ICANN content policing power grab may be dead

A move by ICANN to grant itself more formal “content policing” powers may be dead, after the community was split on the issue and governments failed to back the move.

The Governmental Advisory Committee yesterday sent comments essentially opposing, for now at least, the idea of ICANN reforming its bylaws to give it more powers over internet content, making it very unlikely that ICANN would be able to get such amendments approved by its community overseers.

The comments came a few days after ICANN extended the deadline for responses to a December 2023 consultation on whether applicants in the next new gTLD round should be able to sign up to so-called Registry Voluntary Commitments that regulate content in their zones.

RVCs would be an appendix to ICANN Registry Agreements which would commit a registry to, for example, ban certain types of registrant or certain types of content from domains in their gTLDs.

They’re basically a rebadged version of the Public Interest Commitments found in RAs from the 2012 round, in which the likes of .sucks agreed to ban cyberbullying and .music agreed to ban piracy.

But they’ve got ICANN’s board and lawyers worried, because the Org’s bylaws specifically ban it from restricting or regulating internet content. They’re worried that the RVCs might not be enforceable and that ICANN may wind up in litigation as a result.

ICANN has therefore proposed a framework (pdf) in which RVCs would be enforced by ICANN only after an agreed-upon third-party auditor or monitor found that a registry was out of compliance.

The board sent out several pages of questions to all of its Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees in December, asking among other things whether the bylaws needed to be amended to clarify ICANN’s role, but the responses were split along traditional lines.

Registries and registrars were aligned: there’s no need for a bylaws change, because ICANN should not allow RVCs that regulate content into its contracts at all.

“ICANN should maintain its existing bylaws which exclude content from its mission, and allowing any changes to this could be a slippery slope opening ICANN to becoming a broader ‘content police’,” the Registrars Stakeholder Group said in its response, giving this amusing example:

An example of a content restriction is provided in the proposed implementation framework for .backyardchickens (e.g. no rooster-related content). Restricting rooster-related content would require a significant amount of policing, and could even prohibit valuable content that would benefit such a TLD. For example, a backyard hen farmer might want to promote the pedigree lineage of the roosters that helped sire the hens, show pictures of the roosters that were the fathers, etc. All of this could in theory be prohibited,but would also require review and subjective analysis. This would be a very slippery slope for ICANN, and a substantial departure from its mission. Restricting rooster content would then put ICANN in the place of enforcing laws that prohibit backyard roosters, rather than relying upon the competent government authorities charged with overseeing residential animal husbandry.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group was more strident in its tone, even raising the possibility of legal action if ICANN went down the content policing route, saying “the best way for the Board to address content-related PICs and RVCs is to make it clear that it will reject them categorically.” It added:

The prohibition on content regulation in ICANN’s mission is extremely important and very clear. Mission limitations were a critical part of the accountability reforms that were required before ICANN would be released from US government control in 2016… NCSG will mount a legal challenge to any attempt to dilute this part of the mission.

The opposing view was held by the Business Constituency, the Intellectual Property Constituency, and the At-Large Advisory Committee, which is tasked with representing the interests of ordinary internet users.

They all said that ICANN should be able to allow content-related RVCs in registry contracts, but the IPC and BC said that no bylaws amendment is needed because the bylaws already have a carve-out that enables the Org to enforce PICs in its agreements. The ALAC said a bylaws amendment is needed.

“There is a distinction between ICANN regulating, i.e imposing ‘rules and restrictions on’ services and content, versus the registry operator voluntarily proposing and submitting to such rules and restrictions,” the IPC wrote.

“There is also a distinction between ICANN directly enforcing such rules and restrictions on third parties, i.e. registrants, versus ICANN holding a registry operator to compliance with the specifics of a contractual commitment,” it added.

The last community group to submit a response, fashionably late, was the GAC, which filed its response yesterday having reviewed all the other responses submitted so far. The GAC arguably has the loudest voice at ICANN, but its comments were probably the least committed.

The GAC said that ICANN should only go ahead with a bylaws amendment if it has community backing, but that the community currently lacks consensus. It said, “at this stage there are not sufficient elements to justify commencing a fundamental bylaws amendment to explicitly enable the enforcement of content-related restrictions”.

However, the GAC still thinks that RVCs “will continue to serve as tools for addressing GAC concerns pertaining to new gTLD applications during the next round” and that it wants them to be enforceable by ICANN, with consequences for registries found in breach.

The GAC said that it “will continue to explore options to address this important question”.

This all means that ICANN is a long way from getting the community support it would need to push through a bylaws amendment related to content policing. That’s considered one of the “Fundamental Bylaws” and can only be changed with substantial community support.

Such amendments require the backing of the Empowered Community. That’s the entity created in 2016 to oversee ICANN after it severed ties with the US government. It comprises individuals from five groups — the GAC, the GNSO, the ccNSO, the ALAC and the Address Supporting Organization.

For a fundamental bylaws amendment to get over the line, at least three of these groups must approve it and no more than one must object.

With the GNSO, given its divisions, almost certainly unable to gather enough affirmative votes, the GAC seemingly on the fence, and the ASO and ccNSO recusing themselves so far, only the ALAC looks like a clear-cut yes vote on a possible future bylaws amendment.

Perhaps that’s why ICANN chair Tripti Sinha has written to the ASO and ccNSO in the last few days to ask them whether they’d like to think again about ducking out of the consultation, giving them an extra two weeks to submit comments after the original March 31 deadline.

The ccNSO handles policy for country-code domains and the ASO for IP addresses. Both have previously told ICANN that gTLD policy is none of their business, but Sinha has urged them both to chip in anyway, because “the ICANN Bylaws govern us all”.

Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has decided not to force the Org to pay for a independent cost/benefit analysis of the new gTLD program, removing the potential for timeline friction ahead of the planned 2026 next-round launch.

In its latest communique, published following the ICANN 79 meeting in Puerto Rico last week, the GAC has essentially told ICANN that it broke its bylaws by not following eight-year-old GAC advice, but meh, whatever, just don’t do it again.

As I reported last week, governments had grown concerned that ICANN had not delivered the “objective and independent analysis of costs and benefits” of the new gTLD program that the GAC had asked for in 2016. Such an analysis was supposed to be a prerequisite for the next round going ahead.

What ICANN had delivered instead was a relatively hastily prepared summary of the next round’s policy recommendations, Org’s analysis of these recommendations, and the community-led review of competition, consumer protection and trust issues, the CCT review.

The Puerto Rico communique says that this response “cannot be considered to constitute a cost-benefit analysis, nor to be objective and independent” but that the GAC does not wish to throw up a road-block to the next round going ahead on schedule. It reads:

The GAC recognizes that the Community (with involvement of the GAC) is taking forward the next round of new gTLDs and has set a corresponding timeline. The GAC, therefore, believes that conducting further analysis at this stage would not serve the intended purpose.

The GAC encourages the Board to ensure that GAC advice, which the Board has accepted, is effectively implemented and its implementation is communicated to the GAC.

GAC chair Nicolas Caballero of Paraguay summarized it as the committee telling the ICANN board “we’re not aiming by no means at stopping the next round or anything like that, but that we want to be taken seriously”.

The original draft of the communique, drafted by Denmark, the US, the UK and Switzerland delegations, also contained text noting that the analysis ICANN provided was written by staff or community stakeholders, who were neither independent nor objective, but this was removed during a drafting session last week after objections from Iran, whose rep said it sounded too critical of the multistakeholder process.

It seems ICANN, and others who stand to make a lot of money from the new gTLD program, have dodged a bullet here, with the GAC essentially backing away and backing down from its potentially delay-causing previous demands.

GAC spinning up new gTLD curveball at ICANN 79?

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee had a habit of throwing delaying curveballs before and during the 2012 new gTLD application round, and it might be planning a repeat performance before the upcoming 2026 round.

The GAC today assembled at ICANN 79 in Puerto Rico to discuss the latest developments in planning for the next round, and a major concern emerged around ICANN’s response to its request for a cost/benefit analysis.

The GAC had first asked for such an analysis at the Helsinki meeting in 2016, but after the ICANN 78 Hamburg meeting last October noted that it had still not received one.

At ICANN 56, the GAC had asked that an “objective and independent analysis of costs and benefits… drawing on experience with and outcomes from the recent round” should be a prerequisite for a next round going ahead.

After its Hamburg reminder, ICANN threw together a summary (pdf) of three existing documents that it presumably hoped would check that box and shush the GAC or give the GAC an excuse to shush itself.

The documents were the report of the Competition and Consumer Trust Review Team, the Subsequent Procedures PDP Working Group Final Report (which created the policy recommendations for the next round) and ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment of SubPro (which talked about how ICANN would implement those recommendations).

It was a pretty flimsy response, and GACers weren’t buying it, pointing out today that the three documents in question were all produced by the ICANN community or ICANN staff and couldn’t really be said to be “objective and independent”. Nor could they be said to amount to an “analysis of costs and benefits”.

“I had the pleasure to read through the report, and see whether it’s a cost/benefit analysis, and whether it’s an objective and independent analysis,” the GAC rep from Denmark said. “And I must say that my answer or reply to those questions would be no, and a big no.”

Other GAC members in Europe and North America seemed to agree that either the cost/benefit analysis they had asked for still hadn’t been delivered and that perhaps it wouldn’t be great for the GAC’s credibility if it didn’t press the issue.

The UK rep, who was chairing the session, observed that GAC members’ higher-uppers in government, such as ministers, sometimes ask what economic impact gTLD expansion might have and that an answer might be useful.

The contrarian opinion came, as it so often does, from Iran, whose rep suggested that a cost/benefit analysis might be pointless and maybe the GAC should just put the issue to bed.

What happens if the analysis shows the costs outweigh the benefits, he asked, should ICANN just scrap the next application round and 13 years of policy work?

It seems a request for ICANN to pay for an independent cost/benefit analysis of the new gTLD program could make its way into the GAC’s formal advice-delivering communique later in the week, potentially throwing friction into the roll-out of the next round.

In my opinion, there is no real answer to the question of whether the new gTLD program is a net benefit.

Beyond the billions of dollars of economic activity that will be created, whether it’s beneficial is purely a subjective opinion, and paying a bunch of overpriced consultants to wave their hands in the air for a year before spitting out the 300-page PDF equivalent of a Gallic Shrug probably won’t provide any meaningful clarity.

Registry service provider evaluation handbook published

ICANN has released the first draft of its RSP Handbook, the guidelines and questionnaire for registry service providers that want to get pre-approved by the Org ahead of the next new gTLD application round.

The Handbook is aimed at the few dozen companies that offer back-end services to gTLD registries — companies such as GoDaddy, Identity Digital and CentralNic — to guide them through the process of getting approved under the new Registry Service Provider Evaluation Program.

The program was called for by the GNSO community in order to minimize the amount of time-consuming, expensive evaluation work required for each new gTLD application. If a gTLD applicant’s selected RSP has been pre-approved by ICANN, it’s an automatic pass on the technical part of the application.

The new Handbook 1.0 envisages four types of RSP. A “Main RSP” is a full-service provider that looks after all technical aspects of a registry back-end. There are also categories for companies that provide DNS resolution only and DNSSEC services.

A fourth type, the “Proxy RSP”, is aimed primarily at companies that provide secondary registry services in countries that have very restrictive domain licensing rules. That basically means China, and proxies such as ZDNS.

Incumbent gTLD RSPs have a distinct advantage in the Handbook process. If they’re in good standing with ICANN and have complied with their service level agreements for the last six months, they can skip the second, technical part of the evaluation.

Incumbents also get a streamlined process for additional registry services — stuff like name-blocking and registry locks — they wish to offer. If they already offer them in an existing gTLD, they get to skip the full Registry Services Evaluation Process.

The Handbook is a first draft and does not currently include things like fees and dates. It’s not yet open for public comment but you can read the 108-page PDF here.

ICANN expects to launch the pre-evaluation program 18 months before it starts accepting new gTLD applications, so applicants have a list of approved RSPs to choose from. With a Q2 2026 target date for the next application window, that means the RSP program could launch later this year.

First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop

ICANN has released for comment the first public drafts of seven sections of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook, the first of what are expected to be quarterly comment periods for the next 18 months or so.

As I previewed last week, the documents cover topics including geographic names, blocked strings, Universal Acceptance, conflicts of interest and freedom of expression.

The documents were prepared by the ICANN staff/community Subsequent Procedures Implementation Review Team, based on the recommendations of a working group reporting to the Generic Names Supporting Organization a few years ago.

ICANN says it wants to know whether everyone thinks the AGB text it has come up with is consistent with those recommendations.

The comment period is open until March 19. ICANN hopes to have the full AGB ready by May 2025, with the next application round opening April 2026.

First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week

The internet community will officially get eyes on the draft Applicant Guidebook for ICANN’s next new gTLD Applicant Guidebook as early as next week.

The ICANN staff/community Implementation Review Team crafting the language of the AGB is targeting February 1, next Thursday, for opening a formal Public Comment on drafts of seven sections of the document.

These sections mostly cover some of the low-hanging fruits — explanatory text or rules that have not changed a great deal from the 2012 round. They are:

• Code of Conduct and Conflict of Interest Guidelines.
• Conflicts of Interest Process for Vendors and Subcontractors. Along with the above, these sections specify what ICANN’s vendors (such as application evaluators) must not do in order to avoid the perception of conflicts of interest, such as not accepting gifts and not entering into deals to acquire applicants.
• Applicant Freedom of Expression. This section is a single-paragraph disclaimer warning applicants to be “mindful of limitations to free expression”. In other words, if your applied-for string breaks ICANN rules, your free speech rights are forfeit.
• Universal Acceptance. A brief warning or disclaimer that even successfully applied-for gTLDs may not work everywhere on the internet due to lack of software support.
• Reserved and Blocked Names. Covers the variety of reasons why an applied-for string will be rejected or subject to additional review, including names that break technical standards, are geographic in nature, or refer to organizations in the ICANN ecosystem.
• Geographic Names. Specifies when an applied-for string is considered a Geographic Name and is therefore banned outright or requires governmental approval for the application to proceed. There’s at least one potential applicant, thinking of applying for .eth, that I predict will not be happy with one of these rules.
• Predictability Framework. This is new to the 2026 round. It’s a procedure designed to tackle unexpected changes to process or policy that are required after applicants have already paid up and submitted their paperwork. In some circumstances, it requires ICANN to consult with a community group called SPIRT to make sure applicants are not affected too adversely.

The full AGB is not expected to be completed until May 2025, with ICANN currently hoping to open the next application window in April 2026.

The public comment period on the first batch of docs is expected to run from February 1 to March 19. If you want to get the jump on what is very likely to be published, drafts can be found here.

ICANN rejects a whole bunch of new gTLD policy stuff

ICANN has delivered some bad news for dot-brands, applicants from poorer countries, and others, at the weekend rejecting several items of new gTLD policy advice that the community spent years cooking up.

The board of directors on Sunday approved a scorecard of determinations, including the rejection (or non-adoption) of seven GNSO recommendations that it deems “would not be in the best interests of the ICANN community or ICANN”.

In reality, it’s the latter that seems to have been foremost in the board’s mind; most of the rejections appear to be geared toward reducing ICANN Org’s legal or financial exposure.

Notably, dot-brands are denied some of the relief from cumbersome or expensive requirements that the GNSO had wanted rid of.

The board rejected a recommendation that would exempt them from the Continued Operations Instrument — a financial bond used to pay an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator should the applicant go out of business.

“[T]he Board is concerned that an exemption from an COI for Spec 9 applications would have financial impact on ICANN since there would be no fund to draw from if such a registry went into EBERO,” the board wrote.

It also rejected a request to exempt dot-brands from rules requiring them to contractually ban and monitor abuse in their TLDs. The GNSO had argued that single-registrant TLDs do not suffer abuse, but the board said this could lead to abuse from compromised domains going unaddressed.

“The Board concludes that Recommendation 9.2, if implemented, could lead to DNS abuse for second-level registrations in a single-registrant TLD going unaddressed, unobserved, and unmitigated,” it said.

Applicants hoping to benefit from the Applicant Support Program — which in 2012 offered heavily discounted application fees to poorer applicants — also got some bad news.

The GNSO wants the support to extend to other costs such as application-writing services and lawyers, which naturally enough put the frighteners on the board, which noted “such expansion of support could raise the possibility of inappropriate use of resources (e.g. inflated expenses, private benefit concerns, and other legal or regulatory concerns)”.

The board also rejected a couple of recommendations that could be seen as weakening its role as ultimate authority over all things gTLD.

It rejected a proposal to remove the controversial covenant not to sue (CNTS) from the application process unless other recommendations related to appeals processes are implemented.

ICANN said that because it has not yet approved these other recommendations, it has rejected this recommendation.

The board also rejected a recommendation that would have limited its ability to reject a gTLD application to only when permitted to do so by the rules set out in the Applicant Guidebook.

The idea was to prevent applications being arbitrarily rejected, but the board said this “may unduly limit ICANN’s discretion to reject an application in yet-to-be-identified future circumstance(s)”.

The rejections invoke part of the ICANN bylaws that now requires the GNSO Council to convene and either affirm or amend its recommendations before discussing them with the board. Presumably this could happen at ICANN 78 next month.

The bylaws process essentially gives the board the ultimately authority to throw out the GNSO recommendations if it can muster up a two-thirds supermajority vote, something it rarely has a problem achieving.

Closed generics ban likely to remain after another policy group failure

Closed generic gTLDs are likely off the table for ICANN’s next application round, after a secretive policy development working group failed to reach a consensus on how they could be permitted.

The chairs of the ALAC-GAC-GNSO Facilitated Dialogue on Closed Generic gTLDs have put their names to a draft letter that essentially throws in the towel and recommends ICANN sticks to the status quo in which closed generics are not permitted.

The chairs of the three committees write that they “believe that it is not necessary to resolve the question of closed generic gTLDs as a dependency for the next round of new gTLDs, and we plan to inform the ICANN Board accordingly.”

In other words, whatever latency related to needing a closed generics policy that was built in to ICANN’s recent April 2026 target for opening the next application round could be eliminated from the timeline.

The three chairs added (emphasis in original PDF):

We agree with the ICANN Board (in its original invitation to the GAC and the GNSO to engage in a facilitated dialogue) that this topic is one for community policy work, rather than a decision for the Board. As such and based on our collective belief that there is neither the need nor the community bandwidth to conduct additional work at this stage, we also plan to ask that, for the next round, the Board maintain the position that, unless and until there is a community-developed consensus policy in place, any applications seeking to impose exclusive registry access for “generic strings” to a single person or entity and/or that person’s or entity’s Affiliates (as defined in Section 2.9(c) of the Registry Agreement) should not proceed. Finally, we also plan to inform the Board that any future community policy work on this topic should be based on the good work that has been done to date in this facilitated dialogue.

But that position — still a draft — is already facing some push-back from community members who disagree about what the current status quo actually is.

The 2012 application round opened up with the assumption that closed generics were A-okay, and it received hundreds of such applications.

But the governments of the GAC, no doubt stirred by competition concerns, balked when they saw big companies had applied for gTLD strings that could enable them to dominate their markets.

The GAC demanded that closed generics must service the public interest if they were to be permitted, so ICANN Org — in what would turn out to be an Original Sin injected into the destiny of future rounds — retroactively changed the rules, essentially banning closed generics but allowing applicants to withdraw for a refund or open up their proposed registration policies.

The third option was to defer their applications to a future application round, by which point it was assumed the community would have established a closed generics policy. No applicant took that option.

But making that policy was the job of a committee called SubPro, but when turned its attention to the issue, entrenched positions among volunteers took hold and no consensus could be found. It couldn’t even agree what the status quo was. The group wound up punting the issue to the ICANN board.

The discussion moved on last year when ICANN decided to launch the “Facilitated Dialogue”, forcing the GAC and the GNSO to the negotiating table in last-ditch attempt to put the issue to bed for good.

Ironically, it was the 2013 GAC advice — made at time when the governments drafted their advice in secret and were deliberately ambiguous in their output — that killed off closed generics for a decade that ICANN used to reopen the issue. The GAC hadn’t wanted a blanket ban, after all, it just wanted to mandate a “public interest” benefit.

The assumption was that the Facilitated Dialogue would come up with something in-between a ban and a free-for-all, but what it actually seems to have come up with is a return to the status quo and disagreement about what the status quo even is.

It really is one of those situations where ICANN, in its broadest definition, can’t see to find its ass with two hands and a flashlight (and — if you’ll indulge me — a map, GPS coordinates, and a Sherpa).

April 2026 is the date for the next new gTLD round

ICANN has given itself an April 2026 target for accepting the next round of new gTLD applications.

Board chair Tripti Sinha wrote yesterday that ICANN expects the next Applicant Guidebook — the Book of Mormon for the program — to be completed in May 2025 “which enables the application round to open in Q2 2026 (with the goal of April 2026)”.

She noted, as if it needed note, that there could be delays.

Back in May, ICANN had indicated May 2026 as the likely date. That was in a fairly obscure Inside Baseball document. The newly revealed date is an official ICANN announcement.

Other key dates come in the fourth quarter 2025, when ICANN will start accepting applications for its Applicant Support Program and registry service provider pre-evaluation program.

Sinha said the board last week approved an Implementation Plan that lays out the work — and costs — for the next three years.

ICANN expects the program to cost it $70 million between Q2 2023 and Q2 2026. It’s assuming it gets roughly 2,000 applications, in with its experience in 2012. It will hire 29 new staff.

Next round of gTLDs could come much sooner than expected

ICANN’s next new gTLDs application round may be closer than we thought, after a policy working group dramatically reduced the timetable for completing its work.

The Internationalized Domain Names Expedited Policy Development Process team has managed to shave a whopping 13 months off its schedule, potentially leading to a similar period being shaved off the runway to the next application window.

The IDNs EPDP had expected to deliver its final deliverables — policy recommendations on how IDNs are handled in gTLD applications — in November 2025, meaning the earliest they could be adopted by the ICANN board would be March 2026.

Because the IDNs policy is seen as a critical gating factor to the next round commencing, the date ICANN penciled in for the next application window was May 2026.

But now the IDNs EPDP group has revised its deadline down to October 2024, member Donna Austin told the GNSO Council last Thursday. This could mean the board could approve its work in early 2025.

The new target means that IDNs are no longer the biggest delaying factor on the critical path to the next window — that honor now falls on the “closed generics” problem, which a “small team” of the GNSO and Governmental Advisory Committee have been working on in private all year.

The latest thinking on closed generics is that another EPDP would be formed with an estimated run-time of 96 weeks (22 months) — a mid-2025 end date, in other words.

But there are even question marks over that optimal timeline now, following a less than supportive informal public comment period that closed last week. The closed generics small team has apparently taken a week off to ask itself some fundamental questions.

One possibility that has been suggested to speed things up is to take closed generics out of the critical path by retaining the current de facto ban for the next round.

If that were to happen, we could be looking at an application window in 2025.

But nobody ever won money betting on ICANN hitting deadlines, so take this speculation with a pinch of salt big enough to give an elephant hypertension.