Travel gTLD registry dumps three strings — NOT dot-brands

Future new gTLD application rounds will likely have three extra travel-related strings up for grabs, after the barely-precedented decision by a registry operator to dump three generic, non-branded strings.

Travel Reservations Srl, the registry owned by Despegar, one of South America’s largest online travel booking services, has told ICANN to tear up its contracts for .hoteles, .vuelos and .passagens.

These are the Spanish translations of “hotels” and “flights” and the Portuguese for “tickets” respectively. Despegar had also applied for the Portuguese .hoteis, but withdrew its bid before delegation.

None of the gTLDs ever launched and none had any registered domains. As such ICANN is not looking for a successor registry to protect registrants. The strings will be available to other applicants in future rounds.

Despegar never made any secret about the fact that it didn’t quite know what it wanted to do with its gTLDs when it applied in 2012, its applications noting that it would take a wait-and-see approach before making the domains available.

It waited, it saw, and a decade later it’s apparently decided it doesn’t want to operate these TLDs after all.

The fact that its termination notices were sent in January this year but dated November 6, 2020, may be indicative.

Worried about governments seizing .com domains? Too late

Language proposed for Verisign’s .net registry contract that some say would give governments the ability to arbitrarily seize domains is already present in the company’s .com contract.

As I reported earlier this month, the .net Registry Agreement is up for renewal and ICANN has opened up some largely uncontroversial proposed changes for public comment.

ICANN has received two comments so far, both of which refer to what one commenter called the “outrageous and dangerous” proposed changes to Verisign’s .net Registry-Registrar Agreement.

The RRA is the contract all accredited registrars must agree to when they sign up to sell domains in a given TLD. For ICANN, it’s a way to vicariously enforce policy on registrants via registrars via registries.

Unsimply put, the RA instructs Verisign to have an RRA with its registrars that tells them what rules their registrants have to agree to when they buy a domain name.

The new language causing the consternation is:

Verisign reserves the right to deny, cancel, redirect or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status, as it deems necessary, in its unlimited and sole discretion:

…

to ensure compliance with applicable law, government rules or regulations, or pursuant to any legal order or subpoena of any government, administrative or governmental authority, or court of competent jurisdiction

One commenter states “this proposed agreement would allow any government in the world to cancel, redirect or transfer to their control applicable domain names”, adding “presumably ICANN staff and Verisign would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal”.

In fact, it’s the other way around. The exact same language has been present in Verisign’s .com contract for over three years, a change to Appendix 8a (pdf) that went largely unnoticed when thousands of commenters were instead complaining about the removal of price caps and fretting about the rise of Covid-19 around the world.

For those worried about the new .net language making it into the .com contract one day — worry not! It’s already there.

Epik’s meltdown is a ticking time-bomb for ICANN

There are many ways ICANN could eventually wind up shutting down flailing registrar Epik, but it might face a nightmare of its own when it does.

Epik appears to have been suffering from serious cash-flow problems for the last several months, with some customers still complaining this week that they haven’t been paid money owed as far back as September.

It’s facing a lawsuit by a customer who says he’s owed over $300,000 over a failed domain purchase, accusations that it’s been running its escrow service without the proper paperwork, and claims that current and former executives may have “embezzled” customer money.

It’s an absolute dumpster fire that so far shows little sign of being extinguished, but unfortunately there’s very little about the situation that appears to be in ICANN’s Compliance wheelhouse.

ICANN Compliance has the right to terminate a company’s accreditation — its ability to sell gTLD domains — if that registrar breaches the terms of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement that all registrars must sign.

The RAA does not cover the secondary market, or escrow or store credit services like Epik’s doomed “Masterbucks”.

Ironically, ICANN would stand a better chance of shutting Epik down if its Whois service crashed, or if the registrar for some reason failed to publish an abuse contact on its web site.

However, if Epik is treating its ICANN fees the same way customers say it’s treating their funds, it can expect a nastygram or six from Compliance, if it has not done so already.

Most cases where ICANN ultimately terminates a registrar’s accreditation begin when Compliance gets a note from the bean-counters that somebody hasn’t been paying their quarterly invoices.

Typically, this serves as a tip-off that the registrar is having problems, so Compliance audits the company to see where else it might be in breach, often discovering other minor or major infractions it can add to the docket.

Epik paid ICANN just shy of $150,000 in its last-reported fiscal year to June 30, 2022. If its current cash-flow problem has caused it to miss an ICANN payment in the three quarters since then, Compliance could be another very powerful creditor knocking at its door.

Another way ICANN could bring out the deaccreditation hammer is if Epik suffers unfavorable court rulings related to financial mismanagement. The RAA specifically allows termination if a court finds a registrar committed “fraud” or “a breach of fiduciary duty”.

The customer lawsuit Epik is currently facing could make such a finding, if it reaches trial and things don’t go Epik’s way.

Perhaps a more immediate concern is that the RAA contains another clause allowing termination if a registrar “is disciplined by the government of its domicile for conduct involving dishonesty or misuse of funds of others”.

I am not a lawyer, but I can see an argument being made that this might have happened already.

As Domain Name Wire reported in February, the Insurance Commissioner of Epik’s home state of Washington recently fined the company $10,000 for selling its DNProtect service as an “insurance” product without the proper licences.

Does this count as being “disciplined by the government of its domicile for conduct involving dishonesty”? Legally, I don’t know.

DNW reports in the same article that the Washington state attorney general has been tipped off about Epik’s escrow service, which is also a regulated industry in which Epik apparently does not have the necessary paperwork to operate.

I’m soothsaying here, of course, but any future disciplinary action from Epik’s local AG could well give ICANN Compliance another deaccreditation trigger to pull.

There are multiple excuses Compliance could find to shitcan Epik over the coming months, but let’s look at the downside for ICANN if it does.

Epik has built itself up in recent years as the go-to “free speech” registrar. It’s welcomed, even courted, multiple registrants that have had their domains banished from other registrars for their sites’ controversial content.

That pretty much always means “far-right” content, of course.

Most recently, it took the business of kiwifarms.net, a forum accused of allowing member to doxx and issue death threats against transgender rights activists.

It’s previously been associated with domains for similarly controversial registrants including Andrew Tate, Infowars, 8chan, Gab and The Daily Stormer.

When Monster was replaced by current CEO Brian Royce last September, the company made a big deal about how the new guy and the old guy were aligned on the free speech issue. Royce has subsequently echoed those thoughts.

Given the narrative Epik has created around itself, can you imagine how a certain section of the online public, namely the fringe of the American right-wing, would react if ICANN essentially shut down the “free speech registrar”?

ICANN has for many years faced misinformed criticism that it has the power to take down web sites it does not agree with, that it acts as a gatekeeper for the internet, that it is or risks becoming the internet’s “content police”.

If ICANN were to deaccredit Epik, removing its ability to sell most domain names, it would be incredibly easy to construct a narrative that a bunch of Californian liberals are trying to destroy “free speech” by taking down loads of right-leaning web sites.

It wouldn’t be true, of course, but the notion would only need to be propagated by a clueless Congressperson, a disingenuous podcast host, or a sustained social media campaign, before ICANN’s very raison d’être came under focus by people who don’t particularly care about facts.

ICANN wants more newbies on its board

ICANN is planning changes to how its board of directors are picked, including new measures to get more community virgins around the table.

Under proposed new rules for its Nominating Committee, which chooses eight of the 20 directors, at least three directors at any given time would have to be “unaffiliated”.

The definition of “unaffiliated” is extremely broad, seemingly ruling out anybody who has ever had any professional involvement with the ICANN community whatsoever. Even people who have showed up at ICANN meetings on their employer’s dime would be excluded.

By my reckoning, only two of the current crop of eight NomCom appointees could possibly meet this definition, based on their biographies.

The new rules would give NomCom some flexibility in cases where it really can’t find an otherwise qualified director without any ICANN ties.

NomCom members would also get their own terms extended under the proposals, from one year to two, in order to improve institutional memory. Some current members would have their terms extended while others would not.

To tackle the same continuity issues, ICANN also wants to create a Nominating Committee Standing Committee — that’s right, an entity with two “Committees” in its name — to oversee the NomCom.

The four-person committee would be made up of former NomCom members and would be tasked with things like reviewing the previous hiring cycle and suggesting possible procedural changes. It would have no input on who gets hired and fired.

The proposals, which originate from a review that began in 2016, are open for public comment until May 29.

ICANN to crowd-source CEO search

Community members will get more input into ICANN’s leadership than they have for a decade, as the Org searches for its new CEO.

Chris Chapman, chair of the board’s newly reconstituted CEO Search Committee has laid out plans for a series of “listening sessions” that will give interested parties the chance to give their two cents into what an ICANN CEO should look like.

There’s going to be an open Zoom call for 90 minutes on May 16, along with at least a dozen other sessions with various interest groups.

The GAC, ccNSO, ALAC, RSSAC, GNSO, ISOC, IETF, ASO and former directors will all get bilateral sessions during the board’s April 27-28 workshop, and will meet with the SSAC in May.

Staff have also had two such sessions and will get one more before the June public meeting, where ICANN will publish its “candidate profile” for the gig.

The search process wasn’t nearly as inclusive last time around, when a CEO was hired in 2016, but there was a similar level of outreach in 2012, after Rod Beckstrom resigned.

Verisign’s .net contract up for public comment

ICANN intends to renew Verisign’s contract to run the .net gTLD and has opened the revised deal for public comment.

At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be anything massively controversial about the proposed changes, so we probably shouldn’t expect the same kind of outrage similar contract renewals have solicited in the past.

A great deal of the changes relate to the sunsetting of the Whois protocol and its replacement with the functionally similar RDAP, something set to become part of all gTLD contracts, legacy and new, soon.

The only money-related change of note is the agreement that Verisign will pay pro-rated portions of the $0.75 annual ICANN transaction fee when it sells its Consolidate service, which allows registrants to synchronize their expiry dates for convenience.

That provision is already in the .com contract, and Verisign has agreed to back-date the payments to May 1, 2020, around about the same time the .com contract was signed.

The controversial side-deal under which Verisign agreed to pay ICANN $4 million a year for five years is also being amended, but the duration and amount of money do not appear to be changing.

The new Registry Agreement also includes Public Interest Commitments for the first time. Verisign has agreed to two PICs common to all new gTLD RAs governing prohibitions on abusive behaviors.

The deal would extend Verisign’s oversight for six years, to June 30, 2029. It’s open for public comment until May 25.

New gTLDs — implementation talks to start next month

ICANN expects to kick off its implementation efforts for the next rounds of new gTLDs next month.

The Org is putting together its Implementation Review Team, a group of community members that will help shepherd staff into turning policy into reality.

Each supporting organization, advisory committee and constituency will get to nominate a representative (and an alt) and ICANN will put out an open call for volunteers for the team.

Members of the working group that came up with the policy recommendations in the first place are expected to be likely candidates.

The IRT’s main objective is to make sure that ICANN sticks to the letter and spirit of the recommendations, many of which were adopted by its board of directors last month, and prevent members re-litigating settled disputes.

ICANN expects to hold its first IRT meeting the week of May 14 or sooner.

ICANN spent millions of dollars and most of 2022 carrying out an Operational Design Assessment of new gTLDs policy recommendations, which was intended in part to relieve the IRT of some heavy lifting and speed it up.

.food registry to dump four dot-brand gTLDs

A company controlled by Warner Bros Discovery is dumping four of its dot-brand gTLDs, but keeping hold of .food, which it has been sitting on, unused for the better part of eight years.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .foodnetwork, .travelchannel, .hgtv and .cookingnetwork, which are four of its US cable TV channels.

Unusually, the termination notice contains a bit of color explaining its decision:

Despite efforts over the years to develop a marketing strategy for deployment of these assets, the company has determined there is not a current use for them and therefore requests early termination of the ICANN Registry Agreements and to wind down these assets

The gTLDs have never been used, something that can also be said for the remainder of Lifestyle’s original portfolio of 11 gTLDs.

The registry was originally owned by Scripps Networks, but following a series of M&A since last year it’s been majority owned by media giant Warner Bros Discovery.

It also has current contracts for .food, .diy, .cityeats, .living, .frontdoor, .lifestyle, and the mysterious .vana (presumably a brand that Scripps was planning to launch in 2012 that never materialized).

The registry’s back-end was Verisign and its new gTLD consultant was Jennifer Wolfe.

The end of “do-nothing” ICANN?

ICANN’s new gTLD program hit a remarkable milestone earlier this month. Measured from the 2012 application window, on March 6 it officially overtook NASA’s Apollo Program, which put a dozen humans on the moon, in terms of duration.

But some in the community coming out of ICANN 76 last week appear to be cautiously optimistic that the days of the “do-nothing” ICANN, entirely too wrapped up in pointless bureaucracy and navel-gazing, may be coming to a close under its new leadership.

As I reported in January 2022, at that point ICANN hadn’t implemented a policy in over five years and didn’t seem to be close to actually getting stuff done.

That sentiment was reflected at a Cancun open-mic session last week, when 20-year community member Jordyn Buchanan, who works for Google and said he’d taken a five-year break from the ICANN process, spoke up.

“It’s not so great when I look at the substantive progress that has been made — or rather that hasn’t been made — in the past few years, or really over the past decade or so,” he told the board.

He gave several examples, not least the new gTLD program, where ICANN has been procrastinating for years.

“Consistently across the board, I think we see examples of where we’re just not living up to the vision of ICANN as being an entity that could be more responsive and more rapid looking at technological changes,” he said.

The only area where progress has been made is Whois, and that’s only because ICANN’s hand was forced by European Union legislation, he said.

Board member Chris Chapman, at his first full ICANN meeting in the role, responded positively to the feedback, stating: “There’s a real realization internally within the board that there have got to be more efficient, effective, and timely deliverables.”

Directors including interim CEO Sally Costerton and chair Tripti Sinha, made similar noises throughout the week, repeatedly invoking the idea of an “inflection point” for the institution, which faces increasing pressures from governments and other external forces.

The noises were encouraging to some.

The GNSO Council decided as the Cancun meeting closed to send a letter to Sinha and Costerton, both relatively recent appointments, observing “there seems to be a noticeable change, maybe even a cultural change, towards ‘getting things done’.”

The Council will express its support for “this spirit of pragmatism and delivery” and encourage ICANN to continue along the same lines.

Council’s spirits appear to have been raised by the ICANN’s board’s touring stakeholder bilaterals last week with questions about how ICANN can be more “agile”, particularly through the use of “small teams” to answer narrow policy problems.

Such a practice has been used in areas such as DNS abuse, and its arguably in use today answering the closed generics question.

Community members also used these sessions to express dissatisfaction with the lumbering Operational Design Assessments that have delayed Whois reform and the new gTLD program, suggesting that ODA work in future could run in parallel with the Policy Development Processes they seek to assess.

So, it seems pretty clear that ICANN’s new leadership used ICANN 76 send the signals they needed to send to get the community on board with their program.

Whether this honeymoon-period energy will lead to real change or gradually wither away under 25 years of accumulated labyrinthine bureaucracy, institutional lethargy, and personal beefs remains to be seen.

But this isn’t rocket science.

Governments backtracking on closed generics ban

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee appears to be backpedaling on its commitment to permitting so-called “closed generic” gTLDs in the next application round.

The GAC’s output from ICANN 76, which took place in Cancun last week, contains a paragraph that suggests that governments are reverting to their decade-old position that maybe closed generics are not a good idea.

The GAC, GNSO and At-Large have been engaging in a “facilitated dialogue” for the past few months in an attempt to figure out whether closed generics should be allowed and under what terms.

The GAC is now saying “no policy option, including the prohibition of Closed Generics, should be excluded if no satisfactory solution is found”. It had agreed to the dialogue on the condition that prohibition would not be an outcome.

A closed generic is a single-registrant gTLD matching a dictionary word that is not a trademark. Think McDonald’s controlling all the names in .burger or Jack Daniels controlling the whole .whiskey zone.

These types of TLDs had not been banned in the 2012 application round, resulting over 180 gTLD applications, including the likes of L’Oreal applying for .makeup and Symantec’s .antivirus.

But the GAC took a disliking to these applications, issuing advice in 2013 that stated: “For strings representing generic terms, exclusive registry access should serve a public interest goal.”

This caused ICANN to implement what amounted to a retroactive ban on closed generics. Many applicants withdrew their bids; other tried to fudge their way around the issue or simply sat on their gTLDs defensively.

When the GNSO came around to developing policy in 2020 for the next new gTLD round, it failed to come to a consensus on whether closed generics should be allowed. It couldn’t even agree on what the default, status quo position was — the 2012 round by policy permitted them, but in practice did not. The matter was punted to ICANN.

A year ago, ICANN said the GAC and GNSO should get their heads together in a small group, the “facilitated dialogue”, to resolve the matter, but the framing paper outlining the rules of engagement for the talks explicitly ruled out two “edge outcomes” that, ICANN said, were “unlikely to achieve consensus”.

Those outcomes were:

1. allowing closed generics without restrictions or limitations OR

2. prohibiting closed generics under any circumstance.

The GAC explicitly agreed to these terms, with then-chair Manal Ismail (who vacated the seat last week) writing (pdf):

The GAC generally agrees with the proposed parameters for dialogue, noting that discussion should focus on a compromise to allow closed generics only if they serve a public interest goal and that the two “edge outcomes” (i.e. allowing closed generics without restrictions/limitations, and prohibiting closed generics under any circumstance) are unlikely to achieve consensus, and should therefore be considered out of scope for this dialogue.

Now, after days of closed-door facilitated dialogue have so far failed to reach a consensus on stuff like what the “public interest” is, the GAC has evidently had a change of heart.

Its new Cancun communique states:

In view of the initial outputs from the facilitated dialogue group on closed generics, involving representatives from the GAC, GNSO and At-Large, the GAC acknowledges the importance of this work, which needs to address multiple challenges. While the GAC continues to be committed to the facilitated dialogue, no policy option, including the prohibition of Closed Generics, should be excluded if no satisfactory solution is found. In any event, any potential solution would be subject to the GAC’s consensus agreement.

In other words, the GAC is going back on its word and explicitly ruling-in one of the two edge outcomes it less than a year ago had explicitly ruled out.

It’s noteworthy — and was noted by several governments during the drafting of the communique — that the other edge outcome, allowing closed generics without restriction, is not mentioned.

It’s tempting to read this as a negotiating tactic — the GAC publicly indicating that a failure to reach a deal with the GNSO will mean a closed generics ban by default, but since the facilitated dialogue is being held entirely in secret it’s impossible to know for sure.