How .com became a restricted TLD

Verisign has been given approval to start restricting who can and cannot register .com and .net domain names in various countries.
Customers of Chinese registrars are the first to be affected by the change to the registry’s back-end system, which was made last year.
ICANN last week gave Verisign a “free to deploy” notice for a new “Verification Code Extension” system that enables the company to stop domains registered via selected registrars from resolving unless the registrant’s identity has been verified and the name is not on China’s banned list.
It appears to be the system Verisign deployed in order to receive its Chinese government license to operate in China.
Under Verification Code Extension, Verisign uses ICANN records to identify which registrars are based in countries that have governmental restrictions. I believe China is currently the only affected country.
Those registrars are able to register domains normally, but Verisign will prevent the names from resolving (placing them in serverHold status and keeping them out of the zone file) unless the registration is accompanied by a verification code.
These codes are distributed to the affected registrars by at least two verification service providers. Verisign, in response to DI questions, declined to name them.
Under its “free to deploy” agreement with ICANN (pdf), Verisign is unable to offer verification services itself. It must use third parties.
The company added the functionality to its .com and .net registry as an option in February 2016, according to ICANN records. It seems to have been implemented last July.
A Verisign spokesperson said the company “has implemented” the system.
The Verification Code Extension — technically, it’s an extension to the EPP protocol pretty much all registries use — was outlined in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request (pdf) last May, and approved by ICANN not long after.
Verisign was approved to operate in China last August in the first wave of gTLD registries to obtain government licenses.
Under Chinese regulations, domain names registered in TLDs not approved by the government may not resolve. Registrars are obliged to verify the identities of their registrants and names containing certain sensitive terms are not permitted.
Other gTLDs, including .vip, .club, .xyz .site and .shop have been granted approval over the last few months.
Some have chosen to work with registration gateway providers in China to comply with the local rules.
Apart from XYZ.com and Verisign, no registry has sought ICANN approval for their particular implementation of Chinese law.
Because Chinese influence over ICANN is a politically sensitive issue right now, it should be pointed out that the Verification Code Extension is not something that ICANN came up with in response to Chinese demands.
Rather, it’s something Verisign came up with in response to Chinese market realities. ICANN has merely rubber-stamped a service requested by Verisign.
This, in other words, is a case of China flexing market muscle, not political muscle. Verisign, like many other gTLD registries, is over-exposed to the Chinese market.
It should also be pointed out for avoidance of doubt that the Chinese restrictions do not apply to customers of non-Chinese registrars.
However, it appears that Verisign now has a mechanism baked into its .com and .net registries that would make it much easier to implement .com restrictions that other governments might choose to put into their own legislation in future.

Donuts took down 11 domains for Hollywood last year

Donuts caused 11 domain names in its new gTLD portfolio to be taken down in the first 12 months of its deal with the US movie industry.
The company disclosed yesterday that the Motion Picture Association of America requested the suspension of 12 domains under their bilateral “Trusted Notifier” agreement, which came into effect last February.
The news follows the decisions by Public Interest Registry and the Domain Name Association not to pursue a “Copyright ADRP” process that would have made such Trusted Notifier systems unnecessary.
Of the 12 alleged piracy domains, seven were suspended by the sponsoring registrar, one was addressed by the hosting provider, and Donuts terminated three at the registry level.
For the remaining domain, “questions arose about the nexus between the site’s operators and the content that warranted further investigation”, Donuts said.
“In the end, after consultation with the registrar and the registrant, we elected against further action,” it said.
Trusted Notifier is supposed to address only clear-cut cases of copyright infringement, where domains are being using solely to commit mass piracy. Donuts said:

Of the eleven on which action was taken, each represented a clear violation of law—the key tenet of a referral. In some cases, sites simply were mirrors of other sites that were subject to US legal action. All were clearly and solely dedicated to pervasive illegal streaming of television and movie content. In a reflection of the further damage these types of sites can impart on Internet users, malware was detected on one of the sites.

Donuts also dismissed claims that Trusted Notifier mechanisms represent a slippery slope that will ultimately grant censorship powers to Big Content.
The company said “a mere handful of names have been impacted, and only those that clearly were devoted to illegal activity. And to Donuts’ knowledge, in no case did the registrant contest the suspension or seek reinstatement of the domain.”
It is of course impossible to verify these statements, because Donuts does not publish the names of the domains affected by the program.
Trusted Notifier, which is also in place at competing portfolio registry Radix, was this week criticized in an academic paper from professor Annemarie Bridy of the University of Idaho College of Law and Stanford University.
The paper, “Notice and Takedown in the Domain Name System: ICANN’s Ambivalent Drift into Online Content Regulation”, she argues that while Trusted Notifier may not by an ICANN policy, the organization has nevertheless “abetted the development and implementation of a potentially large-scale program of privately ordered online content regulation”.

Sanchez beats Greenberg to ICANN board seat

Mexican intellectual property lawyer León Felipe Sánchez Ambía has been selected to become a member of the ICANN board of directors by the At-Large, comfortably beating his opponent in a poll this weekend.
Sanchez took 13 votes (65%) to 10-year At-Large veteran Alan Greenberg’s 7, in a vote of At-Large Advisory Committee members and Regional At Large Organization chairs.
He’ll take the seat due to be vacated in November by Rinalia Abdul Rahim, who will leave the board after one three-year term.
He’s currently head of the IP practice and a partner at Fulton & Fulton in Mexico City. According to his bio:

He is co-lead for the Mexican chapter of Creative Commons and advisor to different Government bodies that include the Digital Strategy Coordination Office of the Mexican Presidency, the Special Commission on Digital Agenda and IT of the Mexican House of Representatives and the Science and Technology Commission of the Mexican Senate.
He drafted the Internet Users Rights Protection Act for Mexico and has been very active on issues like Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA), Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and other local initiatives of the same kind, always advocating to defend users’ and creators’ rights in order to achieve a balance between regulation and freedom.

Sanchez is certainly the less experienced of the two short-listed men when it comes to length of involvement in the ICANN community, but he’s a member of the ALAC and is deeply involved as a volunteer in ICANN accountability work following the IANA transition.
The At-Large was recently criticized in a report (pdf) for the perception that it is “controlled by a handful of ICANN veterans who rotate between the different leadership positions”.
Sanchez’s appointment to the board may have an effect on that perception.
The selection of another (white, male) North American to the board, replacing an Asian woman, will of course create more pressure to increase geographic and gender diversity on the other groups within ICANN that select board members.
A written Q&A between the two candidates and At-Large members can be found here.

PIR slams brakes on “UDRP for copyright”

Public Interest Registry has “paused” its plan to allow copyright owners to seize .org domains used for piracy.
In a statement last night, PIR said the plans were being shelved in response to publicly expressed concerns.
The Systemic Copyright Infringement Alternative Dispute Resolution Policy was an in-house development, but had made its way into the Domain Name Association’s recently revealed “healthy practices” document, where it known as Copyright ADRP.
The process was to be modeled on UDRP and similarly priced, with Forum providing arbitration services. The key difference was that instead of trademark infringement in the domain, it dealt with copyright infringement on the associated web site.
PIR general counsel Liz Finberg had told us the standard for losing a domain would be “clear and convincing evidence” of “pervasive and systemic copyright infringement”.
Losers would either have their domain suspended or, like UDRP, seized by the complainant.
The system seemed to be tailor-made to give PIR a way to get thepiratebay.org taken down without violating the owner’s due process rights.
But the the announcement of Copyright ADRP drew an angry response from groups representing domain investors and free speech rights.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the system would be captured by the music and movie industries, and compared it to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US.
The Internet Commerce Association warned that privatized take-down policies at registries opened the door for ICANN to be circumvented when IP interests don’t get what they want from the multi-stakeholder process.
I understand that members of ICANN’s Non-Contracted Parties House was on the verge of formally requesting PIR pause the program pending a wider consultation.
Some or all of these concerns appear to have hit home, with PIR issuing the following brief statement last night:

Over the past year, Public Interest Registry has been developing a highly focused policy that addresses systemic, large scale copyright infringement – the ”Systemic Copyright Infringement Alternative Dispute Resolution Policy” or SCDRP.
Given certain concerns that have been recently raised in the public domain, Public Interest Registry is pausing its SCDRP development process to reflect on those concerns and consider forward steps. We will hold any further development of the SCDRP until further notice.

SCDRP was described in general terms in the DNA’s latest Healthy Domains Initiative proposals, but PIR is the only registry to so far publicly express an interest in implementing such a measure.
Copyright ADRP may not be dead yet, but its future does not look bright.

UPDATE: This post was updated 2/26 to clarify that it was only “some members” of the NCPH that were intending to protest the Copyright ADRP.

Hacked ICANN data for sale on black market

If you were a user of ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service back in 2014 you may wish to think about changing some passwords today.
ICANN has confirmed that a bunch of user names and hashed passwords that were stolen in November 2014 have turned up for sale on the black market.
The batch reportedly contains credentials for over 8,000 users.
ICANN said yesterday:

ICANN recently became aware that some information obtained in the spear phishing incident we announced in 2014 is being offered for sale on underground forums. Our initial assessment is that it is old data and that no new breach of our systems has occurred. The data accessed in the 2014 incident breach included usernames and hashed passwords for our Centralized Zone Data System (CZDS). Once the theft was discovered, we reset all user passwords, and urged users to do the same for any other accounts where they used the same passwords.

While CZDS users have all presumably already changed their CZDS passwords, if they are still using that same password for a non-CZDS web site they may want to think about changing it.
ICANN first announced the hack back in December 2014.
It said at the time that the Government Advisory Committee’s wiki, and a selection of other less interesting pages, had also been compromised.
The attackers got in after a number of ICANN staffers fell for a spear-phishing attack — a narrowly targeted form of phishing that was specifically aimed at them.
If you email with ICANN staff with any regularity you will have noticed that for the last several months your email subject lines get prefixed [EXTERNAL] before the staffer receives them.
That’s to help avoid this kind of attack being successful again.

Blah blah ICANN blah .africa blah delegated blah blah…

Today blah blah ZA Central Registry blah blah .africa blah delegated blah.
ICANN blah blah root blah. Blah blah ZACR blah nic.africa.
Blah blah five years blah blah contention blah lawsuit blah blah DotConnectAfrica blah. Blah blah Bekele blah IRP blah.
ICANN blah blah Governmental Advisory Committee blah blah blah African Union blah blah blah.
Blah blah Geographic Names Panel blah blah controversy blah blah blah blah lawsuit blah blah blah leg to stand on.

Registry Africa celebrates delegation of .africa#ForAfricansByAfricans #WeAreLive pic.twitter.com/UXZX6yKSPV

— dotAfrica (@africandomain) February 15, 2017

Blah racist blah blah conspiracy blah blah blah… nutty. Blah.
Blah reporting blah damned blah story blah forever blah blah bored blah blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah.

.africa to finally go live after judge denies injunction

A Los Angeles court has rejected a demand for a preliminary injunction preventing ICANN delegating .africa, meaning the new gTLD can go live soon.
Judge Howard Halm ruled February 3, in documents published last night, that the “covenant not to sue” signed by every new gTLD applicant is enforceable and that Africans are being harmed as long as .africa is stuck in legal limbo.
The ruling comes two and a half years after ZA Central Registry, the successful of the two .africa applicants, signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN.
Rival applicant DotConnectAfrica, rejected because it has no African government support, is suing ICANN for fraud, alleging that it failed to follow its own rules and unfairly favored ZACR from the outset.
Unfortunately, the ruling does not address the merits of these claims. It merely says that DCA is unlikely to win its suit due to the covenant it signed.
Halm based his decision on the precedent in Ruby Glen v ICANN, the Donuts lawsuit that seeks to stop ICANN awarding .web to Verisign. The judge in that case ruled last November that Donuts signed away its right to sue.
An earlier judge in the DCA v ICANN case had ruled — based at least in part on a misunderstanding of the facts — that the covenant was unenforceable, but that decision now seems to have been brushed aside.
Halm was not convinced that DCA would suffer irreparable harm if ZACR got given .africa, writing:

The .Africa gTLD can be re-delegated to DCA in the event DCA prevails in this litigation… Further, it appears that any interim harm to DCA can be remedied by monetary damages

He balanced this against the harm of NOT delegating .africa:

The public interest also weighs in favor of denying the injunction because the delay in the delegation of the .Africa gTLD is depriving the people of Africa of having their own unique gTLD.

So what now?
ICANN said in a statement: “In accordance with the terms of its Registry Agreement with ZACR for .AFRICA, ICANN will now follow its normal processes towards delegation.”
As of this morning, ZACR’s .africa bid is officially still marked as “On Hold” by ICANN, though this is likely to change shortly.
Assuming ZACR has already completed pre-delegation testing, delegation itself could be less than a week away.
If DCA’s record is anything to go by, it seems unlikely that this latest setback will be enough to get it to abandon its cause.
Its usual MO whenever it receives an adverse decision or criticism is to double down and start screaming about conspiracies.
While the injunction was denied, the lawsuit itself has not been thrown out, so there’s still plenty of time for more of that.
You can read Halm’s ruling here (pdf).

Antitrust feds probing Verisign’s .web deal

US antitrust authorities are investigating Verisign over its anticipated operation of the .web gTLD.
The probe was disclosed by company CEO Jim Bidzos in yesterday’s fourth-quarter earnings call. He said:

On January 18, 2017, the company received a Civil Investigative Demand from the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice, requesting certain information related to Verisign’s potential operations of the .web TLD. The CID is not directed at Verisign’s existing registry agreements.

He did not comment further, beyond describing it as “kind of like a subpoena”.
Verisign acquired the rights to run .web at an ICANN last-resort auction last July, agreeing to pay $135 million.
Rather than applying for the gTLD itself, it secretly bankrolled shell company Nu Dot Co, which intends to transfer its .web contract to Verisign after it is signed.
ICANN is being sued by rival applicant Donuts, which claims NDC should have been banned from the auction. Afilias, the auction runner up, is also challenging the outcome.
But this new DoJ investigation, if we take Bidzos’ words at face value, appears to focus on what Verisign plans to do with .web once it is live.
It’s the view of many that .web would be the new gTLD best positioned as an alternative to .com, which makes Verisign hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
It’s my view that it would make perfect sense for Verisign to flush the $135 million and bury .web, rather than have a viable competitor on the market.
Verisign has repeatedly said that intends to “grow and widely distribute .web”, words Bidzos repeated last night.
The investigation is likely into whether Verisign wants to actually raise .web, or strangle it in its crib.
It seems the investigation was launched in the dying days of the Obama administration, so the recent changing of the guard at Justice — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was confirmed by Congress just two days ago — may have an impact on how it plays out.

.xxx has its ICANN fees slashed and adopts URS

ICM Registry is to see its .xxx ICANN registry fees hugely reduced in contractual amendments approved by ICANN last week.
The changes also mean that .xxx will now become subject to the Uniform Rapid Suspension anti-cybersquatting mechanism, despite it being a pre-2012 gTLD.
.xxx becomes the latest pre-2012 gTLD to move to a contract more closely aligned with the standard Registry Agreement from the new gTLD program.
Under the complex new deal, its per-transaction fee could be reduced from $2 to $0.25 by mid-2018.
Its quarterly fixed fee will go up from $2,500 to $6,250.
ICM has also agreed to take on many aspects of the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement, the most controversial of which is the URS.
The domainer group the Internet Commerce Association was fiercely critical of this addition to the contract, as it has been when URS was brought to .jobs, .travel, .cat, .pro and .mobi.
ICA is largely concerned that URS will also be pushed upon Verisign’s .net, which is up for contract renewal this year, and eventually .com.

ICANN’s Empowered Community to get its first test-drive after appeals panel vote

ICANN’s post-transition bylaws have only been in effect for a few months, but the board of directors wants to change one of them already.
The board last week voted to create a new committee dedicated to handling Requests for Reconsideration — formal appeals against ICANN decisions.
But because this would change a so-called Fundamental Bylaw, ICANN’s new Empowered Community mechanism will have to be triggered.
The Board Governance Committee, noting that the number of RfR complaints it’s having to deal with has sharply increased due to fights over control of new gTLDs, wants that responsibility split out to be handled by a new, dedicated Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee.
It seems on the face of it like a fairly non-controversial change — RfRs will merely be dealt with by a different set of ICANN directors.
However, it will require a change to one of the Fundamental Bylaws — bylaws considered so important they need a much higher threshold to approve.
This means the untested Empowered Community (which I’m not even sure actually exists yet) is going to get its first outing.
The EC is an ad hoc non-profit organization meant to give ICANN the community (that is, you) ultimate authority over ICANN the organization.
It has the power to kick out directors, spill the entire board, reject bylaws changes and approve Fundamental Bylaws changes.
It comprises four or five “Decisional Participants” — GNSO, the ccNSO, the ALAC, the ASO and (usually) the GAC.
In this case at least three of the five Decisional Participants must approve the change, and no more than one may object.
The lengthy process for the EC approving the proposed bylaws change is outlined here.
I wouldn’t expect this proposal to generate a lot of heated discussion on its merits, but it will put the newly untethered ICANN to the test for the first time, which could highlight process weaknesses that could be important when more important policy changes need community scrutiny.