.amazon domain isn’t a slam dunk after all

Amazon’s application for the .amazon dot-brand may not be as secure as it was thought, following an ICANN decision over the Christmas period.
Directors threw out a South American government demand for it to un-approve the .amazon bid, but clarified that ICANN has not yet made a “final decision” to allow the gTLD to go live.
The Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee formally rejected (pdf) a Request for Reconsideration filed by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which is made up of the governments of the eight countries near that big foresty, rivery, basiny thing, on December 21.
ACTO had asked the board to overturn its October resolution that took .amazon off its longstanding “Will Not Proceed” (ie, rejected) status and put it back on the path to delegation.
Secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza last month blasted ICANN for multiple “untrue, misleading, unfortunate and biased statements”, in connection with ACTO’s purported acquiescence to the .amazon bid.
Refusing ACTO’s request, the BAMC stated that ACTO had misinterpreted the resolution, and that ICANN did not intend to delegate .amazon until Amazon the company and ACTO had sat down to talk about how they can amicably share the name.
The October resolution “could have been clearer”, the BAMC said, adding:

the Resolution was passed with the intention that further discussions among the parties take place before the Board takes a final decision on the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains. The language of the Resolution itself does not approve delegation of .AMAZON or support any particular solution. Rather, the Resolution simply “directs the President and CEO, or his designee(s), to remove the ‘Will Not Proceed’ status and resume processing of the .AMAZON applications.”

There are pages and pages of this kind of clarification. The committee clearly wants to help to smooth over relations between ICANN and the governments.
On the face of it, there’s a slight whiff of ret-conny spin about the BAMC recommendations.
There’s some ambiguity in the public record about what the ICANN board actually voted for in October.
Shortly before the ICANN board voted to resume processing .amazon, CEO Goran Marby stated, in front of an audience at ICANN 63 in Barcelona, both that a decision to delegate was being made and that ACTO was still at the table:

what we in practice has done is, through facilitation process, constructed a shared delegation of .AMAZON where the company has or will provide commitments to the ACTO countries how the .AMAZON will be used in the future. And the decision today is to delegate it, forward it to me to finalize those discussions between the company and those countries.
And I’m also formally saying yes to the invitation to go to Brazil from the ACTO countries to their — finish off the last round of discussions.

While the new clarifications seem to suggest that ACTO still has some power to keep .amazon out of the root, the BAMC decision also suggests that the full board could go ahead and approve .amazon at the ICANN 64 meeting in Japan this March, with or without governmental cooperation, saying:

the BAMC recommends that the Board reiterates that the Resolution was taken with the clear intention to grant the President and CEO the authority to progress the facilitation process between the ACTO member states and the Amazon corporation with the goal of helping the involved parties reach a mutually agreed solution, but in the event they are unable to do so the Board will make a decision on the next steps at ICANN 64 regarding the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains. The BAMC encourages a high level of communication between the President and CEO and the relevant stakeholders, including the representatives of the Amazonian countries and the Amazon corporation, between now and ICANN 64.

If you’ve not been following the story, ACTO has concerns about .amazon due to its similarity to the name of the rain-forest region.
Amazon the company has promised to encode cultural safeguards in its ICANN contract and offered to donate a bunch of free stuff to the countries to sweeten the deal
The current Amazon offer has not been published.
The BAMC recommendation will now be considered by the full ICANN board, which is usually just a formality.

Chile opens .cl to all ICANN registrars

The Chilean ccTLD registry has opened its doors to all ICANN-accredited registrars, no matter where they are based.
NIC Chile, part of the University of Chile, this week announced its Registrar Agents Program, an effort to grow the TLD internationally.
Becoming .cl-accredited appears to be a relatively simple process, requiring a brief application, technical tests (it’s an EPP registry) and contract-signing.
A pilot program that kicked off in September 2016 has already attracted 11 ICANN-accredited registrars, mostly but not exclusively those in the corporate brand-protection space.
Chilean companies that want to act as registrars must go through a separate process and do not need ICANN accreditation.
There are no local presence requirements to register a .cl domain.
Today, the TLD has just shy of 575,000 registered domains, having broke through the half-million mark about three years ago.
It may be interesting to see if growth rates increase with a larger pool of registrars, but .cl is already quite broadly available at major retail registrars (presumably via gateway or reseller arrangements) so getting hold of one doesn’t appear to be problematic.

“Please send women!” ICANN board urges

The ICANN board of directors wants more women around the table, according to recent correspondence to the independent Nominating Committee.
The recommendation to balance the genders further was among several made in a letter (pdf) to NomCom from ICANN chair Cherine Chalaby last week. He wrote:

There has been increasing sensitivity within the Board regarding gender balance, probably reflecting comparable sensitivity throughout the community. Without compromising the fundamental requirement to have Board members with the necessary integrity, skills, experience, the Board would find it helpful to have more women on the Board.

It is not specified why a greater number of women would be considered “helpful”.
Of the current 20 directors, six are women. That’s 30%, only slightly less than the proportion of women that usually attend ICANN’s public meetings.
However, two of the six are non-voting committee liaisons. The female portion of the 16 voting members is therefore a rather lower 12.5%.
Of the eight directors selected by NomCom, three are currently female.
The 2018 NomCom had 33 female and 76 male applicants, though these were for more positions than just the board of directors.
Chalaby’s letter, which “strongly encourages” NomCom to follow the board’s guidance for director selection, also shows a clear preference for incumbents.
The board is concerned that it takes new directors “a year or two to come up to speed” and that too-fast board churn could lead to a loss of “institutional knowledge”.
Combined, these two recommendations may be good news for the two first-term female NomCom appointees: Sarah Deutsch and Avri Doria, whose terms expire in November 2020.
Three male NomCom-appointed directors have terms due to expire at this year’s Annual General Meeting: Khaled Koubaa, Maarten Botterman, and Chalaby himself. Koubaa and Botterman are currently on their first three-year terms, while Chalaby is term-limited after nine years of service.
Chalaby’s letter also urges the NomCom to consider personal qualities such as intelligence, technical knowledge, management experience, domain industry independence and communication skills during their deliberations.
“While it will be a rare candidate who ticks all of the boxes on the list of additional characteristics and skill sets, the Board as a whole should do so,” Chalaby wrote.

Another bundle of joy for XYZ as Johnson & Johnson throws out the .baby

XYZ.com seems to have acquired the .baby gTLD from Johnson & Johnson.

ICANN records show that the .baby registry contract was assigned to the growing portfolio registry November 19.

The news, which has yet to be announced by buyer or seller, arrives four years after J&J paid $3,088,888 for .baby at an ICANN last-resort auction, beating off five other applicants.

.baby is not what you’d call a roaring success. It has about 600 domains under management after almost two years of general availability.

It typically retails for about $80.

While the plan for .baby was to keep it quite tightly controlled, with J&J giving itself broad rights to refuse registration of any domain that did not appear to fit within its family-friendly mission, it does not seem that regime was strictly enforced.

Explain realdonaldtrump.baby

I would expect XYZ, with its come-all attitude to domains, to be even more relaxed about the namespace.

IANA records show that the gTLD under J&J was (and still is) managed by FairWinds, with a Neustar back-end. Neither are typical partners for XYZ, which tends to use CentralNic.

I think this makes it 12 gTLDs for the XYZ stable, including those it runs in partnership. It has 10 listed on its web site and it picked up former dot-brand .monster from Monster.com a couple months back.

J&J also owns the dot-brand .jnj, which has about 100 domains in its zone but no publicly facing web sites to speak of.

ICANN budget predicts small new gTLD recovery and slowing legacy growth

The new gTLD market will improve very slightly over the next year or so, according to ICANN’s latest budget predictions.

The organization is now forecasting that it will see $5.2 million of funding from new gTLD registry transaction fees in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, up from the $5.1 million it predicted when it past the FY19 budget in May.

That’s based on expected transactions being 24 million, compared to the previous estimate of 23.9 million.

It’s the first time ICANN has revised its new gTLD transaction revenue estimates upwards in a couple years.

ICANN is also now estimating that FY20 transaction fees from new gTLDs will come in at $5.5 million.

That’s still a few hundred grand less than it was predicting for FY17, back in 2016.

Transaction fees, typically $0.25, are paid by registries with over 50,000 names whenever a domain is created, renewed, or transferred.

The FY19 forecast for new gTLD registrar transaction fees has not been changed from the $4.3 million predicted back in May, but ICANN expects it to increase to $4.6 million in FY20.

ICANN’s budget forecasts are based on activity it’s seeing and conversations with the industry.

It’s previously had to revise new gTLD revenue predictions down in May 2018 and January 2018. 

ICANN is also predicting a bounceback in the number of accredited registrars, an increase of 15 per quarter in FY20 to end the year at 2,564. That would see accreditation fees increase from an estimated $9.9 million to $10.7 million.

The budget is also less than optimistic when it comes to legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs, which includes the likes of .com and .net.

ICANN is now predicting FY19 legacy transaction fees of $49.8 million. That’s compared to its May estimate of $48.6 million.

For FY20, it expects that to go up to $50.5 million, reflecting growth of 2.1%, lower than the 2.6% it predicted last year.

Overall, ICANN expects its funding for FY19 to be $137.1 million, $600,000 less than it was predicting in May.

For FY20, it expects funding to increase to $140.1 million. That’s still lower than the $143 million ICANN had in mind for FY18, before its belt-tightening initiatives kicked off a year ago.

The budget documents are published here for public comment until February 8.

ICANN will also hold a public webinar today at 1700 UTC to discuss the plans. Details of the Adobe Connect room can be found here.

Exclusive gang of 10 to work on making ICANN the Whois gatekeeper

Ten people have been picked to work on a system that would see ICANN act as the gatekeeper for private Whois data.

The organization today announced the composition of what it’s calling the Technical Study Group on Access to Non-Public Registration Data, or TSG-RD.

As the name suggests, the group is tasked with designing a system that would see ICANN act as a centralized access point for Whois data that, in the GDPR era, is otherwise redacted from public view.

ICANN said such a system:

would place ICANN in the position of determining whether a third-party’s query for non-public registration data ought to be approved to proceed. If approved, ICANN would ask the appropriate registry or registrar to provide the requested data to ICANN, which in turn would provide it to the third party. If ICANN does not approve the request, the query would be denied. 

There’s no current ICANN policy saying that the organization should take on this role, but it’s one possible output of the current Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois, which is focusing on how to bring ICANN policy into compliance with GDPR.

The new group is not going to make the rules governing who can access private Whois data, it’s just to create the technical framework, using RDAP, that could be used to implement such rules.

The idea has been discussed for several months now, with varying degrees of support from contracted parties and the intellectual property community.

Registries and registrars have cautiously welcomed the notion of a central ICANN gateway for Whois data, because they think it might make ICANN the sole “data controller” under GDPR, reducing their own legal liability.

IP interests of course leap to support any idea that they think will give them access to data GDPR has denied them.

The new group, which is not a formal policy-making body in the usual ICANN framework, was hand-picked by Afilias CTO Ram Mohan, at the request of ICANN CEO Goran Marby.

As it’s a technical group, the IP crowd and other stakeholders don’t get a look-in. It’s geeks all the way down. Eight of the 10 are based in North America, the other two in the UK. All are male. A non-zero quantity of them have beards.

• Benedict Addis, Registrar Of Last Resort.
• Gavin Brown, CentralNic.
• Jorge Cano, NIC Mexico.
• Steve Crocker, former ICANN chair.
• Scott Hollenbeck, Verisign.
• Jody Kolker, GoDaddy.
• Murray Kucherawy, Facebook.
• Andy Newton, ARIN.
• Tomofumi Okubo, DigiCert.

While the group is not open to all-comers, it’s not going to be secretive either. Its mailing list is available for public perusal here, and its archived teleconferences, which are due to happen for an hour every Tuesday, can be found here. The first meeting happened this week.

Unlike regular ICANN work, the new group hopes to get its work wrapped up fairly quickly, perhaps even producing an initial spec at the ICANN 64 meeting in Kobe, Japan, next March.

For ICANN, that’s Ludicrous Speed.

ICANN outs two more deadbeat new gTLDs

ICANN has published breach notices it has sent to two more new gTLD registries, which it says have failed to pay their quarterly accreditation fees.

One is a dot-brand, the other is not.

The brand is the Arabic اتصالات . (.xn--mgbaakc7dvf), managed by Emirati telecommunications powerhouse Etisalat.

With about $14 billion of annual revenue, no domains other than its obligatory NIC site, and an allegedly non-functioning contact phone number, it appears the UAE-based company may simply have forgotten its dot-brand exists.

The other registry allegedly in breach is Desi Networks, the US-based company that targets .desi at people hailing from the Indian subcontinent.

While it’s been on the market for over four years, and has an addressable market of over a billion people, .desi has failed to claw together much more than 3,700 domains under management.

I thought it would have performed better. The ccTLD for India has over two million domains, and the country has a thriving domain market.

With a retail price in the region of $20 per year, it’s easy to see why the .desi may be having trouble scraping together the $6,250 quarterly flat fee ICANN registry contracts demand.

Desi Networks also commits on its web site to donate some portion of its reg fees to worthy causes in the South Asian region, which was probably optimistic with hindsight.

ICANN first sent notices of late payment to both registries in September, but did not receive the requested money.

Both have until the first week of January to pay up, or ICANN will initiate termination proceedings.

No .web until 2021 after Afilias files ICANN appeal

Afilias has taken ICANN to arbitration to prevent .web being delegated to Verisign.
The company, which came second in the $135 million auction that Verisign won in 2016, filed Independent Review Process documents in late November.
The upshot of the filing is that .web, considered by many the best potential competitor for .com — Afilias describes it as “crown jewels of the New gTLD Program” — is very probably not going to hit the market for at least a couple more years.
Afilias says in in its filing that:

ICANN is enabling VeriSign to acquire the .WEB gTLD, the next closest competitor to VeriSign’s monopoly, and in so doing has eviscerated one of the central pillars of the New gTLD Program: to introduce and promote competition in the Internet namespace in order to break VeriSign’s monopoly

Its beef is that Verisign acquired the rights to .web by hiding behind a third-party proxy, Nu Dot Co, the shell corporation linked to the co-founders of .CO Internet that appears to have been set up in 2012 purely to make money by losing new gTLD auctions.
Afilias says NDC broke the rules of the new gTLD program by failing to notify ICANN that it had made an agreement with Verisign to sign over its rights to .web in advance of the auction.
The company says that NDC’s “obligation to immediately assign .WEB to VeriSign fundamentally changed the nature of NDC’s application” and that ICANN and the other .web applicants should have been told.
NDC’s application had stated that .web was going to compete with .com, and Verisign’s acquisition of the contract would make that claim false, Afilias says.
This means ICANN broke its bylaws commitment to apply its policies, “neutrally, objectively, and fairly”, Afilias claims.
Allowing Verisign to acquire its most significant potential competitor also breaks ICANN’s commitment to introduce competition to the gTLD market, the company reckons.
It will be up to a three-person panel of retired judges to decide whether these claims holds water.
The IRP filing was not unexpected. I noted that it seemed likely after a court threw out a Donuts lawsuit against ICANN which attempted to overturn the auction result for pretty much the same reasons.
The judge in that case ruled that new gTLD applicants’ covenant not to sue ICANN was valid, largely because alternatives such as IRP are available.
ICANN has a recent track record of performing poorly under IRP scrutiny, but this case is by no means a slam-dunk for Afilias.
ICANN could argue that the .web case was not unique, for starters.
The .blog contention set was won by an affiliate of WordPress maker Automattic under almost identical circumstances earlier in 2016, with Colombian-linked applicant Primer Nivel paying $19 million at private auction, secretly bankrolled by WordPress.
Nobody complained about that outcome, probably because it was a private auction so all the other .blog applicants got an even split of the winning bid.
Afilias wants the .web IRP panel to declare NDC’s bid invalid and award .web to Afilias at its final bid price.
For those champing at the bit to register .web domains, and there are some, the filing means they’ve likely got another couple years to wait.
I’ve never known an IRP to take under a year to complete, from filing to final declaration. We’re likely looking at something closer to 18 months.
Even after the declaration, we’d be looking at more months for ICANN’s board to figure out how to implement the decision, and more months still for the implementation itself.
Barring further appeals, I’d say it’s very unlikely .web will start being sold until 2021 at the very earliest, assuming the winning registry is actually motivated to bring it to market as quickly as possible.
The IRP is no skin off Verisign’s nose, of course. Its acquisition of .web was, in my opinion, more about restricting competition than expanding its revenue streams, so a delay simply plays into its hands.

ICANN attendance soars but “females” stay away

ICANN attendees identifying themselves as female plummeted to 20% of the total at ICANN 63, even as overall attendance rocketed.
According to just-published stats from ICANN, 2,639 people checked in at the Barcelona venue for the late-October meeting.
That compares favorably to the Abu Dhabi meeting a year earlier, which saw 1,929 participants show up, to the last European meeting, Copenhagen in March last year, where there were 2,089 attendees, and to the last European AGM, 2015’s Dublin meeting with its 2,395 people.
Oddly, the number of people self-declaring their femaleness was down hugely. It reliably hovers around the 33% mark usually, but in Barcelona it was down to one in five.
The number of “males” was also down, from 59% in Abu Dhabi to 53% in at 63.
It seems very likely that the gender balance has not substantially changed, but that fewer people are ticking the gender box when they sign up.
The number of participants who chose not to disclose their gender was 27%, up from 10% in Abu Dhabi, 11% at ICANN 61 and 14% at ICANN 62.
There were wide regional differences in gender balance.
There were 1,440 attendees from Europe in Barcelona, more than half the total, and 28% of them did not disclose their gender. That number was just 8% among North Americans and 9% for Africans.
I’m at a loss to explain why the number of undeclareds would see such a sharp increase — did ICANN change how it gathers gender data this time around, or are people, women in particular, becoming more reticent to disclose their gender?
Perhaps Europeans registering on-site, where perhaps the gender option was easier to ignore on the terminals, tilted the balance? I’m speculating.
In other stats, it seems the number of sessions and session-hours is (thankfully) on the decline.
There were 338 session at 63, down from 407 a year ago, and the number of hours was down by 100, from 696 to 596.
The numbers also show a strong bias towards sessions involving the Governmental Advisory Committee when it comes to attendance, but that’s probably due to the GAC being so bloody big compared to other groups.
All this, and more additional statistics than anyone could possibly ever find useful, can be found here.

Amazon countries fighting back against .amazon gTLD

When ICANN’s board of directors voted in late October to let Amazon have its controversial .amazon gTLD, it was not entirely clear what governments in the Amazon region of South America thought about it.
Now, it is: they’re pissed.
The governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization have cancelled planned peace talks with the retailer and ICANN boss Goran Marby and have filed an appeal against the board’s decision.
It even seems that the negotiations — aimed at obtaining ACTO’s blessing by stuffing the .amazon registry agreement with cultural safeguards and augmenting it with financial sweeteners — may be dead before they even started.
The rapid deterioration of the relationship between ACTO and ICANN plays out in a series of letters between Marby and ACTO secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza, published last week by ICANN.
After the board’s October 25 resolution, which gave .amazon a pardon from its longstanding “Will Not Proceed” death sentence, it took just 10 days for ACTO to file a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, asking the board to rethink its resolution.
In a cover letter to the November 5 request, Mendoza said that ACTO was still happy to have Marby facilitate talks between the governments and Amazon, “to develop a mutually acceptable solution for the delegation” of .amazon.
Amazon is said to have offered concessions such as the protection of culturally sensitive names, along with $5 million worth of free Kindles, in order to get ACTO to back down.
But the governments had yet to see any proposal from Amazon for them to consider, Mendoza wrote a month ago.
At some point Marby then agreed to meet with the ACTO governments — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela — in Bolivia on November 29.
He froze their reconsideration request pending this meeting, according to his November 20 letter (pdf), which also bulletted out the sequence of events that led to the ICANN resolution.
It seems ICANN has been working rather closely with, and had been hearing encouraging noises from, Brazil’s Governmental Advisory Committee representative, over the last 12 months. Indeed, it seems it was Brazil that said the reconsideration should be put on hold, pending the November 29 meeting.
But on November 22, Mendoza cancelled the summit (pdf), taking a hard line against the unfreezing of the applications.
Four days later, she told Marby and ICANN chair Cherine Chalaby that ICANN should be dealing with ACTO, not its individual members.
She said that a “positive reaction” to the reconsideration request and the request for the board resolution to be “cancelled” are “indispensable pre-requisites for such a meeting to take place”.
The short version: ICANN jumped the gun when it unfroze the .amazon gTLD applications, at least in ACTO’s view.
ACTO didn’t even receive Amazon’s latest proposal until November 23, the day after the talks were cancelled, according to ICANN.
And, judging by the latest missive in this infuriating thread, ICANN may have thrown in the towel already.
Marby informed GAC chair Manal Ismail (pdf) last Wednesday that the “facilitation process” ICANN had resolved to lead “has been unsuccessful” and “has not been able to reach its desired conclusion.”
While he added ICANN remains “open to assist and facilitate this matter, should it be considered useful”, there’s otherwise an air of finality about the choice of language in his letter.
As for the reconsideration request (pdf), it seems to be still active, so there’s a chance for the board to change its mind about .amazon’s status.
It will be interesting to see whether the request will be approved by the board for the sake of political expediency.
Reconsideration requests are almost unfailingly tossed out for failing to reach the threshold of providing the board with information it was not aware of at the time of its contested resolution.
In this case, ACTO claims that the board was wrongly informed that the ACTO members had seen and liked Amazon’s latest proposal, presumably because ICANN had been feeling positive vibes from Brazil.
It’s not impossible that the board might agree this is true, put .amazon back on ice, and try again at the “facilitation” route.
But should it? Part of me wonders why the hell ICANN resources — that is, registrants’ money — should be diverted to pay for ICANN to act as an unpaid lobbyist for one of the world’s wealthiest companies, which can’t seem to actually put a proposal on the table in a timely fashion, or for eight national governments who don’t seem to be even talking to each other on an issue they claim is of the utmost importance.