ICANN decision to cancel Hamburg was NOT unanimous

Surprisingly, ICANN’s decision last week to cancel its Hamburg annual general meeting in favor of Zoom did not receive the unanimous support of its board of directors.

Two directors — Ihab Osman and Ron da Silva — voted against the majority in the June 11 resolution, minutes published last night show.

The resolution noted that the global path of the coronavirus pandemic is currently too unpredictable to ensure that an in-person ICANN 69 could go ahead safely or legally in October.

But the two directors dissented, pushing instead for a “hybrid” model meeting, with a greatly reduced in-person attendance propped up with online participation.

According to the minutes:

Ron expressed concerns that the decision to conduct ICANN69 as a purely virtual meeting is premature and indicated a preference for the President and CEO to explore with the SO and AC leadership the implications, costs and logistics around a hybrid approach for ICANN69. Ihab expressed concerns that the proposed resolution does not allow for the possibility of some sort of physical hybrid model for ICANN69.

Osman went further, arguing that ICANN should set an example by going ahead with Hamburg:

Ihab Osman pointed out that large parts of the world are moving towards opening up, and that ICANN, as global community and global player, has a responsibility to do its part to bring the world back to some level of normalcy.

While CEO Göran Marby came back with a bunch of reasons a physical meeting would be impractical and potentially unsafe, both directors were unconvinced and voted against the 13-person majority anyway.

Notes released alongside the minutes reveal that ICANN stands to save a lot of money by remaining online-only.

Not only will it not have to pay for hundreds of flights and hotel rooms for staff and subsidized community members, but it had not yet signed contracts with the venue or local hotels, so it won’t be losing any deposits either.

Virtual cocktails coming to ICANN meetings. Really.

Fancy a virtual coffee? How about a virtual cocktail? These are both real events coming to ICANN’s public meetings, which for the rest of the year are online-only due to coronavirus restrictions.

It’s part of an effort to better capture the sense of socializing and community-building found at normal, in-person ICANN meetings.

The schedule for ICANN 68, which kicks off on Monday, has just been updated to include several 30-minute “virtual coffee” sessions, which of course will be conducted over Zoom.

ICANN’s calling these “Fika” sessions.

It’s not an acronym, but rather a reference to the Swedish workplace tradition of taking a break to drink coffee, eat cake, and chat with colleagues. I’m guessing Swedish CEO Göran Marby had a hand in the naming.

Each Fika session comes with a number of sub-rooms, in which participants can discuss issues such as “Bingeworthy: My Favorite Shows and Movies During Quarantine” or “I’ve Got the Time Now: Quarantine DIY Projects”.

It’s all very sweet and cuddly.

There’s no confirmed “virtual cocktail” sessions (which strike me as an exceptional excuse for day-drinking, depending on your time zone) on the ICANN 68 schedule yet, but the idea has been floated as part of ICANN org’s plan for enhancing its virtual meetings.

This plan is part of a draft four-phase plan to eventually re-open physical meetings when it becomes safe and permitted.

In the current Phase 0, ICANN’s going to encourage greater use of remote video — by all participants, not just the ICANN hosts — and sponsorship opportunities in a virtual “exhibition hall”.

ICANN’s even thinking about arranging for the shipping of schwag bags filled with sponsor loot.

Phase 1 would see the return of in-person meetings, but only at the local or regional level, Phase 2 would see a return to in-person ICANN public meetings, but with a “hybrid” approach that would retain the current online components.

Phase 3 would be essentially a return to business as usual.

The decision to enter a new phase would be guided by issues such as pandemic status, government guidelines, venue safety, and so on.

There’s no chance of up-phasing public meetings this year. ICANN has already confirmed that ICANN 69, originally set for Hamburg, will also be online-only.

But it does seem that this year’s meetings will be slightly friendlier affairs.

Fortunately for female participants, haptic technology has not sufficiently advanced to accurately replicate the experience of being sexually harassed in a hotel bar by a bearded middle-aged man who stinks of virtual vodka.

More dot-brands dump their gTLDs

A further three new gTLDs have applied to ICANN for self-termination over the last few months, bringing the total to 76.

They’re all dot-brands: .sbs, .rightathome and .symantec.

The most recent application came from the Australian broadcaster SBS, for Special Broadcasting Service. This seems to be a case of a brand owner briefly experimenting with redirects to its .au domain, then deciding against it.

.symantec is biting the dust because the security company Symantec recently rebranded as NortonLifeLock Inc.

.rightathome also appears to be a case of a discontinued brand, in this case formerly used by consumer products firm SC Johnson.

You won’t need a password for ICANN 68 after all

ICANN has ditched plans to require all ICANN 68 participants to enter a password whenever they enter one of the Zoom sessions at the meeting next week.

The org said today that it will use URLs with embedded passwords, removing the need for user input, after reviewing changes Zoom made last month.

These included features such as a waiting room that enables meeting hosts to vet participants manually before allowing them to enter the meeting proper.

ICANN said: “Please use these links cautiously, only share them on secure channels such as encrypted chat or encrypted e-mail, and never post them publicly.”

ICANN had said last month, before the Zoom changes, that it would require passwords in order to limit the risk of Zoombombing — where trolls show up and spam the meeting with offensive content. One ICANN Zoom session had been trolled in this way in March.

The org also said today that participants will be asked to give their consent to be recorded upon entry to a session.

“It is our hope that this small change empowers attendees by providing quick access and more control over the acceptance of our policies as it relates to attending virtual meetings,” ICANN lied, to cover for the obvious piece of legal ass-covering.

Refuse consent and see how far you get.

ICANN confirms Hamburg cancellation

With ICANN 68 due to start online next Monday, ICANN has confirmed that its annual general meeting in October is going to be online-only also.

ICANN 69 will now be held on Zoom, instead of at Hamburg’s new convention center, the organization confirmed on Friday.

It’s because of coronavirus, of course. ICANN’s taking the depressing yet realistic view that mass gatherings of international travelers will still be inadvisable and maybe even illegal four months hence.

It’s bad news for ICANN’s core staff in Los Angeles who, if ICANN sticks to the Hamburg time zone as it has with canceled meetings in Cancun and Kuala Lumpur, will start their working day at 0130 local time for a week straight.

It’s particularly bad news for me. I had a whole range of Ombudsman-enraging jokes lined up related to “sausage fests”, “69s”, etc.

Still, I suppose it could be wurst.

Three big registries will take down opioid domains for US govt

Verisign, Public Interest Registry and Neustar (now part of GoDaddy) will suspend domain names being used to illegally sell opioids under a pilot scheme with the US government.

The Food and Drug Administration announced this week that this new “trusted notifier” program will go into effect for 120 days.

When the FDA finds a site suspected of selling opioids illegally, it will notify the registry as well as the web site’s owner and hosting provider.

The registries will then be able to decide whether to suspend the domain or not. It’s voluntary.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will also take part in the project.

Verisign runs .com and .net, PIR runs .org and Neustar runs .us, .co and .biz.

Opioids are legal, pharmaceutical pain-killers derived from opium. They’re ridiculously addictive and account for as many drug overdose deaths in the US as heroin, but are over-prescribed by US doctors.

It’s not the first time registries have agreed to trusted notifier programs. Some new gTLD registries have deals with the movie and music industries to suspend domains involved in copyright infringement.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after ICANN rejected a deal that would have seen PIR create a community oversight body with responsibilities to monitor domain-suspension policies in .org.

ICANN board tries to redefine mediocrity — literally

After 21 years of covering this stuff, the volume and extent of ICANN’s navel-gazing no longer amazes me, but every now and then I stumble upon something that forces a little angry smile from my lips.

It appears the ICANN board of directors is seeking to redefine mediocrity itself, in a very literal way, and it may well cost your money to do so.

I’ll explain.

Every two years, the board conducts a self-evaluation via a survey put together by ICANN staff. That survey recently came up for review by the board’s seven-person Board Governance Committee.

According to the meeting’s minutes, the BGC decided it was unhappy with the word “neutral” to describe a score of #3 on what I’m guessing is a five-point scale used for rating directors’ performances.

The word “seems somewhat vague”, the BGC noted, asking staff to “consult with external resources and suggest replacement for the term ‘neutral’ on the rating scale”.

I really hope “consult with external resources” means “google it” rather than “piss away registrants’ money on pricey consultants”, but I’m not confident.

The word I’d use is “mediocre”. If you have a better suggestion there’s a comments section below.

Will ICANN swap Hamburg for Zoom for 69?

ICANN’s board of directors is meeting this week to discuss arrangements for ICANN 69, and I think there’s a reasonable chance it will decide to take the meeting online-only.

The last official word from ICANN was that it is working on the assumption that normality will have resumed by September, and that October’s meeting could go ahead in Hamburg, Germany as planned.

But will it?

Current German coronavirus-related travel restrictions, which have been in place since March, forbid non-citizen incoming travelers from pretty much anywhere, even elsewhere in the EU.

Some travelers are being asked to self-quarantine for 14 days upon entry, which is obviously impractical for conference travel.

However, German is loosening its rules next week for EU travelers and will treat countries on a case-by-case basis, based on how many infections they’re recording at the time.

Americans will still not be allowed to travel to Germany and there’s no word on when the ban will be lifted.

German guidelines also currently prohibit any large gatherings of people, including conferences, until at least the end of August.

ICANN’s obviously going to have to do a bit of crystal ball-gazing, to guess whether business travel is going to be safe and permitted in October.

It’s also going to have to guess whether a large enough number of people will actually want to attend to make an in-person meeting worthwhile.

With many medical experts predicting a third-quarter resurgence of the pandemic, the so-called “second wave”, inviting guests from every continent to gather in the same room might be seen as risky.

Conferences in other industries that had been due to take place in Germany in October have been canceled or postponed.

Notably, Oktoberfest in Munich (which starts in September but runs into October) is not going ahead this year, but I’ve found examples of conventions in publishing, gaming and catering sectors that have also been canceled.

However, some events due to take place in March and April have been postponed UNTIL October, suggesting a level of confidence that the virus will be low-risk by that time.

Top-level reshuffle as ICANN loses its COO

ICANN today announced a series of organizational changes at the highest level of management after its COO decided to quit.

Susanna Bennett, senior veep and chief operations officer, will leave July 1 for pastures new after seven years on the job, and her role will be split between other senior figures.

ICANN also said today that Theresa Swinehart has been appointed head of the Global Domains Division, a role she’s been filling on an interim basis since Cyrus Namazi quit a few months back.

She’s also senior VP of multistakeholder strategy and strategic initiatives and CEO Göran Marby’s co-deputy. She’ll be keeping both of those jobs too.

In terms of ops, Bennett’s functions will be split between CFO Xavier Calvez, senior VP of HR Gina Villavicencio, and general counsel John Jeffrey. Calvez will also take on some of the MSSI responsibilities previously held by Swinehart.

The fact that Bennett and Namazi, who together were compensated to the tune of $860,000 in ICANN’s fiscal 2019, had functions that can be easily redistributed among other staffers does rather beg the question of whether ICANN has been spending domain registrants’ money as efficiently as possible.

Still, the rejigger will presumably be welcomed by those who believe that ICANN has in recent years become overly bloated and bureaucratic.

ICANN recently slashed its FY21 budget by 8% due to the expected impact of the coronavirus-related recessions.

Amazon finally gets its dot-brands despite last-minute government plea

Amazon’s three long-sought dot-brand gTLDs were added to the DNS root last night, despite an eleventh-hour attempt by South American governments to drag the company back to the negotiating table.

.amazon, along with the Japanese and Chinese translations — .アマゾン (.xn--cckwcxetd) and .亚马逊 (.xn--jlq480n2rg) — and its NIC sites have already gone live.

Visiting nic.amazon today will present you with a brief corporate blurb and a link to Amazon’s saccharine social-responsibility blog. As a dot-brand, only Amazon will be allowed to use .amazon domains.

The delegations come despite a last-minute plea to ICANN by the eight-government Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which unsuccessfully tried to insert itself into the role of “joint manager” of the gTLDs.

ACTO believes its historical cultural right to the string outweighs the e-commerce giant’s trademark, and that its should have a more or less equal role in the gTLD’s management.

This position was untenable to Amazon, which countered with a collection of safeguards protecting culturally sensitive strings and various other baubles.

Talks fell through last year and ICANN approved the gTLDs over ACTO’s objections.

ACTO’s secretary-general, Alexandra Moreira, wrote to ICANN (pdf) May 21 to take one last stab at getting Amazon back in talks, telling CEO Göran Marby:

the name “Amazon” pertains to a geographical region constituting an integral part of the heritage of its countries. Therefore, we Amazonians have the right to participate in the governance of the “.amazon” TLD.

…

Our side is ready to resume negotiations on the TLD’s governance with the Amazon Corporation., from the point where their side interrupted it, with a view to arriving at a satisfactory agreement.

Her letter came in response to an earlier Marby missive (pdf) that extensively set out ICANN’s case that talks fell apart due to ACTO repeatedly postponing and cancelling scheduled meetings.

Despite the fact that Amazon’s basically got what it wanted, seven years after filing its gTLD applications, ACTO’s members didn’t get nothing.

The contracts Amazon signed with ICANN back in December have Public Interest Commitments in them that allow the governments to reserve up to 1,500 culturally sensitive strings from registration, as well as giving each nation its own .amazon domain.