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ICANN 53 launches with risky Caitlyn Jenner joke

Kevin Murphy, June 22, 2015, Domain Policy

ICANN has risked the ire of community members by kicking off ICANN 53 today with a joke referencing transgender celebrity Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
Just moments into his opening address this hour, ICANN chair Steve Crocker worked a joke around before/after photos of the former athlete.
[UPDATE: Crocker has issued an apology. See the bottom of this post.]
Jenner
This is what Crocker said:

What are we really talking about here? What is this thing we call “the transition”? And why has it captivated the attention of so many?
[Jenner photo appears]
Ahhh, no. That’s not quite the transition that I’m referring to. I’m only referring to the IANA stewardship transition.

Reaction from attendees was mixed.
The joke got laughter from the room.
On Twitter, some were less amused.


I’ll be the first to leap to the defense of the joke.
I laughed. I don’t think it was offensive or insulting to Jenner or to trans people in general — it was more a joke about celebrity culture — and I don’t think any offense was intended.
If I had seen it on TV, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. I even made a joke about Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover, on Twitter, a couple weeks back.
But a lot of ICANN regulars are more sensitive about this kind of thing. I’ve had conversations with people who believe it was highly inappropriate for CEO Fadi Chehade to congratulate a participant, from the stage during a previous meeting, on her visible pregnancy.
For ICANN’s chairman to make a joke about a transgender person’s transition at the opening ceremony of a major meeting? That’s a misjudgment, in my view.
ICANN, recall, has recently been bombarded with letters from equal rights groups over the decision by the Economist Intelligence Unit to reject a .gay gTLD applicant’s Community Priority Evaluation.
EIU based its decision in large part on the fact that the proposed .gay community included transgender and intersex people, which the EIU said were not encapsulated by the string “gay”.
ICANN has expected standards of behavior for its meetings that cover such things as sexism and homophobia.
UPDATE: Crocker issued the following statement on ICANN’s Facebook account:

I understand that I may have inadvertently offended some during my speech at this morning’s welcome session with a reference to Caitlyn Jenner, which was intended as a salute. It opened up an important dialog that is consistent with our principles.
Please know that I view Caitlyn’s decision to be heroic and brave. I made this reference solely because of the world attention on a transition and it was not intended in any way, shape or form to be a criticism of her heroic decision. I was in no way making light or poking fun at her transition, but rather playing on the world attention on a “transition.” I apologize if my comments were perceived in a different manner than I intended them.
Dr. Stephen Crocker
ICANN Board Chair

Photo credit: James Bladel.

URS fight brewing at ICANN 53

Kevin Murphy, June 22, 2015, Domain Registries

Should the Uniform Rapid Suspension process spread from new gTLDs to incumbent gTLDs, possibly including .com?
That’s been the subject of some strong disagreements during the opening weekend of ICANN 53, which formally kicks off in Buenos Aires today.
During sessions of the Generic Names Supporting Organization and the ICANN board and staff, ICANN was accused of trying to circumvent policy-making processes by forcing URS into the .travel, .pro and .cat registry agreements, which are up for renewal.
ICANN executives denied doing any such thing, saying the three registries volunteered to have URS included in their new contracts, which are modeled on the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement.
“It’s just something we’ve suggested and they’ve taken up,” said Cyrus Namazi, ICANN’s vice president of domain name services.
If a registry wants to increase the number of rights protection mechanisms in its gTLD, why not let them, ICANN execs asked, pointing out that loads of new gTLDs have implemented extra RPMs voluntarily.
ICANN admits that it stands to benefit from operational efficiencies when its registry agreements are more uniform.
Opponents pointed out that there’s a difference between Donuts, say, having its bespoke, voluntary Domain Protected Marks List, and bilaterally putting the URS into an enforceable ICANN contract.
URS is not a formal Consensus Policy, they say, unlike UDRP. Consensus Policies apply to all gTLDs, whereas URS was created by ICANN for new gTLDs alone.
Arguably leading the fight against URS osmosis is Phil Corwin, counsel for Internet Commerce Association, which doesn’t want its clients’ vast portfolios of .com domains subject to URS.
He maintained over the weekend that his beef was with the process through which URS was making its way into proposed legacy gTLD contracts.
It shouldn’t be forced upon legacy gTLDs without a Consensus Policy, he said.
While the GNSO, ICANN staff and board spent about an hour talking about “process” over the weekend, it was left to director Chris Disspain to point out that that was basically a smokescreen for an argument about whether the URS should be used in other gTLDs.
He’s right, but the GNSO is split on this issue in unusual ways.
Corwin enjoys the support of the Business Constituency, of which he is a member, in terms of his process criticisms if not his criticisms of RPMs more generally.
ICA does also have backing from some registrars (which bear the support costs of dealing with customers affected by URS), from the pro-registrant Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, and from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Intellectual Property Constituency thinks that the process is just fine — .travel et al can sign up to URS if they want to.
While the registries have not yet put forward a joint position, the IPC’s view has been more or less echoed by Donuts, which owns the largest portfolio of new gTLDs.
The public comment period for the .travel contract ended yesterday. Comments can be read here. Comment periods on .cat and .pro close July 7.

Chehade makes case for insider CEO in frank assessment of failings

Kevin Murphy, June 22, 2015, Domain Policy

Outgoing ICANN CEO has made a case for his successor to be somebody already intimately familiar with the ICANN community.
His remarks, which stopped short of explicitly recommending an insider take over his position when he leaves next March, came during a frank self-assessment of his shortcomings in the job at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires yesterday.
“There are many things I could have done better or done differently,” Chehade said before an audience of Generic Names Supporting Organization members.
He freely confessed to jumping headlong into the job before he fully understood ICANN as a community; how it functions and where the real power is supposed to be wielded.
The key example of that, he said, was the creation of some of the rules now in use at the Trademark Clearinghouse.
“I meant well, I intended well, but I broke every process in the system,” he said. “I didn’t know, and I really didn’t realize that I didn’t until later.”
That’s a reference to late 2012, when Chehade convened a series of secretive, invitation-only community meetings that gave the Intellectual Property Constituency yet another chance to have rights protection mechanisms strengthened.
Chehade famously even asked participants to not even live-tweet during the discussions, it was not webcast, and recordings of (some of) the sessions were not published until DI filed a Documentary Information Disclosure Process request.
These “strawman” meetings culminated in the IPC being given the “Trademark+50” mechanism, which allows variations on trademarks to be protected, and the Non-Commercial Users Constituency to claim its voice had been under-represented and largely ignored.
For this reason and others, Chehade now says his successor had better have “very very good preparation and orientation”.
“Spending about seven minutes with the prior CEO before I took this job is not something I recommend,” he said, apparently a reference to time spent with his predecessor, Rod Beckstrom.
“This is a very complex job, and a very layered role, and I had no orientation to speak of,” he said. “If he or she is not someone who knows this community, this person better have a lot of orientation.”
He described how it took him some time to get to grips with the idea that he’s not a CEO in the conventional sense, able to make changes at will and answerable only to the board of directors.
“I am not a CEO,” he said. “There are types of CEO and this is a servant CEO job. Until you get that you keep hitting walls.”
He also described the job as “a politician without a flag” and “community facilitator”.
His biggest regret, he said, was failing to immediately realize that the facilitator function was the most important part of the job.
It took a clash last year about accountability being a key part of the IANA transition for him to realize this, he said.
“I hope you will all contribute in finding a person who will serve you well from day one, not like me, who from day one will arrive understanding all the parts of this,” he said.
Whether he intended it or not, this sounds like Chehade would err towards hiring an ICANN community veteran as his successor.
He said his replacement should be somebody who “knows all the things I learned, hopefully on day one, or on month one. Or on year one, but not three years in.”
It should be noted that Chehade turned down the chance to be a part of the team that will choose his successor.
Chehade’s position appears to diametrically opposed that of his predecessor. During Beckstrom’s tenure as “outgoing” CEO, he explicitly recommended an outsider take over the role.
“I hope that the person who replaces me will be of the highest integrity and has no recent or current commercial or career interests in the domain industry, because ICANN’s fairness, objectivity and independence are of paramount importance to the future of the internet,” Beckstrom said in October 2011.
Beckstrom’s remarks came as ICANN came under intensified scrutiny over perceived conflicts of interest.
Peter Dengate Thrush had recently come to the end of his tenure as ICANN chair, pushing through the (premature?) approval of the new gTLD program in his last few days on the job and joining applicant Minds + Machines just a few weeks later.
Chehade’s remarks yesterday come as ICANN is in a different position.
When he leaves next March, ICANN will either be freshly decoupled from its oversight relationship with the US government, or will be on the verge of it.
It won’t be an easy time for a new CEO to take over, trying to steer the organization under a fresh, untested set of governance principles.
When it comes to “insiders” with intimate knowledge of ICANN, there are a few community members not already on ICANN staff I could imagine pitching themselves for the CEO’s job.
But there’s also the possibility of an internal hire.
Remember, one of Chehade’s first actions upon taking the job was to hire the two other people who had been on the board’s final shortlist — Tarek Kamel and Sally Costerton.
Kamel, once a controversial minister in Mubarak’s Egyptian government, is currently Chehade’s senior advisor for government engagement.
Costerton was London-based EMEA CEO at the public relations agency Hill & Knowlton. Today, she’s the senior advisor for global stakeholder engagement. She maintains a blog about women in leadership positions that some readers might find eye-opening in the ICANN CEO search context.
Both were considered CEO material three years ago, and both now have three years of ICANN experience to put on their job applications (if they choose to file them).
So why is Chehade leaving ICANN? The persistent rumors have him either being offered the job of his dreams elsewhere, or suffering a severe case of ICANN burnout.
But yesterday he left little doubt whether his next job, which it has been confirmed he already has lined up, would be better that his current one.
“[ICANN CEO] is a beautiful job. It is a fantastic job. It is better job that I’ve ever had, or will ever have I think. It is amazing. Lucky is the person who will take my place,” he said.
So, um, why quit?
“The next phase of ICANN requires a different person. Don’t go rehire Fadi. You don’t need another Fadi. I was there for a purpose, for a time,” he said. “I am a classic change agent CEO. I either build things from scratch… or I transform things. ICANN doesn’t need this now.”
Asked to comment on his biggest successes, Chehade deferred, saying his legacy was something to talk about at a different time.

Famous Four following .sucks playbook with premium pricing for brands?

Kevin Murphy, June 21, 2015, Domain Registries

New gTLD registry Famous Four Media has slapped general availability prices of $500 and up on domain names matching famous brands.
The company plans to shortly introduce eight “premium” pricing tiers, ranging from $200 a year to $10,000 a year.
The first to launch, on July 8, will be its “brand protection tier”, which will carry a $498 registry fee.
Famous Four told its registrars that the tier “will provide an additional deterrent to cyber-squatters for well-known brands ensuring that domain names in this tier will not be eligible for price promotions”.
The gTLDs .date, .faith and .review will be first to use the tiered pricing structure.
It’s not entirely clear what brands will be a part of the $498 tier, or how the registry has compiled its list, but registrars have been given the ability to ask for their clients’ trademarks to be included.
I asked Famous Four for clarification a few days ago but have not yet had a response.
While other registries, such as Donuts, used tiered pricing for GA domains, I’m only aware of one other that puts premium prices on brands: .sucks.
Vox Populi has a trademark-heavy list of .sucks domains it calls Market Premium — formerly Sunrise Premium — that carry a $1,999-a-year registry fee.
Unlike Vox Pop, Famous Four does not appear to be planning a subsidy that would make brand-match domains available at much cheaper prices to third parties.
Famous Four’s gTLDs have seen huge growth in the last month or two, largely because it’s been selling domains at a loss.
.science, for example, has over 300,000 registrations — making it the third-largest new gTLD — because Famous Four’s registry fee has been discounted to just $0.25 from May to July.
The same discount applies to .party (over 195,000 names in its zone) and .webcam (over 60,000).
Those three gTLDs account for exactly half of the over 22,000 spam attacks that used new gTLD domains in March and April, according to Architelos’ latest abuse report.
With names available at such cheap prices, it would not be surprising if cybersquatters are abusing these gTLDs as much as the spammers.
Will intellectual property owners believe a $498+ reg fee is a useful deterrent to cybersquatting?
Or will they look upon this move as “predatory”, as they did with .sucks?

Donuts makes private deal with wine-makers

Kevin Murphy, June 21, 2015, Domain Registries

Donuts inked a private side-deal with wine-making regions in order to launch the .wine and .vin new gTLDs
The company signed both Registry Agreements with ICANN late last week, after the wine regions and the European Union stopped complaining.
The EU and regions had filed Cooperative Engagement Process objections with ICANN, saying that Donuts should be forced to protect “geographic indicators” such as Napa Valley and Champagne.
CEPs are often precursors to Independent Review Process complaints, but both were dropped after Donuts came to a private deal.
“The CEP filed by the Wine Regions was withdrawn because we came to a satisfactory private arrangement with the Registry concerned, Donuts,” David Taylor of Hogan Lovells, who represented the wine-making regions, told DI.
Details of the deal have not been disclosed, but Donuts does not appear to have committed to anything that could create compliance problems with ICANN in future.
“It has been a successful negotiation between private parties that avoids policy precedents,” Taylor said. “There are no special changes to these registry agreements (e.g., no new PICs)”
PICs are Public Interest Commitments, enforceable addenda to Registry Agreements that oblige the registry to adhere to extra rules.
So are GIs protected in .wine or not? For now, Taylor won’t say.
“My view is that this is not a victory for either side of the GI debate,” he said. “This is a victory for the wine community (consumers and producers) and ultimately the new gTLD program.”

Grogan hopeful of content policing clarity within “a few weeks”

Kevin Murphy, June 18, 2015, Domain Registrars

ICANN may be able to provide registrars, intellectual property interests and others with clarity about when domain names should be suspended as early as next month, according to compliance chief Allen Grogan.
With ICANN 53 kicking off in Buenos Aires this weekend, Grogan said he intends to meet with a diverse set of constituents in order to figure out what the Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires registrars to do when they receive abuse complaints.
“I’m hopeful we can publish something in the next few weeks,” he told DI. “It depends to some extent on what direction the discussions take.”
The discussions center on whether registrars are doing enough to take down domains that are being used, for example, to host pirated content or to sell medicines across borders.
Specifically at issue is section 3.18 of the 2013 RAA.
It requires registrars to take “reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately” when they receive abuse reports.
The people who are noisiest about filing such reports — IP owners and pharmacy watchdogs such as LegitScript — reckon “appropriate action” means the domain in question should be suspended.
The US Congress heard these arguments in hearings last month, but there were no witnesses from the ICANN or registrar side to respond.
Registrars don’t think they should be put in the position of having to turn off what may be a perfectly legitimate web site due to a unilateral complaint that may be flawed or frivolous.
ICANN seems to be erring strongly towards the registrars’ view.
“Whatever the terms of the 2013 RAA mean, it can’t really be interpreted as a broad global commitment for ICANN to enforce all illegal activity or all laws on the internet,” Grogan told DI.
“I don’t think ICANN is capable of that, I don’t think we have the expertise or resources to do that, and I don’t think the ICANN multistakeholder community has ever had that discussion and delegated that authority to ICANN,” he said.
CEO Fadi Chehade recently told the Washington Post that it isn’t ICANN’s job to police web content, and Grogan has expanded on that view in a blog post last week.
Grogan notes that what kind of content violates the law varies wildly from country to country — some states will kill you for blasphemy, in some you can get jail time for denying the Holocaust, in others political dissent is a crime.
“Virtually everybody I’ve spoken with has said that is far outside the scope of ICANN’s remit,” he said.
However, he’s leaving some areas open for discussion,
“There are some constituents, including some participants in the [Congressional] hearing — from the intellectual property community and LegitScript — who think there’s a way to distinguish some kinds of illegal activities from others,” he said. “That’s a discussion I’m willing to have.”
The dividing line could be substantial risk to public health or activities that are broadly, globally deemed to be illegal. Child abuse material is the obvious one, but copyright infringement — where Grogan said treaties show “near unanimity” — could be too.
So is ICANN saying it’s not the content police except when it comes to pharmacies and intellectual property?
“No,” said Grogan. “I’m saying I’m willing to engage in that dialogue and have that conversation with the community to see if there’s consensus that some activities are different to others.”
“In a multistakeholder model I don’t think any one constituency should control,” he said.
In practical terms, this all boils down to 3.18 of the RAA, and what steps registrars must take to comply with it.
It’s a surprisingly tricky one even if, like Grogan, you’re talking about “minimum criteria” for compliance.
Should registrars, for example, be required to always check out the content of domains that are the subject of abuse reports? It seems like a no-brainer.
But Grogan points out that even though there could be broad consensus that child abuse material should be taken down immediately upon discovery, in many places it could be illegal for a registrar employee to even check the reported URL, lest they download unwanted child porn.
Similarly, it might seem obvious that abuse reports should be referred to the domain’s registrant for a response. But what of registrars owned by domain investors, where registrar and registrant are one and the same?
These and other topics will come up for discussion in various sessions next week, and Grogan said he’s hopeful that decisions can be made that do not need to involve formal policy development processes or ICANN board action.

Barclays probably not breaching contract, says ICANN compliance chief

Kevin Murphy, June 16, 2015, Domain Registries

Barclays doesn’t seem to have violated its new gTLD registry agreements, despite admitting to criminal charges related to currency manipulation, according to ICANN’s top compliance executive.
Allen Grogan, chief contract compliance officer, told DI today that a “literal” reading of the Registry Agreements for .barclays and .barclaycard would not see the bank in breach.
“As far as I know we haven’t received a formal compliance complaint about it. If we received a complaint we would investigate it,” Grogan said.
“At first blush I wouldn’t see a clear-cut violation of the literal language of the agreement,” he said.
Barclays’ suitability to be a new gTLD registry has come under the spotlight in CircleID blog posts recently, first by domainer George Kirikos and then Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin.
All RAs contain a provision that allows ICANN to terminate the contract if any officer or director of the registry is convicted of a financially-related misdemeanor or any felony.
Barclays was one of five banks that recently fessed up to felony currency market fixing charges in the US, paying a combined $2.5 billion fine.
However, as Kirikos, Corwin and now Grogan have pointed out, the RA only talks about crimes committed by officers and directors, not the companies themselves.
Grogran pointed out that to hold a corporation accountable for its crimes long after the fact might be a bit excessive.
Criminal employees and directors can be fired, but a company cannot fire itself.
“Does that means for the next hundred years ICANN or no other corporation should do business with them?” he said.

ICANN ponders rejecting all closed generics

Kevin Murphy, June 16, 2015, Domain Registries

ICANN is thinking about rejecting all the remaining “closed generic” new gTLD applications from the current round.
According to minutes of a June 5 New gTLD Program Committee meeting published last night, ICANN is considering two options.
First, it could “prohibit exclusive generic TLDs in this round of the New gTLD Program and consult with the GNSO about developing consensus policy for future rounds”.
Or, it could initiate a “community process… to develop criteria to be used to evaluate whether an exclusive generic applicant’s proposed exclusive registry access serves a public interest goal.”
The NGPC has not yet reached a decision.
The rejection option would be fastest and easiest, but risks the wrath of companies that applied for closed generics — which were always envisaged when the new gTLD rules were being developed — in good faith.
Alternatively, developing a process to measure the applications against the “public interest” would be very time-consuming, possibly not even feasible, and would add even more delay to competing applicants.
This is one of the longest-delayed responses to the Governmental Advisory Committee’s April 2013 Beijing communique, which said “exclusive registry access should serve a public interest goal.”.
Closed generics, which ICANN now calls “exclusive access” gTLDs, are dictionary words that the applicant proposes to keep for itself, allowing no third parties to register names.
There are currently only six new gTLD applications that are stubbornly sticking to their original closed generic position.
Applicants for another 175 gTLDs have either changed their applications to allow third-party registrants or denied that they ever even planned to give themselves exclusive access.
Of the six hold-outs, three are delaying their respective contention sets while ICANN endlessly mulls the problem.
Here’s a table showing the affected strings.
[table id=33 /]
The applicants for the closed generics have each submitted responses explaining why they believe their proposals serve the public interest. They’re largely corporate legalese bibble.

US Congresspeople tell ICANN to ignore GAC “interference”

Kevin Murphy, June 12, 2015, Domain Policy

A bispartisan group of US Congresspeople have called on ICANN to stop bowing to Governmental Advisory Committee meddling.
Showing characteristic chutzpah, the governmental body advises ICANN that advice from governments should be viewed less deferentially in future, lest the GAC gain too much power.
The members wrote (pdf):

Recent reports indicate that the GAC has sought to increase its power at the expense of the multistakeholder system. Although government engagement in Internet governance is prudent, we are concerned that allowing government interference threatens to undermine the multistakeholder system, increasing the risk of government capture of the ICANN Board.

The letter was signed by 11 members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, which is one of the House committees that most frequently hauls ICANN to Capitol Hill to explain itself.
Most of the signatories are from the Republican majority, but some are Democrats.
It’s not entirely clear where they draw the line between “engagement” and “interference”.
The letter highlights two specific pieces of GAC input that the signatories seem to believe constitute interference.
First, the GAC’s objection to Amazon’s application for .amazon. The letter says this objection came “without legal basis” and that ICANN “succumbed to political pressure” when it rejected the application.
In reality, the GAC’s advice was consensus advice as envisaged by the Application Guidebook rules. It was the US government that succumbed to political pressure, when it decided to keep its mouth shut and allow the rest of the GAC to reach consensus.
The one thing the GAC did wrong was filing its .amazon objection outside of the window envisaged by the Guidebook, but that’s true of almost every piece of advice it’s given about new gTLD applications.
Second, the Congresspeople are worried that the GAC has seized for its members the right to ban the two-letter code representing their country from any new gTLD of their choosing.
I’ve gone into some depth into how stupid and hypocritical this is before.
The letter says that it has “negative implications for speech and the world economy”, which probably has a grain of truth in it.
But does it cross the line from “engagement” to “interference”?
The Applicant Guidebook explicitly “initially reserved” all two-letter strings at the second level in all new gTLDs.
It goes on to say that they “may be released to the extent that Registry Operator reaches agreement with the government and country-code manager.”
While the rule is pointless and the current implementation convoluted, it comes as a result of the GAC engaging before the new gTLD program kicked off. It was something that all registries were aware of when they applied for their gTLDs.
However, the GAC’s more recent behavior on the two-letter domain subject has been incoherent and looks much more like meddling.
At the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles last October, faced with requests for two-character domains to be released, the GAC issued formal advice saying it was “not in a position to offer consensus advice on the use of two-character second level domain names”.
ICANN’s board of directors accordingly passed a resolution calling for a release mechanism to be developed by ICANN staff.
But by the time February ICANN meeting rolled around, it had emerged that registries’ release requests had been put on hold by ICANN due to letters from the GAC.
The GAC then used its Singapore communique to advise ICANN to “amend the current process… so that relevant governments can be alerted as requests are initiated.” It added that “Comments from relevant governments should be fully considered.”
ICANN interpreted “fully considered” to mean an effective veto, which has led to domains such as it.pizza and fr.domains being banned.
So it does look like thirteenth-hour interference but that’s largely because the GAC is often incapable of making its mind up, rarely talks in specifics, and doesn’t meet frequently enough to work within timelines set by the rest of the community.
However, while there’s undoubtedly harm from registries being messed around by the GAC recently, governments don’t seem to have given themselves any powers that they did not already have in the Applicant Guidebook.

Canada shrugs over .sucks

Kevin Murphy, June 12, 2015, Domain Registries

The Canadian trade regulator has sent ICANN a big old “Whatever” in response to queries about the legalities of .sucks.
The response, sent by Industry Canada’s deputy minister John Knubley yesterday, basically says if the intellectual property lobby doesn’t like .sucks it can always take its complaints to the courts.
Other than opening and closing paragraphs of pleasantries, this is all Knubley’s letter (pdf) says:

Canada’s laws provide comprehensive protections for all Canadians. Canada has intellectual property, competition, criminal law and other relevant legal frameworks in place to protect trademark owners, competitors, consumers and individuals. These frameworks are equally applicable to online activities and can provide recourse, for example, to trademark owners concerned about the use of the dotSucks domains, provided that trademark owners can demonstrate that the use of dotSucks domains infringes on a trademark. Intellectual property rights are privately held and are settled privately by the courts.

There’s not much to go on in there; it could quite easily be a template letter.
But it seems that Vox Populi Registry has been cleared to go ahead with the launch of .sucks, despite IP owner complaints, at least as far as the US and Canadian regulators are concerned.
The Federal Trade Commission was equally noncommittal in its response to ICANN two weeks ago.
Vox Populi is based in Canada. It’s still not entirely clear why the FTC was asked its opinion.
ICANN had asked both agencies for comment on .sucks’ legality after its Intellectual Property Constituency raised concerns about Vox Pop’s “predatory” pricing.
Pricing for .sucks names in sunrise starts at around $2,000.
ICANN told DI in April that it was in “fact finding” mode, trying to see if Vox Pop was in breach of any laws or its Registry Agreement.
The .sucks domain is due to hit general availability one week from now, June 19, with a suggested retail price of $250 a year.
If anything, the $250 says much more about Vox Pop’s business model than the sunrise fees, in my opinion.