.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.

.art links DNS and alt-root ENS

UK Creative Ideas, the .art gTLD registry, has started offering its registrants the ability to register names on the blockchain-based alt-root Ethereum Name Service that exactly match their DNS names, for a one-time fee.

CMO Jeff Sass said that for $20, paid in Ethereum coin, registrants can secure their exact-match on the ENS, with no renewal fees.

There’s an authentication system using DNS TXT records to make sure only .art DNS registrants can obtain their matching ENS names, he said.

“We’ve married the two together, so there can’t be any confusion or collisions,” he said.

The benefit of this is that registrants will be able use their .art domains to address their cryptocurrency wallets. Web browsers that support ENS obviously already support DNS, so there’s no real benefit in that context.

.ART is also selling ENS .art names without matching DNS names — and these can include ICANN-prohibited characters such as emojis — but these are priced from $5 to $650, based on character count, and have annual renewal fees.

.art current has about 230,000 registered names, a pretty respectable number for a new gTLD, and Sass said about 60% of them are in the form of firstnamelastname.art, suggesting usage by professional and amateur artists.

gTLD registries selling matches in alt-roots has been a cause of concern at ICANN over recent years, due to legal concerns. Uniregistry’s sale of its portfolio was held up for months because of this.

Brands want new gTLD fast track

The Brand Registry Group is to propose a set of principles for the next round of ICANN’s new gTLD program that it thinks would see the initial application fee slashed by more than half and some evaluations starting as early as this October.

Under the proposals, TLD-curious applicants could get into the system for as little as $100,000 per string, about $150,000 lower than ICANN’s current estimate, and could see ICANN accepting applications as early as April 2025.

The recommendations, drafted by GoDaddy’s Tony Kirsch and Pharos Global’s Michael Palage, will be presented at a session on Saturday, the first day of ICANN’s 76th public meeting, in Cancun, Mexico.

They’re calling the proposals “Option 2a”, a reference to the two options laid out in ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment of the next round, which was completed in December.

The plan would allow applicants to pay $100,000 to submit a bare-bones application and test the waters in terms of contention, objections and similarity. They could then choose to withdraw before submitting the financial and technical portions of their bid.

Applicants with straightforward applications (presumably including most dot-brands) would have a lower overall cost than those who need additional reviews, contention resolution and objection processing.

The paper also criticizes the “astonishing” estimate of a $400 million program development cost, suggesting instead that ICANN repurpose its existing tools such as Salesforce to roll out the application submission system.

It reckons ICANN could start its Registry Service Provider Pre-Evaluation Program, based on the process it already uses when registries switch back-ends, in October this year.

If ICANN adopts the proposals, the BRG reckons a final Applicant Guidebook could be approved in October 2024, with applications accepted from April 2025.

Whois disclosure system coming this year?

ICANN has approved the creation of a Whois Disclosure System, almost six years after Europe’s GDPR rules tore up the rule book on Whois access.

The system is likely to face a name change before going live, due to the fact that it does not guarantee, nor process, the disclosure of private Whois data.

The board of directors passed a resolution February 27, a month later than expected, “to develop and launch the WHOIS Disclosure System (System) as requested by the GNSO Council within 11 months from the date of this resolution.”

That’s two months longer than earlier anticipated, but we’re still looking potentially at a live system that people can sign up for and use a year from now.

The system is expected to be based on the Centralized Zone Data Service that many of us have been using to request and download gTLD zone files for the last decade. While not perfect, CZDS gets the job done and has improved over the years.

The technology will be adapted to create what essentially amounts to a ticketing system, allowing the likes of IP lawyers to request unredacted Whois records. The requests would then be forwarded to the relevant registrar.

It’s an incredibly trimmed-down version of what Whois users had been asking for. Participation is voluntary on both sides of the transaction, and registrars are under no new obligations to approve requests.

If nobody uses the system, it could be turned off. ICANN Org has only been directed to run it for “for up to two years”. ICANN will collect and publish usage data to figure out whether it’s worth the quite substantial number of hours and dollars that have already gone into its development.

The actual cost of development and operation had been pegged at $3.3 million, but the board’s resolution states that most of the cost will be existing staff and excess costs will come from the Supplemental Fund for Implementation of Community Recommendations (SFICR).

This is why ICANN is worried about new gTLDs right now

ICANN’s board of directors yesterday laid out a whole bucket list of concerns it has about the next round of new gTLDs, some of which it thinks might take over a year to resolve.

The board told the GNSO Council on a conference call that it has 38 areas of concern that will need to be addressed before it can fully approve the policy recommendations sent to it two years ago.

ICANN has identified 298 recommendations emerging from the GNSO’s Final Report (pdf) into the future of the new gTLD program.

The board intends to fully approve 94 of those recommendations March 16, at its meeting in Cancun, which begins next week. A further 168 are believed to be covered by already-approved policy and will simply be “acknowledged”.

That leaves 38 that will need further discussion between the board, Council and Governmental Advisory Committee, covering areas such as legal and financial exposure, potential bylaws violations, and worries about gaming.

Here’s my non-exhaustive hot take on the issues that look most interesting to me.

First-come, first-served

Most surprising to me are indications that the current board appears to favor a gradual transition to making new gTLDs available to applicants on a first-come, first-served basis.

The GNSO’s Final Report was firm that the program continue to operate in discrete, regular rounds, with finite application windows. It rejected the idea of FCFS for a host of persuasive reasons.

But director Becky Burr told the Council yesterday: “The Board really would like to consider whether it makes sense to move to a system of continuous applications at some point.”

“In other words, moving out of rounds into a first-come first-served mode at some point, because that would have a lot of potential advantages with respect to string similarity issues and contention sets and the like,” she said.

FCFS could remove these costly aspects of the program — no contention sets means no auctions, for a start — but do we really want a process where the fastest trigger-finger is the sole decider of who gets a gTLD?

This would make obtaining a gTLD more akin to drop-catching. Anyone remember digital archery?

The board suggests the GNSO reconvene its Policy Development Process working group to address this issue, with a target date of June this year for resolution.

Emojis

The board is also worried that the Final Report suggests a blanket ban on emojis “at any level” in gTLDs, for security and stability reasons — since there’s no standard for how emojis are rendered in software, the chance of confusion is pretty high.

This appears to be an easily fixable problem of wording. The board points out that it only has power to set policy for gTLDs and second-level domains, a ban “at any level” — which would include [emoji].example.example domains — may be ultra vires.

Simply clarifying that the ban only applies at any “registerable” level may be enough to put this concern to bed, but the board reckons it might take until October.

The Content Police

As previously reported, the board has concerns about proposals for “Registry Voluntary Commitments”, which would be contractually enforceable promises to only allow, for example, certain types of content or registrant.

This could go against ICANN’s bylaws commitments to stay out of policing internet content, a very sensitive issue.

ICANN has previously floated the idea of amending the bylaws to enable RVCs, but now the board wants to talk further with the GNSO before taking any action. It thinks it could take until April 2024, 13 months from now, to sort this out.

Watching the Pennies

The board has a number of concerns that some GNSO recommendations may risk emptying ICANN’s coffers.

It wants to revisit the idea that the Applicant Support program be expanded to include lawyers fees and application-writing services, for example. In 2012, it only subsidized ICANN’s own application fees.

The board is also worried that releasing dot-brand owners from the required to post a financial bond to cover the Emergency Back-End Registry Operator’s costs should the TLD fail may end up costing ICANN money.

The Future

The good news arising from yesterday’s briefing appears to be that the board is set on approving the continuation of the new gTLD program in less than two weeks.

The bad news is that there are a few dozen recommendations, grouped into 16 buckets, that it thinks need more work before they can be approved. It thinks these issues can be wrapped up by April 2024, however.

IDNs — small and shrinking

It’s no secret that internationalized domain names haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves since they were first introduced over a decade ago, but the latest ICANN data shows registration volumes are shrinking.

According to its second annual IDN Progress Report (pdf), there were 1.52 million IDN names across all gTLDs (including Latin-script TLDs) at the end of 2022, which was down 2.94% from a year earlier.

ICANN pointed out that this is actually a slower decline than in previous years, where the average shrinkage from 2019 to 2021 was 11.36%.

Chinese-script names were perhaps unsurprisingly the most common, representing 50% of the total, with Latin coming second-place with 26%. Some Latin-script languages need representing as IDNs to accommodate diacritics like cedillas and umlauts.

Korean, Cyrillic and Japanese followed in popularity. The multitude of scripts used in India fall into the “other” category, with less than 1% of the total — fewer than Hebrew — despite the country’s vast population.

The relatively low number of registrations is spread across ASCII and IDN gTLDs. Ninety-one of the 1,172 total gTLDs are IDN gTLDs and 462 gTLDs support IDNs at the second-level, regardless of top-level script.

ICANN’s report does not cover ccTLDs, presumably because the zone files are not usually readily available, but we know from ccTLD registry that their own IDNs can be somewhat popular.

Russia reports 681,000 .РФ names today, while China recorded 190,000 .中国 names mid-2022.

ICANN has made IDNs and universal acceptance a cornerstone of its current strategic plan and there’s likely to be a push for IDN applications in the next new gTLD rounnd.

New gTLDs report came in under budget

ICANN spent less than expected carrying out the Operational Design Phase of the new gTLD program last year, according to financials published yesterday.

The Org’s second fiscal quarter (fourth calendar quarter) report shows it spent $6.8 million on the ODP, which ended in mid-December with the delivery of the Operational Design Assessment.

That’s under the low-end of the $7 million to $9 million ICANN’s board of directors had approved for its budget.

The report also reveals that roughly 15 full-time equivalents, mostly ICANN staff, spent a total of over 27,000 hours to produce the ODA report, which is currently awaiting board approval.

The financial report shows that ICANN spent about $400,000 more than expected on its AGM in Kuala Lumpur last October. This, it said, was due to higher airfare costs, partially offset by 45 fewer funded travelers than expected attending.

Overall, ICANN received about $1 million more in funding than it expected, at $76 million, due to not losing as many registrars as expected, and its FY23 spend to date was $67 million, about $5 million under budget due to “lower than planned professional services and personnel costs”.

It had an average 399 staff over the period and ended the year with total assets of $558 million, $438.3 million of which is invested.

ICANN to approve next new gTLD round next month (kinda)

ICANN’s board of directors is sending mixed signals about the new gTLD program, but it seems it is ready to start approving the next round when the community meets for its 76th public meeting in Mexico next month.

It seems the board will approve the GNSO’s policy recommendations in a piecemeal fashion. There are some undisclosed sticking points that will have to be approved at a later date.

Chair Tripti Sinha wrote this week that the board “anticipates making incremental decisions leading up to the final decision on opening a new application window for new gTLDs”.

While “many” recommendations will be approved at ICANN 76, the board “will defer a small, but important, subset of the recommendations for future consideration”.

The good news is that the board is erring towards the so-called “Option 2” sketched out in Org’s Operational Design Assessment, which would be much quicker and cheaper than the five-year slog the ODA primarily envisaged.

Sinha wrote:

the Board has asked ICANN Org to provide more detail on the financing of the steps envisioned in the ODA, and to develop a variation of the proposed Option 2 that ensures adequate time and resources to reduce the need for manual processing and takes into account the need to resolve critical policy issues, such as closed generics.

The closed generics issue — where companies can keep all the domains in a generic-term gTLD all to themselves — did not have a community consensus recommendation, and the GNSO Council and Governmental Advisory Committee have been holding bilateral talks to resolve the impasse.

There’s been an informal agreement that some closed generics should be allowed, but only if they serve the global public interest.

A recent two-day GAC-GNSO discussion failed to find agreement on what “generic” and “global public interest” actually mean, so the talks could be slow going. The group intends to file an update before ICANN 76.