ICANN to review reviews after review review request fails

An effort by ICANN’s At-Large community to force the Org to stick to its bylaws commitments to periodically review its accountability and transparency has failed after nobody else supported it.

As I reported last month, ALAC petitioned its Empowered Community co-members to get ICANN to overturn its decision to delay Accountability and Transparency Review Team 4, which is already more than a year late.

The other EC members — Government Advisory Committee, the Address Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization — had until July 10 to file their letters of support or objection.

But it received no support and the ccNSO actively objected. The threshold for the petition to go ahead was three votes in favor and no more than one vote against.

The ccNSO pointed out that the current cycle of constantly reviewing itself is broken and getting worse over time. It instead called for a fundamental change in how ICANN reviews itself:

We strongly believe that breaking this vicious cycle can only be achieved if the community pauses and critically assesses the current review system. Specifically, the community should evaluate the breadth and number of reviews by looking at purpose, scope, frequency and associated workload of all ICANN Bylaw mandated reviews (a review of reviews), before embarking again on an Accountability and Transparency Review, or any other Bylaw mandated review.

The GNSO Council had a motion on its table last week that would have expressed non-support for the ALAC’s petition, but a vote was deferred until August, by which point it will be moot anyway.

The ASO and GAC do not appear to have publicly expressed an opinion.

It was the first time any community group has attempted to get the Empowered Community to flex its powers over ICANN. Since Org’s split from the US government nine years ago, the EC has been essentially ICANN’s sovereign body.

The petition being thrown out enables either, depending on your point of view: a) a horrifying, bylaws-defying power grab by Org that threatens transparency and accountability or b) a common-sense step away from an interminable, soul-crushing, resource-sapping cycle of endless navel-gazing.

What it means is that ICANN is going to conduct a meta-review, reviewing how it conducts reviews, and then will fiddle with its bylaws to implement a new renew regime.

ICANN ditches Oman due to Middle-East conflicts

ICANN is relocating its next meeting, scheduled for this October in Muscat, Oman, due to travel difficulties and uncertainties caused by the ongoing conflicts in the region.

The meeting, ICANN’s 2025 Annual General Meeting, will now take place in Dublin, Ireland from October 25 to 30, the same dates as the Oman meeting was meant to take place, Org said.

“Recent developments, including associated flight disruptions and impending timelines related to planning the meeting, made it prudent and necessary to select an alternative and available location,” ICANN said.

While Oman is not involved in any current hostilities, other than as a mediator, Israel’s recent strikes on Iran have caused some busy air corridors in the region to be shut down.

Oman is over 2,000 kilometres distant from Israel, and just across the Gulf of Iran from Iran.

The switch will be frustrating not only for Omanis but also to community members from further afield who have booked their travel early or paid for visas and might have limited refund options. Dublin’s a way more expensive city to visit for travelers on a budget, too.

It also sucks for the organizers of Domain Days Dubai, the upcoming domainer conference. It is scheduled to take place in nearby Dubai immediately before ICANN 84.

ICANN has visited Dublin once before, exactly 10 years before the upcoming ICANN 84.

The Org hinted that Muscat could be selected for a future meeting, when and if things settle down.

ICANN’s mighty overlord flexes on transparency

ICANN is heading into uncharted waters after a key community group flexed its powers to hold the Org accountable for a recent board decision.

The At-Large Advisory Committee has become the first of ICANN’s overseers to push for a formal objection to ICANN’s decision to delay its next large-scale accountability review.

In layman’s terms, the ALAC wants the other DPs of the EC — the ASO, the ccNSO, the GNSO, and the GAC — to support its ECRP for a CRR challenging ICANN’s decision to delay ATRT4.

All clear? Great. Thanks for clicking.

Or… perhaps that all deserves some unpicking.

ALAC, the group that represents end-users at ICANN, is one of the five members of the Empowered Community — the group from which, under its bylaws, ICANN derives its powers and authority over domain names and such.

The other Decisional Participants are the Government Advisory Committee, the Address Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization.

One of the EC’s powers is the ability to file a Community Reconsideration Request challenging an ICANN board or staff decision, if three of the DPs support the request and no more than one objects.

ALAC has become the first EC member since ICANN split from the US government in 2016 to formally kick off the process of scrounging up support for such a reconsideration request.

It’s filed an Empowered Community Reconsideration Petition, giving the other four DPs 21 days to vote yay or nay on whether the request should be formally filed.

Its beef is with the ICANN board’s decision in May to delay indefinitely the fourth Accountability and Transparency Review Team, ATRT4, and replace it with a CEO-led meta-review.

ATRTs are community-led reviews that ICANN, according to its bylaws, have to carry out every five years. ATRT3 kicked off at the end of 2018 and concluded in 2020 but its recommendations have not yet been fully implemented by ICANN.

ATRT4 has already been delayed for a year once by the board, last April, but the board wants the delay to continue so the community can take a step back and review, as one group put it, “why we review, what we should review and how best to review”.

I’m not making this up. One review is being replaced with a broader, CEO-led, meta-review that reviews the reviews. I haven’t even mentioned the Pilot Holistic Review or the various Continuous Improvement Programs.

The root rationale here relates to intellectual bandwidth. Arguably the biggest issue facing ICANN in recent years is its perceived (or actual) inability to get anything done in a timely fashion, and part of the reason for that is that community members, most of whom have day jobs or are volunteers, are forced to spend so much time navel-gazing or entangled in Tolkienesque cobwebs of red tape.

ALAC’s petition (pdf) accused the board of “usurping” the community by delaying ATRT4, in violation of its bylaws:

The EC, and by extension the ICANN community, believes that this continuing contravention of the Bylaws and disregard for ICANN’s Core Values poses a serious threat to ICANN’s mandate… It also significantly undermines trust in, and protection of, ICANN’s multistakeholder model of governance. This brings about a real risk of negative actions against ICANN, which could result in the loss of its mandate or could substantially risk the credibility and effectiveness of ICANN’s multistakeholder model.

It wants the decision to delay ATRT4 reversed. The question is, will it be able to muster up support from two other Decisional Participants, as required by the bylaws? I’d say that ALAC’s most-natural ally is the GAC, with the GNSO, seemingly baffled by the ALAC’s filing, the most likely to object.

The other four DPs have until a minute before midnight July 10 to submit expressions of support or objection.

ICANN faces first pushback over DEI U-turn

ICANN’s decision to remove the words “diversity” and “inclusion” from its web site has prompted the first public, angry response from a community organization.

The Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization, APRALO, one of the five regional groups making up the At-Large Community, wrote to ICANN’s top brass to say that “diversity, equity and inclusion” should be part of ICANN’s DNA.

As DI reported last month, ICANN buried a previously prominently linked “Diversity at ICANN” web page and changed all references to diversity and inclusion to “representation” or similar.

ICANN later said that the changes, which have not to date been reverted to the old language, were in response to “evolving external dynamics”. That’s broadly believed to be code for the Trump administration’s profound aversion to all things DEI.

Many US companies have been distancing themselves from DEI terminology since Trump took office in January, out of fear of reprisals. That includes Verisign, which deleted a section on DEI from its annual regulatory report.

But APRALO, which represents end-user groups across Asia, Australasia and the Pacific, reckons diversity is a core value of the ICANN multistakeholder model that should stay. Writing to ICANN, the group said:

ICANN is not a representative (or representational) model, but a multistakeholder participatory model that invites and welcomes broad spectrums of participation (i.e. diverse, inclusive, and not “representational”)… Therefore, the title change from “Diversity at ICANN” to “Representation at ICANN” is a misrepresentation.

…

ICANN cannot claim to be a multistakeholder-based organisation if diversity, equity and inclusion is not part of its DNA.

APRALO said that ICANN should restore the old DEI language or replace it with “alternative words that truthfully retain the meaning and intent”. Org should also be more transparent when it makes these kinds of changes, the group said.

Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program

A surprising number of would-be back-end registry service providers have already been eliminated from ICANN’s Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program for not submitting their applications in time.

Program statistics for May recently published reveal that 19 potential RSPs were in the system but failed to submit their required information before the application window closed May 20.

That leaves a total of 46 RSPs still in the system (pretty much in line with expectations) with 26 of those still waiting to clear their background checks. Another 15 have fully submitted their bids, though none have yet been approved.

The stats, which are broken down by geographic region, means that a maximum of one RSP from the Latin America and Caribbean region and one from Africa will be pre-approved to provide back-end services when the next new gTLD application window opens next year.

But wannabe RSPs will be able to apply again, simultaneously with their clients gTLD applications.

Asia-Pacific has 15 live applications, Europe 17 and North America 12.

The RSP program gives new gTLD applicants the chance to tick the technical services questions box by simply signing up with an already-approved provider. Being preapproved gives a pretty strong competitive advantage to RSPs in the 2026 round.

Governments erect bulk-reg barrier to new gTLD next round

No new gTLDs should be added to the internet until ICANN develops policies addressing the abuse of bulk domain name registrations, according to the Governmental Advisory Committee.

The GAC this afternoon drafted formal Advice for the ICANN board stating that policy work on bulk regs should get underway before ICANN 84, which takes place in Muscat, Oman in late October.

While the wording still may change before it is sent to ICANN, the current draft advice reads:

The GAC advises the board: To urge the GNSO Council to undertake all necessary preparation prior to ICANN84 towards enabling targeted and narrowly scoped Policy Development Processes (PDPs) on DNS Abuse issues, prioritizing the following: to address bulk registration of malicious domain names; and the responsibility of registrars to investigate domains associated with registrar accounts that are the subject of actionable reports of DNS Abuse.

The advice on bulk regs is fairly self-explanatory: the GAC has become aware that spammers typically shop around for the cheapest TLDs then register huge amounts of domains on the assumption that some will start getting blocked quite quickly.

The second part of the advice probably needs some explanation: under the current ICANN contracts, registrars have to deal with abuse reports concerning domains they sponsor, but they’re under no obligation to investigate other domains belonging to the registrants of those domains.

So, if a scumbag registers 100 domains for a spam campaign and only one of them is reported as abusive, the registrar can comply with its contract by simply suspending that one domain. The GAC thinks it should be obliged to proactively investigate the other 99 names too.

The advice seems to have been inspired by two sources: NetBeacon’s recent Proposal for PDPs on DNS Abuse (pdf) and data from Interisle Consulting.

Both pieces of advice obviously could have an impact on registrars’ top and bottom lines. They could lose revenue if they currently make a lot of money from bulk regs, and their costs could be increased with new obligations to investigate abuse.

An added wrinkle comes in the GAC’s rationale for its advice, which suggests that dealing with bulk regs and abuse probes should be a gating factor for the next round of new gTLDs going ahead. It reads:

Before new strings are added to the DNS as a result of the next round, further work on DNS Abuse is needed to stem the increasing cost to the public of phishing, malware, botnets, and other forms of DNS Abuse.

The core text of the advice was compiled in furtive huddles on the edges of sessions at ICANN 83, and I believe Switzerland held the pen, but it seems the US government was the driving force behind the push to make abuse a barrier to the next round.

As I reported on Monday, the US GAC rep said that “in light of the global phishing problem… and similar concerns the United States is of the view that we should not expand the DNS too broadly”.

Little interest in cheapo gTLD program

ICANN’s program to offer heavily discounted new gTLD application fees to certain organizations has so far seen little uptake, and some governments are not happy about it.

The Applicant Support Program offers up to 45 qualified applicants a discount of up to 85% on their application fees. That’s worth almost $200,000 each. ICANN will also hook applicants up with pro-bono application consultants and help out with auctions if necessary.

While 40 applications are in the process of being drafted, according to ICANN’s latest monthly stats, only four finalized applications have been submitted and there’s no way of telling whether the other 40 will convert to full applications.

The low number has members of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee concerned, partly because of a deal it struck with ICANN last year that would encourage a change of strategy if it turned out some regions were more represented than others.

The arrangement saw ICANN promise to refocus its outreach efforts on under-served regions after tallying up the home nations of the first 20 submitted applications. With the 12-month program application window now well past the half-way mark, the GAC is worried that by the time the 20th bid is logged, it will be too late to course-correct.

It now seems likely that the GAC’s formal Advice from the ongoing ICANN 83 meeting in Prague will see language included saying ICANN should conduct its review of the applications now, while there’s still time to adjust the strategy.

Currently, the stats show a strange and surprising mix of geographies.

North America has the most applications in draft at 15. This is weird because entities based in the US and Canada don’t qualify for the discount, ICANN doesn’t count Mexico as North American, and the only other economies in the region are US island territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.

Meanwhile, the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean region, with all its half a billion citizens, has just two applications in draft. That’s the just one more than Europe, which has just a handful of qualifying nations.

Africa and Asia-Pacific both have seven applications in draft, and Asia-Pac also has three fully submitted bids.

Based on the current stats, you’d have to assume ICANN would need beef up its outreach in Latin America if it wanted to rebalance the numbers. Europe probably doesn’t need as much love because so few countries there qualify.

As well as encouraging ICANN to analyse its number immediately, the GAC is also considering text that would connect applicants in drafting with their local governments, to see if they need any assistance getting over the final hurdle.

US government opposes most new gTLDs

The US government has come out against most of the new gTLDs likely to be applied for in next year’s application round, saying they will contribute to the “global phishing problem”.

The eyebrow-raising revelation came during an intervention from Susan Chalmers, the country’s senior representative on the Governmental Advisory Committee, at the ICANN 83 meeting in Prague this afternoon.

Chalmers said the US is not opposed to the next round in general, but “has some reservations” that the expansion could make DNS abuse worse and that ICANN should “consider how to limit the expansion appropriately”.

Here are her remarks in full:

The United States has some reservations about the next round of new gTLDs. Specifically we have concerns that expanding the DNS too broadly can lead to more spam and DNS abuse for everyone on the internet. Our concerns are not for a next round in general to be clear. We see value in certain categories of applications such as for geo-TLDs and for internationalized domain names. In some cases it makes sense to add new strings to the DNS, but in light of the global phishing problem (which we will learn more about tomorrow) and similar concerns the United States is of the view that we should not expand the DNS too broadly. As the GAC did in 2013 we must consider how to limit the expansion appropriately to take into account public interest impacts.

The US, which has at least five civil servants attending the GAC meetings in Prague, was the only government to openly oppose new gTLDs during this afternoon’s session.

The position puts the US at odds with likely the majority of next-round new gTLD applicants, which could be a cause for concern.

While there will no doubt be some worthy geographic TLDs and IDNs applied for, if 2026 is anything like the 2012 round most applications will be commercial in nature, with as broad an appeal as possible.

Sadly, no doubt some applicants will be the kind of chancers who want to make their millions selling disposable domains for a buck apiece to spammers.

While Chalmers’ remarks may be somewhat surprising, the US position under Trump isn’t a million miles away from the Obama administration’s position in the run-up to the 2012 round.

Back then, the US tried successfully to strong-arm ICANN into giving the GAC more powers over which gTLDs could and could not enter the root. Those powers have been grandfathered in to the rules for next year’s round.

But the political landscape was different back then. ICANN was still a US government contractor, which irked other governments. Some nations wanted ICANN’s powers to be expatriated and given to a body like the International Telecommunications Union. The US was keen to keep the Org under its jurisdiction, and thought a beefed-up GAC was the way to do it.

It seems unlikely that the US could derail the next round entirely. Technically, it would have to win over the full GAC to produce a consensus against the expansion, but one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration so far has been its refusal to play nicely or respect multilateralism, so who knows what might happen.

The US could also use ICANN’s own rules to object to individual new gTLD applications it deems risky or unworthy.

A GAC consensus advice objection against an applications has historically been enough to kill it dead, but any nation can also choose to go it alone by issuing a so-called GAC Early Warning.

An Early Warning is a unilateral notice to an applicant that a government doesn’t like their application and may try to get it rejected or changed in some way. Applicants are free to ignore such warnings, but are encouraged to engage with the government in question to resolve their concerns.

Could Chalmers’ remarks today be the first early warning?

.TOP promises to play nice on DNS abuse

.TOP Registry is off the ICANN naughty step, almost a year after it became the first registry to be hit by a public contract-breach notice over ICANN’s latest rules on DNS abuse.

The Org took the highly unusual step yesterday of publishing a blog post drawing attention to what it clearly sees as a big Compliance win, ahead of its public meeting in Prague later this month, at which abuse will no doubt, as usual, be a key discussion topic.

ICANN said that it has been working with .TOP for months to put in systems aimed at reducing the abuse of .top domains. It posted:

.TOP Registry expressed its commitment to maintaining compliance with the DNS Abuse obligations and continuously strengthening its abuse detection and mitigation processes through newly established collaboration channels and a structured approach designed to drive ongoing enhancement. ICANN Compliance acknowledged that the remedial measures were sufficient to cure the Notice of Breach. We noted that future violations of these requirements will result in expedited compliance action, up to and including the issuance of additional Notices of Breach.

Compliance had hit .TOP with the breach notice last year over allegations that it repeatedly ignored abuse reports submitted by security researchers, and that it was ignoring Uniform Rapid Suspension notices.

Security outfit URLAbuse later revealed it was the party that had reported .TOP to ICANN.

.TOP is a Chinese registry that sells mainly via Chinese registrars, typically at under a couple bucks retail. A non-scientific perusal of its zone files reveals that the majority of the many thousands of domains it sells every day are nothing but disposable junk — random strings of characters with no meaning in any language.

While .top is far from alone in that regard, it is the most successful at the abuse-attractive low-price-high-volume business model. Its zone grew by almost 1.2 million domains in the last 12 months — the biggest growth spurt of any TLD — and it has just shy of four million domains today.

Despite this implausibly rapid growth, ICANN says that abuse reports for .top domains started falling in April and there has been a “noticeable decrease in reported abuse”.

The Org says it will “actively monitor the effectiveness of these new [.TOP] systems and processes, the Registry Operator’s abuse rankings and their compliance with the requirements.”

The registry has told ICANN it has already “mitigated” over 100,000 abusive domain names with its new systems and processes.

Court denies ICANN’s #MeToo “cover up” attempt

A Los Angeles court has ruled against ICANN’s attempt to have a former employee’s sexual harassment lawsuit against it thrown out, which the plaintiff claims was an attempt to “silence” her.

Tanzanica King, one of ICANN’s longest-serving employees, sued ICANN last August, claiming that had been repeatedly sexually harassed by her superior and others, as well as being paid less than male counterparts and passed over for promotions.

She was ultimately let go in ICANN’s round of layoffs last year. King, who has given her consent to be named in this reporting, claims that she was fired for becoming a whistleblower.

ICANN’s response to the suit was to point out that King’s employment contract, signed in 2002, requires her to take all disagreements to arbitration, rather than the courts, so the case should be dismissed.

But a US Federal law signed onto the statute books in 2023 in the wake of the #MeToo movement — the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFAA) — says that employees cannot be forced into arbitration.

ICANN argued, according to the court’s ruling (pdf) that the EFAA did not apply and local California state arbitration law should apply instead, but the judge disagreed.

The Superior Court in LA last week ruled, following precedent from Casey v. Superior Court last year:

The EFAA prohibits enforcing arbitration agreements against persons who allege sexual harassment… The EFAA applies to any dispute arising or accruing on or after the enactment of the act, May 2022

King’s lawyer, Jonathan Delshad, said in a statement:

ICANN tried to silence Ms. King and suppress the truth behind the secret walls of arbitration. This ruling affirms her right to tell her story in a public forum so that all can see what ICANN did to her. The Court’s decision makes clear that companies cannot use California law to escape accountability for sexual harassment and retaliation and make an end around the EFAA.

A trial date in July 2027 (not a typo) has been set.