XYZ says it won’t block censored Chinese domains

New gTLD registry XYZ.com has said it will not preemptively censor domain names based on the wishes of the Chinese government.
Over the last couple of days, CEO Daniel Negari has sought to “clarify” its plans to block and suspend domain names based on Chinese government requests.
It follows XYZ’s Registry Services Evaluation Request for a gateway service in the country, first reported by DI and subsequently picked up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Wall Street Journal columnist, Fortune magazine and others.
The clarifications offered up by XYZ probably did more to confuse matters.
A blog post on Wednesday said that XYZ will not reserve any .xyz domain names from being registered, except those ICANN makes all new gTLD registries reserve.
Subsequent comments from Negari stated that XYZ will, as the RSEP stated, prevent names that have been banned in China from being registered.
However, there’s one significant difference.
Now, the registry is saying that it will only put those bans in place for domain names that have been specifically banned by the Chinese government when the name had already been registered by a Chinese registrant.
So, if I understand correctly, it would not preemptively ban anyone anywhere from registering [banned term].xyz.
However, if [banned term].xyz was registered to a Chinese resident and the Chinese government told the registry to suspend it, it would be suspended and nobody would be able to re-register it anywhere in the world.
Negari said in a blog comment yesterday:

if we receive a Chinese legal order tomorrow (before the gateway has launched) which requires disabling a domain name registered in China and properly under Chinese jurisdiction, then it will be disabled at the registry level, and not by the gateway. When the gateway launches the name will continue to be unavailable, and the gateway will not implement the action on a localized basis only in China. The normal registry system would continue to be the only system used to resolve the name globally. Again — the specific stability concern ICANN had was that we would use the Chinese gateway to make .xyz names resolve differently, depending on what country you are in. I completely agree that our [RSEP] re-draft to address that concern came out in a way that can be read in a way that we sincerely did not intend.

So there is a list of preemptively banned .xyz, .college, .rent, .security and .protection domains, compiled by XYZ from individual Chinese government requests targeting names registered to Chinese registrants.
Negari said in an email to DI yesterday:

To clarify the statement “XYZ will reserve domains,” we meant that XYZ will takedown domains in order to comply with “applicable law.” Unfortunately, the inaccuracies in your post caused people to believe that we were allowing the Chinese government to control what names could be registered or how they could be used by people outside of China. The idea that XYZ is going to impose Chinese law and prevent people outside of China from registering certain domain names is simply incorrect and not true. To be 100% clear, there is no “banned list.”

That was the first time anyone connected with XYZ had complained about the October 12 post, other than since-deleted tweets that corrected the size of the list from 40,000 domains to 12,000.
The RSEP (pdf) that causes all this kerfuffle has not been amended. It still says:

XYZ will reserve names prohibited for registration by the Chinese government at the registry level internationally, so the Gateway itself will not need to be used to block the registration of of any names. Therefore, a registrant in China will be able to register the same domain names as anyone else in the world.

This fairly unambiguous statement is what XYZ says was “misinterpreted” by DI (and everyone else who read it).
However, it’s not just a couple of sentences taken out of context. The context also suggests preemptive banning of domains.
The very next sentence states:

When the Gateway is initially implemented we will not run into a problem whereby a Chinese registrant has already registered a name prohibited for registration by the Chinese government because Chinese registrars are already enforcing a prohibition on the registration of names that are in violation of Chinese law.

This states that Chinese residents are already being preemptively banned, by Chinese registrars, from registering domains deemed illegal in China.
The next few paragraphs of the RSEP deal with post-registration scenarios of domains being banned, clearly delineated from the paragraph dealing with pre-registration scenarios.
In his blog post, Negari said the RSEP “addressed the proactive abuse mitigation we will take to shut down phishing, pharming, malware, and other abuse in China”.
I can’t believe this is true. The consequence would be that if China sent XYZ a take-down notice about a malware or phishing site registered to a non-Chinese registrant, XYZ would simply ignore it.
Regardless, the takeaway today is that XYZ is now saying that it will not ban a domain before it has been registered, unless that domain has previously been registered by a Chinese resident and subsequently specifically banned by the Chinese government.
The registry says this is no different to how it would treat take-down notices issued by, for example, a US court. It’s part of its contractual obligation to abide by “applicable law”, it says.
Whether this is a policy U-turn or a case of an erroneous RSEP being submitted… frankly I don’t want to get into that debate.
Disclosure: during the course of researching this story, I registered .xyz domains matching (as far as this monoglot can tell) the Chinese words for “democracy”, “human rights”, “porn” and possibly “Tiananmen Square”. I have no idea if they have value and have no plans to develop them into web sites.

Forget .sucks, .feedback will drive trademark owners nuts all over again

Top Level Spectrum, the new gTLD registry behind .feedback, plans to give sell domains matching 5,000 of the world’s top brands to a third party that does not own the trademarks.
That’s one novel element of a .feedback business model that is guaranteed to drive the intellectual property community crazy in much the same way as .sucks did earlier this year.
The other piece of ‘innovation’ will see all .feedback domains — including the 5,000 brands — point by default to a hosted service that facilitates comment and criticism.
An example of such a site can be seen at www.eggsample.feedback. The registry’s CEO, Jay Westerdal, has a .feedback site at www.jay.feedback
If you agree to use the hosted service with your domain, the domain and service combined will cost a minimum of just $20 per year.
However, if you want to turn off the hosted service and use your .feedback like a regular domain, pointing to the web site of your choice, the price will ratchet up to $50 a month, or $620 a year.
Those are the wholesale prices. Both services will be offered through registrars, where some markup is to be expected.
The hosted service is being offered by Feedback SAAS LLC, a company that, judging by its web site, appears to share ownership with Top Level Spectrum, though Westerdal says the two firms have different employees.
It’s not dissimilar to the model employed by .tel, where name servers by default point to a registry-hosted service.
Unlike .tel, .feedback registrants will be able to opt out of using the SAAS service and point their domains to whatever name servers they want.
Westerdal told DI that .feedback is in the process of making a deal with a “third party” he could not yet name to have 5,000 branded .feedback domains deployed during the Early Access Period of the .feedback launch. That’s scheduled to start January 6.
“We are striking a deal to get feedback sites out there. We want everything to have feedback,” he said. “We are signing an agreement to get the ball rolling by doing a founders program to get names out there. Your favorite shoe, your pizza place, your everything.”
“The sites are all geared towards free speech and giving reviews,” he said. He said:

No trademark infringement will occur though, the sites are all geared towards free speech and giving reviews. Confusing the public that the brand is running the site will not happen, each site has a disclaimer and makes it clear the brand is not running the site.

Asked whether we were talking about a genuine third party or a shell set up by the registry, he said: “A real third party. I am not playing games.”
He said the higher pricing for the naked domain registration is intended to discourage companies from turning off the domains matching their brands.
The whole point of .feedback is to solicit feedback.
The as-yet unspecified third-party taking possession of the 5,000 brand names would not be prevented from selling the domains to the matching brand owner, or to any third parties, he said, though he would not be in favor of such a move.
He said that $20 a year to run a configurable .feedback site, with moderator privileges, is a “great deal” compared to the $300-a-month service he said consumer review site Yelp offers.
The SAAS service will make additional revenue by selling added features, suitable for enterprises, he said.
.feedback went into its sunrise period last week with a $2,000 wholesale fee — the same high price that attracted criticism for .sucks.
The original Registry Service Evaluation Process for the .feedback service hit ICANN over a year ago (pdf).
I missed it then. Sorry.
I noticed it today after corporate registrar MarkMonitor blogged about it.
Matt Serlin, VP of MarkMonitor, who blogged his opinion on .feedback’s strategy earlier today, said in an email that the .feedback strategy was “more objectionable” than he had thought, and that “[W]e would most likely look to raise to ICANN if that is his stated intent.”

.apple goes live

Apple’s .apple new gTLD was delegated today.
It’s going to be a strict dot-brand gTLD, in which only Apple can register domain names, but could wind up being highly influential.
While .apple now appears in the DNS root zone, no second-level names (not even nic.apple) are yet resolving.
Should Apple actually use its new TLD in a prominent way, it would be good news for the visibility of new gTLDs internationally.
The company has sold hundreds of millions of devices over the last decade or so.
But the company has a spotty history of paying attention to domain names, regularly launching products without first securing matching domain names.
It did recently adopt a .news domain name for one of its apps, however.
.apple could wind up being purely defensive, at least in the near term.
Apple’s 2012 application to ICANN describes its plans in literally one sentence, repeated five times:

Apple seeks to obtain the new .apple gTLD in order to provide consumers with another opportunity to learn about Apple, and its products and services.

Apple division Beats Electronics, which makes headphones, also had its dot-brand, .beats, delegated today.

Correction: .shop auction weirder than I thought

The upcoming auction for .shop and .shopping new gTLDs is weird, but in a different way to which I reported on Friday.
The actual rules, which are pretty complicated, mean that one applicant could win a gTLD auction without spending a single penny.
The nine applicants for .shop and the two applicants for .shopping are not necessarily all fighting it out to be a single victor, which is what I originally reported.
Rather, it seems to be certain that both .shop and .shopping will wind up being delegated.
The ICANN rules about indirect contention are not well-documented, as far as I can tell.
When I originally reported on the rules exactly two years ago today, I thought an animated GIF of a man’s head exploding was an appropriate way to end the story.
In the .shop/.shopping case, it seems that all 11 applications — nine for .shop and two for .shopping — will be lumped into the same auction.
Which applicant drops out first will determine whether both strings get delegated or only one.
Uniregistry and Donuts have applied for .shopping, but only Donuts’ application is in contention with Commercial Connect’s .shop application (due to a String Confusion Objection).
As Donuts has applied for both .shop and .shopping, it will be submitting separate bids for each application during the auction.
The auction could play out in one of three general ways.
Commercial Connect drops out. If Commercial Connect finds the .shop auction getting too rich for it and drops out, the .shopping contention set will immediately become an entirely separate auction between Uniregistry and Donuts. In this scenario, both .shop and .shopping get to become real gTLDs.
Donuts drops its .shopping bid. If Donuts drops its bid for .shopping, Uniregistry is no longer in indirect contention with Commercial Connect’s .shop application, so it gets .shopping for free.
Commercial Connect wins .shop. If Commercial Connect prevails in .shop, that means Donuts has withdrawn from the .shopping auction and Uniregistry wins.
It’s complicated, and doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, but it seems them’s the rules.
It could have been even more complex. Until recently, Amazon’s application for .通販 was also in indirect contention with .shop.
Thanks to Rubens Kuhl of Nic.br for pointing out the error.

.shop among four gTLDs heading to auction

The new gTLDs .shop, .shopping, .cam and .phone are all set to go to auction after their various delays and objections were cleared up.
It seems that .shop and .shopping contention sets remain merged, so only one string from one applicant will emerge victorious.
That’s due to a completely mad String Confusion Objection decision that ruled the two words are too confusingly similar to coexist in the DNS.
That SCO ruling was made by the same guy who held up both sets of applications when he ruled that .shop and .通販 (“.onlineshopping”) were also too confusingly similar.
The two rulings combined linked the contention sets for all three strings.
.通販 applicant Amazon appealed its SCO loss using a special process that ICANN created especially for the occasion, and won.
But .shop and .shopping applicants were not given the same right to appeal, meaning the auction will take place between nine .shop applicants and .shopping applicants Uniregistry and Donuts.
Donuts is an applicant for .shop and .shopping, meaning it will have to make its mind up which string it prefers, if it intends to win the auction.
If it’s a private auction, Donuts would presumably qualify for a share of its own winning bid. Weird.
(UPDATE: That was incorrect).
The other contention set held up by an inconsistent SCO decision was .cam, which was originally ruled too similar to .com.
Rightside won its appeal too, meaning it will be fought at auction between Famous Four, Rightside and AC Webconnecting.
.phone had been held up for different reasons.
It’s a two-way fight between Donuts and Dish DBS, a TV company that wanted to run .phone as a closed generic. Like almost all closed generic applicants, Dish has since changed its plans.

Aussie government slams .food closed generic bid

The Australian government is among those asking ICANN deny a request to make .food a “closed generic” gTLD.
Eight people have filed comments opposing Lifestyle Domain’s application for Specification 13 status for its .food registry contract, which would allow the company to keep all .food domains for itself, since we reported the news earlier this month.
The Aussies are arguably the highest-profile opponent, and the one most likely to be taken seriously by ICANN.
Governmental Advisory Committee rep Annaliese Williams wrote:

The Australian Government issued an Early Warning to Lifestyle Domain Holdings, Inc on the grounds that ‘food’ is a common generic term, and that restricting common generic strings, such as .food, for the exclusive use of a single entity could have a negative impact on competition…
The Australian Government does not consider that Lifestyle Domain Holdings’ application to operate .food for its exclusive use serves a public interest goal.

Lifestyle Domain is a subsidiary of Scripps Networks, the company that runs the Food Network TV stations and Food.com web site.
The company claims that it has trademark rights to the word “food” that should allow it to run .food as a dot-brand gTLD.
That would mean nobody but Scripps, which won the right to .food at auction, would be able to register .food domains.
ICANN has also received negative comments from employees of registrars (both retail and corporate) and registries.
One comment, taken at face value, appears to be pro-Scripps, but I’m fairly confident it’s actually just extreme sarcasm.
The decision about whether to allow Scripps to add Spec 13 to its contract will be made by ICANN legal staff.
ICANN told me this week that there’s no ETA on a decision yet.

.gay applicant appeals community loss, again

dotgay LLC has appealed its Community Priority Evaluation defeat again, filing a new Request for Reconsideration with ICANN this week.
It’s an unprecedented second use of the RfR process to appeal its CPE loss, in which the Economist Intelligence Unit panel decided the applicant’s definition of “gay” was far too broad to award dotgay enough points to pass the evaluation.
But dotgay wants ICANN to initiate a third CPE, to be carried out by anyone other than the EIU.
The EIU panel said earlier this month that it had “determined that the applied-for string does not sufficiently identify some members of the applicant’s defined community, in particular transgender, intersex, and ally individuals”.
Basically, EIU was pointing out, for the second time, that transgender people and straight “allies” aren’t “gay”.
It awarded dotgay 0 out of the possible 4 points available on “Nexus” criteria, meaning the applicant failed to hit the 14 points required to win.
While the RfR dodges the transgender issue altogether, dotgay has some interesting arguments in response to the “ally” question.
It’s now claiming that “ally” refers to companies and organizations that support the equal rights cause (because non-human legal entities don’t have a gender identity or sexual preference) and to proxy registrars:

Now, since an organization or company in itself can impossibly be “lesbian” or “gay”, Requester has been seeking for a way to also position these companies and organizations in this community definition. For this reason, Requester has referred to these organizations as “allies” in the context of the LGBTQIA definition.
Furthermore, as stated in the Application, LGBTQIAs are a vulnerable group in many countries and societies, and too often still the subject of prosecution for who they are. In order to put in place safeguards for those gay community members who do not wish to be directly associated with a domain name registration, organizations and companies who in essence cannot be “non-heterosexual” should have the possibility to act as a proxy service, which is common practice in the domain name industry.
In any case, any such “ally” must be approved by an Authentication Partner in order to be able to register a domain name in its own name or in the name or on behalf of a third party who meets the LGBTQI requirements.

It’s an interesting argument, but I can’t see anything in its original application that would support such a position.
dotgay may be on stronger ground with its claim that it unfairly lost one point on the “Opposition” criteria of the CPE.
Two points were available there. Applicants could lose one point immediately if there was a single letter of opposition from a relevant, non-negligible organization.
The EIU seems to have been in possession of such a letter, though its CPE ruling does not name the opponent.
dotgay thinks the opponent was the Q Center, a community center in Portland, Oregon, which opposed dotgay in writing in 2014 but, following a change in its board of directors, retracted that opposition (pdf).
So it may be the case that dotgay unfairly lost a point.
Regaining that point would not be enough to give the company a winning CPE score, but if the EIU screwed up that may be grounds for ICANN to initiate another rerun of the CPE.
However, it’s quite rare for ICANN’s board of directors to approve an RfR.
If dotgay loses, it will either have to go to auction against its rival applicants or file an Independent Review Process complaint, its final avenue of appeal.
Read its RfR here.

Three new ICANN directors started today

A former Dutch politician, a cable company VP and a Latin American ccTLD manager joined the ICANN board of directors today.
The three new directors took their seats at the conclusion of the ICANN 54 public meeting in Dublin.
Two were Nominating Committee appointees, the third was selected by the Address Supporting Organization to replace six-year veteran Ray Plzak.
Lousewies van der Laan is possibly the highest-profile new director.
She is a former politician who has sat as a member of both Dutch national and European parliaments.
She was a member of the super liberal D66 party in the Netherlands, briefly leading whilst it was part of a governing coalition before a leadership vote defeat and her subsequent retirement from politics in 2006.
Wikipedia has her as a former party spokesperson for “foreign policy, higher education, justice, technology, European affairs and gay rights”
Since then, she has spent time as chief of staff of the president of the International Criminal Court and an independent public affairs consultant.
She’s the second former MEP to sit on the current ICANN board, after German Facebook lobbyist Erika Mann.
The other NomCom appointee is Rafael “Lito” Ibarra, who runs SVNet, the ccTLD manager for El Salvador’s .sv domain.
According to ICANN, he is known as the “father of the Internet” in El Salvador, due to his contributions over the last couple of decades.
He seems to have received the .sv delegation from Jon Postel himself, in the pre-ICANN days.
He’s also on the board of LACNIC, the Latin American IP address registry.
The ASO appointee is Ron da Silva, VP of network engineering at US cable giant Time Warner Cable.
His previous employers include AOL and Sprint. He’s also been chair of ARIN’s advisory council.
The NomCom also reappointed incumbent George Sadowsky, who already has six years of ICANN board service under his belt.
The other two departing directors were Wolfang Kleinwachter and Gonzalo Navarro.

Why did the GNSO fail to pick a new leader?

Political infighting between sections of the Generic Names Supporting Organization seems to be responsible for the GNSO Council’s failure to elect a new chair yesterday.
Rumor has it that Contracted Parties House pick James Bladel, a VP at Go Daddy, only lost because of ructions in the Non-Contracted Parties House.
I stress these are just rumors — nobody with any first-hand knowledge of the situation was prepared to go on-record with me today — but they come from multiple sources.
As I reported earlier today, Bladel failed to secure the support of over 60% of the NCPH — the threshold to be elected chair — despite having the unanimous support of the CPH.
Roughly 47% of the NCPH chose to vote for “none of the above” instead, resulting in the GNSO Council now lacking a chair.
But I gather that this was not a diss against Bladel, his employer, or the CPH per se.
Rather, the story I’m hearing is that some councilors gave an empty chair their votes as a result of disagreements between the commercial and non-commercial sides of the NCPH.
Some say a deal had been made under which NCPH candidate Heather Forrest would receive at least 60% of the vote in round one, but some voters reneged on the deal, meaning she was knocked out of the running.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what it implies is that some votes that would have otherwise gone to Bladel in round two of voting were withheld, essentially out of spite.
Bladel only needed one additional NCPH vote to hit his 60%.
If this sounds like childish bickering, you may be right, but it wouldn’t be the first time a GNSO constituency has disrupted the council in order to make a point.
The last time that happened to a significant degree was over three years ago, when non-commercial users exploited a timing issue to protest new rights protection mechanisms for the Olympics, risking the new gTLD program timeline.
That led some at the time to predict the “death” of the GNSO.
That’s not happening this time. If anything, the wagons are circling.
Hastily reappointed council vice chair Volker Greimann, who became de facto chair at least for today, described the current situation as “business as usual” today, pointing out that ICANN bylaws envisaged and accounted for this kind of power vacuum.
The next vote on the chair’s position will take place at least a month from now.

Go Daddy veep loses ICANN election to “none of the above”

ICANN’s multistakeholder GNSO Council has been left embarrassingly rudderless after its members failed to elect a new chair.
The unprecedented result saw Go Daddy VP of policy James Bladel lose an election to “none of the above” yesterday.
Under GNSO rules, there are two candidates for chair. One is nominated by the Contracted Parties House (registries and registrars), the other by the Non-Contracted Parties House (intellectual property interests, ISPs, non-commercial users etc).
Bladel was the CPH candidate. He stood against Australian academic Heather Forrest, on the council representing the Intellectual Property Constituency.
To get elected, a candidate must get 60% of the vote from both houses.
In the first round of voting, conducted via secret ballot, Bladel won 100% of the CPH vote and 47% of the NCPH vote.
Forrest was then eliminated for the second round, which meant Bladel proceeded to a second round of voting: him against “none of the above”.
Council members took 15 minutes out to discuss among themselves what to do.
When they returned, Bladel’s CPH support remained unchanged, but he had only managed to get 53.85% of the NCPH vote.
If my calculations are correct, Bladel essentially missed the 60% threshold by a single vote.
That means the GNSO Council no longer has a chair.
The interregnum will last at least a month.
Each house now has until November 5 to make new nominations. The election will then be re-run “no sooner than 30 days” from yesterday.
In the meantime, the two vice chairs are running the show. The CPH said its current vice chair Volker Greiman will remain in the role while a new chair is being elected. The NCPH has not yet appointed a vice chair.
This morning, the CPH issued a statement that read in part:

Like many in the GNSO Community, the Contracted Party House is disappointed in the unprecedented outcome of the Council election. It is particularly unfortunate that this scenario occurred at a time when ICANN is in the global spotlight.
Throughout the election process, the common theme has been an agreement amongst all Councilors that either candidate would have made a competent and effective GNSO Chair. However, the qualifications of both candidates were ultimately disregarded.

In recent history, GNSO chairs have been drawn from the registries and registrars.
Since 2009, the chairs have been Jonathan Robinson (Afilias), Stephane Van Gelder (then Group NBT, a registrar), Chuck Gomes (Verisign).
This trend did not escape the notice of GNSO members, who quizzed Bladel and Forrest on Sunday on whether they would be able to give fair treatment to both houses on the Council.
Both candidates gave gracious responses. Bladel said:”The chair does not get extra votes when it comes to decisions. The chair does not have his votes taken away; his or her votes taken away. So really this is a question of optics.”