ICANN Ombudsman quits

Herb Waye has quit as ICANN’s independent Ombudsman, according to ICANN.

His last day will be September 30 and ICANN is already looking for his replacement, the Org said in a statement.

While the announcement includes a glowing quote from board chair Tripti Sinha it does not contain a quote from Waye and no reason was given for his departure.

Waye has been in the Ombudsman’s office for 16 years, the last seven as the Ombudsman itself.

The Ombudsman is a structurally independent office that deals with issues of fairness within the ICANN community. It’s one way community members can complain about each other and ICANN itself.

Most the work is handled confidentially, so it’s difficult to say exactly what it is the Ombudsman does for their money, but the last few years’ Ombudsman annual reports show the office typically receives a couple hundred complaints a year, maybe a couple dozen of which are actually within its jurisdiction.

Complaints cover issues such as abusive discourse, harassment, and contractual compliance.

Some of the most visible Ombudsman work has related to sexual harassment complaints at ICANN public meetings. Some female community members have stated that they would feel uncomfortable reporting sexual harassment to a male Ombudsman.

I’d be very surprised if the next Ombudsman is not a woman.

No $8 million discount for dot-brands, says ICANN

ICANN has rejected a request for a 80% discount on registry fees paid by dot-brand gTLD operators.

The Brand Registry Group had asked ICANN in May for a reduction in the annual fixed fee from $25,000 to $5,000, largely on the basis that they have essentially no abuse and require very little Compliance oversight.

But interim CEO Sally Costerton has now responded to “respectfully decline” the request, which would have wiped out about $8 million of ICANN’s annual budget, about 5% of its total revenue.

“The cost to support New gTLDs is not merely based on the number of domains under management or the level of abuse. Regardless of the size of the TLD, registry operators must still comply with the Registry Agreement and associated policies, and ICANN must monitor that compliance,” Costerton wrote.

Dot-brands already have lower fees because they uniformly don’t pass the 50,000 domains limit at which transactional fees kick in, she said.

There are mechanisms in the Base Registry Agreement that all amendments to be made, she said.

Epik is off the ICANN naughty step

Epik is no longer in breach of its ICANN registrar accreditation agreement, but it remains to be seen whether its anonymous new owners can take over the contract, ICANN has said.

The registrar has paid its past-due fees, explained why it delayed its customers’ renewal requests and promised to put in place measures to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, ICANN Compliance chief Jamie Hedlund blogged.

This means Epik has dodged a contract suspension and gets to continue with business as usual, for now, albeit with many distrustful customers.

Hedlund wrote that ICANN is now reviewing Epik’s request to transfer its accreditation from Epik Inc to new entity Epik LLC, whose owners have yet to reveal their identities.

ICANN has to do due diligence on the buyer before approving the transfer, but Hedlund said this case is “complex” and is expected to take “several months”.

The LLC bought the old registrar for almost $5 million last month after a tortuous few months for customers claiming to be owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some have speculated that the LLC is a front for Epik founder and former CEO Rob Monster, the person arguably most responsible for Epik’s woes over the last 12 months, but court documents published as part of a customer lawsuit include emails from Monster that suggest he was not involved.

o.com auction likely a damp squib after Overstock rebrand

Verisign’s long-planned auction of the single-character domain o.com is looking even less likely, with its most motivated bidder completely rebranding its company.

Overstock.com, which had been lobbying for Verisign to release the domain since at least 2004, said this week it’s bought the intellectual property assets of bankrupt rival furniture retailer Bed Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million, and will rebrand accordingly.

That means it will drop Overstock.com the brand and overstock.com the domain, in favor of bedbathandbeyond.com in the US. The rebrand of its equivalent Canadian sites under .ca will come first.

The domain switch will presumably be less chaotic than the company’s attempt to rebrand as O.co in 2011, which caused huge confusion in .com-loving North America and was quickly reversed.

The change of course means that Overstock now has no motivation to bid on o.com, should Verisign ever actually get around to exercising its hard-won right to sell off the domain for charity.

All but a handful of single-character .com domains have been reserved for decades, but Verisign was given permission to sell o.com by ICANN in 2018 after years of pleading by Overstock founder Patrick Byrne.

Byrne quit Overstock not long after ICANN gave the nod due to his involvement with Russian spy-turned-politician Maria Butina and evidently took his obsession with o.com with him.

Disclosure: over a decade ago, I provided consulting services to a third party in support of the release of o.com.

ICANN actually CHANGES Verisign’s .net contract after public comments

ICANN has decided to make a change to the upcoming new version of Verisign’s .net registry agreement in response to public comments, but it’s not the change most commenters wanted.

In the near-unprecedented nod to the public comment process, the Org says it’s agreed with Verisign to change two instances of upper-case “S” in the term “Security and Stability” to lower case.

That’s it.

Some commenters had wrung their hands over the fact that the .net contract includes upper-case “Security and Stability” as defined terms, in contrast to the lower-case “security and stability” found in other gTLD contracts.

Based on a strict reading, this could in some circumstances give Verisign an excuse to avoid implementing ICANN Consensus Policies, commenters including the Business Constituency and Intellectual Property Constituency noted,

It appears that this was an oversight by ICANN and Verisign rather that some kind of nefarious plot. In its public comments analysis and summary (pdf), ICANN writes:

We acknowledge however that the capitalization of the “s” could in theory potentially lead to different interpretations of the applicability of certain future Consensus Policies under Section 3.1(b)(iv)(1) for the .NET RA.

Because in this instance it was not the intent of ICANN org nor Verisign to limit in this manner the applicability of Consensus Policy topics for which uniform or coordinated resolution is reasonably necessary to facilitate the interoperability, security and/or stability of the Internet or DNS, ICANN org and Verisign have mutually agreed to update Section 3.1(b)(iv)(1) of the .NET RA to the lower case “s.”

So there we have it: a rare instance of a public comment period accomplishing something and a confirmed victory for accountability and transparency!

Most of the comments had focused on Verisign’s ability to raise prices and a clause that some domainers thought would allow censorial government regimes to seize domains, but ICANN said that’s all fine.

GoDaddy takes over .health

GoDaddy Registry has added .health to its growing stable of TLDs.

According to ICANN records, the company has taken over the contract from original registry DotHealth.

GoDaddy was already the back-end registry services provider for the gTLD, and as registrar is responsible for roughly half of the roughly 35,000 domains registered there.

Judging by ICANN documentation, GoDaddy has also acquired DotHealth.

The looooong road to urgently hiring ICANN’s next CEO

ICANN expects to appoint its next CEO about a year from now, up to 18 months after Göran Marby quit, despite impressing on job-hunters the need to act with speed or risk ICANN’s very existence.

After about 16 “listening sessions” with pretty much every part of the ICANN community over the last three months, the board of directors has approved a 10-page job description for the role.

The document pretty much prays for the Second Coming, at one point calling for a “servant leader” — an oxymoron arguably originating with the words of Jesus H Christ Himself and recently echoed by King Charles III during his coronation.

The new boss will have to be a global visionary with reams of experience managing large, big-budget technical organizations; an impeccably ethical open book; an international diplomat; a compassionate, empathetic nerd; a consensus-building polyglot; a disinterested ICANN insider.

The job description acknowledges that “few, if any” candidates will tick all the boxes, but it’s still setting itself a pretty high bar.

The fact that it takes half a year to write a job ad for a role that’s already been held by nine people over the last quarter century is baffling enough, but the recruitment process itself hasn’t even started yet.

ICANN now says it will put out a request for proposals for executive recruitment companies to manage the hiring process. It doesn’t expect to start interviewing candidates until the start of next year.

The actual appointment should come in the second quarter 2024, ICANN says. Whether the next chief will be available to start immediately is of course unknowable. In the meantime, interim CEO Sally Costerton will carry on filling the role.

You might expect the hiring process to get faster as ICANN gets older, better-resourced and more experienced, but it’s actually months slower than on the last few occasions a new CEO has been sought.

It was 10 months between Rod Beckstrom announcing he was quitting in 2011 and Fadi Chehadé being named heir apparent. After he announced he was out in 2015, it was nine months before Marby was crowned.

We’re now looking at potentially twice as long a runway between CEOs, and a job description that unironically calls for leadership amidst a “rapidly evolving” governance space, addressing the “the need to ‘get things done'” and ICANN’s need to “act with urgency” to manage emerging technological threats that could Balkanize the namespace and threaten ICANN’s very raison d’etre.

Rwanda picked for ICANN meeting

ICANN is inviting its community to Kigali, Rwanda, for its ICANN 80 public meeting.

The shorter “Policy Forum” meeting, the same format as the one that took place in Washington DC this month, will start from June 10 next year at the Kigali Convention Centre, ICANN’s board decided last week.

It’s the first time ICANN has visited Africa since before the Covid-19 pandemic and the first time Rwanda will have hosted a meeting.

ICANN has hosted meetings in Africa on 12 occasions over the last 25 years, in seven countries — Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.

ICANN’s practice is to rotate meetings through each of its five geographic regions, but it rarely happens in a strict order and obviously the pandemic shook up scheduling.

Rwanda and questions about its safety and human rights record have been in the news here in the UK for the last couple of years due to the British government’s plan to deport illegal migrants there.

But the UK and US authorities class Rwanda as safe, as long as you stay away from contested border regions. Visas appear to be free upon arrival for all travelers, regardless of origin.

Governments call for ban on gTLD auctions

Governments are calling for a ban on new gTLD contention sets being settled via private auctions, a practice that allowed many tens of millions of dollars to change hands in the last application round.

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee said in its ICANN 77 communique that it formally advises ICANN: “To ban or strongly disincentivize private monetary means of resolution of contention sets, including private auctions.”

Private auctions typically see the losers split the winner’s winning bid among themselves. The GAC endorsed the At-Large Advisory Committee’s recommendation that applicants should be forced to ICANN-run “last resort” auctions, where ICANN gets all the money, instead.

The concern is that companies with no intention of actually operating a gTLD will file applications purely in order to have a tradeable asset that can be sold to competing applicants for a huge profit.

In the 2012 round, 224 contention sets were settled in private, often via auctions. ICANN not only allowed but encouraged the practice.

For example, publicly listed portfolio registry Minds + Machines disclosed tens of millions of income from losing private auctions, some of which was reinvested into winning auctions for gTLDs that it did intend to run.

Another applicant, Nu Do Co, did not win a single auction it was involved in, with the exception of the ICANN-run “last resort” auction for .web, where its winning $135 million bid was secretly funded by Verisign.

In the case of .web, rival bidders urged NDC to go to private auction until almost the last moment, eager to get a piece of the winning bid. It remains the subject of legal disputes to this day.

The current GNSO “SubPro” policy recommendations do not include a ban on private settlements, instead saying that applicants should affirm that they have a “bona fide” intent to operate the TLD, under penalty of unspecified sanctions if they lie.

The recommendations include a set of suggested red flags that ICANN should look out for when trying to determine whether an applicant is game the system, such as the number of applications filed versus contention sets won.

It’s pretty vague — the kind of thing that would have to be ironed out during implementation — and the ICANN board of directors has yet to formally approve these specific recommendations.

The GAC’s latest advice also has concerns about the “last resort” auctions that ICANN conducts, which see ICANN place the winning bid in a special fund, particular with regards non-commercial applicants.

The GAC advised ICANN: “To take steps to avoid the use of auctions of last resort in contentions between commercial and non-commercial applications; alternative means for the resolution of such contention sets, such as drawing lots, may be explored.”

Some previous ways to mitigate contention gaming include Vickrey auctions, where every applicant submits a high bid at the time of application and the applicant with the highest bid pays ICANN the amount of the second-highest bid.

Bidding before one even knows whether the gTLD string will be subject to contention is seen as a way to dissuade applicants from applying for strings they don’t really want.

ICANN directors said repeatedly at ICANN 77 last week that the Org will be hiring an auctions expert to investigate the best way to handle auctions and reduce gaming.

Closed generics and IDNs debates are big drag on new gTLDs

As ICANN 77 officially kicks off in Washington DC today, the issues of closed generics and IDNs have already emerged as big drag factors on the launch of the next new gTLD application round.

During a day-long “day zero” session yesterday, the community heard that the absolute fastest the GNSO will be able to make policy on closed generics is 96 weeks — over 22 months — using its “expedited” Policy Development Process.

Meanwhile, making policy on internationalized domain names — mainly, how to handle string similarity conflicts in non-Latin scripts — is not expected to be done until March 2026 at the earliest. And that’s through an “expedited” PDP that has already been running for over two years.

The predicted closed generics timetable (on page 16 of this PDF presentation) is actually relatively aggressive compared to the two previous EPDPs (on post-GDPR Whois policy) that the GNSO has previously completed.

It only calls for 36 weeks — about eight months — for the actual working group deliberations, for example, compared to the 48 weeks the equally controversial Whois EPDP took a few years ago.

But the expected duration prompted some criticism yesterday from those wondering why, for example, a “call for volunteers” needs to take as long as three months to carry out.

The timetable was written up prior to the publication over the weekend of a draft framework for closed generics (pdf), which lays out a few dozen principles that should be taken into account in subsequent EPDP work.

With what looks like a certain amount of wheel-reinvention, the document describes a points-based system for determining whether an applicant is worthy of a closed generic. It seems to be based quite a lot on the process used to assess “Community” applications in the 2012 round.

The framework was created in private over the last six months by a cross-community group of 14 people from the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee. Chatham House rules applied, so we don’t know exactly whose opinions made it into the final draft. But it exists now, and at first glance it looks like a decent starting point for a closed generics policy.

The major issue is that the work, at its core, is about predicting and preemptively shutting down all the ways devious corporate marketing people might try to blag themselves a closed generic for competitive or defensive purposes, rather than for the public interest, and I’m not sure that’s possible.

Discussion on closed generics will continue this week at ICANN 77, including a session that starts around about the same time I’m hitting publish on this article.