Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant

Shib, the developer behind the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency, said today that it plans to apply to ICANN for the .shib top-level domain.

The idea is to have the domain in the consensus DNS root and also in a blockchain and to make the two interoperable.

The company has partnered with D3 Global, the startup launched in September by industry veterans Fred Hsu, Paul Stahura and Shayan Rostam, to work on the application and interoperability platform.

Shib seems to be the second customer for D3. It’s also working with a blockchain company called Viction on .vic.

Perhaps erring on the side of responsibility, D3 is using an asterisk instead of a dot when offering names prior to ICANN approval, so it’s *shib and *vic instead of .shib and .vic.

The next ICANN application round is not expected to open until early-to-mid-2026.

Amazon planning new push into registrar market?

Amazon has kept a pretty low profile to date both as a registry and registrar, but there are reasons to believe it’s on the verge of becoming a more visible player in the market.

The e-commerce and web services giant has secured a second ICANN registrar accreditation and appears to be readying a new domain-focused web site.

The subsidiary Amazon Domain Registrar US LLC picked up its accreditation this week, and its official web site domain is domains.amazon, which was registered November 29.

The domain does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

Amazon already uses the dot-brand domain registry.amazon for its 50-odd new gTLDs, almost all of which remain unlaunched.

In the registrar market, Amazon’s subsidiary Amazon Registrar Inc has been accredited for well over a decade and has been taking registrations since 2015 as part of its Route 53 managed DNS service.

It’s not a conventional registrar storefront by any stretch — registrations seem to be available only via the management console used by existing Route 53 customers — but it has amassed over 1.3 million gTLD registrations so far.

So could domains.amazon become the newest player in the retail registrar market? Smaller registrars that cheered the exit of the Google brand from the registrar space may soon have a new big boy to contend with.

Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules

ICANN’s contracted registries and registrars have voted to accept new rules requiring them to take action on DNS abuse.

The new rules come after a vote lasting a few months with some quite high thresholds for success.

The current Registrar Accreditation Agreement merely requires registrars to “take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to any reports of abuse”, which is pretty vague and barely enforceable.

The amendments, which still need to be rubber-stamped by the ICANN board, make it much clearer what registrars are expected to do in which circumstances. A new paragraph is added that reads:

3.18.2 When Registrar has actionable evidence that a Registered Name sponsored by Registrar is being used for DNS Abuse, Registrar must promptly take the appropriate mitigation action(s) that are reasonably necessary to stop, or otherwise disrupt, the Registered Name from being used for DNS Abuse. Action(s) may vary depending on the circumstances, taking into account the cause and severity of the harm from the DNS Abuse and the possibility of associated collateral damage.

For registries, the new text for the base gTLD Registry Agreement is similar, but with a little more wiggle-room:

Where a Registry Operator reasonably determines, based on actionable evidence, that a registered domain name in the TLD is being used for DNS Abuse, Registry Operator must promptly take the appropriate mitigation action(s) that are reasonably necessary to contribute to stopping, or otherwise disrupting, the domain name from being used for DNS Abuse. Such action(s) shall, at a minimum, include: (i)the referral of the domains being used for the DNS Abuse, along with relevant evidence, to the sponsoring registrar; or (ii) the taking of direct action, by the Registry Operator, where the Registry Operator deems appropriate. Action(s) may vary depending on the circumstances of each case, taking into account the severity of the harm from the DNS Abuse and the possibility of associated collateral damage.

In both cases, DNS abuse is defined by the now industry standard line: “malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam (when spam serves as a delivery mechanism for the other forms of DNS Abuse listed in this Section)”.

There are a few other quality of life updates, such as the requirement for registrars to acknowledge receipt of abuse reports and to have their abuse reporting mechanism “conspicuously and readily accessible from” their home pages.

ICANN needed registrars representing over 90% of registered gTLD domains (adjusted slightly to make GoDaddy’s voice less powerful). That threshold was passed last week, with 94% of domains voting in favor of the amendments.

For registries, ICANN required a simple majority of registries (counted by contract rather than company) and for all registries voting in favor to have been responsible for two thirds of all registry fees paid last year.

Judging by the financial thresholds, .com and .net, which are not on the base RA, were not involved.

ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry

The gTLD domain industry will be pretty much flat in terms of sales next year, according to the predictions in ICANN’s latest budget.

The bean counters reckon the Org will make $89 million from transactions in legacy gTLDs (mainly .com) in its fiscal 2025, up from the $88.9 million it expects to make in fiscal 2024, which ends next June 30.

Meanwhile, it expects transactions in new gTLDs to bring in $10.1 million, up from the $9.9 million it expects in FY24.

Both of the updated FY24 estimates are actually a bit ahead of ICANN’s current budget, written in April and approved in May, which predicted $87.1 million from legacy and $9.2 million from new.

ICANN expects to lose 22 registries (presumably unused dot-brands, of which there are still plenty, with a couple hundred contracts up for renewal in 2025) and gain 40 new registrars.

This will lead to revenue from registry fixed fees to dip to $27.6 million from a predicted $28.1 million, and registrar fixed fees going up from $10.4 million from a predicted $10.1 million.

The FY24 registrar numbers are a little healthier than ICANN predicted back in April, when it expected 2,447 accredited registrars at the end of the financial year versus the 2,575 it’s expecting now. Gname’s decision to buy 150 new accreditations will have played a big role in moving this number up. ICANN expects 2,615 registrars at the end of FY25.

But ICANN is losing registries faster than it predicted back in April. Then, it had expected to end FY24 with 1,127 registries; now it thinks it will have 1,118. It expects that to drop to 1,089 by the end of June 2025.

Overall, ICANN is budgeting for funding of $148 million and the same level of expenses in FY25, the same as FY24.

Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars

Gname, the fast-growing Singaporean registrar, has added 150 ICANN registrar accreditations to its drop-catching army.

The companies are named Gname 151 through Gname 300. The companies Gname 2 through Gname 150 were accredited in June 2021.

Gname’s primary accreditation has grown massively since it became a drop-catcher in the last two years, going from under 10,000 names under management at the start of 2021 to 3.9 million at the end of August this year. About 3.2 million of its names were in .com.

Its first 150 secondary accreditations had almost a million names between them.

In August, it was the fastest-growing registrar of gTLD names, growing by over 156,000 domains and becoming the 12th-largest registrar accreditation overall.

Drop-catchers use large numbers of accreditations because registries rate-limit their connections. More accreditations means more connections and a better chance to register a valuable domain when it drops.

The primary accreditation was originally Chinese, in the name of Beijing Huaqi Weiye Technology Co and doing business at iwanshang.cn, before it moved to a Singaporean company called Gname.com.

ICANN’s current budget predicts an increase of five accrediations in fiscal 2024, which ends next June. Its high estimate was an increase of 60. So it’s now getting about half a million bucks more than it was expecting.

ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman

ICANN is looking for a new “Ombuds”, having quietly dropped the “man” from Ombudsman following the resignation of Herb Waye.

The Org said it has hired a recruitment consultant and put out a call for expressions of interest in the role last night.

The Ombuds’ job is to handle complaints independently of ICANN Org and board and be an “objective advocate for fairness”. It’s one of ICANN’s bylaws-mandated accountability mechanisms.

The Org seems to have officially made the switch from “Ombudsman” to “Ombuds” at the start of October when Krista Papac took on the job on an interim basis. The old URL icann.org/ombudsman now forwards to icann.org/ombuds.

Like many middle-aged men, I often roll my eyes at this kind of terminology change, despite my impeccable woke credentials.

I have always assumed that “Ombudsman” was etymologically a gender-neutral term, given its Scandinavian roots, but I’ve read around the topic today and it seems that that assumption is open to debate.

I’ve concluded that it doesn’t matter either way — nobody’s getting hurt by the change, so fuck it, “Ombuds” it is.

Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system

Most of the largest domain registrars are not currently participating in ICANN’s new Registration Data Request Service, according to my research.

I used the RDRS tool to check domains managed by every accredited registrar that has over a million domains under management and discovered that at least 25 out of these 40 registrars do not currently support the service.

The number may be 26, but RDRS did not recognize any domains managed by Chinese registrar Ali Baba as valid, giving instead a “domain does not exist” error message, even for alibaba.com itself.

In total, the 25 registrars coming up blank look after over 63 million gTLD domains, about 28% of the total.

Some very recognizable brands are not in the system.

Squarespace Domains II, the new name for the old Google Domains, the fourth-largest registrar, is the largest company not participating. Together with its original accreditation, Squarespace Domains, they have over 10 million domains under management.

TurnCommerce, GMO, IONOS, NameSilo, PDR, Gname, Dynadot, Wix, OVH, Register.com, FastDomain, Name.com, Domain.com, Hostinger, Sav.com, Xin Net, West.cn, Cronon, Domain Robot, Automattic, DNSPod, and Cloudflare are also not in the system.

Oh, and neither is Markmonitor.

While I only checked 40 registrars, not the full 2,702 that were active in the July registry transaction reports, I would expect the level of support to decline the lower down the list you get, particularly as hundreds of accreditations have a trivial number of domains or are merely aliases for companies already known to not support RDRS.

It’s quite possible some of the registrars I’ve named here are planning to sign up and have just been slow to do so, but they’ve had plenty of time — ICANN has been onboarding registrars since September 20.

The level of support from the registrar industry will be critical to judging whether the RDRS project is deemed a success.

In a recent letter to the GNSO Council discussing “success criteria” for the program, ICANN chair Tripti Sinha wrote (pdf):

The Board agrees that the participation of a sufficient number of registrars with a sufficient number of domain name registrations under management will be important with respect to gathering data.

On the bright side, GoDaddy, Tucows and Namecheap are on board, and that represents about 90 million domains. GoDaddy alone accounts for 65 million, slightly more than the combined total of the 25 large registrars that are not participating.

RDRS is a system designed to simplify the process of requesting non-public Whois data by passing all such requests to the relevant registrars through a central hub.

Of course, it’s only useful if the registrars are actually in the system.

ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting

The ICANN community will head to Türkiye for the Org’s 2024 Annual General Meeting, it has been confirmed.

The board of directors picked Istanbul for ICANN 81, which will kick off November 9 next year, according to a just-published resolution.

While the precise venue has not been revealed, you’d have to assume the Istanbul Congress Center is a prime candidate.

While it’s conveniently on the doorstep of Europe, Türkiye counts as Asia-Pacific under ICANN’s rules mandating meetings rotate through the world’s five geographic regions.

ICANN maintains an office in Istanbul, so it can presumably save a bit of money not having to pay for travel and lodgings for local staff who would usually travel.

Next year’s meetings also see the community travel to San Juan, Puerto Rico in March and Kigali, Rwanda in June. The first meeting of 2025 will be held in Seattle, Washington.

ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live

ICANN has this evening gone live with its service that enables anyone to request private Whois data on any gTLD domain.

The Registration Data Request Service lets people request contact information on registrants that would otherwise be redacted in the public Whois due to laws such as the GDPR.

The press release announcing the launch seems to have come out an hour or two before the service actually became accessible, but it’s definitely live now and I’ve tried it out.

The system is defined largely by what it isn’t. It isn’t an automated way to get access to private data. It isn’t guaranteed to result in private data being released. It isn’t an easy workaround to post-GDPR privacy restrictions.

It is a way to request an unredacted Whois record knowing only the domain and not having to faff around figuring out who the registrar is and what their mechanisms and policies are for requesting the data.

After scaling back the extremely complex and expensive original community recommendations for a post-GDPR Whois service, ICANN based the RDRS on its now decade-old Centralized Zone Data Service, which acts as an intermediary between registries and people like myself who enjoy sniffing around in zone files.

The RDRS merely connects Whois data requestors — the default settings in the interface suggest that ICANN thinks they’ll mostly be people with court orders — with the registrars in charge of the domains they are interested in.

Anyone who has used CZDS will recognize the interface, but the requesting process is longer, more complex, and requires accepting more disclaimers and Ts&Cs. That said, it’s not particularly confusing.

At first glance, it looks fine. Slick, even. I’ve used it to submit a test request with GoDaddy for my own Whois data, specifying that whoever deals with the request is free to ignore it. Let’s see what happens.

ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund

ICANN has acted outside of its powers by ignoring community policy recommendations and leaving its $271 million gTLD auction windfall open to being frittered away on lawyers, according to community members.

The Intellectual Property Constituency of the GNSO has filed a formal Request for Reconsideration over a board resolution passed at ICANN 78 last month in Hamburg, and other constituencies may add their names to it shortly.

The row concerns the huge cash pile ICANN was left sitting on following the auction of 17 new gTLD contracts between 2014 and 2016, which raised $240 million (as of July, around $271 million after investment returns and ICANN helping itself to a portion to fund its operations reserve).

It was decided that the money should be used to fund a grant program for worthy causes, with organizations able to apply for up to $500,000 during discrete rounds, the first of which is due to open next year with a $10 million pot. Around $220 million is believed to be earmarked for the grant program over its lifetime.

But the Cross Community Working Group for Auction Proceeds (CCWG-AP) that came up with the rules of the program was concerned that unsuccessful applicants, or others chagrined by ICANN’s grant allocations, might challenge decisions using ICANN’s accountability mechanisms.

This would cause money earmarked for worthy causes to be spaffed away on lawyers, which the CCWG-AP wanted to avoid, so it recommended that ICANN modify its fundamental bylaws to exclude the grant program from mechanisms such as the Independent Review Process, which usually incurs high six-figure or seven-figure legal fees.

ICANN seemed to accept this recommendation — formally approving it in June last year — until ICANN 78, when the board approved a surprise U-turn on this so-called Recommendation 7.

The board said it was changing its mind because it had found “alternative ways” to achieve the same objective, “including ways that do not require modification to ICANN’s core Bylaws on accountability”. The resolution stated:

As a result, the Board is updating its action on Recommendation 7 to reflect that ICANN org should implement this Recommendation 7 directly through the use of applicant terms and conditions rather than through a change to ICANN’s Fundamental Bylaws.

This left some community members — and at least one ICANN director — scratching their heads. Sure, you might be able to ban grant applicants from using the IRP in the program’s terms and conditions, but that wouldn’t stop third parties such as an applicant’s competitors from filing an IRP and causing legal spaffery.

The board was well aware of these concerns when it passed the resolution last month. Directors pointed out in Hamburg that ICANN is still pursuing the bylaws amendment route, but has removed it as a dependency for the first grant round going ahead.

This left some community members nonplussed — it wasn’t clear whether ICANN planned to go ahead with the program ignoring community recommendations, or not. The reassuring words of directors didn’t seem to tally with the language of the resolution.

So the IPC took the initiative and unironically invoked an accountability mechanism — the RfR — to get ICANN to change its mind again. I gather the request was filed as a precaution within the 30-day filing window due to the lack of clarity on ICANN’s direction.

The RfR states:

the impetus behind the Bylaws change was to prevent anyone from challenging grant decisions, including challenges from parties not in contractual privity with ICANN. The Board’s hasty solution would only prevent contracting grant applicants from challenging decisions; it would not in any way affect challenges by anyone else – including anyone who wished to challenge the award of a grant. The grant program could be tied in knots by disgruntled parties, competitive organizations or anyone else who wished to delay or prevent ICANN from carrying out any decision to grant funds. This is exactly what the CCWG-AP sought to prevent

The IPC says that by bypassing the bylaws amendment process, which involves community consent, the ICANN board is basically giving itself the unilateral right to turn off its bylaws-mandated accountability mechanisms when it sees fit. A power grab.

It wants the Hamburg resolution reversed.

Discussing the RfR a few days before it was filed, other members of the GNSO Council suggested that their constituencies might sign on as fellow complainants if and when it is amended.

RfRs are handled by ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which does not currently have a publicly scheduled upcoming meeting.