that everyone participating in policy-making needs to be up-front about their interests, in accordance with global norms. In a session with the GNSO Council, UK rep and vice-chair Nigel Hickson urged the GNSO to sort out the SOI issue before ICANN meets again, set for Kigali this June, because ministers will be present, wanting answers.
Separately at ICANN 79 last week, there was a parallel debate going on about whether a group affiliated with ICANN should force its members to even file SOIs at all.
The Universal Acceptance Steering Group isn’t technically an ICANN body — a Supporting Organization or Advisory Committee — but it is funded and supported by ICANN and carries out ICANN work. It’s been around since 2015 but so far hasn’t required members to submit SOIs.
As anyone who attended or remotely lurked on the ICANN 79 Public Forum last week will know, the UASG came in for a lot of criticism, mostly from remote participants, some of whom have managed to pull off the near-miraculously impressive achievement of having a non-existent Google footprint.
I’m not of course suggesting that some of the people in the Public Forum chat room were trolls using pseudonyms, but… actually, yes, that is what I am suggesting.
These participants had beef with the UASG for imposing a new strict SOI requirement — rules coming into force right now give participants a few months to file their SOIs or get kicked off the UASG mailing list — and suggested UASG leadership had broken with ICANN rules by unilaterally imposing the requirement.
Said mailing list is notable for being lightly used, but with occasional traffic spikes, usually during discussions of anything related to elections or UASG leadership, from participants using free webmail addresses and often what appear to be joke names (Yisrael Memshelet, really?).
Sometimes, these participants have helped steer the mailing list discussion, and at least one question from an aforementioned Google-resistant remote participant was read out at last week’s Public Forum and responded to (kinda) by a board member. ICANN received so many remote UASG questions during the Public Forum that it said it would provide a consolidated written response after the meeting.
It seems ICANN is suffering from twin related transparency problems right now — lawyers who don’t want to reveal their clients, and trolls who don’t want to reveal their identities — neither of which is ideal for its legitimacy.
ICANN scores win in single-letter .com lawsuit
A Los Angeles court has handed ICANN a victory in a lawsuit filed against it by a domainer who thinks he has the rights to register all the remaining single-character .com domains.
Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com sued ICANN back in August, claiming the Org was breaking the law by refusing to allow him to register domains such as 1.com and A.com.
He already owns the matching domains in Verisign’s Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew .com IDNs, such as A.קום (A.xn--9dbq2a) and 1.コム (1.xn--tckwe), and says previous Verisign statements mean this gives him the right to the equivalents in vanilla .com.
These domains would very likely be worth tens of millions of dollars apiece. Verisign has held almost all single-character domain names in registry-reserved status since the 1990s. A few, notably Elon Musk’s x.com, pre-date the reservation.
Tallman claimed unfair competition, breach of contract, negligence and fraud and sought a declaratory judgement stating that ICANN be forced to transfer to him all of the 10 digits and all 23 of the remaining unregistered letters in .com, along with some matching .net names.
Pretty outlandish stuff, based on some pretty flimsy arguments.
ICANN filed a demurrer last year, objecting to the suit and asking the Superior Court of California in LA to throw it out, and the judge mostly agreed. In a February ruling (pdf), published recently by ICANN, he threw out all seven of Tallman’s claims.
Tallman was given permission to re-state and re-file five of the claims within 30 days, but his demand for a declaratory judgement was ruled out completely as being irreparably broken.
Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD
Brazilian cosmetics maker Natura has become the latest new gTLD operator to tell ICANN to terminate its dot-brand contract.
The company said it is “no longer interested” in operating .natura, and ICANN has agreed to end the Registry Agreement.
Natura was not using the domain beyond the mandatory nic.natura, but my records show that it did start experimenting with usage about five years ago.
A handful of domains, including global.natura, app.natura and innovationchallenge.natura were active and resolved to full-content web sites, but these were all shut off at the end of 2023.
The move comes at a time when Natura has been in a cost-cutting drive, divesting various assets and de-listing itself from the New York Stock Exchange.
The string “natura” is a dictionary word in some languages, meaning “nature” in Italian for example, so it could feasibly be applied for in future new gTLD program rounds.
Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has decided not to force the Org to pay for a independent cost/benefit analysis of the new gTLD program, removing the potential for timeline friction ahead of the planned 2026 next-round launch.
In its latest communique, published following the ICANN 79 meeting in Puerto Rico last week, the GAC has essentially told ICANN that it broke its bylaws by not following eight-year-old GAC advice, but meh, whatever, just don’t do it again.
As I reported last week, governments had grown concerned that ICANN had not delivered the “objective and independent analysis of costs and benefits” of the new gTLD program that the GAC had asked for in 2016. Such an analysis was supposed to be a prerequisite for the next round going ahead.
What ICANN had delivered instead was a relatively hastily prepared summary of the next round’s policy recommendations, Org’s analysis of these recommendations, and the community-led review of competition, consumer protection and trust issues, the CCT review.
The Puerto Rico communique says that this response “cannot be considered to constitute a cost-benefit analysis, nor to be objective and independent” but that the GAC does not wish to throw up a road-block to the next round going ahead on schedule. It reads:
The GAC recognizes that the Community (with involvement of the GAC) is taking forward the next round of new gTLDs and has set a corresponding timeline. The GAC, therefore, believes that conducting further analysis at this stage would not serve the intended purpose.
The GAC encourages the Board to ensure that GAC advice, which the Board has accepted, is effectively implemented and its implementation is communicated to the GAC.
GAC chair Nicolas Caballero of Paraguay summarized it as the committee telling the ICANN board “we’re not aiming by no means at stopping the next round or anything like that, but that we want to be taken seriously”.
The original draft of the communique, drafted by Denmark, the US, the UK and Switzerland delegations, also contained text noting that the analysis ICANN provided was written by staff or community stakeholders, who were neither independent nor objective, but this was removed during a drafting session last week after objections from Iran, whose rep said it sounded too critical of the multistakeholder process.
It seems ICANN, and others who stand to make a lot of money from the new gTLD program, have dodged a bullet here, with the GAC essentially backing away and backing down from its potentially delay-causing previous demands.
Private auctions could be banned in new gTLD next round
ICANN is “sympathetic” to the view that private auctions between competing new gTLD applicants are a Bad Thing that should be discouraged in the next application round.
Director Alan Barrett told the GNSO Council at ICANN 79 today that the board of directors, following Governmental Advisory Committee advice, has hired a consultant and is looking at ways to design an ICANN-run “last resort” auction in a way that “disincentivizes” the use of private auctions.
In the 2012 round, many contention sets were settled with private auctions, with tens of millions of dollars changing hands. Losing auctions was a real money-spinner for several portfolio applicants. When ICANN conducted the auctions, ICANN got the money.
Last June, the GAC advised ICANN to “ban or strongly disincentivize private monetary means of resolution of contention sets, including private auctions”, and Barrett said ICANN is considering how to fulfill that advice.
“We don’t know the answers yet, but what I can say is that we are looking at it and we are sympathetic to the idea of disincentivizing private auctions,” Barrett said.
He added that ICANN is looking at how it might discourage competing applicants from settling their contention sets using joint ventures “in a bad faith kind of way”.
“There’s the risk that applicants might use a joint venture in a bad faith kind of way, as a way of transferring money from one applicant to another, in much the same way as private actions could have done,” he said. “We want to figure out a way of allowing good-faith joint ventures.”
My sense is that whatever ICANN comes up with will have to have a substantial carrot component, or an equally big stick. The domain industry can be incredibly devious at times, and if there’s a way to make a big chunk of change filing unsuccessful new gTLD applications, somebody will figure it out.
ICANN meeting venue “insensitive and hurtful”
ICANN has taken some criticism over the decision to host its flagship Universal Acceptance 2024 meeting in Serbia.
An individual named Dmitry Noskov has written to ICANN to complain that the Universal Acceptance Steering Group will hold its “Keystone” meeting — the main event of the UA Day series of meetings around the world — later this month in Belgrade. He wrote (pdf):
Given the current global tension in the region due to ongoing conflict and the close cultural and historical ties between Serbia and Russia, which have led to diplomatic and trade actions by several countries against Russia, I am concerned about the implications of holding the event in Belgrade. It is crucial to consider the potential perception of insensitivity or hurtfulness to global sentiments, especially to those affected by the conflict.
Unlike most of Europe, Serbia has maintained a somewhat neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and there is reportedly large popular support for Russia, and a large Russian population, in the country. Russia and Serbia are old allies.
ICANN has taken a generally pro-Ukraine stance. It donated $1 million to relief efforts in 2022 after the war started. It also lobbied against the Russian nomination for ITU secretary-general. Russia’s ccTLD registry cut off its ICANN funding last year.
CEO Sally Costerton replied (pdf) to Noskov to say that the choice of Belgrade as the keystone UA Day event for 2024 was made by the UASG.
The UA Day event in Belgrade is being hosted by local ccTLD registry RNIDS, which runs .rs and the Cyrillic equivalent .срб.
GAC spinning up new gTLD curveball at ICANN 79?
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee had a habit of throwing delaying curveballs before and during the 2012 new gTLD application round, and it might be planning a repeat performance before the upcoming 2026 round.
The GAC today assembled at ICANN 79 in Puerto Rico to discuss the latest developments in planning for the next round, and a major concern emerged around ICANN’s response to its request for a cost/benefit analysis.
The GAC had first asked for such an analysis at the Helsinki meeting in 2016, but after the ICANN 78 Hamburg meeting last October noted that it had still not received one.
At ICANN 56, the GAC had asked that an “objective and independent analysis of costs and benefits… drawing on experience with and outcomes from the recent round” should be a prerequisite for a next round going ahead.
After its Hamburg reminder, ICANN threw together a summary (pdf) of three existing documents that it presumably hoped would check that box and shush the GAC or give the GAC an excuse to shush itself.
The documents were the report of the Competition and Consumer Trust Review Team, the Subsequent Procedures PDP Working Group Final Report (which created the policy recommendations for the next round) and ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment of SubPro (which talked about how ICANN would implement those recommendations).
It was a pretty flimsy response, and GACers weren’t buying it, pointing out today that the three documents in question were all produced by the ICANN community or ICANN staff and couldn’t really be said to be “objective and independent”. Nor could they be said to amount to an “analysis of costs and benefits”.
“I had the pleasure to read through the report, and see whether it’s a cost/benefit analysis, and whether it’s an objective and independent analysis,” the GAC rep from Denmark said. “And I must say that my answer or reply to those questions would be no, and a big no.”
Other GAC members in Europe and North America seemed to agree that either the cost/benefit analysis they had asked for still hadn’t been delivered and that perhaps it wouldn’t be great for the GAC’s credibility if it didn’t press the issue.
The UK rep, who was chairing the session, observed that GAC members’ higher-uppers in government, such as ministers, sometimes ask what economic impact gTLD expansion might have and that an answer might be useful.
The contrarian opinion came, as it so often does, from Iran, whose rep suggested that a cost/benefit analysis might be pointless and maybe the GAC should just put the issue to bed.
What happens if the analysis shows the costs outweigh the benefits, he asked, should ICANN just scrap the next application round and 13 years of policy work?
It seems a request for ICANN to pay for an independent cost/benefit analysis of the new gTLD program could make its way into the GAC’s formal advice-delivering communique later in the week, potentially throwing friction into the roll-out of the next round.
In my opinion, there is no real answer to the question of whether the new gTLD program is a net benefit.
Beyond the billions of dollars of economic activity that will be created, whether it’s beneficial is purely a subjective opinion, and paying a bunch of overpriced consultants to wave their hands in the air for a year before spitting out the 300-page PDF equivalent of a Gallic Shrug probably won’t provide any meaningful clarity.
GoDaddy wants to cut the bullshit from .xxx
GoDaddy Registry wants to drop a big chunk of nonsense from the contract governing its .xxx domain, some 20 years after it was applied for as a “Sponsored” gTLD.
It’s asked ICANN if it can kill off its sponsor, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, and sign up to something closer to the Base New gTLD Registry Agreement, the contract that all new gTLDs from the 2012 application round are on.
GoDaddy’s .porn, .adult and .sex gTLDs have been on a non-sponsored contract for a decade to no complaint, though they haven’t sold nearly as many domains as .xxx.
IFFOR’s board, the IFFOR Ombudsman, and .xxx registrants polled by GoDaddy all agree that the “sponsored” classification is no longer needed, GoDaddy VP Nicolai Bezsonoff told ICANN VP Russ Weinstein (pdf).
The registry wants ICANN to put out a non-sponsored version of the .xxx contract out for public comment.
It looks like a fait accompli. GoDaddy and ICANN have been negotiating the renewal of the .xxx contract, which was due to expire in 2021, for at least three years. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the two parties have not already agreed terms.
Nobody who doesn’t get paid by IFFOR will miss IFFOR. For 20 years it’s been the domain industry’s least-convincing merkin, existing entirely to give original .xxx manager ICM Registry (and then MMX, then GoDaddy, following industry consolidation) the illusion that it had community support for selling porn domains.
ICM created IFFOR when it applied for .xxx in 2003 during ICANN’s well-intentioned but poorly considered and ill-fated “sponsored TLD” round, where applicants had to show they had support from a community related to their chosen string.
Because the porn industry, particularly in the US, hated the idea of a .xxx domain — erroneously believing governments would force all porn sites into it and then shut it down — ICM was forced to pull a community out of its backside. And thence IFFOR was born.
IFFOR was designed to be a mini-ICANN. It was to have a board, policy-making committees, an ombudsman, oversight, transparency, etc. Its foundational documents (pdf), list 14 obligations, most of which were never fulfilled to any meaningful extent.
Judging by its web site, it’s never made a single policy since it was formed in 2011. But we can’t be sure, because the web site has been poorly maintained (a breach of the first of its original 14 commitments), with no board minutes published for the last six years (despite employing a full-time staffer on a $60,000 salary who, tax forms say, works 40 hours a week).
It did come up with something called a “Policy Engine” for new gTLD registries around the time of the 2012 round, but discontinued it a year later when nobody wanted it.
IFFOR, a not-for-profit registered in California, was supposed to receive $10 from ICM for every registered, resolving .xxx domain and use a portion of that to issue grants to worthy causes related to its mission — child protection, free speech, and so on.
While IFFOR did announce two $5,000 awards in 2013, its tax filings have not reported a single penny spent on grants since 2011. Nada.
IFFOR’s charter seems to have been renegotiated behind the scenes at some point, when .xxx turned out to not be quite the internet cash machine its founders had hoped for. From 2011 to 2014 it was rolling in cash — getting over $1 million from ICM in 2013 — but from 2016 it’s been receiving a flat $100,000 a year, most of which is spent on director salaries.
At around the same time, instead of issuing cash grants, IFFOR started producing an “educational program” for UK schools called AtFirstSite. Aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds, it covers topics such as sexting, dick pics and online pornography, with a clear emphasis on keeping young teens safe online.
AtFirstSite carried a price tag of £150, but the revenue lines on tax forms since 2016 suggest none were ever sold. Instead, the program was given for free to schools that asked for it and this was called a “grant”, to satisfy IFFOR’s grant-giving mandate.
The program — which consists of a PDF and a PowerPoint presentation — is now free, and can be downloaded here , if you want to bemuse an 11-year-old with a reference to Rihanna and Chris Brown’s destructive relationship, which ended before they were born.
Closing IFFOR is not going to cause anyone to lose any sleep, but it will nevertheless be interesting to see whether anyone objects to .xxx losing its “sponsored TLD” status when ICANN opens the contract to public comment.
Olive retires from ICANN
David Olive, senior VP of policy development and support, will retire from ICANN at the end of May, the Org announced today.
Olive joined ICANN in February 2010 after 20 years with Fujitsu and has led his department ever since.
He also was the first managing director of ICANN’s office in Istanbul, though he’s been running the Washington DC office since 2021, ICANN said.
No immediate replacement was announced, but there’s a few months to go before he actually leaves the job.
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