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.

ICANN confirms new gTLD application fee

It’s $227,000. That’s the minimum ICANN expects to charge for each new gTLD application in the Next Round.

The Org confirmed the price, which is $42,000 more than it charged in 2012, in a blog post this afternoon.

It’s toward the low end of the $208,000 to $293,000 range discussed in June, but up on the $220,000 number being circulated a few weeks ago.

ICANN is able to put a tentative price on applications now because its board has now squared away all the outstanding policy items that could have substantially affected its evaluation costs.

That includes its new process for evaluating potential name collisions, which I wrote about just a few hours ago.

The fee is based on an estimate that ICANN will receive 1,500 applications, where $227,000 will allow it to recover its development, implementation, and operations costs. It may issue rebates if there are more applications.

The $227,000 fee is just a baseline. Applicants will be expected to pay more for extra services, such as if they want a Community Priority Evaluation or want to operate a dot-brand, ICANN said.

ICANN has previously said that most of the price increase over 2012 is due to inflation. But this hasn’t stopped grumbling that the fee is too high, given efficiencies such as technical back-end operations being evaluated separately.

Less well-financed wannabe applicants from certain countries — mostly outside Europe and North America — will have the chance to apply for a fee subsidy under the Applicant Support Program.

New gTLD application fee rises by thousands after collision call

ICANN has upped its expected new gTLD application fee after approving a costly new plan to tack name collisions.

The baseline price of applying for a single string, most recently pegged at $220,000, is now expected to go up by $5,000, according to a recent resolution of the ICANN board of directors.

The board earlier this month approved the Name Collision Analysis Project Study 2 Final Report, which proposed a way to prevent new gTLDs seriously interfering with existing non-standard TLD use on private networks.

Strings applied for successfully in the 2012 round had to agree to a 90-day post-launch period of “controlled interruption”, during which the entire gTLD was wildcarded with information to help affected parties fix their DNS configuration.

So if a company had been using .horse on its internal network, and a suddenly-delegated .horse gTLD started causing leakages to the public DNS, the company was quickly alerted to what the problem was.

Under the now-approved NCAP 2 plan, ICANN will take over responsibility for controlled interruption. Applied-for strings will be tested in the live DNS before a registry has even been contracted.

The results would be assessed by a Technical Review Team and applicants for strings considered at high risk of collisions would be able to submit mitigation plans for evaluation before having their registry contracts approved.

While approving NCAP 2 will generate more confidence that the Next Round will in fact go ahead in the second quarter of 2026, this extra stage of course will add friction and cost to the evaluation process.

ICANN estimates it will add $500,000 to its program implementation budget and $6.9 million to the application processing budget, increasing the application fee by $5,000 per application. That seems to assume 1,500 applications being submitted.

The likely increase has been flagged up for months, so is unlikely to surprise potential applicants, but will not appease those already grumbling that the fee has gone up so sharply from the $185,000 charged in the 2012 round.

It’s also bad news for companies that applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012, which were rejected due to the high risk of collisions.

The ICANN board rejected NCAP 2’s recommendation that these three gTLDs should be submitted to the new Name Collision Risk Assessment Process, potentially reawakening their applications from their Not Approved status.

Under the latest board action, anyone who applied for .home, .corp or .mail in 2012 will have no preferential treatment if they apply for the same strings again in 2026, according to the resolution.

Affected applicants were already offered a full refund for their rejected bids, with only deep-pocketed Amazon and Google so far not exercising that option. Now they have no excuse.

ICANN names its Supreme Court judges

ICANN has finally named the members of the quasi-judicial body that will oversee its highest accountability mechanism.

The names of the 12 members of the Independent Review Process Standing Panel were published by ICANN this afternoon and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, which manages the IRP, published their resumes.

They’re mainly lawyers and law professors with extensive arbitration experience. There’s one African, and the rest are either North American or European; none are from Asia or Latin America.

The Standing Panel has been a long time coming. It’s been over a decade since ICANN first said it would create one. The jurists were picked by a community committee in January, but ICANN wanted to get them all contracted and up to speed before naming them.

The idea is to streamline IRP, which currently is barely distinguishable from the judicial system when it comes to duration of cases, by allowing ICANN and complainants to select their panel from a known pool of trained, experienced, vetted experts.

The IRP is the final formal appeals mechanism within the ICANN process before lawsuits start flying. There’s been over 20 filed in the last 16 years, and ICANN’s win-to-loss ratio is not great.