ICANN throws out prostitution complaint

ICANN has rejected a complaint from a man about a web site apparently offering prostitution services.

As I reported last month, the American had filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN’s board of directors after his complaints to Compliance about Namecheap were rejected.

He’s unhappy that US-based Namecheap won’t take down the domain adultsearch.com, which operates as a marketplace for sex workers, many of whom are offering services that may well be illegal in most parts of the US.

But ICANN’s Board Governance Committee rejected the complaint (pdf) for lack of standing.

While the ruling is procedural, rather than substantive, the BGC does spend quite a lot of time tying itself in knots to show that while the complainant may well believe prostitution is harmful to society in general, he failed to state how he, specifically, had been harmed.

The decision also directly references the part of the request the requester has specifically asked to be redacted (but was not).

Did a sexy Russian spy nerf the o.com auction?

It’s been over three years since Verisign won the right to auction off the domain name o.com for charity, and so far there’s no sign of a sale. Could a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist’s affair with a Russian spy be the reason?

The .com registry operator received permission from ICANN for a one-off auction — a unique exception to the decades-old convention that single-character .com domains are reserved — in March 2019, and that was the last we heard of it.

There’s been no announcement of an auction date, and neither ICANN nor Verisign have mentioned it since.

I asked Verisign a couple of weeks ago what the company’s plans were and at the weekend received the reply: “Thanks for reaching out and your interest is noted. Once there is an update, we will reach back out to you.”

I don’t think I’m getting into conspiracy theory territory to suggest that the reason for the lack of movement is that the domain’s most likely buyer, the man most likely behind Verisign asking ICANN’s permission in the first place, lost his job a few months after the auction was approved.

When in 2017 Verisign filed its request with ICANN it was widely believed to be primarily the result of a pressure campaign by Patrick Byrne, then-CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, that had gone on for over a decade.

Byrne had been nagging Verisign and ICANN to let him register the domain since at least 2004, as this published correspondence (pdf) illustrates.

Former senior ICANN staffer Kurt Pritz later recounted how Byrne “slid a check for $1,000,000 payable to ICANN across my desk” to persuade a then-broke ICANN to release the name, around the same time. The offer was rebuffed.

Byrne’s obsession with o.com continued, but in 2010 he seemed to throw in the towel briefly when Overstock paid relaunching Colombian ccTLD operator .CO Internet a whopping $350,000 for the domain o.co, which Overstock promptly rebranded around.

Overstock even purchased the naming rights to the Oakland Coliseum baseball stadium, which was known as the O.co Coliseum from 2011 to 2016.

But rebranding is always a risk, not least when it’s to an unfamiliar TLD, and Byrne admitted in 2012 that the move had been a huge mistake.

“O.co was my bad call,” Byrne said at the time, adding that “about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com”.

So when Verisign got the nod to sell o.com, you might have expected Byrne to be champing at the bit.

But in August 2019, Byrne quit Overstock after it emerged he had been in a sexual relationship — according to him encouraged by shadowy FBI agents — with a Russian woman half his age convicted in the US of being a spy in 2018.

Byrne admitted the reportedly three-year relationship with Maria Butina, who after her release from US prison became a member of Russia’s parliament with Putin’s United Russia party, in August 2019. It’s a pretty wild story.

He quit his job at Overstock, the company he had founded, at the same time and a month later sold all his stock in the company.

Byrne has since gone on to be a full-time conspiracy theorist, including reportedly being one of several people who, in December 2020, had a bizarre White House meeting in which they attempted to explain to then-President Trump how the 2020 election had been stolen — the birth of the “Big Lie”.

That was reportedly the first time he had met Trump. There’s no evidence I’m aware of that he had the president’s ear while Verisign was asking his administration to lift the price freeze on .com domains, which it did in 2018.

Conspiracies aside, it’s undoubtedly true that Byrne’s resignation means Verisign has lost its most motivated bidder for o.com, so an auction would likely prove disappointing, unless Oprah Winfrey is feeling particularly frivolous.

Google reveals launch dates for two new gTLDs

Google is slowly working through its backlog of unlaunched new gTLDs, this week announcing go-live dates for two dormant strings.

.boo and .rsvp will both follow the same launch schedule, with month-long Sunrise periods for trademark owners beginning October 4 and general availability starting November 15.

There will also be Early Access Periods, where names can be secured early for daily-decreasing premium fees, running from November 8 to November 15.

Google Registry described .boo as for those “building a website for love, laughs, or a surprise”, while .rsvp is for customers “celebrating a wedding, throwing a fundraiser, or accepting bookings for their business”.

They appear to be among the lightest-touch Google TLDs in terms of restrictions.

Google has been sitting on both gTLDs for over eight years.

Ducos a shoo-in for GNSO Council chair

The next chair of ICANN’s GNSO Council will be GoDaddy’s Sebastien Ducos.

Ducos, who manages TLD clients for GoDaddy Registry, will stand unopposed for the role after the GNSO’s Non-Contracted Parties House decided not to field a candidate.

The election, which seems a formality, will take place at the end of ICANN 75, the Org’s Annual General Meeting, in Kuala Lumpur and Zoom next month.

Australian Ducos has been a vice-chair of the Council since the last AGM.

He will replace Philippe Fouquart, an employee of Orange from the NCPH, after his second one-year term ends.

There hasn’t been a contested election for Council chair since 2018.

ICANN rushes mystery directors onto board in apparent bylaws breach

ICANN is hurrying two new directors onto its board despite that fact that hardly anybody, apparently including the people who this week gave them the nod, seemed to know who they are.

The Org also seems to have technically breached its bylaws with the timing of the move, which also sees chair Maarten Botterman appointed for another three-year term.

Earlier this week the Empowered Community Administration, which has broad powers to hire and fire directors, submitted ICANN-drafted letters formally approving this year’s Nominating Committee picks — Botterman, Christopher Chapman and Sajidur Rahman.

But I’m told that the ECA, like the rest of us, were not given any information by ICANN about the two newcomers beyond their names and the geographic regions they hail from. They were basically waved onto the board blind, it seems.

Photographs subsequently published on the NomCom web site confirm the two directors’ identities. They’re the former head of the Australian Communications and Media Authority Chris Chapman, and Indonesian venture capitalist Sajid Rahman of MyAsiaVC.

Judging by the ICANN bylaws, approval by the ECA — which comprises one person from each of the ASO, the ccNSO, the GNSO, the ALAC and the GAC — is pretty much just a rubber-stamp. All the due diligence is done by NomCom and the Org.

But the appointments appear to amount to a technical bylaws breach on timing grounds, coming about a month late. The bylaws state:

At least two months before the commencement of each annual meeting, the Nominating Committee shall give the EC Administration (with a copy to the Decisional Participants and Secretary) written notice of its nomination of Directors for seats with terms beginning at the conclusion of the annual meeting, and the EC Administration shall promptly provide the Secretary (with a copy to the Decisional Participants) with written notice of the designation of those Directors.

This year’s AGM will be held in Kuala Lumpur from September 17, with the new directors taking their seats at its conclusion on September 22. So NomCom seems to have missed its “at least two months before” deadline by a month. ECA approval came August 15.

This year’s AGM is a little earlier than usual, which may help explain the problem. They’re usually held in October or November, and there hasn’t been one held in September since 2001.

NomCom also missed the two-month window in 2020, by an even bigger margin, for entirely understandable pandemic-related reasons. It announced its selections just a couple of weeks before the AGM.

ICANN staffing up for next new gTLD round

ICANN has started hiring staff to support the next round of new gTLD applications.

The Org this week posted an ad for a “Policy Development Support Analyst” who will “track generic top-level domain policy proposals and contribute to capacity development in the civil society and noncommercial communities”.

It also appears to be still looking for a “Senior Director, New gTLD Subsequent Procedures”, with an ad first posted in June.

The latter is almost certainly a revolving-door type of opening, where somebody with deep, long-term insight into the industry and ICANN would be the likely hire.

ICANN describes it as a “highly visible role requiring a high degree of organization, leadership experience, management and communications acumen, and subject matter knowledge” where the successful candidate “will provide leadership and direction over multiple tracks of organizational activities toward implementation of a subsequent round of ICANN’s New gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domain) Program”.

The newer, more junior opening appears to have a broader remit, with the focus on non-commercial stakeholder engagement as well as the new gTLD program.

The two jobs are among 35 currently being advertised by ICANN.

German motoring club dot-brand crashes out

Europe’s largest motoring club has become the latest organization to ask ICANN to tear up its dot-brand Registry Agreement.

The Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club, which has about 21 million members, has told ICANN it no longer wishes to run .adac. As usual, no explanation was provided.

The gTLD was in use — ADAC currently has a few live non-redirecting sites, including blog.adac and presse.adac. Its primary domain is adac.de.

Whois Disclosure System likely over a year away

ICANN lifted the curtain a little on its fetal Whois Disclosure System this week, but the news is not good if you’re champing at the bit for a usable system for requesting private Whois data from registrars.

The system, formerly referred to as SSAD Lite, will take “seven to nine months” to develop after ICANN staff gets the green light from its board, staffers told a small GNSO volunteer working group on a Wednesday conference call.

That timetable assumes the staffers working on it are 100% devoted to developing the system, rather than sharing their time between competing projects, they quickly clarified.

This raises the specter of months-long delays to the other big, already-delayed, ICANN work-in-progress — the next new gTLD application round.

The responsible staffers plan to publish a design document for the Whois Disclosure System around ICANN 75 next month, but whether the board will give its immediate approval is not clear.

We’re probably looking at at least a year before there’s a system in place that IP lawyers, security researchers and the like can log into, request data, and be disappointed.

And that’s despite the fact that the system will be built using existing technology — namely the CZDS or Centralized Zone Data Service, which has be in use for many years allowing people to request zone files from gTLD registries.

During this week’s webinar, staffers described how, like CZDS, there will be two user interfaces: one for the data requester, one for the data holder. The system will simply act as an intermediary between the two.

It will use ICANN’s existing accounts system, so there will be no user vetting beyond email address verification. There’ll be no integration with registrars’ existing ticketing systems, and any communications between registrar and requester will have to take place via email.

There’ll also be no billing function, because the system will be free to use by all parties and completely voluntary. While registrars are contractually bound to respond to Whois data requests, there’s no such obligation to use the Whois Disclosure System to do so.

Staffers admitted on the call that they’re a bit stumped about how to encourage registrars to sign up when the system goes live.

Belgium slashes its ICANN funding in “mission creep” protest

DNS Belgium has cut its contribution to ICANN’s budget by two thirds, in protest at ICANN’s “mission creep” and its handling of GDPR.

The Belgian ccTLD registry informed ICANN CFO Xavier Calvez that it will only pay $25,000 this fiscal year, compared to the $75,000 it usually pays.

Registry general manager Philip Du Bois wrote (pdf) that “during recent years there has been a shift in focus which is not in the benefit of ccTLD’s”.

ICANN has become a large corporate structure with a tendency to suffer from “mission creep”… At the same time ICANN seems to fail in dealing in an appropriate way with important issues such as GDPR/privacy. It goes beyond our comprehension that ICANN and its officers don’t feel any reluctancy to “advise” European institutions and national governmental bodies to embrace “standards developed by the multi-stakeholder structures on international level” while at the same time it is obvious that ICANN itself has not yet mastered the implementation of important European legislation.

Based in the heart of the EU, DNS Belgium was a strong proponent of Whois privacy many years before the GDPR came into effect in 2018.

Calvez, in his reply (pdf), acknowledges that ccTLD contributions are voluntary, but seems to insinuate (call me a cynic) that the criticisms are hollow and that the registry might simply be trying to reduce its costs during an economic downturn:

We do appreciate any amount of contribution, and also that the ability for any ccTLD to contribute varies over time, including based on economic circumstances. We do understand that the reduction of DNS Belgium’s contribution from US$75,000 to US$25,000 represents a significant and meaningful reduction of costs for DNS Belgium.

DNS Belgium seems to be doing okay, based on its latest annual financial report. It’s not a huge company, but registrations and revenue have been growing at a slow and steady rate for the last several years.

All ccTLD contributions to ICANN are voluntary, but there are suggested donations based on how many domains a registry has under management, ranging from the $225,000 paid by the likes of the UK registry to the $500 paid by the likes of Pitcairn.

DNS Belgium, which manages about 1.7 million names, falls into the third-highest band, with a $75,000 suggested contribution.

ICANN is budgeting for funding of $152 million in its current FY23.

Diversity takes a hit as NomCom replaces two ICANN directors with newcomers

ICANN will be left with fewer women and Africans on its board of directors following this year’s Nominating Committee selections, after which apparent community newcomers will take seats.

NomCom last night announced that its three picks for the board, due to take or retake their seats at the Annual General Meeting in Kuala Lumpur next month, are Maarten Botterman, Christopher Chapman and Sajidur Rahman.

Botterman is of course the current chair, and his reappointment was surely never in any doubt. He’ll be entering his third and final term at the AGM.

Less is known about the two newcomers. ICANN has so far provided no biographical information about them beyond the geographic region they represent. Botterman is European and both Chapman and Rahman are from Asia-Pacific.

Both new appointees have very common, google-resistant names, and neither appears to have a track record of vocal ICANN community participation.

Chapman, if I had to guess, would be Chris Chapman, the former long-term independent media regulator from Australia. Sajid Rahman is such a common name I don’t think I could confidently make a call on his identity early doors.

What we do know is that they’re both Asia-Pac, and they’re both replacing one-term African directors.

Leaving the board at the AGM will be NomCom’s 2019 picks Mandla Msimang from South Africa and Ihab Osman from Sudan. This means the sole remaining voting African on the board come October will be South African Alan Barrett.

Msimang leaving and being replaced by a man of course changes the gender mix. After the AGM, there will be six women on the 20-seat board, five out of the 16 voting seats.

Note that I’m not analyzing the picks by some subjective “woke” criteria — ICANN has strict rules about geographic representation in its bylaws and every year its board of directors encourages NomCom to consider the gender mix when making its selections.

The bylaws state that each of the five geographic regions must have at least one seat on the board, and that no one region can have more than five directors.

That said, ICANN doesn’t make it easy to figure out which directors hail from which regions. There’s no published breakdown that I’m aware of and many directors have multiple citizenships and/or are long-term residents of nations outside their birth region.

Two other directors have their current terms ending next month — GNSO appointee Becky Burr (North America), who has been reappointed for a third term, and Akinori Maemura (Asia-Pac) who is being replaced by Christian Kaufmann (Europe) as an ASO appointee.

NomCom broke down the gender and geographic mix of applicants for all the open board and non-board positions here.