Surprise! Most private Whois look-ups come from Facebook

Facebook is behind almost two-thirds of requests for private Whois data, according to stats published by Tucows this week.
Tucows said that it has received 2,100 requests for Whois data since it started redacting records in the public database when the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect last May.
But 65% of these requests came from Facebook and its proxy, AppDetex, that has been hammering many registrars with Whois requests for months.
AppDetex is an ICANN-accredited brand-protection registrar, which counts Facebook as its primary client. It’s developed a workflow tool that allows it, or its clients, to semi-automatically send out Whois requests to registrars.
It sent at least 9,000 such requests between June and October, and has twice sent data to ICANN complaining about registrars not responding adequately to its requests.
Tucows has arguably been the registrar most vocally opposed to AppDetex’s campaign, accusing it of artificially inflating the number of Whois requests sent to registrars for political reasons.
An ICANN policy working group will soon begin to discuss whether companies such as Facebook, as well as security and law enforcement interests, should be able to get credentials enabling them to access private Whois data.
Tucows notes that it sees spikes in Whois requests coinciding with ICANN meetings.
Tucows said its data shows that 92% of the disclosure requests it has received so far come from “commercial interests”, mostly either trademark or copyright owners.
Of this 92%, 85% were identified as trademark interests, and 76% of those were Facebook.
Law enforcement accounted for 2% of requests, and security researchers 1%, Tucows said.

The internet is about to get a lot gayer

Seven years after four companies applied for the .gay top-level domain, we finally have a winner.
Three applicants, including the community-driven bid that has been fighting ICANN for exclusive recognition for years, this week withdrew their applications, leaving Top Level Design the prevailing bidder.
Top Level Design is the Portland, Oregon registry that already runs .ink, .design and .wiki.
The withdrawing applicants are fellow portfolio registries Donuts and MMX, and community applicant dotgay LLC, which had been the main holdout preventing the contention set being resolved.
I do not yet know how the settlement was reached, but it smells very much like a private auction.
As a contention set only goes to auction with consent of all the applicants, it seems rather like it came about after dotgay finally threw in the towel.
dotgay was the only applicant to apply as a formal “community”, a special class of applicant under ICANN rules that gives a no-auction path to delegation if a rigorous set of tests can be surmounted.
Under dotgay’s plan, registrants would have to have been verified gay or gay-friendly before they could register a .gay domain, which never sat right with me.
The other applicants, Top Level Design included, all proposed open, unrestricted TLDs.
dotgay, which had huge amounts of support from gay rights groups, failed its Community Priority Evaluation in late 2014. The panel of Economist Intelligence Unit experts awarded it 10 out the 16 available points, short of the 14-point prevailing threshold.
Basically, the EIU said dotgay’s applicant wasn’t gay enough, largely because its definition of “gay” was considered overly broad, comprising the entire LGBTQIA+ community, including non-gay people.
After dotgay appealed, ICANN a few months later overturned the CPE ruling on a technicality.
A rerun of the CPE in October 2015 led to dotgay’s bid being awarded exactly the same failing score as a year earlier, leading to more dotgay appeals.
The .gay set was also held up by an ICANN investigation into the fairness of the CPE process as carried out by the EIU, which unsurprisingly found that everything was just hunky-dory.
The company in 2016 tried crowdfunding to raise $360,000 to fund its appeal, but after a few weeks had raised little more than a hundred bucks.
Since October 2017, dotgay has been in ICANN’s Cooperative Engagement Process, a form of negotiation designed to avert a formal, expensive, Independent Review Process appeal, and the contention set had been on hold.
The company evidently decided it made more sense to cut its losses by submitting to an auction it had little chance of winning, rather than spend six or seven figures on a lengthy IRP in which it had no guarantee of prevailing.
Top Level Design, in its application, says it wants to create “the most safe, secure, and prideful .gay TLD possible” and that it is largely targeting “gay and queer people as well as those individuals that are involved in supporting gay cultures, such as advocacy, outreach, and civil rights.”
But, let’s face it, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of porn in there too.
There’s no mention in the winning bid of any specific policies to counter the abuse, such as cyberbullying or overt homophobia, that .gay is very likely to attract.
Top Level Design is likely to take .gay to launch in the back end of the year.
The settlement of the contention set is also good news for two publicly traded London companies.
MMX presumably stands to get a one-off revenue boost (I’m guessing in seven figures) from losing another auction, while CentralNic, Top Level Design’s chosen back-end registry provider, will see the benefits on an ongoing basis.

Claims UDRP has cost over $360 million so far

Trademark owners have splashed out over $360 million on UDRP cases over the 20 years the policy has been active, according to an intellectual property trade group.
Marques, a European body representing trademark owners, reckons $360 million is a “conservative” estimate.
It reached the figure by multiplying the number of UDRP complaints filed to the end of 2018 — 72,038 — by the $5,000 estimated total cost of each complaint.
The World Intellectual Property Organization, which handles well over half of all UDRP cases, charges at least $1,500 per case, but trademark owners have other fees, such as paying lawyers to draft the complaints.
WIPO, which basically designed and wrote the UDRP back in 1998, has been paid at least $63.8 million in filing fees to date, Marques calculates.
Across all UDRP providers, well over 100,000 individual domain names have been subject to UDRP. It’s likely much more, but the National Arbitration Forum does not publish data on unique domains.
The Marques claims were made in a letter (pdf) from council member (and Com Laude managing director) Nick Wood to ICANN last week, part of IP lobbying efforts in the face of UDRP reform efforts. He wrote:

This lowest-case estimate of $360m is a very significant financial burden. Registrants, on the other hand, pay only for their own defence, if any. They do not pay damages, or even contribute to the provider fees, if they lose – which across the five active panel providers appears to be majority of the time.

One proposal that has been put forward by IP owners is for registrants to pay a $500 fee when they are hit by a UDRP complaint, which would be refundable if they prevail.
I can see this idea going down like a cup of iced sick in the domainer community.
Rather than lobbying for any specific proposal, however, Marques is asking ICANN to create an “independent expert group” outside of the usual Policy Development Process, to highlight “priority issues and possible solutions” for the PDP to consider.
Marques thinks the group should comprise a small number of trademark interests, registries and registrars, and registrant rights groups. It wants WIPO to chair it.
It also wants ICANN to coordinate UDRP providers in the creation of a unified set of data on UDRP cases processed to date, to help with future reform discussions.
ICANN community volunteers have been working on the “PDP Review of All Rights Protection Mechanisms in All gTLDs” — the RPM WG — since March 2016.
The RPM WG expects to put out its “Phase One” initial report, comprising recommendations for reform of the Trademark Clearinghouse, Trademark Claims and Sunrise policies, in early June this year.
Only then will it turns its attention to UDRP, in “Phase Two”, with talks due to begin at the ICANN 65 meeting in Marrakech later that month.
The working group has been beset by all kinds of personal drama among volunteers recently, which continues to add friction to discussions.

ICANN director Burr leaving Neustar

Neustar is losing its chief privacy officer, Becky Burr, who also sits on ICANN’s board of directors.
Burr, a lawyer, said last week that she’s decided to return to private practice after almost seven years at the registry.
Her last day will be March 1, but she’ll continue to advise the company as outside counsel on issues such as privacy and .us policy.
Lips are sealed on her exact destination, but it’s apparently small, Washington, DC-based, and focused on data protection.
Prior to Neustar, Burr worked for the law firm Wilmer Hale. Prior to that, she was in the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where she helped create ICANN 20 years ago.
Despite no longer being directly employed by a registry or registrar, Burr said she’s hoping to be reelected to the ICANN board, where she represents the Contracted Parties House, when her current term expires at the end of the year.
In addition to .us, Neustar runs .co, .biz and acts as back-end for dozens of other TLDs.

After ICANN knockback, Amazon countries agree to .amazon talks

Talks that could lead to Amazon finally getting its long-sought .amazon gTLD are back on, after a dispute between ICANN and eight South American governments.
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization last week invited ICANN CEO Goran Marby to meet ACTO members in Brasilia, any day next week.
It’s not clear whether Amazon representatives have also been invited.
The outreach came despite, or possibly because of, ICANN’s recent rejection of an ACTO demand that the .amazon gTLD applications be returned to their old “Will Not Proceed” status.
In rejecting ACTO’s Request for Reconsideration, ICANN’s board of directors had stressed that putting .amazon back in the evaluation stream was necessary in order to negotiate contractual concessions that would benefit ACTO.
Amazon is said to have agreed to some Public Interest Commitments that ACTO would be able to enforce via ICANN’s PIC Dispute Resolution Process.
The e-commerce giant is also known to have offered ACTO cultural safeguards and financial sweeteners.
ACTO’s decision to return to the negotiating table may have been made politically less uncomfortable due to a recent change in its leadership.
Secretary-general Jacqueline Mendoza, who had held the pen on a series of hard-line letters to Marby, was in January replaced by Bolivian politician Alexandra Moreira after her three-year term naturally came to an end.
ICANN’s board has said it will look at .amazon again at its meetings in Kobe, Japan, in March.

ICANN picks Seattle for public meeting

ICANN will hold one of its 2021 public meetings in Seattle, Washington.
The organization’s board of directors directed the CEO to start talks with the yet-unnamed venue at its meeting at the weekend.
The meeting, ICANN 72, will be the 2021 Annual General meeting and will be held from October 23 to 28.
Believe it or not, it will be the first time a public ICANN meeting has been held on the mainland United States since the LA meeting in 2014.
That’s quite a feat, given that ICANN’s definition of “North America” basically only has two countries in it.

ICANN approves two new TLDs, including THAT one

ICANN’s board of directors has given the nod to two more country-code TLDs.
The eight-year-old nation of South Sudan is finally getting its possibly controversial .ss, while Mauritania is getting the Arabic-script version of its name, موريتانيا. (.xn--mgbah1a3hjkrd), to complement its existing .mr ccTLD.
Both TLDs were approved by ICANN after going through the usual, secretive IANA process, at its board meeting at the weekend.
The recipient of موريتانيا. is the Université de Nouakchott Al Aasriya, while .ss is going to National Communication Authority, a governmental agency.
As previously noted, .ss has the potential to be controversial due to its Nazi associations, and the fact that Nazis are precisely the kind of people who have trouble finding TLDs that will allow them to register names.
But none of that is ICANN’s business. It simply checks to make sure the requester has the support of the local internet community and that the string is on the ISO 3166 list.
The Mauritanian IDN has already been added to the DNS root, while .ss has not.

Pay up or sell up, ICANN tells failing new gTLD

ICANN has responded to a request for it to reduce the $25,000 annual fee it charges gTLD registries.
The answer is no.
That wholly unsurprising reply came in a letter from registry services director Russ Weinstein to John McCabe, CEO of failing new gTLD operator Who’s Who Registry.
McCabe, in November, had asked ICANN to reduce its fees for TLDs, such as its own .whoswho, that have zero levels of abuse. ICANN fees are the “single biggest item” in the company’s budget, he said.
His request coincided with ICANN commencing compliance proceedings against the company for failure to pay these fees
Weinstein wrote, in a letter (pdf) published today:

We sympathize with the financial challenges that some new gTLD registry operators may be facing in the early periods of these new businesses. New gTLD operators face a challenging task of building consumer awareness and this can and may take significant time and effort.

But he goes on to point out that the $25,000-a-year fee was known to all applicants before they applied, and had been subject to numerous rounds of public comment before the Applicant Guidebook was finalized.
Weinstein writes:

The AGB made clear that evaluation phase was to determine whether an applicant had the requisite technical, operation and financial capabilities to operate a registry, and was not a assessment nor an endorsement of a particular business plan.

It’s pretty clear that the .whoswho business plan has failed. It’s sold no more than a handful of non-defensive domains over the four years it has been available.
Weinstein concludes his letter by pointing out that all new gTLD registries are free to terminate their contracts for any reason, and that it’s perfectly permissible under ICANN rules to sell your contract to another registry.
ICANN told Who’s Who earlier this month that it has until February 10 to pay its overdue fees or risk having its contract terminated.

Nazis rejoice! A TLD for you could be coming soon

The domain name system could soon get its first new standard country-code domain for eight years.
This weekend, ICANN’s board of directors is set to vote on whether to allow the delegation of a ccTLD for the relatively new nation of South Sudan.
The string would be .ss.
It would be the first Latin-script ccTLD added to the root since 2010, when .cw and .sx were delegated for Curaçao and Sint Maarten, two of the countries formed by the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles.
Dozens of internationalized domain name ccTLDs — those in non-Latin scripts — have been delegated in the meantime.
But South Sudan is the world’s newest country. It formed in 2011 following an independence referendum that saw it break away from Sudan.
It was recognized by the UN as a sovereign nation in July that year and was given the SS delegation by the International Standards Organization on the ISO 3166-2 list a month later.
The country has been wracked by civil war for almost all of its existence, which may well be a reason why it’s taken so long for a delegation request to come up for an ICANN vote. The warring sides agreed to a peace treaty last year.
South Sudan is among the world’s poorest and least-developed nations, with shocking levels of infant and maternal mortality. Having an unfortunate ccTLD is the very least of its problems.
The choice of .ss was made in 2011 by the new South Sudan government in the full knowledge that it has an uncomfortable alternate meaning in the global north, where the string denotes the Schutzstaffel, the properly evil, black-uniformed bastards in every World War II movie you’ve ever seen.
The Anti-Defamation League classifies “SS” as a “hate symbol” that has been “adopted by white supremacists and neo-Nazis worldwide”.
When South Sudan went to ISO for the SS delegation, then-secretary of telecommunications Stephen Lugga told Reuters

We want our domain name to be ‘SS’ for ‘South Sudan’, but people are telling us ‘SS’ has an association in Europe with Nazis… Some might prefer us to have a different one. We have applied for it anyway, SS, and we are waiting for a reply.

To be fair, it would have been pretty dumb to have applied for a different string, when SS, clearly the obvious choice, was available.
There’s nothing ICANN can do about the string. It takes its lead from the ISO 3166 list. Nor does it have the authority to impose any content-regulation rules on the new registry.
Unless the new South Sudan registry takes a hard line voluntarily, I think it’s a near-certainty that .ss will be used by neo-Nazis who have been turfed out of their regular domains.
The vote of ICANN’s board is scheduled to be part of its main agenda, rather than its consent agenda, so it’s not yet 100% certain that the delegation will be approved.

ICANN creates female-heavy anti-harassment team

ICANN’s board of directors has created a new team to look at issues of harassment in the community.
The new Board Working Group on Anti-Harassment has eight members, six of whom are women.
In fact, all six female members of the board, including non-voting liaisons, have been appointed to the group.
The members are Becky Burr, Chris Disspain, Avri Doria, Lito Ibarra, Manal Ismail, Merike Kaeo and Tripti Sinha. It will be chaired by Sarah Deutsch.
The board said “a focused group of Board members can be part of a group that is trying to help create an environment where the ICANN community is free to focus on the mission and not on behaviors that should not be a part of the working environment.”
Harassment, particularly sexual harassment, has been a simmering topic in the community for a few years, ever since the infamous Cheesesandwichgate affair.
In response, ICANN created its first anti-harassment policy, to complement its longstanding Expected Rules of Behavior.
At ICANN 63 in Barcelona last October, I noticed several unavoidably prominent warnings — billboards the height of a man person — warning attendees against harassing their fellow participants, citing the policy.
In late 2017, an unscientific survey of ICANN community members found that one in three women had experienced or witnessed sexism while participating.
But ICANN’s Ombudsman told DI at the time that no complaints had been filed under the harassment policy in the first eight months it was in effect, even as the #MeToo movement took off.
Critics say that women are reluctant to report incidents to the Ombudsman because he is a man. I expect this is something the new board working group will look at.
In March last year, a group of female community members wrote to ICANN with a set of stories about how they had been harassed at ICANN meetings.
While stopping short of any serious criminal allegations, the stories depicted a working environment that can sometimes be very hostile to women, particularly when alcohol is involved.