How many elephants did ICANN send to Helsinki?

ICANN ships a quite staggering amount of equipment to its thrice-yearly public meetings, equivalent to more than 12 mid-sized cars at the recent Helsinki meeting.
That’s one of the interesting data points in ICANN’s just published “Technical Report” — a 49-page data dump — for ICANN 56.
It’s the second meeting in a row the organization has published such a report, the first for a so-called “Meeting B” or “Policy Forum” which run on a reduced-formality, more focused schedule.
The Helsinki report reveals that 1,436 people showed up in person, compared to 2,273 for March’s Marrakech meeting, which had a normal ICANN meeting agenda.
The attendees were 61% male and 32% female. Another 7% did not disclose their gender. No comparable numbers were published in the Marrakech report.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the Helsinki numbers show not a terrible gender balance as far as tech conferences go. It’s a bit better than you’d expect from anecdotal evidence.
Not many big tech events publish their male/female attendee ratios, but Google has said attendees at this year’s Google IO were 23% female.
Europeans accounted for most of the Helsinki attendees, as you might expect, at 43%. That compared to 20% in Marrakech.
The next largest geographic contingent came from North America — 27%, compared to just 18% in Marrakech.
The big surprise to me is how much equipment ICANN ships out to each of its meetings.
In March, it moved 93 metric tonnes (103 American tons) of kit to Marrakech. About 19 metric tonnes of that was ICANN-owned gear, the rest was hired. That weighs as much as 3.5 African elephants, the report says.
For Helsinki, that was up to 19.7 metric tonnes, more than 12 cars’ worth. Shipped equipment includes stuff like 412 microphones, 73 laptops and 28 printers.
In both reports, ICANN explains the shipments like this:

Much like a touring band, ICANN learned over time that the most cost-effective method of ensuring that meeting participants have a positive experience is to sea freight our own equipment to ICANN meetings. We ship critical equipment, then rent the remaining equipment locally to help promote the economy.

Rock on.
The Helsinki report, which reveals more data than anyone could possibly find useful, can be downloaded as a PDF here.

Is Verisign .web applicant’s secret sugar daddy?

The fiercely contested .web gTLD is being forced into a last-resort auction and some people seem to think a major registry player is behind it.
Two .web applicants — Radix (pdf) and Schlund (pdf) — this week wrote to ICANN to demand that the .web auction, currently planned for July 27, be postponed.
They said the sale should be delayed to give applicants time “to investigate whether there has been a change of leadership and/or control” at rival applicant Nu Dot Co LLC.
Nu Dot Co is a new gTLD investment vehicle headed up by Juan Diego Calle, who launched and ran .CO Internet until it was sold to Neustar a couple of years ago.
I gather that some applicants believe that Nu Dot Co’s .web application is now being bankrolled by a larger company with deeper pockets.
The two names I’ve heard bandied around, talking to industry sources this week, are Verisign and Neustar.
Nobody I’ve talked to has a shred of direct evidence either company is involved and Calle declined to comment.
So is this paranoia or not?
There are a few reasons these suspicions may have come about.
First, the recent revelation that successful .blog applicant Primer Nivel, a no-name Panama entity with a Colombian connection, was actually secretly being bankrolled by WordPress, has opened eyes to the possibility of proxy bidders.
It was only after the .blog contention set was irreversibly settled that the .blog contract changed hands and the truth become known.
Some applicants may have pushed the price up beyond the $19 million winning bid — making the rewards of losing the private auction that much higher — had they known they were bidding against a richer, more motivated opponent.
Second, sources say the .web contention set had been heading to a private auction — in which all losing applicants get a share of the winning bid — but Nu Dot Co decided to back out at the last minute.
Under ICANN rules, if competing applicants are not able to privately resolve their contention set, an ICANN last-resort auction must ensue.
Third, this effective vetoing of the private auction does not appear to fit in with Nu Dot Co’s strategy to date.
It applied for 13 gTLDs in total. Nine of those have already gone to auctions that Nu Dot Co ultimately lost (usually reaping the rewards of losing).
The other four are either still awaiting auction or, in the case of .corp, have been essentially rejected for technical reasons.
It usually only makes sense to go to an ICANN last-resort auction — where the proceeds all go to ICANN — if you plan on winning or if you want to make sure your competitors do not get a financial windfall from a private auction.
Nu Dot Co isn’t actually an operational registry, so it doesn’t strictly have competitors.
That suggests to some that its backer is an operational registry with a disdain for new gTLD rivals. Verisign, in other words.
Others think Neustar, given the fact that its non-domains business is on the verge of imploding and its previous acquisition of .CO Internet from Calle.
I have no evidence either company is involved. I’m just explaining the thought process here.
According to its application, two entities own more than 15% of Nu Dot Co. Both — Domain Marketing Holdings, LLC and NUCO LP, LLC — are Delaware shell corporations set up via an agent in March 2012, shortly before the new gTLD application filing deadline.
Many in the industry are expecting .web to go for more than the $41.5 million GMO paid for .shop. Others talk down the price, saying “web” lacks the cultural impact it once had.
But it seems we will all find out later this month.
Responding to the letters from Schlund and Radix, ICANN yesterday said that it had no plans to postpone the July 27 last-resort auction.
All seven applicants had to submit a postponement form by June 12 if they wanted a delay, ICANN informed them in a letter (pdf), and they missed that deadline.
They now have until July 20 to either resolve the contention privately or put down their deposits, ICANN said.
The applicants for .web, aside from Nu Dot Co, are Google, Donuts, Radix, Schlund, Web.com and Afilias.
Due to a string confusion ruling, .webs applicant Vistaprint will also be in the auction.

Web.com policy exec moves to ICANN

Domain industry veteran Jennifer Gore is to become ICANN’s new director of registrar relations.
She takes over the role from Mike Zupke, who I gather is leaving ICANN, from next Monday. She will report to Cyrus Namazi in ICANN’s Global Domains Division.
Gore was most recently senior director of policy at Web.com, a role she held for over five years. Much of her earlier career was spent at Network Solutions and Verisign.
Her move from industry to ICANN means she has had to resign her position on the GNSO Council, where she represented the Registrars Stakeholder Group.
The RrSG will now have to hold an election to find her replacement.

After long battle, first Bulgarian IDN domain goes live

Bulgarians finally have the ability to register domain names in their native Cyrillic script, after years of fighting with ICANN.
The domain Имена.бг, which translates as “names.bg” went live on the internet this week, according to local reports.
Bulgaria was one of the first countries to ask for a internationalized domain name version of its ccTLD, almost seven years ago, but it was rejected by ICANN in 2010.
The requested .бг was found too similar to Brazil’s existing Latin-script ccTLD .br. Evaluators thought the risk of phishing and other types of attacks was too high.
The requested string didn’t change, but ICANN processes were adapted to allow appeals and a new method for establishing similarity was established.
On appeal, .бг was determined to be less prone to confusion with .br than existing pairs of Latin ccTLDs are with each other, ergo should be approved.
Имена.бг does not yet directly resolve (for me at least) from the Google Chrome address bar. It’s treated as a web search instead. But clicking on links to it does work.
The new ccTLD, which is .xn--90ae in the DNS, was delegated last week.
The registry is Imena.bg (which also means “names.bg”), based in Sofia and partially owned by Register.bg, the .bg registry.
Despite the long battle, the success of .бг is by no means assured. IDNs have a patchy record worldwide.
It’s true that Russians went nuts for their .рф (.rf for Russian Federation) ccTLD during its scandal-rocked launch in 2010, but Arabic IDNs have had hardly any interest and the current boom in China seems to be largely concentrated on Latin-script TLDs.
.бг is expected to open for general registration in the fourth quarter.
I guess we’ll have to wait until at least next year to discover whether the concerns about confusion with .br were well-founded.

Buy it or lose it? Governments could get first dibs on two-letter domains

Governments and ccTLD registries would get new rights to own two-letter domains in new gTLDs under a proposed ICANN policy.
These highly-prized domains, many of which are likely worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, would be subject to a mini sunrise period, under the proposal.
The so-called Exclusive Availability Pre-registration Period would be limited to those companies or government entities in charge of matching ccTLDs.
The measures are outlined in “Proposed Measures for Letter/Letter Two-Character ASCII Labels to Avoid Confusion with Corresponding Country Codes” (pdf), published by ICANN late last week.
The surprisingly succinct document outlines three things new gTLD registries must do if they want to start selling two-letter domains matching ccTLDs, which are currently restricted.
The key measure is:

Registry Operator must implement a 30-day period in which registration of letter/letter two-character ASCII labels that are country codes, as specified in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard, will be made exclusively available to the applicable country-code manager or government.

In other words, if you’re a government or company listed as the ccTLD manager here, you get 30 days of exclusive opportunity to buy the LL.example matching your ccTLD.
Until now, governments have been able to block the release of LL new gTLD domains matching their ccTLDs.
The new proposal, introduced in an attempt to settle a long-running debate about the most appropriate way to enable the release of two-character strings, appears to add a “buy it or lose it” component to existing policy.
Under the base New gTLD Registry Agreement, all two-character domains were initially reserved.
Then, in late 2014, ICANN said registries could release all letter-number, number-letter and number-number combinations.
Many registries have already released such names, some selling for thousands at auction. When Rightside released its LN/NL/NN names, some carried price tags as high as $50,000.
Letter-letter domains could also be released following a formal registry request to ICANN, but were subject to a 60-day period during which governments could object.
Almost 1,000 new gTLDs have submitted such requests, and almost all have been “partially approved”.
That means some governments objected to the release of ccTLD-matching domains. Over 16,000 unique domain names have been objected to and therefore blocked over the last year or so.
The new proposal would add an extra process under which these blocked domains could be released, with ccTLD concerns getting first rights.
Interestingly, it appears to bring ccTLD managers into the mix, rather than restricting the names simply to governments.
The Governmental Advisory Committee has been the main driving force behind demands for restrictions on LL domains, but the proposed policy appears to also extend rights to private entities.
Remember, many ccTLDs are operated independently by private companies, without local government oversight.
For example, .uk is managed by Nominet, a non-governmental entity. The UK government has blocked many uk.example domains from being registered. The new policy appears to allow either Nominet or the government to register these names.
The one-page proposal is light on some details. It does not say, for example, what happens when the government and the ccTLD manager both want the name.
In keeping with ICANN’s habit of staying out of pricing, it does not specify price caps either.
It does, however, oblige registries to ban registrants from pretending to be affiliated with the relevant government when they are not.
Governments also get to complain, and registries have to investigate, if the relevant domains are causing “confusion”, though registries do not appear to be under a strict obligation to delete or suspend domains.
The policy is open for public comment until August here.

Chinese gTLD cranks up renewal prices from $18 to $100

Chinese new gTLD registry Beijing RITT-Net has said it intends to more than quintuple its registration and renewal prices.
From January 1, 2017, prices for .手机 will go up from $18 a year to $100 a year, the company said in a notice to ICANN late last month.
.手机 (.xn--kput3i) is a Chinese internationalized domain name meaning “.cell” or “.cellphone”.
The registry told ICANN:

it is our sincere hope to adjust the initial registration and renewal fees from 18 dollars to 100 dollars with the aim to keep up with the status quo of China’s domain name market and to provide registrants with better services. We wish the new price will be effective from Jan 1st, 2017.

I believe this is the biggest renewal price hike for a new gTLD registry to date.
Around 25,000 existing registrations appear to be affected, but very few registrars will have to deal with the ramifications.
According to registry reports, over 99% of its registrations were made via Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology, which does business at dns.com.cn.

GoDaddy gets its dot-brand

GoDaddy has become a new gTLD registry with the delegation yesterday of .godaddy.
It’s a dot-brand, so domain name registrations will not be made available to the general public.
In one of the shortest mission statements found in new gTLD applications, the company describes .godaddy like this:

The mission or purpose of the .GODADDY gTLD is strictly for branding protection and internal use. The gTLD .GODADDY will give visitors to any .GODADDY site the assurance that they are truly dealing with Go Daddy and not an imposter or cybersquatter.

GoDaddy has not yet gone live with its nic.godaddy site.
It’s not the first domain name firm to get its own dot-brand. Notably, Neustar and Verisign own .neustar and .verisign.
It’s not the only registrar with a dot-brand, either. France’s OVH got there first with .ovh.
GoDaddy originally applied for two other gTLDs — .home and .casa — but withdrew their applications almost immediately after a shift of company strategy.

dotgay loses third .gay appeal

Death warrant or portent of impending legal action?
dotgay LLC has lost its third attempt to get ICANN to reconsider tossing its application for community priority status in the fight for the .gay gTLD.
According to ICANN, on Sunday its Board Governance Committee threw out dotgay’s third Request for Reconsideration, an attempt to give the company an unprecedented third go at the Community Priority Evaluation process.
CPEs allow community gTLD applicants to avoid expensive auctions, but dotgay has lost two primarily on the grounds that its definition of community includes people who are not gay.
Its latest RfR was pretty weak, based on a technicality about which staffers at the Economist Intelligence Unit (which carries out the CPEs) were in charge of verifying its letters of community support.
The rationale for the BGC’s determination, which still needs to be rubber-stamped by the full ICANN board, has not been published yet.
But it seems from a blog post that ICANN now expects .gay to go to auction, where there are four competing applicants in total.
ICANN does not usually publish blog posts on RfR decisions, but in the .gay case it has been keen to avoid being accused of any motivation beyond a dogged pursuit of correct procedure.
So will dotgay go quietly? It remains to be seen.
While all new gTLD applicants had to sign a release promising not to sue ICANN, .africa applicant DotConnectAfrica sued earlier this year and managed to get a sympathetic judge who seems bent on allowing the case to go to trial.

Verisign to get .com for six more years, but prices to stay frozen

ICANN and Verisign have agreed to extend their .com registry contract for another six years, but there are no big changes in store for .com owners.
Verisign will now get to run the gTLD until November 30, 2024.
The contract was not due to expire until 2018, but the two parties have agreed to renew it now in order to synchronize it with Verisign’s new contract to run the root zone.
Separately, ICANN and Verisign have signed a Root Zone Maintainer Agreement, which gives Verisign the responsibility to make updates to the DNS root zone when told to do so by ICANN’s IANA department.
That’s part of the IANA transition process, which will (assuming it isn’t scuppered by US Republicans) see the US government’s role in root zone maintenance disappear later this year.
Cunningly, Verisign’s operation of the root zone is technically intermingled with its .com infrastructure, using many of the same security and redundancy features, which makes the two difficult to untangle.
There are no other substantial changes to the .com agreement.
Verisign has not agreed to take on any of the rules that applies to new gTLDs, for example.
It also means wholesale .com prices will be frozen at $7.85 for the foreseeable future.
The deal only gives Verisign the right to raise prices if it can come up with a plausible security/stability reason, which for one of the most profitable tech companies in the world seems highly unlikely.
Pricing is also regulated by Verisign’s side deal (pdf) with the US Department of Commerce, which requires government approval for any price increases until such time as .com no longer has dominant “market power”.
The .com extension is now open for public comment.
Predictably, it’s already attracted a couple of comments saying that the contract should instead be put out to tender, so a rival registry can run the show for cheaper.
That’s never, ever, ever, ever going to happen.

Fight as ICANN “backtracks” on piracy policing

ICANN has clarified that it will not terminate new gTLD registries that have piracy web sites in their zones, potentially inflaming an ongoing fight between domain companies and intellectual property interests.
This week’s ICANN 56 policy meeting in Helsinki saw registries and the Intellectual Property Constituency clash over whether an ICANN rule means that registries breach their contract if they don’t suspend piracy domains.
Both sides have different interpretation of the rule, found in the so-called “Public Interest Commitments” or PICs that can be found in Specification 11 of every new gTLD Registry Agreement.
But ICANN chair Steve Crocker, in a letter to the IPC last night, seemed to side strongly with the registries’ interpretation.
Spec 11 states, among other things, that:

Registry Operator will include a provision in its Registry-Registrar Agreement that requires Registrars to include in their Registration Agreements a provision prohibiting Registered Name Holders from distributing malware, abusively operating botnets, phishing, piracy, trademark or copyright infringement, fraudulent or deceptive practices, counterfeiting or otherwise engaging in activity contrary to applicable law, and providing (consistent with applicable law and any related procedures) consequences for such activities including suspension of the domain name.

A literal reading of this, and the reading favored by registries, is that all registries have to do to be in compliance is to include the piracy prohibitions in their Registry-Registrar Agreement, essentially passing off responsibility for piracy to registrars (which in turn pass of responsibility to registrants).
Registries believe that the phrase “consistent with applicable law and related procedures” means they only have to suspend a domain name when they receive a court order.
Members of the IPC, on the other hand, say this reading is ridiculous.
“We don’t know what this clause means,” Marc Trachtenberg of the IPC said during a session in Helsinki on Tuesday. “It’s got to mean something. It can’t just mean you have to put a provision into a contract, that’s pointless.”
“To put a provision into a contract that you’re not going to enforce, has no meaning,” he added. “And to have a clause that a registry operator or registrar has to comply with a court order, that’s meaningless also. Clearly a registry operator has to comply with a court order.”
Some IPC members think ICANN has “backtracked” by introducing the PICs concept then failing to enforce it.
IPC members in general believe that registries are supposed to not only require their registrars to ban piracy sites, but also to suspend piracy domains when they’re told about them.
Registries including Donuts have started doing this recently on a voluntary basis with partners such as the Motion Picture Association of America, but believe that ICANN should not be in the business of content policing.
“[Spec 11] doesn’t say what some members of the IPC think it says,” Donuts VP Jon Nevett said during the Helsinki session. “To say we’re in blatant violation of that PIC and that ICANN is not enforcing that PIC is problematic.”
The fight kicked off face-to-face in Helsinki, but it has been happening behind the scenes for several months.
The IPC got mad back in February when Crocker, responding to Governmental Advisory Committee concerns about intellectual property abuse, said the issue “appears to be outside of our mandate” (pdf).
That’s a reference to ICANN’s strengthening resolve that it is not and should not be the internet’s “content police”.
In April (pdf) and June (pdf) letters, IPC president Greg Shatan and the Coalition for Online Accountability’s Steve Metalitz called on Crocker to clarify this statement.
Last night, he did, and the clarification is unlikely to make the IPC happy.
Crocker wrote (pdf):

ICANN will bring enforcement actions against Registries that fail to include the required prohibitions and reservations in its end-user agreements and against Registrars that fail to main the required abuse point of contact…
This does not mean, however, that ICANN is required or qualified to make factual and legal determinations as to whether a Registered Name Holder or website operator is violating applicable laws and governmental regulations, and to assess what would constitute an appropriate remedy in any particular situation.

This seems pretty clear — new gTLD registries are not going to be held accountable for domains used for content piracy.
The debate may not be over however.
During Helsinki there was a smaller, semi-private (recorded but not webcast live) meeting of the some registries, IPC and GAC members, hosted by ICANN board member Bruce Tonkin, which evidently concluded that more discussion is needed to reach a common understanding of just what the hell these PICs mean.