We grassed up .TOP, says free abuse outfit

A community-run URL “blacklist” project has claimed credit for the complaints that led to .TOP Registry getting hit by an ICANN Compliance action earlier this week.

.TOP was told on Tuesday that it has a month to sort of its abuse-handing procedures or risk losing the .top gTLD, which has over three million domains.

ICANN said the company had failed to respond to an unspecified complainant that had reported multiple phishing attacks, and now the source of that complaint has revealed itself in a news release.

URLAbuse says it was the party that reported the attacks to .TOP, which according to ICANN happened in mid April.

“Despite repeated notifications, the .TOP Registry Operator failed to address these issues, prompting URLAbuse to escalate the matter to ICANN,” URLAbuse said, providing a screenshot of ICANN’s response.

URLAbuse provides a free abuse blocklist that anyone is free to incorporate into their security setup. Domain industry partners include Radix, XYZ.com and Namecheap.

ICANN to earmark $10 million for new gTLD subsidies

ICANN is planning to give $5 million of its auctions war-chest to new gTLD applicants from less well-off nations and wants community feedback on the idea.

The Org is sitting on over $200 million raised by auctioning gTLDs from the 2012 application round, and thinks some of it could be well-spent on subsidizing applicants in the next round.

It wants to create a $10 million fund for the Applicant Support Program, half of which will come from the auction proceeds and half of which will be covered by the existing program budget.

ICANN says this will be enough to provide “meaningful support for up to 45 new gTLD applicants”.

The auction funds have previously been used to replenish ICANN’s reserve and to launch the new Grant Program, which is making $10 million available with year to worthy, on-topic projects.

Clearly, at that rate, the Grant Program may well never exhaust the auction fund, given the likelihood of future auctions and investment gains over the next couple of decades.

The Applicant Support Program will be open to non-profit or small business applicants in most of the world’s territories, as I previously blogged. In the 2012 round, three applicants applied but only one received the discount.

The request to divert some of the cash into the ASP is not subject to a regular public comment process. Rather, ICANN’s community groups have been asked to send their thoughts to the board directly before August 12.

First registry gets breach notice over new abuse rules

.TOP Registry allegedly ignored reports about phishing attacks and has become the first ICANN contracted party to get put on the naughty step over DNS abuse rules that came into effect a few months ago.

ICANN has issued a public breach notice claiming that the registry, which runs .top, has also been ignoring the results of Uniform Rapid Suspension cases, enabling cybersquatting to take place.

The notice says that .TOP breached new rules, which came into effect April 5, that require it to act on reports of DNS abuse (such as malware or phishing attacks) by suspending the domains or referring them to the responsible registrar.

The registry didn’t do this with respect to a report of April 18, concerning “multiple .top domain names allegedly used to conduct phishing attacks”. It didn’t even read the report until contacted by ICANN, according to the notice.

As of yesterday, only 33% of the phishing domains have been suspended by their registrars, some three months after the attacks were reported, ICANN says.

Compliance is also concerned that .TOP seems to be ignoring notices from Forum, the company that processes URS cases, requiring domains to be locked within 24 hours when they’ve been hit with a charge of cybersquatting.

The registry “blatantly and repeatedly violated” these rules, according to ICANN.

.TOP has been given until August 15 to get its act together or risk having its Registry Agreement suspended or terminated.

The registry has about three million .top domains under management, having long been one of the most successful new gTLDs of the 2012 round in volume terms. It typically sells domains very cheaply, which of course attracts bad actors.

Americans and ICANNers avoid Kigali in droves

The number of North Americans and ICANN staffers turning up to the latest community meeting hit their lowest numbers since records began, according to newly published ICANN statistics.

In-person attendance plummeted compared to the same meeting last year, and the total number of North Americans collecting lanyards was the lowest since ICANN started tracking these things in 2016.

The number of staffers showing up to ICANN 80 in Kigali, Rwanda last month also tied as the lowest-ever turnout for Org employees.

There were 214 North Americans at Kigali, compared to 612 at the Washington DC meeting a year earlier and 262 at the meeting in The Hague in 2022, which was the first post-pandemic non-virtual meeting.

The previous low was 310, at the ICANN 65 meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.

It’s probably no surprise that many regular attendees stayed away. The shorter, mid-year Policy Forum meetings typically see the lowest in-person participation, and that’s particularly noticeable when the rotation has them held in Africa.

Flight web sites I checked show no direct flights from the US to Kigali. A connection at a European hub is required and you’re realistically looking at over 24 hours of travel time. Asian community members have it a little easier, with connecting hubs available in the Middle East.

For ICANN, the lower number of staff being sent may be indicative of the Org’s latest belt-tightening moves, which recently saw a number of staff laid off.

RDRS stats improve a little in June

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service saw a small improvement in usage and response times in June, but it did lose a registrar, according to statistics published today.

There were 170 requests for private Whois data in the month, up a little from May’s historic low of 153, and 20.88% were approved, compared to 20.29% in May.

The mean average response time for an approved request was down to 6.59 days, from 11.34 days in May and April’s huge 14.09 days. Since the RDRS project began last November, the median response time is two days.

Smaller registrar OwnRegistrar opted out of the program during the month, but the coverage in percentage terms held steady at 59%, with 90 registrars of various sizes still participating.

Four more gTLDs in emergency measures

ICANN has thrown four more gTLDs into the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, presumably as a prelude to terminating their registry’s contracts in a few weeks.

Asia Green IT System’s .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) are all going EBERO, meaning Nominet will take over their operation on ICANN’s behalf.

Not that they need much operation, given that all four, which all connect in some way to Iran and Iranian culture, were unlaunched and dormant, with no third-party registrations.

The four TLDs, along with AGIT’s .nowruz, which went into EBERO last week, had been running on CoCCA’s back-end, but it sounds rather like the registry forgot to pay its bills, causing CoCCA to disable its services.

That led to functions such as Whois going offline, triggering a breach of the ICANN Registry Agreement. A day of Whois downtime in one week gives ICANN grounds to get Nominet involved and move towards termination.

A breach notice issued a couple weeks ago gave AGIT until the end of the month to come back into compliance or risk termination. That escalation now appears inevitable.

AGIT almost got to run .islam and .halal, but had its applications rejected after protests from governments of Muslim-majority country. Somehow, .shia did not receive the same outcry.

Unstoppable announces another new gTLD bid

In the run-up to the 2012 new gTLD application round, we were hard-pressed to find a company willing to announce an application. This time around, announcements are coming out of the blockchain world at the rate of about one a week.

Unstoppable Domains has announced that it’s working with Raiinmaker Network to operate .raiin, first as a blockchain-only namespace and later as a new gTLD hopeful.

Raiinmaker says it developers a blockchain protocol that “utilizes decentralized AI and scalable Web3 powered infrastructure to transform the distribution of value tied to authentic identity, data and behavior.”

No, me neither.

Unstoppable said it “will be planning and strategizing with Raiinmaker Network for the next ICANN gTLD application to further solidify its place in the digital landscape.”

It’s the tenth potential application the company has publicly revealed.

Blockchain naming firm gets ICANN accreditation

A company heavily involved in promoting blockchain-based domain name alternatives has received its ICANN registrar accreditation, allowing it to sell real domains as well.

Switzerland-based Freename’s London subsidiary seems to have obtained the accreditation in the last week or so. Accreditation means it gets the right to sell gTLD domains from any registry that it can sign a contract with.

Freename currently sells names in thousands of “TLDs”, some of which look very similar to existing ICANN gTLDs albeit with the addition of emojis, and which of course only work with special client software installed.

ICANN does not accept gTLD applications including emojis, so there’s no risk of collisions at the technical level, even if the text portion of the Freename suffix matches a DNS TLD.

Fellow blockchain naming company Unstoppable Domains already sells real .com domains, but I believe that’s as a reseller rather than a full-fat ICANN registrar.

Last year, it emerged that ICANN had turned down an offer of sponsorship from Freename.

This article was updated July 15, 2024 with additional information about Freename’s use of emojis.

ICANN takes over gTLD after Whois failures

ICANN has swooped to take over operation of a new gTLD after it missed its strict thresholds for Whois availability.

.nowruz, originally operated by Istanbul-based Asia Green IT System, is now in the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator program, meaning its essential functions will be carried out by Nominet.

The gTLD is the Latinized version of the word for the Persian new year holiday. It has barely a dozen domains under management and is the only one of AgitSys’s five gTLDs with any registrations.

The company’s other gTLDs — .pars, .shia, .tci and .همراه (.xn--mgbt3dhd) — were also all found to have breached their registry agreements, but as they have no third-party domains where was no need for the EBERO, ICANN said.

The takeover follows a rapidly issued notice last week, in which ICANN Compliance accused AgitSys of a range of breaches of contract.

It seems AGIT went into breach with ICANN after its back-end provider, CoCCA, terminated its contract after a “breach” earlier this year. CoCCA said it had been turning off services ever since the contract ended.

.nowruz becomes the third gTLD from the 2012 round to go into emergency measures, the others being .desi and .wed, which went EBERO seven years ago.

ICANN said it planned to auction off .wed in 2021, but nothing has come of that plan yet.

Verisign: would-be .com contract killers are “wrong”

Verisign has responded to the campaign to have the US government cancel its contract to run .com and open the agreement to competitive bidding, saying it is “wrong” and “based on a fundamental misunderstanding” of the deal.

The American Economic Liberties Project, the Demand Progress Education Fund, and the Revolving Door Project put their names to letters last week calling the .com deal between ICANN and Verisign a “de facto cartel” that competition authorities should dismantle.

But, as others have also pointed out, Verisign says that removing the US government from the trilateral agreement would not have the effect the letter-writers believe it would.

In a regulatory filing, Verisign said:

The campaign, and the letters, assert that the 32-year-old Cooperative Agreement between the Department of Commerce (Department) and Verisign involving the .com top-level domain registry can be terminated by the Department on August 2, 2024, and, if it is, the management of .com can be transferred after a competitive bidding process. This assertion is wrong: If the Department chooses to sunset the Cooperative Agreement, which Verisign does not seek, the .com registry will continue to be managed pursuant to the terms of Verisign’s and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) valid, enforceable Registry Agreement

In other words, if the US government butts out, all that’s left to regulate .com pricing is ICANN, and ICANN is institutional averse to regulating pricing, believing it would open it up to genuine concerns about cartel-like behavior.

The Cooperative Agreement (pdf) states:

upon expiration or termination of the Cooperative Agreement, neither party shall have any further obligation to the other and nothing shall prevent Verisign from operating the .com TLD pursuant to an agreement with ICANN or its successor