Pilot program for Whois killer launches

ICANN is to oversee a set of pilot programs for RDAP, the protocol expected to eventually replace Whois.
Registration Data Access Protocol, an IETF standard since 2015, fills the same function as Whois, but it is more structured and enables access control rules.
ICANN said this week that it has launched the pilot in response to a request last month from the Registries Stakeholder Group and Registrars Stakeholder Group. It said on its web site:

The goal of this pilot program is to develop a baseline profile (or profiles) to guide implementation, establish an implementation target date, and develop a plan for the implementation of a production RDAP service.

Participation will be voluntary by registries and registrars. It appears that ICANN is merely coordinating the program, which will see registrars and registrars offer their own individual pilots.
So far, no registries or registrars have notified ICANN of their own pilots, but the program is just a few days old.
It is expected that the pilots will allow registrars and registries to experiment with different types of profiles (how the data is presented) and extensions before ICANN settles on a standard, contractually enforced format.
Under RDAP, ICANN/IANA acts as a “bootstrapping” service, maintaining a list of RDAP servers and making it easier to discover which entity is authoritative for which domain name.
RDAP is basically Whois, but it’s based on HTTP/S and JSON, making it easier to for software to parse and easier to compare records between TLDs and registrars.
It also allows non-Latin scripts to be more easily used, allowing internationalized registration data.
Perhaps most controversially, it is also expected to allow differentiated access control.
This means in future, depending on what policies the ICANN community puts in place, millions of current Whois users could find themselves with access to fewer data elements than they do today.
The ICANN pilot will run until July 31, 2018.

Deutsch and Doria to join ICANN board

Veteran ICANN community members Avri Doria and Sarah Deutsch are to join ICANN’s board of directors in November.
Both have been selected by ICANN’s Nominating Committee to serve three-year terms starting at the end of the public meeting in Abu Dhabi, which wraps up November 3.
They replace current chair Steve Crocker, who is leaving after his maximum three terms on the board, and Asha Hemrajani, who is leaving after one term. Both take seats reserved for North Americans.
Doria, an independent consultant, is a 12-year member of the community and tireless working group volunteer, most closely associated with the Non-Commercial Users Constituency. Her clients include Public Interest Registry.
Deutsch is an intellectual property attorney perhaps best known as a 23-year employee of Verizon. She currently works at Mayer Brown in Washington DC.
Both new directors have been knocking about ICANN for ages in various leadership positions.
This contrasts with previous years, in which NomCom has gone outside of the community for board expertise.
NomCom also selected new members of the ccNSO, GNSO and ALAC, listed here.

After slow launch, .africa looks to add hundreds of resellers

ZA Central Registry is opening up .africa and its South African city gTLDs to potentially hundreds of new registrars via a new proxy program.
The company today announced that its new registrar AF Proxy Services has received ICANN accreditation, which should open up .africa, .joburg, .capetown and .durban to its existing .za channel.
ZACR is the ccTLD registry for South Africa and as such it already has almost 500 partners accredited to sell .za names. But most of these resellers are not also ICANN accredited, so they cannot sell gTLD domains.
The AF Proxy service is intended to give these existing resellers the ability to sell ZACR’s four gTLDs without having to seek out an ICANN accreditation themselves.
“Effectively, all users of the AF Proxy service become resellers of the Proxy Registrar which is an elegant technical solution aimed at boosting new gTLD domain name registrations,” ZACR CEO Lucky Masilela said in a press release.
While reseller networks are of course a staple of the industry and registries acting as retail registrars is fairly common nowadays, this new ZACR business model is unusual.
According to ZACR’s web site, it has 489 accredited .za registrars active today, with 52 more in testing and a whopping 792 more in the application process.
Depending on uptake of the proxy service, that could bring the number of potential .africa resellers to over 1,300.
And they’re probably needed.
The .africa gTLD went into general availability in July — after five years of expensive legal and quasi-legal challenges from rival applicant DotConnectAfrica — but has so far managed to put just 8,600 names in its zone file.
That’s no doubt disappointing for TLD serving a population of 1.2 billion and which had been expected to see substantial domain investor activity from overseas, particularly China.

No $17 million rebate for struggling new gTLDs

ICANN has turned down a request for about $17 million to be refunded to under-performing new gTLD registries.
The organization cannot spare the cash from its $96 million new gTLD program war chest because it does not yet know how much it will need to spend in future, Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah told registries this week.
The Registries Stakeholder Group made the request for fee relief back in March, arguing that the $25,000 per-TLD fixed annual fee each registry must pay amounts to an unfair “burden” that has “hampered their success and put them at a competitive disadvantage”.
The RySG proposed that this $6,250 per quarter fee should be reduced by $4,687.50 per quarter for a year, a 75% reduction, at a cost to ICANN of $16.87 million.
The money, they said, should be drawn from the $96.1 million in new gTLD application fees that were still unspent at the time.
The new gTLD program charged each applicant $185,000 per application. About third of the fee was to cover unforeseen events, and is often sniggeringly referred to as its legal defense fund.
Because the program was meant to work only on a cost-recovery basis, there are question marks hanging over what ICANN should ultimately do with whatever cash is left over.
(It should be noted that this cash is separate from and does not include the quarter-billion dollars ICANN has squirreled away from its new gTLD last-resort auctions).
Now that the vast majority of the 2012 round’s 1,930 applications have been fully processed, it must have seemed like a good time for the RySG to ask for some cashback, but ICANN has declined.
Atallah said in a August 29 letter (pdf) to the group that ICANN has had to spent lots of its program reserve on unanticipated projects such as name collisions, universal acceptance, the EBERO program and the Trademark Clearinghouse. He wrote:

We do not yet know how much of the New gTLD Program remaining funds will be required to address future unanticipated expenses, and by when. As such, at this time, ICANN is not in a position to commit to the dispensation of any potential remaining funds from the New gTLD Program applications fees.

It seems for now the hundreds of new gTLDs with far fewer than 10,000 registrations in their zones are going to keep having to fork over $25,000 a year for the privilege.

.museum soon could be open to all (no haters please)

The 15-year-old .museum gTLD could soon be open to a great many more potential registrants, following an ICANN contract renewal.
The registry, MuseDoma, has negotiated a new Registry Agreement that rewrites eligibility rules to the extent that soon basically anyone should be able to register a name.
Since the gTLD went live back in 2002, it has been tightly restricted to legitimate museums and museum associations, as well as verifiable museum workers such as curators.
But the new proposed contract expands eligibility to “individuals with an interest or a link with museum profession and/or activity” and “bona fide museum users”.
It’s not at all clear how one proves they are a “bona fide museum user”, but the language suggests to me that the registry is likely to take registrants at their word and enforce some kind of post-registration review of how the domains are being used.
Indeed, the new contract contains the following new restriction:

Registration implies compliance with a fair use that only allows a use harmless to the image of museums and the community. Non-compliance will result in suspension or termination of the domain name.

So if you are fundamentally opposed to the idea of museums and want to set up a .museum web site trashing the entire concept, you probably won’t be allowed to.
Even though .museum was part of the “test-bed” application round from 2000, the proposed new contract has acquired chunks of the standard new gTLD RA from 2012.
As such, MuseDoma has agreed to take on the Uniform Rapid Suspension rights protection mechanism. This may prove somewhat controversial among those opposed to URS being “forced” on legacy gTLD registries before it has been approved as full ICANN policy.
The way ICANN fees are calculated — .museum’s flat fees are much lower — has not changed.
.museum has had a fairly steady 450 to 600 domains under management for the entirety of its existence.
The contract is open for public comment until October 3.

HTC dumps its dot-brand

Mobile phone manufacturer HTC has become the latest dot-brand operator to get out of the new gTLD game.
The $4.3 billion-a-year Taiwanese firm has told ICANN that it no longer wishes to run .htc as a dot-brand registry and ICANN has signaled its intent to terminate the contract.
It becomes the 27th dot-brand, from the hundreds that have entered contracts over the last few years, to change its mind about owning a vanity gTLD.
Most recently, fast food chain McDonalds and kitchen utensils company Pampered Chef both dumped their respective dot-brands.
Like the previous terminations, HTC never actually did anything with .htc; it only had the contractually mandated nic.htc in its zone file.

Halloran made ICANN’s first chief data protection officer

ICANN lifer Dan Halloran has added the title of chief data protection officer to his business card.
The long-serving deputy general counsel was named ICANN’s first CDPO on Friday, continuing to report to his current boss, general counsel John Jeffrey.
Privacy is currently the hottest topic in the ICANN community, with considerable debate about how contracted parties might be able to reconcile their ICANN obligations with forthcoming European data protection legislation.
But Halloran’s new role only covers the protection of personal data that ICANN itself handles; it does not appear to give him powers in relation to ongoing discussions about how registries and registrars comply with data privacy regulations.
He will be tasked with overseeing privacy frameworks for data handling and conducting occasional reviews, ICANN said.
ICANN has on occasion messed up when it comes to privacy, such as when it accidentally published the home addresses of new gTLD applicants in 2012, or when it made sensitive applicant financial data openly searchable on its applicant portal.
Halloran joined ICANN over 17 years ago and before his deputy GC position served as chief registrar liaison.

Verisign confirms first price increase under new .net contract

Verisign is to increase the wholesale price of an annual .net domain registration by 10%, the company confirmed yesterday.
It’s the first in an expected series of six annual 10% price hikes permitted under its recently renewed registry agreement with ICANN.
The annual price of a .net registration, renewal, or transfer will go up from $8.20 to $9.02, effective February 1, 2018
If all six options are exercised, the price of a .net would be $15.27 by the time the current contract expires, including the $0.75 ICANN fee. It would be $14.52 without the ICANN fee.
The increase was confirmed by CEO Jim Bidzos as Verisign reported its second-quarter earnings yesterday.
For the quarter, Verisign saw net income go up to $123 million from $113 million a year ago, on revenue that was up 0.7% at $289 million.
It now has cash of $1.8 billion, up $11 million on a year ago.
It ended the quarter with 144.3 million .com and .net names in its registry, up 0.8% on last year and 0.68 million sequentially.

Crocker: no date on next new gTLD round

ICANN will NOT set a date for the next round of new gTLD applications, despite recent pleas from registry operators.
That’s according to a letter (pdf) from ICANN chair Steve Crocker to the Registries Stakeholder Group published today.
The RySG had asked (pdf) last month for ICANN’s leadership to set a fourth-quarter 2018 deadline for the next application window.
It said that that drawing a line in the sand would allow potential applicants to plan and would prevent current policy-development processes from being abused to delay the next round.
But Crocker says in his letter that it is up to the ICANN community, not its board of directors, to determine if and when a new round should commence. He wrote:

Once the community completes its work, the Board will consider the community’s recommendations to introduce additional new gTLDs. Without the final findings and recommendations from the review and PDP, the Board won’t be able to determine what needs to be done prior to the opening of another application process…
The Registry Stakeholder Group’s letter suggests that by setting a date for the opening of another application process, the Board will provide the community with a target date to work toward. Although the Board setting a date would achieve this, doing so might contravene the multi-stakeholder process that allows for the community to have the necessary discussions to arrive at consensus, and to determine the timing of their own work

It seems this is an instance in which the board does not like the idea of setting policy in a top-down manner.
Crocker said the two remaining gating factors for a next round are the consumer choice and competition review of the first round, which is ongoing, and the GNSO’s New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Policy Development Process (PDP).
The PDP has now been going on for 18 months and yet discussions remain at a very early stage, with hardly any preliminary recommendations being agreed upon.
There’s not even agreement on foundational issues such as whether to carry on dividing the program into discreet application rounds or to start a first-come, first-served process.
The RySG had suggested in its letter that the next window could open after certain threshold issues had been resolved but before all policy work was complete, and that at the very least ICANN staff should get to work on a new version of the Applicant Guidebook while the PDP is still ongoing.
But Crocker again responded that the staff cannot get to work on implementation until the board has considered the community’s final recommendations.
ICANN’s most recent estimates for the opening of the next round would see applications accepted in 2020, eight years after the last round.

Attendance dips for ICANN in Johannesburg

The number of people showing up for ICANN’s latest meeting was down compared to previous meetings, just-released statistics show.
The organization reported today that there were 1,353 attendees at the ICANN 59 meeting in Johannesburg last month, down from 1,436 at the comparable Helsinki meeting a year ago.
It was also down from the 2,089 people attending the Copenhagen meeting in March, but that’s to be expected due to the mid-year meeting having a shorter schedule more tightly focused on policy work.
It also seems to be typical for meetings in Africa to get lower attendance than meetings elsewhere in the world, given the relatively low participation at last year’s Marrakech meeting.
But attendance from the local region spiked again. There were 498 Africans there, 36% of the total. By comparison, just 5% of Copenhagen attendees were African.
This tilted the gender balance towards males, with declared female participation down to 31% from 33% in Copenhagen and 32% in Helsinki.
The number of people attending their first ICANN meeting was 33% of the total. That’s much higher than the 20% reported for Copenhagen. About two thirds of the noobs were from Africa.
These numbers are among the thousands of statistics released in the ICANN 59 roundup today, which for the first time included some eye-opening facts about food and drink consumption at the venue, reproduced here.

If these numbers are correct, there was one waiter or member of service staff for every 2.7 meeting attendees, which strikes me as a weirdly balanced ratio.