ICANN steps in front of astrology lawsuit

ICANN has agreed to take over a critical online time zone database, after its original operators were sued for copyright infringement by an astrology software company.
The organization said last night that it will start to manage the Internet Time Zone Database, following the retirement of Arthur David Olson, who has managed it for nearly 30 years at the US National Institutes of Health.
“The Time Zone Database provides an essential service on the Internet and keeping it operational falls within ICANN’s mission of maintaining a stable and dependable Internet,” ICANN COO Akram Atallah said.
While it’s possible that ICANN will face criticism for this apparent case of “mission creep”, the move could actually be pretty good news for new top-level domains applicants.
The tz database is used by countless applications and platforms. It’s baked into Java, PHP, Perl, Python, .NET, PostgreSQL and BSD-derived operating systems including Mac OS X.
If ICANN is able to leverage those relationships, it may be able to increase adoption of its Universal Acceptance of TLDs project, an authoritative database of all live TLDs.
This could help new gTLDs, primarily those longer than three characters, have a smoother ride in terms of compatibility with internet software.
But the real reason for the handover to ICANN at this time appears to be the fact that Olson was sued at the end of September by Astrolabe, a Massachusetts-based provider of astrology software.
Astrolabe claims (pdf) it has copyright on some facts about historical time zone information, and has sued Olson for an injunction and damages
The lawsuit prompted the removal of the FTP site where the database is hosted, and oodles of bad karma for Astrolabe after the suit was reported in The Register.
So has ICANN just risked having its name added to the lawsuit in order to ensure the ongoing stability of the time zone database? Is it taking one for the team? It certainly appears so.
According to Astrolabe’s latest observations:

Conditions are confused and uncertain. Feelings run high. Perceptions are altered, leading to misunderstandings. Imagination, escapism, and gullibility are factors to contend with.

Indeed.

ICANN directors ruled out of CEO search

ICANN’s directors have been barred from applying for the soon-to-be-vacated CEO position.
The board elected a panel of directors to get the CEO search underway last Tuesday, but noted:

no current or incoming member of the Board or liaisons may be considered as a candidate for the role of the CEO for the current CEO Selection process.

A replacement for Rod Beckstrom, who announced that he will step down when his contract expires next June, will now be overseen by a special CEO Search Process Management Work Committee.
The committee will comprise: Steve Crocker, Bertrand de La Chapelle, Erika Mann Chris Disspain, Cherine Chalaby, Ray Plzak and R. Ramaraj. George Sadowsky will chair.
I had previously put at least three of those on my speculative list of “insiders” who could conceivably apply for the CEO’s job.

VeriSign yanks domain seizure power request

That was quick.
VeriSign has withdrawn its request for new powers to delete domain names being used for abusive purposes, just a few days after filing it with ICANN.
The company had proposed a policy that would give law enforcement the ability to seize .com and .net names apparently without a court order, and a new malware scanning service.
The former came in for immediate criticism from groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, while the latter appeared to have unnerved some registrars.
But now both proposals have been yanked from ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process queue.
This is not without precedent. Last year, VeriSign filed for and then withdrew requests to auction off one-letter .net names and a “Domain Name Exchange” service that looked a bit like domain tasting.
Both came in for criticism, and have not reappeared.
Whether the latest abuse proposals will make a reappearance after VeriSign has had time to work out some of the more controversial kinks remains to be seen.

Registrars not happy with VeriSign abuse plans

VeriSign has been talking quietly to domain name registrars about its newly revealed anti-abuse policies for several months, but some are still not happy about its plans for .com malware scans.
The company yesterday revealed a two-pronged attack on domain name abuse, designed to counteract a perception that .com is not as secure a space as it should be.
One prong, dealing with law enforcement requests to seize domains, I covered yesterday. It’s already received criticism from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union.
The other is an attempt to introduce automatic malware scanning into the .com, .net and .name spaces, rather like ICM Registry has said it will do with all .xxx domains.
Unlike the daily ICM/McAfee service, VeriSign’s free scans will be quarterly, but the company intends to also offer a paid-for upgrade that would search domains for malware more frequently.
On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea.
But some registrars are worried about the fading line between registrars, which today “own” the customer relationship, and the registries, which for the most part are hidden away in the cloud.
Go Daddy director of network abuse Ben Butler, asked about both of yesterday’s VeriSign proposals, said in a statement that they have “some merit”, but sounded several notes of caution:

This is going to make all registrars responsible for remediation efforts and negative customer-service clean up. The registrar at this point becomes the “middle man,” dealing with customers whose livelihood is being negatively impacted. As mentioned in their report, the majority of sites infected with malware were not created by the “bad guys.”
While there is an appeal process mentioned, it could take some time to get issues resolved, potentially leaving a customer’s website down for an extended period.
This could also create a dangerous situation, allowing registries to gain further control over registrars’ operations – as registrars have the relationship with the registrant, the registrar should be responsible for enforcing policies and facilitating remediation.

It has also emerged that VeriSign unilaterally introduced the malware scanning service as a mandatory feature of .cc and .tv domains – which are not regulated by ICANN – earlier this year.
The changes appear to have been introduced without fanfare, but are clearly reflected in today’s .tv registration policies, which are likely to form the basis of the .com policies.
Some registrars weren’t happy about that either.
Six European registrars wrote to VeriSign last month to complain that they were “extremely displeased” with the way the scanning service was introduced. They told VeriSign:

These changes mark the beginning of a substantive shift in the roles of registries regarding the monitoring and controlling of content and may lead to an increase of responsibility and liability of registries and registrars for content hosted elsewhere. As domain name registrars, we hold the position that the responsibilities for hosted content and the registration of a domain name are substantially different, and this view has been upheld in European court decisions numerous times. In this case, Verisign is assuming an up-front responsibility that surpasses even the responsibilities of a web hoster, and therefore opens the door to added responsibilities and legal liability for any form of abuse.
…
In the end, the registrar community will have to face the registrant backlash and criticism, waste countless hours of support time to explain this policy to the registrants and again every time they notice downtimes or loss of performance. These changes are entirely for the benefit of Verisign, but the costs are delegated to the registrants, the registrars and the hosting service providers.

The registrars were concerned that scanning could cause hosting performance hits, but VeriSign says the quarterly scan uses a virtual browser and is roughly equivalent to a single user visit.
They were also worried that the scans, which would presumably ignore robots.txt prohibitions on spidering, would be “intrusive” enough to potentially violate European Union data privacy laws.
VeriSign now plans to give all registrars an opt-out, which could enable them to avoid this problem.
It looks like VeriSign’s plans to amend the Registry-Registrar Agreement are heading for ICANN-overseen talks, so registrars may just be digging into a negotiating position, of course.
But it’s clear that there is some unease in the industry about the blurring of the lines between registries and registrars, which is only likely to increase as new gTLDs are introduced.
In the era of new gTLDs, and the liberalization of ICANN’s vertical integration prohibitions, we’re likely to see more registries having hands-on relationships with customers.

VeriSign’s .com takedown power grab causing controversy

VeriSign’s request for a wide-ranging set of powers that would enable it to shut down .com and .net domain names that are suspected of abuse is already attracting criticism.
The proposals came in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request to ICANN that I reported on for The Register this morning.
It’s asking (pdf) to be able to create a new anti-abuse policy that would refocus many of the controls currently in the hands of registrars to the registry level instead.
The policy would “allow the denial, cancellation or transfer” of any VeriSign-managed domain if any any of these conditions were triggered:

(a) to protect the integrity, security and stability of the DNS;
(b) to comply with any applicable court orders, laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency, or any dispute resolution process;
(c) to avoid any liability, civil or criminal, on the part of Verisign, as well as its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers, directors, and employees;
(d) per the terms of the registration agreement,
(e) to respond to or protect against any form of malware (defined to include, without limitation, malicious code or software that might affect the operation of the Internet),
(f) to comply with specifications adopted by any industry group generally recognized as authoritative with respect to the Internet (e.g., RFCs),
(g) to correct mistakes made by Verisign or any Registrar in connection with a domain name registration, or
(h) for the non-payment of fees to Verisign. Verisign also reserves the right to place upon registry lock, hold or similar status a domain name during resolution of a dispute;

As you can see, that’s a pretty broad range of justifications.
Notably, it would enable a domain to be canceled or transferred at the “requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency”, which would seem to circumvent the current practice of a court order being obtained before a domain is seized.
The question of what constitutes a “quasi-governmental agency” is also interesting. Is ICANN itself such a thing?
The policy would also enable a take-down “to avoid any liability, civil or criminal”, which seems to be just begging for VeriSign to be named spuriously in commercial lawsuits between .com registrants.
The RSEP also suggests that VeriSign plans to extend its hand of friendship to law enforcement agencies from outside the US:

Pilots with European Law Enforcement, Government CERTS and Registrars are planned, and other global test pilots will follow, to ensure global collaboration in the continuing development of the procedures.

Today, US agencies can get court orders instructing VeriSign to hand over domains. While imposing US law on .com owners from other countries is controversial, at least overseas registrants know where they stand.
Now VeriSign is talking about cooperating with European law enforcement agencies too.
At the risk of getting dangerously close to invoking Godwin’s Law, this brings us back to an old jurisdictional problem – what if the French police demand the seizure of a .com site selling Nazi memorabilia, which is illegal in France but legal in the US, for example?
Taking it a step further, what if VeriSign starts entertaining takedown requests from some of the world’s least pleasant theocracies, banana republics and dictatorships?
Half of .com could disappear overnight.
Since VeriSign has a business to run, that’s obviously not going to happen. So the company is going to have to draw a line somewhere, separating criminality from legitimate behavior and free speech.
I’m speculating wildly here, of course, but the RSEP doesn’t contain nearly enough detailed information about VeriSign’s proposed procedures to make a more informed analysis.
VeriSign knows what it is proposing is controversial. The RSEP says:

Registrants may be concerned about an improper takedown of a legitimate website. Verisign will be offering a protest procedure to support restoring a domain name to the zone.

The proposals have been made following many months of discussions between registries, registrars, law enforcement agencies and other community stakeholders.
It’s not entirely clear from VeriSign’s RSEP, which sometimes confusingly conflates the abuse policy with a separate proposed malware scanning service, how a takedown notice would be processed.
One likely reading is that VeriSign would act almost like a centralized clearinghouse for takedown requests, forwarding them to individual registrars for enforcement.
The registrars could be obliged by the terms of an amended Registry-Registrar Agreement to follow whatever process had been laid down.
There seems to be some concern in the ICANN community about this.
ICANN senior VP of stakeholder relations Kurt Pritz recently sent a document to PIR’s David Maher and Oversee.net’s Mason Cole outlining the procedure for amending the RRA.
The flowchart (pdf) describes a trilateral negotiation between the registry proposing the change, the Registrars Stakeholder Group and ICANN, with the ICANN board having the ultimate decision-making authority.
However this proceeds through ICANN, it’s going to cause some heated community debate.

ANA finds SEO more effective than Facebook

Advertisers are “beginning to question the effectiveness” of social media marketing, but they’re still mostly sold on the benefits of search engine optimization.
That’s according to a new study from the Association of National Advertisers, the results of which have just been published.
The ANA’s survey of 92 marketers gave SEO an “effectiveness rating” of 52%, the highest rating given to any of the six categories respondents were asked to comment on.
However, that represented a decline of three percentage points from a similar survey in 2009.
Social networking sites (presumably including Facebook, although names were not named) received an effectiveness rating of 28%, up from 17% two years ago, ANA reported.
SEO and social sites were used in marketing by 88% and 89% of respondents respectively.
ANA president Bob Liodice said in a press release:

While marketers have substantially increased their use of newer media platforms over the past few years, they are beginning to question the effectiveness of some of these vehicles. The ANA survey indicates a strong willingness by marketers to integrate innovative new approaches into their marketing mix; however, this enthusiasm is tempered by concerns regarding the return-on-investment of these emerging options.

While it’s all speculation at this point, SEO improvements are often pointed to as a potential (and I stress: potential) benefit of new dot-brand or category-killer top-level domains.
The ANA is the current opponent-in-chief of ICANN’s new gTLD program.

Corsica seeks new gTLD registry operator

The local government of the French island of Corsica is looking for contractors to apply for and manage a .corsica top-level domain.
The Executive Council of the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse issued an RFP in late September. The deadline for responses is October 17, a week from now.
The desired string appears to be the Anglicized .corsica, rather than the French .corse.
Corsica, situated in the Mediterranean, is one of France’s 22 official regions. According to Wikipedia, it has slightly more political power than its mainland counterparts.
Under ICANN’s new gTLD application rules, geographical strings need the approval of the relevant local government before they can be accepted.
I expect any .corsica application would need a letter of support or non-objection from the French national government as well as the Corsican executive, before it is approved.
(via Jean Guillon)

ICANN hunts for anti-cybersquatting database provider

ICANN is in the process of looking for an operator for the Trademark Clearinghouse that will play a crucial brand protection role in new top-level domains.
An RFI published last week says that ICANN is looking for an exclusive contractor, but that it may consider splitting the deal between two companies — one to provide trademark validation services and the other to manage the database.
The TMCH is basically a big database of validated trademarks that registrars/registries will have to integrate with. It will be an integral part of any new gTLD launch.
Registries are obliged by ICANN rules to hold a sunrise period and a Trademark Claims service when they go live, both of which leverage the clearinghouse’s services.
Rather than having to submit proof of trademark rights to each gTLD operator, brand owners will only have to be validated by the TMCH in order to be pre-validated by all gTLDs.
I estimate that the contract is worth a few million dollars a year, minimum.
If the ongoing .xxx sunrise period is any guide, we might be looking at a database of some 30,000 to 40,000 trademark registrations in the first year of the TMCH.
One potential TMCH provider currently charges $100 for the initial first-year validation and a recurring $70 for re-validation in subsequent years.
ICANN has not ruled out the successful TMCH provider selling add-on services too.
But the organization also seems to be at pains to ensure that the clearinghouse is not seen as another gouge on the trademark industry.
The RFI contains questions such as: “How can it be assured that you will not maximize your registrations at the expense of security, quality, and technical and operational excellence?”
The two providers that immediately spring to mind as RFI respondents are IProta and the Clearinghouse for Intellectual Property (CHIP).
Belgium-based CHIP arguably has the most institutional experience. It’s handled sunrise periods for Somalia’s .so, the .asia IDN sunrise, a few pseudo-gTLD initiatives from the likes of CentralNIC (de.com, us.org, etc), and is signed up to do the same for .sx.
Its chief architect, Bart Lieben of the law firm Crowell & Moring, is also well-known in the industry for his work on several sunrise period policies.
IProta is a newer company, founded in London this year by Jonathan Robinson, an industry veteran best known for co-founding corporate domain registrar Group NBT.
The company is currently managing the .xxx sunrise period, which is believed to be the highest-volume launch since .eu in late 2005.
“IPRota is very well positioned on the basis of our recent and past experience so I think we almost certainly will go ahead and respond,” Robinson confirmed to DI.
Domain name registries and registrars could conceivably also apply, based on their experience handling high-volume transactional databases and their familiarity with the EPP protocol.
ICANN sees the potential for conflicts of interest — its RFI anticipates that any already-contracted party applying to run the TMCH will have to impose a Chinese wall to reduce that risk.
The RFI is open for responses until November 25. ICANN intends to name its selected provider February 14, a month after it starts accepting new gTLD applications.
This is another reason, in my view, why submitting an application in January may not be the smartest move in the world.

Domain Registry of America still slamming, still scamming

Domain name slamming is alive and well in the ICANN-accredited registrar community.
I’ve just received a letter in the mail offering me the chance to transfer and renew domainincite.com for the knock-down price of £25 ($38) a year.
It’s Domain Registry of America again, still slamming almost a decade after it was first sued for the completely unethical practice of conning people into transferring their domain names.
The letter looks like a renewal notice. Besides ostensibly coming from “Domain Renewal Group”, it also contains the prominent text “Domain Name Renewal Service”.
Domain Renewal Group and Domain Registry of America are one and the same – fronts for the ICANN-accredited registrar Brandon Gray Internet Services Inc, dba NameJuice.com.
The letter, as you can see from the scan, is a little less bogus than the ones DROA started sending out back in 2001. The text states now much more clearly that “this is not a bill”.
But domain slamming has always relied upon people not reading the letter properly and/or not understanding the intricacies of domain transfers, and this is no different.
DROA’s business depends upon its letters finding their way into the hands of gullible individual registrants or accounting departments that will blindly pay official-looking notices.
At the prices the company charges – pretty much the most expensive in the industry – very few people will have transferred their domains because they thought they were getting a good deal.
There have been numerous complaints and lawsuits against DROA over the last decade.
In November 2009, the UK Advertising Standards Agency found DROA in breach of truthfulness and honesty guidelines for a substantially similar mailshot and ruled:

The mailing must not appear again in its current form.

And last year, the .ca registry CIRA terminated Domain Registry of Canada, another Brandon Gray front, for slamming .ca registrants using the same methods.
So isn’t it about time ICANN shut these muppets down too?
Unfortunately, ICANN can only use contracts to enforce compliance, and I’m not sure there are any sticks in the 2001 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that it can use to beat them.
DROA has plainly breached Go Daddy’s Whois access policy by slamming me (the letter was sent to my Whois billing address, not my actual residence), but I don’t think there’s much Go Daddy can do about that short of suing.
As far as I can tell, Brandon Gray, which has about 130,000 domains under management, got its ICANN accreditation in about 2003. It was previously an eNom reseller.
So its accreditation is probably going to be up for renewal within the next couple of years.
Fortunately, ICANN has just this week introduced stricter new accreditation application rules that are specifically designed to weed out the scumbags.
Any company or individual with a track record of dishonesty is no longer welcome at ICANN.
So if there’s nothing that can be done before then, at the very least when Brandon Gray’s accreditation expires ICANN should not renew it.
What’s more, other registrars should lean on ICANN to make sure Brandon Gray is shown the door. It’s been bringing their industry into disrepute for the best part of a decade and it’s time for it to stop.

ICANN to hire conflict of interest experts

ICANN is to bring in ethics experts to advise it on its conflicts of interest policy, addressing the ongoing controversy over its former chairman’s move to the domain industry.
The organization plans to “engage an external firm with expertise in advising on ethical issues”, according to the minutes of a September 15 meeting of its Board Governance Committee.
The consultants will be tasked with helping to “develop an ICANN Ethics Regime or set of Guidelines for the Board, the staff and the community.”
ICANN has been faced recently with calls to impose post-employment restrictions on board members and staff, in order to prevent a “revolving door” between it and the industry it essentially regulates.
This follows former chairman Peter Dengate Thrush’s move to new gTLD applicant Minds + Machines just a few weeks after voting to approve the new gTLD program.
Senator Ron Wyden and the Association of National Advertisers are among those making the call, and the US Department of Commerce, which oversees ICANN, appears to have heard it.
But as I reported earlier in the week, it may actually be illegal for ICANN, as a California corporation, to contractually ban employees from joining domain name companies after they quit.
However, the BGC has other ideas about how to strengthen ethics without imposing these potentially problematic employment restrictions.
It’s now talking about a ethics policy with “disclosure and abstention requirements” for directors “surrounding future interests or potential future interests”.
While the policy has yet to be written, one can imagine a scenario in which an ICANN director would be prevented from voting on a policy that would be likely to enrich them in a future job.
Cherine Chalaby, Bill Graham and Ray Plzak are the BGC members who will be leading the board discussions, which are expected to continue in Dakar later this month.
The ethics issue was first raised publicly by ICANN president Rod Beckstrom during his opening address at the Singapore meeting in June — before the new gTLD vote and before Dengate Thrush’s departure.