Non-coms say .org price cap should be RAISED

With the entire domain name community apparently split along binary lines on the issue of price caps in .org, a third option has emerged from a surprising source.
ICANN’s Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group has suggested that price caps should remain, but that they should be raised from their current level of 10% per year.
In its comments to ICANN (pdf), NCSG wrote that it would “not object to the price cap being raised by a reasonable level”, adding:

Rather than removing price caps from the agreement entirely, these should be retained but raised by an appropriate amount. In addition, this aspect of the contract should be subject to a review midway through the contract, based on the impact of the price changes on non-profit registrants.

The NCSG does not quote a percentage or dollar value that it would consider “reasonable” or “appropriate”.
The letter notes that Public Interest Registry, which runs .org, uses some of its registration money to fund NCSG’s activities.

The NCSG disagrees with the decision to remove price cap provisions in the current .org agreement. On the one hand, we recognize the maturation of the domain name market, and the need for Public Interest Registry to capitalize on the commercial opportunities available to it. Public Interest Registry, as a non-profit entity, supports many excellent causes (including, it is worth noting, the NCSG). On the other hand, as the home for schools, community organizations, open-source projects, and other non-profit entities that are run on shoestring budgets, this registry should not necessarily operate under the same commercial realities that guide other domains. Fees should remain affordable, with domains which are priced within reach of everyone, no matter how few resources they have. Consequently, we support leaving the price cap provisions in place. We would not object to the price cap being raised by a reasonable level.

Basically, the ICANN community group nominally representing precisely .org’s target market doesn’t mind prices going up, just as long as PIR doesn’t get greedy.
It’s slightly surprising, to me, to find NCSG on the middle ground here.
There are currently over 3,250 comments on the renewal of PIR’s registry contract with ICANN — coming from domainers, individual registrants, and large and small non-profit organizations — almost all of which are firmly against the removal of price caps.
The only comments I’ve been able to find in favor of the scrapping of caps came from the Business Constituency. Intellectual property interests had no opinion.
I don’t believe the registries and registrars stakeholder groups filed consensus comments, but Tucows did file an individual comment (pdf) objecting to the removal of caps.

Dot-brand early adopter becomes 48th to disappear

A Singaporean telecommunications company has become the latest gTLD registry to voluntarily drop its dot-brand.
StarHub, which had 2018 revenue equivalent to $1.73 billion, told ICANN it no longer wished to operate .starhub in February and ICANN opened its request up for a month of public comment last week (a formality).
It’s the 48th of the several hundred original dot-brand applications to change its mind after delegation.
Notably, StarHub was one of the first companies to announce its participation in, and tout the expected benefits of, the new gTLD program.
Back in February 2012, when most applicants were playing their cards close to their chest because the application window was still open, Oliver Chong, assistant vice president of brand and marketing communications at StarHub, said:

We believe the ‘.starhub’ Top-Level Domain will deliver clear marketing and advertising benefits to StarHub, such as improved online brand recall and a more intuitive consumer experience with easy to remember domain names such as ‘mobile.starhub’. We also anticipate potential Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits by operating a more targeted and relevant naming system that is clearly matched with our website content.

Yeah… so, none of that actually happened.
Like all the other dot-brands to self-terminate, StarHub never actually used .starhub, other than the obligatory nic.starhub placeholder.
As an aside that may counterbalance this bad news for the perception of new gTLDs, one of StarHub’s competitors in the Singapore mobile market is called Circles.Life. It uses circles.life as its primary domain and has apparently performed respectably since its launch in 2016.
Imagine that! A mobile phone operator being successful using a new gTLD domain!

Donuts acquires its 242nd gTLD

Donuts, the registry with the largest stable of new gTLDs, has added its 242nd string to its bow.
The company seems to have acquired .contact from, nominally at least, smaller portfolio rival Top Level Spectrum.
The ICANN contract for the gTLD was transferred to one of Donuts’ subsidiaries a couple weeks ago.
According to TLS CEO Jay Westerdal, while TLS was the signatory of the contract the “economic owner” of the TLD was Whitepages.com, an online directory services provider, which paid for the original uncontested .contact application.
Whitepages.com doesn’t appear in the application, the registry agreement, or the IANA records. I was unaware of the connection until today.
Despite being in the root since December 2015, .contact never actually launched. Donuts has not yet filed its launch dates with ICANN either, but it’s usually fairly speedy about pumping out strings.

Non-profits worth $2.6 billion a year say .org price caps should stay

Eight large US-based non-profits, several of them household names, have put their names to a letter demanding that Public Interest Registry should not be allowed to increase its .org registry fees beyond 10% a year.
Combined, these eight outfits have revenue of roughly $2.6 billion per year.
PIR’s fees are currently under $10 per domain per year. It has roughly 10.6 million names under management.
The organizations signing the letter are TV network C-SPAN, broadcaster NPR, conservation charity the National Trust for Historic Preservation, retired persons advocate the AARP, environmental groups the National Geographic Society, the Conservation Fund and Oceana, and disco legends YMCA of the USA.
In a joint letter, submitted as part of ICANN’s public comment period on the renewal of PIR’s .org contract, they write:

We agree with the current .org registry operator, the Public Interest Registry, that the .org gTLD “has assumed the reputation as the domain of choice for organisations dedicated to serving the public interest.” We have come to rely on this reputation to help distinguish the online presence of our organizations from the online presence of organizations that are not intended to serve the public interest. As nonprofit organizations, we also have come to rely on the certainty and predictability of reasonable domain name registration expenses when allocating our limited resources.

Sourced from Wikipedia and tax returns, here’s how much revenue these non-profits bring in per year:

• NPR — $208 million (2016)
• C-SPAN — $73.2 million (2014)
• YMCA of the USA — $169.5 million (2017)
• National Geographic Society — $188 million (2017)
• AARP — $1.6 billion (2016)
• The Conservation Fund — $238 million (2017)
• Oceana — $53 million (2017)
• National Trust for Historic Preservation — $62.9 million (2017)

Limited resources indeed.
The deadline for comments is midnight UTC tonight, about two hours from the dateline on this post.

Governments demand Whois reopened within a year

ICANN’s government advisers wants cops, trademark owners and others to get access to private Whois data in under a year from now.
The Governmental Advisory Committee wants to see “considerable and demonstrable progress, if not completion” of the so-called “unified access model” for Whois by ICANN66 in Montreal, a meeting due to kick off November 4 this year.
The demand came in a letter (pdf) last week from GAC chair Manal Ismail to her ICANN board counterpart Cherine Chalaby.
She wrote that the GAC wants “phase 2” of the ongoing Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois not only concluded but also implemented “within 12 months or less” of now.
It’s a more specific version of the generic “hurry up” advice delivered formally in last month’s Kobe GAC communique.
It strikes me as a ludicrously ambitious deadline.
Phase 2 of the EPDP’s work involves deciding what “legitimate interests” should be able to request access to unredacted private Whois data, and how such requests should be handled.
The GAC believes “legitimate interests include civil, administrative and criminal law enforcement, cybersecurity, consumer protection and IP rights protection”.
IP interests including Facebook want to be able to vacuum up as much data as they want more or less on demand, but they face resistance from privacy advocates in the non-commercial sector (which want to make access as restrictive as possible) and to a lesser extent registries and registrars (which want something as cheap and easy as possible to implement and operate that does not open them up to legal liability).
Ismail’s letter suggests that work could be sped up by starting the implementation of stuff the EPDP group agrees to as it agrees to it, rather than waiting for its full workload to be complete.
Given the likelihood that there will be a great many dependencies between the various recommendations the group will come up with, this suggestion also comes across as ambitious.
The EPDP group is currently in a bit of a lull, following the delivery of its phase 1 report to ICANN, which is expected to approve its recommendations next month.
Since the phase 1 work finished in late February, there’s been a change of leadership of the group, and bunch of its volunteer members have been swapped out.
Volunteers have also complained about burnout, and there’s been some pressure for the pace of work — which included four to five hours of teleconferences per week for six months — to be scaled back for the second phase.
The group’s leadership has discussed 12 to 18 months as a “realistic and desirable” timeframe for it to reach its Initial Report stage on the phase 2 work.
For comparison, it published its Initial Report for phase 1 after only six stressful months on the job, and not only have its recommendations not been implemented, they’ve not even been approved by ICANN’s board of directors yet. That’s expected to happen this Friday, at the board’s retreat in Istanbul.
With this previous experience in mind, the chances of the GAC getting a unified Whois access service implemented within a year seem very remote.

These people support scrapping .org price caps

The first examples of people supporting the scrapping of price caps in .org have emerged.
ICANN’s Business Constituency and Intellectual Property Constituency have both in the last few hours filed comments on the proposed renewal of Public Interest Registry’s .org contract, which includes the controversial removal of the current 10%-a-year price caps.
The BC expresses outright support for the end of caps — the first example I’ve seen of explicit support for the move — while the IPC utterly fails to address it.
A prominent US antitrust lawyer has also weighed in to claim that approving the new provisions would not raise competition concerns.
Both the IPC and BC seem happy to accept the proposed pricing regime, given that PIR’s new contract will also include new rights protection mechanisms, such as the Uniform Rapid Suspension process.
The BC wrote in its comment to ICANN:

Given the BC’s established position that ICANN should not be a price regulator, and considering that .ORG and .INFO are adopting RPMs and other registrant provisions we favor, the BC supports broader implementation of the Base Registry Agreement, including removal of price controls

Seemingly uninterested in price caps whatsoever, the IPC wrote:

The IPC applauds Public Interest Registry and other Registry Operators that choose to implement enhanced rights protection mechanisms for third party trademark owners, and to take on enhanced responsibilities for the Registry Operator to prevent use of registrations for abusive purposes, including but not limited to violations of intellectual property rights.

From outside the ICANN community, Washington DC-based antitrust attorney David Balto, a former Federal Trade Commission official, has submitted a brief analysis in which he finds little to be concerned about from a competition perspective. He writes:

An analysis of the .org gTLD under competition would likely find that it has little market power, and thus would be unable to unreasonably raise prices. Any attempt to do so should result in users defecting to alternative gTLDs.
Users have ample protections in the form of marketplace competition and contract provisions that allow users to be notified of price increases and lock in rates for up to ten years.

These arguments stand in stark contrast to those made by many in the domainer community, such as in Andrew Allemann’s post today.
Balto says that “market power” — a legal test under US competition law — starts to kick in at about 30% market share. But .org only has about 5.5%, he wrote.
The lawyer does not identify a client affiliation in his letter.
With just a few hours left on the clock before public comments close, there have been 3,129 submitted comments, the vast majority coming from domain investors.
Some non-profit groups have also registered their objections.

.org price anger comments top 3,000 as non-profits weigh in

The proposal to remove price caps from .org domains has now attracted more than 3,000 angry comments, and it’s not just domainers who are feeling the outrage.
Non-profit groups have now also submitted objections to the ICANN proposal, which would remove the 10%-a-year price increase limit that Public Interest Registry is currently subject to.
At least two organizations, which together claim to represent over 32,000 non-profits, have rejected the pricing plan since I first posted about it last week.
The National Council of Nonprofits is a support network for around 25,000 organizations in the US.
Its VP of public policy, David Thompson, told ICANN that price increases in .org would funnel money to PIR away from worthy causes:

Quite literally, the profits derived by this unwarranted change will ultimately be paid by the people nonprofits will not be able to serve. Every $1 in increased prices on the 10+ million .org domain users would generate more revenue each year than is utilized by all but the top one-percent of charitable nonprofits. Each one-dollar hike in costs per domain would divert more than $10 million from nonprofit missions for the enrichment of the monopoly. By anyone’s estimate, this money would be better spent delivering an additional 1,600,000 meals by Meals on Wheels to seniors to help maintain their health, independence and quality of life. Or $10 million could enable nonprofits to provide vision screenings for every two- and three-year-olds in California. Or pay for one million middle school students to attend performances of “Hamilton” or “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Nonprofits should not need to choose between paying for a domain name and helping people.

He said that ICANN should not treat .org the same way as commercial domain registries simply in order to normalize its registry agreements, when .org has a public-interest purpose.
It’s probably worth noting that even under the existing 10% price increase limit, PIR would be able to raise its prices by almost $1 in the first year anyway.
The American Society of Association Executives is a trade association that represents trade associations in the US. It says it has 44,000 individual members from 7,400 organizations.
Its president, John Graham, told ICANN that .org, as a legacy gTLD that PIR spent no money to acquire, should not have the same pricing flexibility as gTLDs that have gone live more recently:

It’s true that registry operators that won the right to sponsor new gTLDs can charge whatever price they see fit, but they also paid millions of dollars in some cases to acquire all of the value in their sponsored domain names, whereas the service contractors managing legacy domain names most assuredly did not. This is a crucial difference that ICANN should take great care to enforce.
Stating that nonprofit organizations can easily switch from one domain name to another if they don’t like the pricing structure ignores the reality that established nonprofits have a longstanding Internet presence built on a .org domain name — a name and online reputation that the organization (not the registry operator) has spent decades cultivating.

Ayden Férdeline, who sits on the GNSO Council representing non-commercial interests commented in his personal capacity to say that while he does not necessarily expect PIR to exploit the customers of its 10 million .org domains:

To exploit these organizations and to have them paying substantially more every year to maintain their domain names would have a detrimental impact on the public’s ability to obtain information and services, and could see smaller non-profit organizations either stop renewing their domain names altogether or moving away from the Domain Name System to proprietary platforms like Facebook.

These were some of the most significant voices from outside the domain investment community that I’ve been able to find from my trawl of the 3,105 comments that had been submitted as of time of writing.
At least 700 of these comments, likely hundreds more, were filed via a form-letter submission tool created by the Internet Commerce Association. Others seem to have been inspired by coverage in the domainer blogosphere and on social media platforms.
Please let me know in the comments or privately if you’ve seen any comments opposing or supporting the price increases from any other major non-domainer organizations.
Of the larger domainers, I spotted that Nat Cohen of Telepathy echoed the views of many, writing:

The legacy domain names, including .info and .org, were handed over to ICANN as trustee to manage for the public benefit. ICANN has betrayed that trust by turning .org over to an organization, that no matter how worthy its mission, will have the unchecked ability to extract vast sums from the base of .org registrants, many of which are non-profits with worthy missions in their own right.

The public comment period ends tonight at midnight UTC. That’s about seven hours from the timestamp on this post.
PIR declined to comment for this article.

ICA rallies the troops to defeat .org price hikes. It won’t work

Over 100 letters have been sent to ICANN opposing the proposed lifting of price caps in .org, after the Internet Commerce Association reached out to rally its supporters.
This is an atypically large response to an ICANN public comment period, and there are four days left on the clock for more submissions to be made, but I doubt it will change ICANN’s mind.
Almost all of the 131 comments filed so far this month were submitted in the 24 hours after ICA published its comment submission form earlier this week.
About a third of the comments comprise simply the unedited ICA text. Others appeared to have been inspired by the campaign to write their own complaints about the proposal, which would scrap the 10%-a-year .org price increase cap Public Interest Registry currently has in place.
Zak Muscovitch, ICA’s general counsel, told DI that as of this morning the form generates different template text dynamically. I’ve spotted at least four completely different versions of the letter just by refreshing the page. This may make some comments appear to be the original thoughts of their senders.
This is the original text, as it relates to price caps:

I believe that legacy gTLDs are fundamentally different from for-profit new gTLDs. Legacy TLDs are essentially a public trust, unlike new gTLDs which were created, bought and paid for by private interests. Registrants of legacy TLDs are entitled to price stability and predictability, and should not be subject to price increases with no maximums. Unlike new gTLDs, registrants of legacy TLDs registered their names and made their online presence on legacy TLDs on the basis that price caps would continue to exist.
Unrestrained price increases on the millions of .org registrants who are not-for-profits or non-profits would be unfair to them. Unchecked price increases have the potential to result in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred from these organizations to one non-profit, the Internet Society, with .org registrants receiving no benefit in return. ICANN should not allow one non-profit nearly unlimited access to the funds of other non-profits.

The gist of the other texts is the same — it’s not fair to lift price caps on domains largely used by non-profits that may have budget struggles and which have built their online presences on the old, predictable pricing rules.
The issues raised are probably fair, to a point.
Should the true “legacy” gTLDs — .com, .net and .org — which date from the 1980s and pose very little commercial risk to their registries, be treated the same as the exceptionally risky gTLD businesses that have been launched since?
Does changing the pricing rules amount to unfairly moving the goal posts for millions of registrants who have built their business on the legacy rules?
These are good, valid questions.
But I think it’s unlikely that the ICA’s campaign will get ICANN to change its mind. The opposition would have to be broader than from a single interest group.
First, the message about non-profits rings a bit hollow coming from an explicitly commercial organization whose members’ business model entails flipping domain names for large multiples.
If a non-profit can’t afford an extra 10 bucks a year for a .org renewal, can it afford the hundreds or thousands of dollars a domainer would charge for a transfer?
Even if PIR goes nuts, abandons its “public interest” mantra, and immediately significantly increases its prices, the retail price of a .org (currently around $20 at GoDaddy, which has about a third of all .orgs) would be unlikely to rise to above the price of PIR-owned .ong and .ngo domains, which sell for $32 to $50 retail.
Such an increase might adversely affect a small number of very low-budget registrants, but the biggest impact will be felt by the big for-profit portfolio owners: domainers.
Second, letter-writing campaigns don’t have a strong track record of persuading ICANN to change course.
The largest such campaign to date was organized by registrars in 2015 in response to proposals, made by members of the Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues working group, that would have would have essentially banned Whois privacy for commercial web sites.
Over 20,000 people signed petitions or sent semi-automated comments opposing that recommendation, and ICANN ended up not approving that specific proposal.
But the commercial web site privacy ban was a minority position written by IP lawyers, included as an addendum to the group’s recommendations, and it did not receive the consensus of the PPSAI working group.
In other words, ICANN almost certainly would not have implemented it anyway, due to lack of consensus, even if the public comment period had been silent.
The second-largest public comment period concerned the possible approval of .xxx in 2010, which attracted almost 14,000 semi-automated comments from members of American Christian-right groups and pornographers.
.xxx was nevertheless approved less than a year later.
ICANN also has a track record of not acceding to ICA’s demands when it comes to changes in registry agreements for pre-2012 gTLDs.
ICA, under former GC Phil Corwin, has also strongly objected to similar changes in .mobi, .jobs, .cat, .xxx and .travel over the last few years, and had no impact.
ICANN seems hell-bent on normalizing its gTLD contracts to the greatest extent possible. It’s also currently proposing to lift the price caps on .biz and .info.
This, through force of precedent codified in the contracts, could lead to the price caps one day, many years from now, being lifted on .com.
Which, let’s face it, is what most people really care about.
Info on the .org contract renewal public comment period can be found here.

Karklins beats LaHatte to chair ICANN’s Whois privacy team

Latvian diplomat and former senior WIPO member Janis Karklins has been appointed chair of the ICANN working group that will decide whether to start making private Whois records available to trademark owners.
Karklins’ appointment was approved by the GNSO Council last week. He beat a single rival applicant, New Zealand’s Chris LaHatte, the former ICANN Ombudsman.
He replaces Kurt Pritz, the former ICANN Org number two, who quit the chair after it finished its “phase one” work earlier this year.
Karklins has a varied resume, including a four-year stint as chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
He’s currently Latvia’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, as well as president of the Arms Trade Treaty.
Apparently fighting for Latvia’s interests at the UN and overseeing the international conventional weapons trade still gives him enough free time to now also chair the notoriously intense and tiring Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois, which has suffered significant burnout-related volunteer churn.
But it was Karklins’ one-year term as chair of the general assembly of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, that gave some GNSO Council members pause.
The EPDP is basically a big bloodless ruck between intellectual property lawyers and privacy advocates, so having a former WIPO bigwig in the neutral hot seat could be seen as a conflict.
This issue was raised by the pro-privacy Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group during GNSO Council discussions last week, who asked whether LaHatte could not also be brought on as a co-chair.
But it was pointed out that it would be difficult to find a qualified chair without some connection to some interested party, and that Karklins is replacing Pritz, who at the time worked for a new gTLD registry and could have had similar perception-of-conflict issues.
In the end, the vote to confirm Karklins was unanimous, NCSG and all.
The EPDP, having decided how to bring ICANN’s Whois policy into compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, is now turning its attention to the far trickier issue of a “unified access model” for private Whois data.
It will basically decide who should be able to request access to this data and how such a system should be administered.
It will not be smooth sailing. If Karklins thinks international arms dealers are tricky customers, he ain’t seen nothing yet.

ICANN to approve new UDRP provider

ICANN is set to approve a new UDRP provider at a board of directors meeting next week.
May 3, the board will approve the Canadian International Internet Dispute Resolution Centre as its sixth approved provider and the second based in North America.
The resolution to approve its now year-old application is on the consent agenda for next week’s meeting, meaning the decision to approve has basically already been made.
CIIDRC is a division of the British Columbia International Commercial Arbitration Centre, a non-profit set up by the BC government in the 1980s.
It’s been exclusively handling cybersquatting disputes over .ca domain names since 2002, under a deal with local registry CIRA.
The organization reckons it will be ready to start accepting complaints within a few months of approval, and could handle up to 200 cases per month.
It had a roster of 26 panelists in rotation at the time it applied to ICANN for UDRP approval, many of whom also provide their expertise to other UDRP providers such as WIPO and NAF.