.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.

Earthquake survivors given domain renewal holiday

ICANN has announced that registrants in earthquake-hit Türkiye and Syria could have their domains protected from expiration.

It’s triggered part of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement that permits registrars to avoid deleting names owned by registrants unable to renew due to “extenuating circumstances”.

ICANN has declared last week’s quakes, which have claimed tens of thousands of lives, such a circumstance.

The move requires registrar participation to be truly effective. There are nine registrars based in Türkiye, none in Syria, but the offer is valid to all accredited gTLD registrars.

ICANN has exercised this power three times before — after Hurricane Maria, during the Covid-19 outbreak, and last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.

How ICANN could help out after Türkiye earthquake

A new ICANN program could see funds directed to Türkiye and Syria after Monday’s devastating earthquakes.

Interim CEO Sally Costerton last month said that the Org has created an Emergency Assistance Program, which emerged out of the $1 million it pledged towards the crisis in Ukraine almost a year ago.

The initial donation saw money go to the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), a network of humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, charities and private companies that provides connectivity to disaster zones.

ETC said this week that a coordinator is on the ground in Türkiye to assess the need for its services. It has been in Syria for many years due to the ongoing bloody civil war.

While ICANN’s donation to ETC was a one-off, it intends to open an expressions of interest process soon for global organizations that provide communications during disasters. Contributions up to $1 million will be considered.

Much like the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there were calls this week for Elon Musk to make his Starlink satellites available over Türkiye to help coordinate emergency relief, but his subsequent offer was reportedly declined by the government.

There have also been reports today that the Turkish government has blocked access to Twitter in the country, after receiving criticism over its handling of rescue efforts.

While ICANN’s funds will of course not be available during the current phase of the crisis, they could if connectivity issues persist. The Turkish government has declared a three-month state of emergency.

The earthquake hit close to home for ICANN, which has several staff at its satellite office in Istanbul, more than a thousand kilometers from the quake’s epicenter.

New gTLDs: the next round just got real

It seems ICANN can multi-task, after all.

Its board of directors has yet to formally approve the next application round, but staff have started looking for a company to build the application system, regardless.

Org has published an RFI (pdf) for potential developers of a “gTLD Application Lifecycle System” that ICANN, applicants and third-party contractors will be able to use to manage bids from application to delegation.

The document details the 18 system services outlined in the Operational Design Assessment ICANN completed in December.

The deadline for submitting responses is February 24 and there’ll be a follow-up, invitation-only RFP in April. Companies have to respond to the RFI to have a chance at joining the RFP.

By ICANN’s recent standards, this is a pretty ambitious timetable, and will no doubt raise the spirits of those in the GNSO who have been calling for the Org to get a move on after the lengthy and disappointing ODA.

It may also please those worried about ICANN’s apparent inability to operate in anything other that a serial manner — it’s setting the ball rolling now, before the board has approved the program.

It may also give a hint at which way the board is leaning. It met eight days ago to discuss the next round and the ODA but did not formally pass any resolutions or provide any color on the nature of the talks.