ICANN finally publishes THAT .africa letter, makes me look like an idiot

ICANN has finally published the letter it controversially drafted for the African Union Commission in order to help it express support for ZA Central Registry’s .africa bid.
Having now read the draft letter for the first time, on balance I’d have to say my previous opinions on its contents were more wrong than right.
The letter was central to claims by rival .africa applicant DotConnectAfrica that ICANN treated ZACR preferentially during the evaluation of both applications.
It was drafted by ICANN staffer Trang Nguyen around June 25, 2013, and sent to ZACR.
It was then edited by ZACR and the AUC, signed by the AUC, and returned to ICANN, whereupon it was forwarded to the new gTLD’s program’s Geographic Names Panel at InterConnect Communications.
The GNP took the letter as an official endorsement of ZACR’s bid, enabling it to pass the Geographic Names Review and proceed to the next stage of the program.
Having seen (and published) the signed AUC letter, I opined here in July that it looked like it had been mostly been written by ZACR and/or the AUC.
I no longer believe that.
It’s now proven that the AUC redraft goes far beyond the “minor edits” that have been claimed by DCA and others — for starters, it’s 40% longer — but a lot of the text that I believed to be ZACR’s work turns out in fact to have come from ICANN.
I’ve put the two letters into a single document (pdf), so you can do a side-by-side comparison if you wish.
There’s still no question that ZACR had African government support for its bid and DCA did not. The dispute centers entirely on whether InterConnect had received expressions of support in the correct format.
An Independent Review Process panel declined to issue an opinion on whether ICANN did anything wrong by drafting the letter, though it is mentioned in its final declaration.
ICANN itself says that it did nothing wrong by drafting the letter, and had DCA had any governmental support it would have done exactly the same thing for it.
The draft letter was among hundreds of pages of documents published last night by ICANN following a Documentary Information Disclosure Process request filed by DI a little over a month ago.

ICANN will post more uncensored .africa info

ICANN has committed to post more unredacted documents from its Independent Review Process case with DotConnectAfrica, following a request from DI.
The organization told DI today that it will publish the documents on its web site by August 31, in response to our July 27 Documentary Information Disclosure Request.
I’d asked ICANN to publish, unredacted, the entire declaration of the IRP panel, along with all equally unredacted exhibits and hearing transcripts.
Aware that ICANN enjoys invoking its “Defined Conditions for Non-Disclosure” in order to stop material being released sometimes, I added “that the public interest and transparency benefits to ICANN of disclosing this information far outweigh any benefit that could be accrued by invoking the Defined Conditions for Non-Disclosure”.
In response, ICANN said today (pdf) that it evaluates the public interest when processing DIDP requests, adding:

we have determined that to the extent additional information warrants disclosure and can be released without further consultation with third parties ICANN will publish that unredacted information no later than 31 August 2015. We will send you an email notification upon that publication. To the extent that disclosure of some information designated as confidential by third parties may be warranted and requires further consultation with third parties, or consultation with other third parties not previously consulted, ICANN has already initiated that consultation process. ICANN will publish such further unredacted information promptly upon, and to the extent that we receive, authorization from the relevant parties to release the information, and will send you an email notification upon that publication.

Since the DIDP was filed, ICANN has published over 700 pages of redacted transcripts from two in-person IRP hearings that took place in May.
Today, it also published a letter from DCA’s competing .africa applicant, ZA Central Registry, comprising an ultimately unsuccessful request for a couple of seats at the hearing.
What has not yet been published are the IRP exhibits showing exactly what ICANN did to oil the gears for ZACR’s application.
Due to Kieren McCarthy’s articles at The Register and ICANN’s subsequent admissions, we know that ICANN staff drafted a letter that the African Union Commission could use to express its support for ZACR in the correct format.
However, the IRP exhibits that would give clarity into what exactly ICANN sent and why remain redacted.
Communications between ICANN and InterConnect, which ran the Geographic Names Panel, and references to the Kenyan government’s did-they-didn’t-they support for DCA also remain redacted.

OpenTLD suspension reinstated

ICANN has suspended OpenTLD’s ability to sell gTLD domain names for the second time, following an arbitration ruling yesterday.
OpenTLD, part of the Freenom group, will not be able to sell gTLD names or accept inbound transfers from tomorrow — about two hours from now — to November 24, according to ICANN’s web site.
That doesn’t give the company much time to make the required changes to its web site and registrar systems.
As reported earlier today, OpenTLD lost its battle to have the suspension frozen in arbitration with ICANN.
The arbitrator agreed with ICANN Compliance that the registrar cybersquatted its competitors and has not yet done enough to ensure that it does not do the same again in future.

Yes, you are dangerous, arbitrator tells “cybersquatter” OpenTLD

Free domains provider OpenTLD has been dealt a crushing blow in its fight against the suspension of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
ICANN is now free to suspend OpenTLD’s RAA, due to the company’s “pattern of cybersquatting”, following a decision by an independent arbitrator.
The arbitrator ruled yesterday that OpenTLD’s suspension should go ahead, because “OpenTLD’s continued operation could potentially harm consumers and the public interest.”
The 90-day suspension was imposed by ICANN Compliance in June, after it became aware that OpenTLD had lost two UDRP cases filed by competing registrars.
WIPO panelists found in both cases that the company had infringed its competitors’ trademarks in order to entice resellers over to its platform.
The suspension was put on hold voluntarily by ICANN, pending the arbitrator’s ruling on OpenTLD’s request for emergency stay. That request was conclusively rejected yesterday.
The arbitrator wrote:

the Arbitrator has little doubt that the multiple abusive name registrations made by OpenTLD, each of which included the registered mark of a competing domain name registrar and OpenTLD’s subsequent use of those domains… formed part of a broad concerted effort by OpenTLD calculated to deliberately divert name registration business, otherwise destined for competing domain name registrars… away from those registrars to OpenTLD instead.

He wrote that OpenTLD needs to put a process in place to prevent similarly cybersquatty behavior in future, rather than just making a commitment to changing its ways.
It’s pretty harsh stuff.
OpenTLD said recently that a suspension would “devastate” and “decimate” its business, due to the intertwining of its massive ccTLD business and rather smaller gTLD platform, but the arbitrator thought a technology workaround would be rather simple to implement.
No RAA means no gTLD sales and no inbound transfers.
OpenTLD is part of Freenom, which runs .tk and other free-to-register ccTLDs.
The company’s only ray of sunlight in the ruling is that the arbitrator said the costs of the proceeding should be split equally, not all falling on OpenTLD’s shoulders.
ICANN has not yet re-instituted the suspension, but it could come soon.
The full ruling can be read here.

Panel throws out ludicrous .shop confusion ruling

The new gTLD strings .shop and .通販 are not too confusingly similar-looking to coexist on the internet.
While that may be blindingly obvious to anyone who is not already blind, it’s taken the ICANN process three years to arrive at this conclusion.
An August 18 ruling by a three-person International Centre for Dispute Resolution appeals panel has “reversed, replaced and superseded” a two-year-old decision by a lone String Confusion Objection panelist. The appeals panel found:

the [original] expert panel could not have reasonably come to the decision reached by it in connection with the underlying String Confusion Objection
…
The two strings indisputably have no visual or aural similarity, are in different languages, written in different scripts that look very different, and have different phonetic spellings and pronunciations.

.通販 is the Japanese for “.onlineshopping”, applied for by Amazon in the 2012 new gTLD round.
.shop is a contested string applied for by Commercial Connect and others.
The two strings were ruled dissimilar by the String Similarity Panel in February 2013, but Commercial Connect filed the SCO a few weeks later.
In an SCO, the complainant must show that it is “probable, not merely possible” that the two strings will get mixed up by internet users.
In August 2013, ICDR panelist Robert Nau ignored that burden of proof and inexplicably ruled that the two strings were too similar to coexist and should therefore be placed in a contention set.
Nau would later rule that .shop and .shopping are also confusingly similar.
The .通販 decision was widely criticized for being completely mad.
Amazon appealed the decision via the ICANN Request for Reconsideration, but predictably lost.
After much lobbying, last October ICANN’s board of directors created an appeals process for SCO decisions, but limited the appellant pool to Amazon with .通販 and applicants for .cam (which had been ruled similar to .com).
Now, 10 months later, we finally have a sane decision in the Amazon case. Its application will presumably now be removed from the .shop contention set.
Read the final ruling here.

Registrants guilty until proven innocent, say UK cops

UK police have stated an eyebrow-raising “guilty until proven innocent” point of view when it comes to domain name registrations, in comments filed recently with ICANN.
In a Governmental Advisory Committee submission (pdf) to a review of the Whois accuracy rules in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, unspecified “UK law enforcement” wrote:

Internet governance efforts by Industry, most notably the ICANN 2013 RAA agreement have seen a paradigm shift in Industry in the way a domain name is viewed as “suspicious” before being validated as “good” within the 15 day period of review.
UK law enforcement’s view is that a 45 day period would revert Industry back to a culture of viewing domains “good” until they are proven “bad” therefore allowing crime to propagate and increase harm online.

The GAC submission was made August 13 to a public comment period that closed July 3.
The Whois Accuracy Program Specification Review had proposed a number of measures to bring more clarity to registrars under the 2013 RAA.
One such measure, proposed by the registrars, was to change the rules so that registrars have an extra 30 days — 45 instead of 15 — to validate registrants’ contact information before suspending the domain.
That’s what the UK cops — and the GAC as a whole — don’t like.
They have a point, of course. Criminals often register domains with bogus contact information with the expectation that the domains will not have a long shelf life. Fifteen days is actually quite generous if you want to stop phishing attacks, say.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group says phishing attacks have an average up-time of 29 hours.
Clearly, ICANN’s Whois accuracy program is doing little to prevent phishing as it is; a switch to 45 days would presumably have little impact.
But the number of domains suspended for lack of accuracy at any given time is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, and registrars say it’s mostly innocent registrants who are affected.
Verisign said this March that .com domains “on hold” grew from roughly 394,000 names at the end of 2013 to about 870,000 at the end of 2014.
In June 2014, registrars claimed that over 800,000 domains had been suspended for want of Whois accuracy in the first six months the policy was in place.

US gives ICANN an extra year to complete transition

US government oversight of ICANN and the domain name system will end a year later than originally expected.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration said last night that it has extended ICANN’s IANA contract until September 30, 2016, giving the community and others more time to complete and review the transition proposals.
NTIA assistant secretary Larry Strickling wrote that “it has become increasingly apparent over the last few months that the community needs time to complete its work, have the plan reviewed by the U.S. Government and then implement it if it is approved.”
Simultaneously, NTIA has finally published a proposal — written by ICANN and Verisign — for how management of the DNS root will move away from hands-on US involvement.
The extension of the IANA contract from its September 30, 2015 end date was not unexpected. The current contract allows for such extensions.
As we recently reported, outgoing ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade had guessed a mid-2016 finalization of the transition.
Regardless, expect op-eds in the coming days to claim this as some kind of political victory against the Obama administration.
Part of the reason for the extension, beyond the fact that the ICANN community hasn’t finished its work yet, is legislation proposed in the US.
The inappropriately named DOTCOM Act, passed by the House but frozen for political reasons in the Senate by Tea Party presidential hopeful Sen Ted Cruz, would give Congress 30 legislative days (which could equal months of real time) to review the IANA transition proposals.
There are basically three prongs to the transition, each with very long names.
The “Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the Global Multistakeholder Community” is the first.
That was created by the multistakeholder IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) and deals with how the IANA contract will be managed after the US government goes away.
The second prong comes from the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability, which deals with how ICANN itself can improve its accountability to the internet community without the Damoclean sword of US intervention hanging over it.
The CCWG’s latest draft report would strengthen the ICANN board against capture by, for example, making certain bylaws harder to amend and giving the community the right to fire directors.
Both of these proposals are currently open for public comment here.
The third prong, which only appears to have been published this week, deals with the nuts and bolts of how changes to the DNS root zone are made.
The current system is a tripartite arrangement between IANA, NTIA and Verisign.
When a TLD operator needs a change to the DNS root — for example adding a name server for its TLD — the request is submitted to and processed by IANA, sent to NTIA for authorization, then actually implemented on the primary root server by Verisign.
Under the new proposal (pdf) to phase the NTIA out of this arrangement, the NTIA’s “authorization” role would be temporarily complemented by a parallel “authentication” role.
The proposal is not written in the clearest English, even by ICANN standards, but it seems that the current Root Zone Management System would be duplicated in its entirety and every change request would have to be processed by both systems.
The output of both would be compared for discrepancies before Verisign actually made the changes to the root.
It seems that this model is only being proposed as a temporary measure, almost like a proof of concept to demonstrate that the NTIA’s current authorization role isn’t actually required and won’t be replaced in this brave new world.

Did Chehade really quit ICANN for this?

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade will become a senior adviser with a private equity firm after he leaves ICANN next March.
He blogged today that he will take the role with Boston-based ABRY Partners and “provide guidance to ABRY’s partners and their companies’ leaders on digital strategy”.
Chehade, back in June, had described the ICANN CEO role as a “better job that I’ve ever had, or will ever have”.
He had years left on his contract.
My first thought is: really? This is the gig you quit ICANN for?
I’m drawn down the path of thinking that rather than finding the job of his dreams elsewhere, the dude is just suffering from ICANN burnout.
Chehade suggests in his post that ABRY is not a full-time job, writing: “I expect to add other roles to my portfolio and will update you all as appropriate.”
ABRY, at first glance, does not appear to have any significant connection to the domain name industry or to ICANN itself.

OpenTLD says suspension would “devastate” its business

OpenTLD has fired off its newest salvo in its ongoing cybersquatting dispute with ICANN, saying the ICANN-imposed suspension would “devastate” its business.
The company has also addressed many of ICANN’s cybersquatting allegations, while failing to deny it squatted on two competitors’ trademarks.
In its latest arbitration filing (pdf), OpenTLD said: “Quite simply, the suspension of OpenTLD’s ability to offer gTLD registrations and inbound transfers would decimate its unique business model.”
ICANN had argued that the suspension of its registrar accreditation was no big deal because its gTLD domain base is measured in the low thousands, whereas the total domains under management of parent Freenom, which offers free domains in .tk and other ccTLDS, is in excess of 25 million.
But OpenTLD said the two businesses as “deeply intertwined” and separating the two would impair its ability to do business.
ICANN is pushing for the suspension because OpenTLD lost two UDRP cases earlier this year. Both were filed by competitors — Key-Systems and NetEarth — who accused the registrar of attempting to lure resellers to its platform by infringing rivals’ trademarks.
ICANN has since followed up by accusing OpenTLD of continuing to cybersquat famous brands, including Google and Facebook, even after the suspension notice was issued. These claims, as I noted last week, are very dubious, however.
In its latest filing, OpenTLD denies that any of those domains — all of which use its privacy service — were registered by itself. It goes so far as to name the actual registrants.
But it fails to deny that it was the true registrant of the Key-Systems and NetEarth domains lost in the UDRP cases.
Rather, it focuses on ICANN’s claims that it committed “cyberflight” by deleting the UDRP’d domains rather than allowing them to be transferred to the trademark owners.
It admits that the domains were deleted but said this was “inadvertent” and that it attempted to transfer them to its competitors later.
OpenTLD wants the threatened suspension stayed.
The case continues. A decision by the arbitration panel is expected August 24.

OpenTLD cybersquatting fight escalates

ICANN has accused OpenTLD, the registrar arm of Freenom, of cybersquatting famous brands even after it was threatened with suspension.
The claims may be worrying for some registrars as ICANN may in fact be holding the registrar responsible for the actions of its proxy service customers.
OpenTLD was suspended by ICANN in early July, after two UDRP rulings found the company had cybersquatted rival registrars’ brands in order to poach customers.
The suspension was lifted after just a few hours when OpenTLD took ICANN to arbitration under the terms of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
In ICANN’s latest arbitration filing, the organization’s lawyers argue that the suspension should not be stayed, because OpenTLD has been shown to engage in a pattern of cybersquatting.
Like the original suspension notice, the filing cites the two UDRP losses, along with footnotes indicating that as many as seven competing brands had been cybersquatted.
But ICANN has now also escalated its allegations to bring in non-registrar brands where it’s far from clear that OpenTLD is the actual registrant.
ICANN’s filing states:

even a brief review of the domain names in OpenTLD’s portfolio demonstrates that OpenTLD appears to be continuing to engage in bad faith and abusive registration practices. As of 3 August 2015, there were at least 73 gTLD domains registered to Stichting OpenTLD WHOIS Proxy (which is OpenTLD’s proxy service) that are identical to or contain the registered trademarks or trade names of third parties, including, by way of small example, the domain names barnesandnoble.link, sephora.bargains, at-facebook.com, ebaybh.com, googlefreeporn.com, global-paypal.com, hotmailtechnicalsupport.com, and secure-apple.com. ICANN is not aware of any legitimate interest or right that OpenTLD has to use these third-party trademarks and trade names.
Even more concerning is the fact that at least 14 gTLD domain names that contain the registered trademarks or trade names of third parties were registered by OpenTLD’s proxy service after the 23 June 2015 Suspension Notice was issued to OpenTLD, further demonstrating that OpenTLD’s overtures of “cooperation” ring hollow.

To be clear, that’s ICANN accusing OpenTLD of cybersquatting because some of the domains registered via its privacy service appear to be trademark infringements.
It’s basically equating infringing use of OpenTLD’s proxy service (such the registration of barnesandnoble.link) with the infringing behavior of OpenTLD itself (such as the registration of godaddy.cf, a February 2015 screenshot of which can be seen below.)

This may just be legal posturing, but I imagine many other registrars would be worried to know that they could have their accreditation suspended for cybersquatting simply because some of their privacy customers are cybersquatters.
I’d wager that every proxy/privacy service available has been used by blatant cybersquatters at one time or another.
Filings in the arbitration case can be found here.