ICANN Brussels – .xxx approved but not approved

The controversy over the .xxx top-level domain has for the last few years, at least from one point of view, centered on opposing views of whether it was already “approved”.
ICM Registry has long claimed that ICANN “approved” it in 2005, and believes the Independent Review Panel agreed with that position. ICANN said the opposite.
Regardless of what happened in Brussels yesterday, when the board grudgingly voted to reopen talks on .xxx (to a surprisingly muted audience response), the question of whether .xxx is “approved” is definitely not over yet.
ICM tweeted shortly after the ICANN’s board’s decision:

@ICMRegistry: We are delighted to announce that the #ICANN Board has approved the .xxx top-level domain.

But a couple of hours later, ICANN chair Peter Dengate Thrush told us at a press conference that it categorically was not “approved”.
In terms of getting its point across to the media, ICM’s message trumped ICANN’s, judging by the headlines currently scrolling past me on Google News.
I guess this boils down to a question of definitions.
From the ICANN perspective, a TLD is presumably not “approved” until a contract has been signed and the board has resolved to add it to the root.
The board’s decision yesterday merely sets out the track towards that eventuality, with a few hurdles scattered along the way. In conversation with ICM people, I get the impression they believe the hurdles are low and easily surmountable.
Crucially for ICM, the issue of community support, the stick with which ICANN nearly killed .xxx back in 2007, is now off the table. There will be a quick review of ICM’s books and technical capabilities, but the views of the porn industry now seem pretty much irrelevant.
The only real way I can see .xxx being derailed again now is if the Governmental Advisory Committee issues future advice that unequivocally opposes the TLD.
As Kieren McCarthy noted in some detail over on CircleID, the GAC has never had a hell of a lot of substantial advice to impart about .xxx in its official communiques, so it’s difficult to see where a clash could arise based on its previous missives.
But with the GAC currently using bogus “morality and public order” arguments to jerk everybody around with regards the next new TLD round, it’s not entirely impossible that it could lob one final grenade in ICM’s direction.
This story ain’t over yet.

ICANN Brussels – some of my coverage

As you may have noticed from my relatively light posting week, it really is a lot easier to cover ICANN meetings remotely.
The only drawback is, of course, that you don’t get to meet, greet, debate, argue and inevitably get into drunken fist-fights with any of the lovely people who show up to these things.
So, on balance, I think I prefer to be on-site rather than off.
I was not entirely lazy in Brussels this week, however. Here are links to a few pieces I filed with The Register.
Cyber cops want stronger domain rules

International police have called for stricter rules on domain name registration, to help them track down online crooks, warning the industry that if it does not self-regulate, governments could legislate.

.XXX to get ICANN nod

ICANN plans to give conditional approval to .xxx, the controversial top-level internet domain just for porn, 10 years after it was first proposed.

Governments mull net censorship grab

Governments working within ICANN are pondering asking for a right of veto on new internet top-level domains, a move that would almost certainly spell doom for politically or sexually controversial TLDs.

New TLD guidebook could be finalized at ICANN retreat

ICANN’s Draft Applicant Guidebook for new TLDs could become the Final Applicant Guidebook at an ICANN retreat before the next ICANN meeting.
Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said at a press conference here in Brussels earlier that a private two-day board retreat this year, focused entirely on new TLDs, could “clear up any remaining issues” with the DAG.
I believe he was referring to the ICANN board’s scheduled September 24-25 retreat, although he may have had something else in mind.
Dengate Thrush said that we should not expect the board to pass as many resolutions relating to the DAG at the end of the Brussels meeting as it did at the end of Nairobi three months ago.
But he still expects DAG v4 will be the final draft published before the guidebook is finalized.
“The reality is that there are a number of overarching issues where the community has to reach consensus, and it’s difficult for us to put time limits on the community,” he said.
A few minutes ago, during an open mic session on new TLDs, Jon Nevett of Domain Dimensions questioned whether there should be a special ICANN meeting, before the retreat, to give the community a chance to help with the finalization process.

The ICANN Brussels schwag bag – full details

I’ve just landed at ICANN 38, in the really rather lovely setting of the Mont des Arts in Brussels.
Either I’m lost, or it’s a bit quiet at the moment, so I thought I’d get the most important news out of the way first – what’s in the schwag bag?
A heck of a lot more than the last ICANN meeting I attended, in Mar Del Plata, Argentina three five years ago.
Consider this a disclosure statement – I am now forever beholden to all of these companies, in no particular order:

• T-shirt (Hanes) from ICANN.
• T-shirt (Fruit of the Loom) from RegistryPro.
• Empty Belgian chocolate bag from Iron Mountain (visit the booth for the choccie, presumably).
• Fan with party invite printed on it from GMO (dotShop).
• Pen from .CO Internet.
• Keyring (foam) from dns.be.
• Pen from Nic.ru.
• Belgian chocolate box (full) from Centr.
• Keyring (metal) from PIR (slogan: “PracticeSafeDNS.org”)
• Badge/button (small) from .quebec.
• Badge/button (huge) from ICM Registry (slogan: “Yes to .XXX”)
• Bumper sticker from .quebec.
• Notebook from PIR (.org “Celebrating 25 years”)
• Playing cards (one-way backs) from Ausregistry.
• “Multi-purpose retractable lock” from SIDN.
• USB Flash drive (4GB) from Afnic.
• Notebook from .eu.
• A good-sized tree’s worth of flyers, booklets and sales pitches from the meeting’s sponsors – very strong contingent of new TLD players and consultancies.
• The bag itself is sponsored by Afilias.

I heard a rumor that ICM was giving away .xxx vuvuzelas, but if they were they appear to have already run out.

Register.com sold at a $65 million loss

Register.com has been acquired by web hosting company Web.com for $135 million, substantially less than the $200 million Vector Capital paid for it five years ago.
Web.com said the acquisition will help it access new small business customers for lead generation, to cross-sell its existing products.
The company’s customer base will increase by over 400% to more than one million customers, Web.com said. The combined firm will have annual revenue of $180 million.
Register.com was one of the first five ICANN-accredited registrars. It failed as a public company, and after years of financial wrangling was finally taken private by Vector in 2005.
Vector specializes in buying up troubled companies and turning them around, but it doesn’t appear to have increased the value of this particular asset over the last five years.

Will ICANN punt .xxx in Brussels?

Is ICANN set to delay approval of the proposed .xxx top-level domain – again – in Brussels?
That’s my reading of ICANN’s latest document concerning ICM Registry’s long-running and controversial battle for a porn-only TLD.
This week, ICANN submitted its summary of the public comment period that ran to May 10. It’s a fair bit shorter than the one Kieren McCarthy compiled for ICM last month.
As usual, it’s written in a fairly neutral tone. But, if you’re feeling conspiratorial, the mask does slip on occasion, perhaps giving a sense of where the .xxx application could head next.
The ICANN summary occasionally breaks from reporting what a commenter actually said in order to highlight a potential problem they did not address.
Example (my emphasis):

Only two commenters directly addressed the question of further interaction with the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) on the .XXX sTLD Application. Both of those commenters were against seeking any further input from the GAC outside of any public comment period. Neither of these commenters – nor any other – addressed the potential violation of the ICANN Bylaws that could result from the Board’s failure to properly consider the advice of the GAC

This suggests, to me, that the ICANN board will be receiving advice to the effect that further GAC input needs to be forthcoming before it can move forward with .xxx.
If this is the case, the GAC might have to produce some advice before next Friday’s board meeting if ICM has any hope of getting back around the negotiating table prior to Cartagena in December.
That’s not the only reason to believe ICANN may punt .xxx again, however. Elsewhere in the report, we read (my emphasis again):

For those in favor of proceeding with the .XXX sTLD Application, many created an alternative option – that ICM and ICANN should proceed to a contract right away. There was substantial discussion on this point in the ICM submissions. Few commenters addressed the technical realities identified within the Process Report ‐ that prompt execution of the agreement negotiated in 2007 is not feasible.

The Process Report referenced says that it is not possible to go straight into contract talks because ICM first applied for .xxx more than six years ago.
This has been a bone of contention. ICM points to .post, which was applied for at the same time as .xxx and only approved late last year, as proof that the passage of time should be no barrier.
But ICANN president Rod Beckstrom doesn’t buy that comparison. He wrote to ICM (pdf) at the end of March noting that .post was backed by the International Postal Union, whereas .xxx is “sponsored” by IFFOR, an organization created by ICM purely to act as its sponsor.
In that letter, Beckstrom talks about due diligence to make sure ICM and IFFOR still satisfy financial and technical criteria, and a review of whether .xxx “can still satisfy the requisite sponsorship criteria”.
I’ll admit that I’m breaking out the crystal ball a bit here, and I’ve been wrong before, but I don’t think it’s looking great for ICM in Brussels.

ICANN creates DNSSEC root keys

ICANN took the penultimate step towards adding DNSSEC to the root of the domain name system, during in a lengthy ceremony in Virginia yesterday.
The move means we’re still on track to have the DNSSEC “trust anchor” go live in the root on July 15, which will make end-to-end validation of DNS answers feasible for the first time.
DNSSEC is an extension to the DNS protocol that enables resolvers to validate that the DNS answers they receive come from the true owner of the domain.
Yesterday, ICANN generated the Key Signing Key for the root zone. That’s one of two keys required when adding DNSSEC to a zone.
The KSK is used to sign the DNSKey record, the public half of a key pair used to validate DNS responses. It has a longer expiration date than the Zone Signing Key used to sign other records in the zone, so its security is more important.
The videotaped ceremony, held at a facility in Culpeper, Virginia, was expected to take six hours, due to a lengthy check-list of precautions designed to instil confidence in the security of the KSK.
ICANN said:

During the ceremony, participants were present within a secure facility and witnessed the preparations required to ensure that the so-called key-signing-key (KSK) was not only generated correctly, but that almost every aspect of the equipment, software and procedures associated with its generation were also verified to be correct and trustworthy.

Ten hand-picked independent observers were present to bear witness.
ICANN expects to perform the ceremony four times a year. The second will be held at a backup facility in California next month.

Employ Media asks ICANN for a .jobs landrush

The company behind the .jobs sponsored top-level domain wants to loosen the shackles of sponsorship by vastly liberalizing its namespace.
Employ Media has applied (pdf) to ICANN to get rid of the current restrictions on .jobs domain ownership and open hundreds of thousands of strings to the highest bidder.
The registry wants to amend its contract with ICANN to cut the text that limits .jobs domains to the exact match or abbreviation of a company name, and add:

Domain registrations are permitted for other types of names (e.g., occupational and certain geographic identifiers) in addition to the “company name” designation.

Employ Media is basically asking for the right to open the floodgates to a complete relaunch of the .jobs TLD with very few restrictions on who can register and what strings they can register.
Phase One of the relaunch would be an RFP “to invite interested parties to propose specific plans for registration, use and promotion of domains that are not their company name”.
It sounds a little like the current .co Founders Program, or the marketing initiatives Afilias and Neustar asked for to supplement the auction of their single-character domains.
In practice, I expect that this first phase is when the DirectEmployers Association would expect to grab hundreds of thousands of .jobs domains under its universe.jobs business plan, in which it intends to offer job listings tailored to “city, state, geographic region, country, occupation [and] skill”.
Phase Two would see your basic landrush auction of any premium domains left over.
Phase three would be “A first-come, first-served real-time release of any domains not registered through the RFP or auction processes.”
While I have no strong views on the merits of this particular proposal, I do think that the application and ICANN’s response to it could wind up setting the template for how to operate a bait-and-switch in ICANN’s forthcoming round of new TLD applications.
If you say you want to do one thing with your TLD, and later decide you could make more money doing another, how much will ground will ICANN give when it comes to renegotiating your contract? It will be interesting to find out.
Reactions so far from the HR community have not been positive.
Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com wrote that the process by which Employ Media’s sponsor, the Society for Human Resource Management, approved the new proposal “stunk”.
“The only winner here is Employ Media,” he wrote.
Comments posted at ERE.net, which has been on top of this story from the beginning, express what could be easily described as outrage over Employ Media’s plans.
The comment posted by Ted Daywalt of VetJobs.com is especially worth a read.
The Employ Media proposal has been submitted under ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process, which allows comments to be submitted.

WSJ reporting bogus Indian domain name market info?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that India “passed an Internet milestone of sorts” in the first quarter, when the number of .com domains registered in the country broke through 1 million.
Did it?
This is what the WSJ says:

[India] now has more than one million registered web sites using the suffixes .com or .net, according to data released today by VeriSign Inc., the U.S. company that tracks this sort of thing.
In its Domain Name Industry Brief, it reported that India now has a registered total of 1.037 million .com and .net domain names, up from about 800,000 in the same period the year before.

The number 1.037 million is terribly specific, considering that VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief doesn’t say anything of the sort.
There’s nothing in the DNIB to suggest that anybody in India has ever registered a single .com domain.
The DNIB has never broken down .com registrations by location, and the Q1 report, released on Monday, doesn’t use the word “India” once.
If the WSJ numbers are accurate – the paper does appear to have interviewed a VeriSign India executive – I’m wondering how they were calculated.
It can’t be a case of tallying the number of .com domains managed by Indian registrars. Mumbai-based Directi alone has had more than a million .com names under its belt for a long time.
Could VeriSign be mining Whois records for location data?
It runs a thin registry, so it would have to reference Whois data acquired from its registrars in order to compute the numbers.
Or did the WSJ hit on unreliable sources? It seems possible.

More WordPress attacks at Go Daddy

The Kneber gang has continued its attacks on Go Daddy this week, again targeting hosting customers running self-managed WordPress installations.
Go Daddy said that several hundred accounts were compromised in order to inject malicious code into the PHP scripts.
“The attack injects websites with a fake-antivirus pop-up ad, claiming the visitor’s computer is infected,” Go Daddy security manager Scott Gerlach blogged.
According to the alarmists-in-chief over at WPSecurityLock, the attacks place a link to a script hosted on cloudisthebestnow.com, a domain registered by “Hilary Kneber”.
The script attempts to install bot software on visitors’ machines.
As I’ve written before, the Kneber botnet has been running since at least December 2009. It generally hosts its malware on domains registered with ICANN-accredited BizCN.com, a Chinese registrar.
Go Daddy said it has contacted the registrar to get the domain yanked. It may have been successfully killed already, but I’m too much of a little girl to check manually.
I must confess, as somebody with a number of WordPress installations on Go Daddy servers, it makes me a little nervous that these attacks are now well into their second month and I still don’t know whether I should be worried or not.