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Poblete to replace Disspain on ICANN board

Kevin Murphy, March 3, 2020, Domain Policy

Chilean registry manager Patricio Poblete will join ICANN’s board of directors this October, replacing longstanding member Chris Disspain.
PobleteThe Country Code Names Supporting Organization confirmed Poblete as its new nominee at the weekend following a lengthy election process also fought by Australian Nigel Phair and South African Calvin Browne.
Poblete is the director of NIC Chile, the ccTLD registry for some almost 600,000 .cl domains. He’s been involved in ICANN since its very beginning.
In the election, he received 57 votes compared to Browne’s 42 and Phair’s eight.
Disspain, a very influential member of the board who was vice-chair for years until he stepped aside last September, is being forced out due to term limits in ICANN’s bylaws. He’s almost done serving his third and final three-year term.
Poblete will become one of two ccNSO-selected directors. The other is Nigel Roberts, who runs the Channel Islands ccTLDs. Roberts’ term ends next year.
The nomination frees up a spot for a possible future director from Asia-Pacific, while reducing the available spots from Latin America.

Court rules domain name list should stay secret

Kevin Murphy, May 21, 2019, Domain Registries

Publishing a list of every domain name in their zone is something that most TLD registries do automatically on a daily basis, but a court in Chile has ruled that doing so is a cybersecurity risk.
NIC Chile, which runs .cl, said last week that it has won an appeal against a Transparency Council ruling that would have forced it to publish a list of the domains it manages.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the registry was within its rights to refuse to hand over an Excel spreadsheet listing the 575,430 domains in .cl to the person who requested it.
The request was just for the list of domains, with none of the other data you’d find in a zone file and no Whois information about the registrants.
Nevertheless, the court unanimously ruled that to hand over the list would present “cybersecurity risks”, according to NIC Chile attorney Margarita Valdés Cortés.
NIC Chile said in a statement:

In this particular case, it was considered that the bulk delivery of domain names to a private individual could generate risks of cybersecurity of various kinds, both in access to information as a result of those domain names as well as the possibility that, by having such a list, attacks on servers, phishing, spam or others could be made easier. Similarly, the ruling of the Court of Appeals understood that the delivery of the data affects commercial and economic rights of the holders of these .CL domains, and considered that there is a legal cause that justifies NIC Chile´s refusal to turn over the list of all registered names.

Cortés said that the case will now go to the nation’s Supreme Court for a final decision, after the Transparency Council appealed.
Access to zone files is considered by many security researchers to be an invaluable tool in the fight against cybercrime.
NIC Chile has published the ruling, in Spanish, here (pdf).

Chile opens .cl to all ICANN registrars

Kevin Murphy, January 9, 2019, Domain Registries

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.