ICANN just put a date on the next new gTLD round

ICANN has just penciled in a date for the next round of new gTLD applications for the first time, but it’s already upsetting some people who think it’s not aggressive enough.

Org has released its draft Implementation Plan for the next round, which would see it launch in May 2026, three years from now.

The date seems to have been set from the top. The plan refers to “the Board’s desire to launch the next round by May 2026”.

The plan sets out the timeline by which community members will work with staff to turn the community’s policy recommendations into the rules and procedures for accepting and processing gTLD applications.

This cross-community Implementation Review Team will write the next Applicant Guidebook — the new gTLD’s program’s Holy Quran.

The plan covers the 98 policy recommendations already approved by the ICANN board of directors, it will be updated when or if the board approves the 38 recommendations currently considered “pending”.

The work would be split into eight “modules”, corresponding to the sections of the AGB, and the IRT would tackle each in turn, meeting mostly via Zoom for a couple hours once a week.

The modules would be split into about 40 topics, each covering a group of related recommendations, and each topic would be discussed for two meetings, with Org-drafted text undergoing first and second “readings” by the IRT.

The first module would take seven months to complete, timed from this month, and each subsequent module would take three to four months after the completion of the preceding module, according to the draft plan.

Above and beyond that timetable, the IRT has certain external dependencies, such as the work being done with governments on the “closed generics” issue, the plan notes.

After the AGB is published, ICANN would need to carry out other work, such as subjecting the AGB to public comment, then marketing the program for four months, before an application window would open.

The timeline has been received negatively by pretty much everyone on the IRT expressing a view on mailing list or Zoom chatter so far, with some asking why the modules have to be tackled sequentially rather than in parallel work tracks.

Some have also pointed out that an IRT lasting over two years risks participant attrition, a frequent problem with ICANN’s interminable policy-making work.

The IRT comprises dozens of volunteers from all sections of the community, though the most-engaged tend to be the lawyers and consultants who stand to make money advising large enterprises on their dot-brand applications.

Three more dot-brands realize the futility of existence

A big bank and a big retailer have ditched their dot-brand gTLDs.

Northwestern Mutual has told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate .mutual and .northwesternmutual, while iconic jewelry store operator Tiffany said it doesn’t want .tiffany any more.

Neither gTLD has been used. The Northwestern registry pages contain a notice, apparently from 2017, about how it expected to publish launch plans “over the coming months”.

Northwestern’s gTLDs are on GoDaddy’s back-end. Tiffany is on Verisign. All three were managed by Fairwinds Partners.

.web delay likely after Verisign rival files ICANN appeal

The .web gTLD appears unlikely to see the light of day any time soon, after the Afilias spin-off that came second to Verisign in the $135 million auction in 2016 kicked off another appeals process.

Altanovo, which is made up of bits of Afilias left over when Identity Digital acquired the company, has asked ICANN to enter a Cooperative Engagement Process, according to ICANN’s records.

The CEP is a form of mediation companies can force ICANN into when they have beef. It’s designed to avoid the relative expense of a full-on Independent Review Process. They usually result in an IRP anyway.

Altanovo made its request the same day ICANN announced that its board of directors had decided to take .web off hold and resume registry contract negotiations with Verisign, following Altanovo’s original, unsuccessful IRP.

Verisign yesterday said the move amounted to an “abuse of process” and “baseless procedural maneuvering”, likely to lead to “delay for delay’s sake”.

IRPs typically last years and cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars in panel fees, not counting each party’s lawyer fees.

Altanovo believes that Verisign broke ICANN’s new gTLD program rules when it bid for .web via a secret intermediary. Verisign has countered that its rival, then Afilias, broke the rules by trying to negotiate a private deal during the auction’s “black out” period.

Progress made on next new gTLD round rules

Pace towards finalizing the details of the next new gTLD application round is picking up, with a group of policy-makers close to overcoming some of the ICANN board’s concerns about the program.

A so-called “small team” of GNSO members, aided by a couple of ICANN directors, have drafted a set of recommendations aimed at helping the board approve the 38 community recommendations it has not yet adopted.

The board approved 98 new gTLD “Subsequent Procedures” policy recommendations in March, but was hesitant on issues such as the proposed registry back-end evaluation program, round-based applications, and content policing.

The board had raised the specter of a first-come, first-served model for new gTLD applications, something the community roundly rejected during the Policy Development Process for the next rounds.

Directors in the small group have since clarified that they’re really looking for a “steady state” application process, that may or may not involve FCFS, in order to make planning, hiring and software development more predictable.

There seems to be no question of the next application opportunity being anything other than a round-based process.

Nevertheless, it’s now possible that the GNSO may throw the board a bone by suggesting a PDP that would look into how the new gTLD program could operate in a “steady state” over the long term.

Content policing is another issue that has caused the board pause.

SubPro and the GNSO have recommended that registries be able to add Registry Voluntary Commitments — promises to ban certain types of content from their zone, for example — to their ICANN contracts.

But the board is worried that this may break its 2016 bylaws, which demand ICANN not get involved in content policing, even though the similar Public Interest Commitments from the 2012 round are enforceable.

The GNSO and board currently seem to be leaning towards a bylaws amendment to address RVCs, but it will be a bit of a tightrope, language-wise, to keep ICANN on its ostensibly technical mandate.

The small group has met nine times since late March to try and resolve these and other board concerns ahead of the mid-year ICANN 77 meeting in Washington DC, which starts June 12.

There’s a pretty aggressive schedule of meetings between now and then, with a bilateral between GNSO and board May 22. The board should have the GNSO’s response to its roadblocks by DC, which should allow it to start chipping away at some of the 38 unadopted recommendations.

Brands ask for cheaper ICANN fees

The group representing dot-brand gTLD registries has asked ICANN to relieve its members of millions of dollars of annual fees.

The Brand Registry Group has written to ICANN to complain that the current $25,000 a year fixed registry fee is too high, given that most dot-brands have next to no domains in their zones and pretty much no abuse.

A dot-brand is a gTLD matching a trademark in which only the brand holder may register domains. Most are unused, and those that are used don’t face many of the contractual compliance-related issues as regular gTLDs.

The BRG wants its members’ fees reduced to $5,000 a year, when the registry has fewer than 5,000 names and basically no abuse.
The group notes that 20-year-old gTLDs such as .museum, .coop, and .aero have a base fixed fee of just $500.

Given that there are about 400 contracted dot-brands, it’s basically asking ICANN to throw away about $8 million of annual revenue, paid for by some of the largest and wealthiest multinationals out there.

ICANN salary porn: 2022 edition

ICANN has published its fiscal 2022 US tax returns, revealing as usual the big bucks its top brass and contractors are paid for boldly keeping the internet stable and secure.

It was a good year for former CEO Göran Marby, who held the top job until the end of calendar 2022 and saw his total compensation top a million dollars for a second time, having dipped in fiscal 2021.

Marby’s total package was $1,050,755 in salary, bonus and benefits for the year ended June 30, up from $977,540 in the previous year. The performance-related portion was $218,315, up from $202,038. His base salary was $734,579, up from $673,462.

The tax filing lists 17 highly compensated employees, down by two from 2021, who are making $390,000 and up. Seven made over half a million dollars a year, up from five in the previous year.

One of the missing employees this year was CTO David Conrad, who left the Org at the end of 2021. The filing reveals he was paid $115,874 in severance, despite ICANN characterizing his departure as a decision he made himself.

Current interim CEO Sally Costerton’s compensation is not revealed. It’s paid to her consulting company and the sum, whatever it is, presumably does not meet the threshold for disclosure as a top contractor.

(I hope this number is disclosed in future, because I’ve just come up with a funny nickname for her if it’s a very large amount.)

Top contractors are as usual law firm Jones Day ($5,164,603, down from $8,769,608) and software developers Architech, Zensar and OSTechnical, which received $2,857,500, $1,488,077 and $1,169,210 respectively.

ICANN’s total revenue was $167,893,854, up from $163,942,482. Its surplus after expenses was $22,755,179, down from $32,564,762. It had net assets of $539,863,742 at the end of June, down from $555,804,201.

The filing reveals that non-accreditation fees from registries and registrars topped $100 million.

Another registrar seemingly vanishes

An accredited registrar appears to have gone bust after its parent company failed.

ICANN has sent a breach notice to Nimzo 98, which while registered as an LLC in the US appears to be Indian-operated, saying the company has not paid its fees and the Compliance folk haven’t been able to reach management since December.

The notice also complains that the company isn’t providing a Whois service as required, which may be a polite way of saying that the entire web site is down — it’s not resolving properly for me.

Digging into the data a little, it seems Nimzo was the in-house registrar of a company called Houm that, according to its press releases, was operating some kind of privacy-oriented social network slash cloud storage service.

Part of Houm’s offering was a personal domain name, which came bundled as part of the monthly service fee.

When Houm seriously started promoting its service last year, it appears to have led to a spike in registrations via Nimzo. Most of its domains were concentrated in new gTLDs such as .live, .xyz, .earth, .world and .space.

Having consistently registered no more than a couple hundred gTLD names per month for years, there was a sudden spike to over 5,000 in July and 12,000 in August, peaking Nimzo’s total domains at 21,000 that month.

But then, in October, the registrar deleted almost all of its names. It went from 21,000 domains under management in August to 190 at the end of October. These were not grace-period deletes, so fees would have been applicable.

Houm’s web site at houm.me also appears inoperable today, showing a server error when I access it, and its Twitter account has been silent since last August.

ICANN has given Nimzo until May 22 to pay up or lose its accrediation.

Verisign “pleased” at ICANN’s .web call

Verisign said it is “pleased” that ICANN has decided it should be awarded the .web gTLD, but hinted that it might not launch this year.

“We now look forward to NDC’s execution of the .web Registry Agreement and submission to ICANN of the request for assignment of the .web Registry Agreement to Verisign,” the company said in a statement this afternoon.

It follows the news this morning that ICANN’s board of directors decided that the company did not break any rules when it won the auction for .web via a secret intermediary company, Nu Dot Co.

Verisign reiterated that its current financial guidance for the year does not include any impact from .web.

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.