Brands want new gTLD fast track

The Brand Registry Group is to propose a set of principles for the next round of ICANN’s new gTLD program that it thinks would see the initial application fee slashed by more than half and some evaluations starting as early as this October.

Under the proposals, TLD-curious applicants could get into the system for as little as $100,000 per string, about $150,000 lower than ICANN’s current estimate, and could see ICANN accepting applications as early as April 2025.

The recommendations, drafted by GoDaddy’s Tony Kirsch and Pharos Global’s Michael Palage, will be presented at a session on Saturday, the first day of ICANN’s 76th public meeting, in Cancun, Mexico.

They’re calling the proposals “Option 2a”, a reference to the two options laid out in ICANN’s Operational Design Assessment of the next round, which was completed in December.

The plan would allow applicants to pay $100,000 to submit a bare-bones application and test the waters in terms of contention, objections and similarity. They could then choose to withdraw before submitting the financial and technical portions of their bid.

Applicants with straightforward applications (presumably including most dot-brands) would have a lower overall cost than those who need additional reviews, contention resolution and objection processing.

The paper also criticizes the “astonishing” estimate of a $400 million program development cost, suggesting instead that ICANN repurpose its existing tools such as Salesforce to roll out the application submission system.

It reckons ICANN could start its Registry Service Provider Pre-Evaluation Program, based on the process it already uses when registries switch back-ends, in October this year.

If ICANN adopts the proposals, the BRG reckons a final Applicant Guidebook could be approved in October 2024, with applications accepted from April 2025.

ICANN to approve next new gTLD round next month (kinda)

ICANN’s board of directors is sending mixed signals about the new gTLD program, but it seems it is ready to start approving the next round when the community meets for its 76th public meeting in Mexico next month.

It seems the board will approve the GNSO’s policy recommendations in a piecemeal fashion. There are some undisclosed sticking points that will have to be approved at a later date.

Chair Tripti Sinha wrote this week that the board “anticipates making incremental decisions leading up to the final decision on opening a new application window for new gTLDs”.

While “many” recommendations will be approved at ICANN 76, the board “will defer a small, but important, subset of the recommendations for future consideration”.

The good news is that the board is erring towards the so-called “Option 2” sketched out in Org’s Operational Design Assessment, which would be much quicker and cheaper than the five-year slog the ODA primarily envisaged.

Sinha wrote:

the Board has asked ICANN Org to provide more detail on the financing of the steps envisioned in the ODA, and to develop a variation of the proposed Option 2 that ensures adequate time and resources to reduce the need for manual processing and takes into account the need to resolve critical policy issues, such as closed generics.

The closed generics issue — where companies can keep all the domains in a generic-term gTLD all to themselves — did not have a community consensus recommendation, and the GNSO Council and Governmental Advisory Committee have been holding bilateral talks to resolve the impasse.

There’s been an informal agreement that some closed generics should be allowed, but only if they serve the global public interest.

A recent two-day GAC-GNSO discussion failed to find agreement on what “generic” and “global public interest” actually mean, so the talks could be slow going. The group intends to file an update before ICANN 76.

New gTLDs: the next round just got real

It seems ICANN can multi-task, after all.

Its board of directors has yet to formally approve the next application round, but staff have started looking for a company to build the application system, regardless.

Org has published an RFI (pdf) for potential developers of a “gTLD Application Lifecycle System” that ICANN, applicants and third-party contractors will be able to use to manage bids from application to delegation.

The document details the 18 system services outlined in the Operational Design Assessment ICANN completed in December.

The deadline for submitting responses is February 24 and there’ll be a follow-up, invitation-only RFP in April. Companies have to respond to the RFI to have a chance at joining the RFP.

By ICANN’s recent standards, this is a pretty ambitious timetable, and will no doubt raise the spirits of those in the GNSO who have been calling for the Org to get a move on after the lengthy and disappointing ODA.

It may also please those worried about ICANN’s apparent inability to operate in anything other that a serial manner — it’s setting the ball rolling now, before the board has approved the program.

It may also give a hint at which way the board is leaning. It met eight days ago to discuss the next round and the ODA but did not formally pass any resolutions or provide any color on the nature of the talks.

New gTLD applications to cost about $250,000

Getting hold of a new gTLD could cost applicants well north of a quarter million dollars in base application fees alone in the next round, according to ICANN.

Presenting the results of its year-long Operational Design Phase to the GNSO Council via Zoom last night, staffers said application fees are likely to be either around $240,600 or $270,000 next time, higher than the $185,000 it charged in 2012.

Those would be the base fees, not including any additional evaluations or contention-related fees.

The Org next week is set to present its board and the community with a stark choice — one big expensive round along the lines of 2012, with a potential five-year wait for the next application window to open, or a cheaper, staggered four-stage round with maybe only 18 months of development time.

The Operational Design Assessment — a 400-page tome the Org has spent the last 14 months developing — is set to be published early next week, outlining two options for how ICANN should proceed on the next round.

One option is to build a highly automated system that fully implements all of the GNSO’s policy recommendations but costs up to $125 million up-front to build and roll out over five years. Application fees would be about $270,000.

The other would cut some bells and whistles and require more human intervention, but would be cheaper at up to $67 million up-front and could be rolled out within 18 months. Application fees would be about $240,600.

ICANN CFO Xavier Calvez, responding to exclamations of surprise via Zoom chat, said that a decade of inflation alone would lead to a 28% price increase to $237,000 if the next round were opened today, but in two or three years the price could be even higher if current economic trends continue.

While many expected the fact that technical evaluations will be conducted on a registry service provider basis rather than a per-application basis would wipe tens of thousands from the application fee, ICANN pointed out that building and executing this RSP pre-evaluation process will also cost it money.

ICANN wants to operate the program on a “cost-recovery basis”, so it neither makes a profit nor has to dig into its operational budget. It expects “more than three dozen vendors will be required” to help run the round.

It seems that the portion of the fee set aside to deal with “risks” — basically, anticipated litigation — is expected to be around a fifth of the total, compared to about a third in the 2012 round.

ICANN is asking its board and the community to decide between what it calls “Option 1 — One Big Round” and “Option 2 — Four Annual Cycles”.

Option 1 would essentially be a replay of 2012, where there’s a single unlimited application window, maybe a couple thousand applications, and then ICANN processes them all in a highly automated fashion using custom-built software.

Option 2 would allow unlimited applications once a year for four years, but it would cap the number processed per year at 450 and there’d be a greater degree of manual processing, which ICANN, apparently unfamiliar with its own history of software development, thinks poses additional risk.

My hot take is that the Org is presenting a false choice here, much like it did in January with its ODA on Whois reform, where one option was so unpalatably time-consuming and expensive that it had most of the community retching into their soy-based lattes.

There’s also an implicit criticism in both ODAs that the community-driven policy-making process has a tendency to make big asks without adequately considering the resources required to actually get them done.

I might be wrong, but I can’t at this early stage see much support emerging for the “One Big Round” option, except perhaps from the most ardent opponents of the new gTLD program.

ICANN expects to deliver the ODA — 100 pages with 300 pages of appendices — to its board on Monday, with wider publication not long after that. It will hold two webinars for the community to discuss the document on Wednesday.

No SSAD before 2028? ICANN publishes its brutal review of Whois policy

Emergency measures introduced by ICANN to reform Whois in light of new privacy laws could wind up taking a full decade, or even longer, to bear dead-on-the-vine fruit.

That’s arguably the humiliating key takeaway from ICANN’s review of community-created policy recommendations to create a Standardized System for Access and Disclosure (SSAD), published this evening.

The Org has released its Operational Design Assessment (pdf) of SSAD, the first-ever ODA, almost nine months after the Operational Design Phase was launched last April.

It’s a 122-page document, about half of which is appendices, that goes into some detail about how SSAD and its myriad components would be built and by whom, how long it would take and how much it would cost.

It’s going to take a while for the community (and me) to digest, and while it generally veers away from editorializing it does gift opponents of SSAD (which may include ICANN itself) with plenty of ammunition, in the form of enumerated risk factors and generally impenetrable descriptions of complex systems, to strangle the project in the crib.

Today I’m just going to look at the timing.

Regular DI readers will find little to surprise them among the headline cost and timeline predictions — they’ve been heavily teased by ICANN in webinars for over a month — but the ODA goes into a much more detailed breakdown.

SSAD, ICANN predicts, could cost as much as $27 million to build and over $100 million a year to operate, depending on adoption, the ODA says. We knew this already.

But the ODA contains a more detailed breakdown of the timeline to launch, and it reveals that SSAD, at the most-optimistic projections, would be unlikely to see the light of day until 2028.

That’s a decade after the European Union introduced the GDPR privacy law in May 2018.

Simply stated, the GDPR told registries and registrars that the days of unfettered access to Whois records was over — the records contain personal information that should be treated with respect. Abusers could be fined big.

ICANN had been taken off-guard by the law. GDPR wasn’t really designed for Whois and ICANN had not been consulted during its drafting. The Org started to plan for its impact on Whois barely a year before it became effective.

It used the unprecedented top-down emergency measure of the Temporary Specification to force contracted parties to start to redact Whois data, and the GNSO Council approved an equally unprecedented Expedited Policy Development Process, so the community could create some bottom-up policy.

The EPDP was essentially tasked with creating a way for the people who found Old Whois made their jobs easier, such as intellectual property lawyers and the police, to request access to the now-private personal data.

It came up with SSAD, which would be a system where approved, accredited users could funnel their data requests through a centralized gateway and have some measure of assurance that they would at least be looked at in a standardized way.

But, considering the fact that they would not be guaranteed to have their requests approved, the system would be wildly complex, potentially very expensive, and easily circumvented, the ODP found.

It’s so complex that ICANN reckons it will take between 31.5 and 42 months for an outsourced vendor to build, and that’s after the Org has spent two years on its Implementation Review Team activities.

That’s up to almost six years from the moment ICANN’s board of directors approves the GNSO’s SSAD recommendations. That could come as early as next month (but as I reported earlier today, that seems increasingly unlikely).

The ODA points out that this timetable could be extended due to factors such as new legislation being introduced around the world that would affect the underlying privacy assumptions with which SSAD was conceived.

And this is an “expedited” process, remember?

Ten years ago, under different management and a different set of bylaws, ICANN published some research into the average duration of a Policy Development Process.

The average PDP took 620 days back then, from the GNSO Council kicking off the process to the ICANN board voting to approve or reject the policy. I compared it to an elephant pregnancy, the longest gestation period of all the mammals, to emphasize how slow ICANN had become.

Slow-forward to today, when the “expedited” PDP leading to SSAD has so far lasted 1,059 days, if we’re counting from when Phase 2 began in March 2019. It’s taken 1,287 days if we’re being less generous and counting from the original EPDP kicking off.

Nelly could have squeezed out two ankle-nibblers in that time. Two little elephants, one of which would most assuredly be white.

ICANN board not happy with $100 million Whois reform proposals

ICANN’s board of directors has given its clearest indication yet that it’s likely to shoot down community proposals for a new system for handling requests for private Whois data.

Referring to the proposed System for Standardized Access and Disclosure, ICANN chair Maarten Botterman said “the Board has indicated it may not be able to support the SSAD recommendations as a whole”.

In a letter (pdf) to the GNSO Council last night, Botterman wrote:

the complexity and resources required to implement all or some of the recommendations may outweigh the benefits of an SSAD, and thus may not be in the best interests of ICANN nor the ICANN community.

The SSAD would be a centralized way for accredited users such as trademark lawyers, security researchers and law enforcement officers to request access to Whois data that is currently redacted due to privacy laws such as GDRP.

The system was the key recommendation of a GNSO Expedited Policy Development Process working group, but an ICANN staff analysis last year, the Operational Design Phase, concluded that it could be incredibly expensive to build and operate while not providing the functionality the trademark lawyers et al require of it.

ICANN was unable to predict with any accuracy how many people would likely use SSAD. It will this week present its final ODP findings, estimating running costs of between $14 million and $107 million per year and a user base of 25,000 to three million.

At the same time, ICANN has pointed out that its own policies cannot overrule GDPR. Registries and registrars still would bear the legal responsibility to decide whether to supply private data to requestors, and requestors could go to them directly to bypass the cost of SSAD altogether. Botterman wrote:

This significant investment in time and resources would not fundamentally change what many in the community see as the underlying problem with the current process for requesting non-public gTLD registration data: There is no guarantee that SSAD users would receive the registration data they request via this system.

ICANN management and board seem to be teasing the GNSO towards revising and scaling back its recommendations to make SSAD simpler and less costly, perhaps by eliminating some of its more expensive elements.

This moves ICANN into the perennially tricky territory of opening itself up to allegations of top-down policy-making.

Botterman wrote:

Previously, the Board highlighted its perspective on the importance of a single, unified model to ensure a common framework for requesting non-public gTLD registration data. However, in light of what we’ve learned to date from the ODP, the Board has indicated it may not be able to support the SSAD recommendations as a whole as envisioned by the EPDP. The Board is eager to discuss next steps with the Council, as well as possible alternatives to design a system that meets the benefits envisioned by the EPDP

The board wants to know whether the GNSO Council shares its concerns. The two parties will meet via teleconference on Thursday to discuss the matter. The ODP’s final report may be published before then.

ICANN splits $9 million new gTLD ODP into nine tracks

ICANN has added a little more detail to its plans for the Operational Design Phase for the next round of the new gTLD program.

VP and ODP manager Karen Lentz last night blogged that the project is being split into nine work tracks, each addressing a different aspect of the work.

She also clarified that the ODP officially kicked off January 3, meaning the deadline for completion, barring unforeseen issues, is November 3. The specific dates hadn’t been clear in previous communications.

The nine work tracks are “Project Governance”, “Policy Development and Implementation Materials”, “Operational Readiness”, “Systems and Tools”, “Vendors”, “Communications and Outreach”, “Resources, Staffing, and Logistics”, “Finance”, and “Overarching”.

Thankfully, ICANN has not created nine new acronyms to keep track of. Yet.

Pro-new-gTLD community members observing how ICANN’s first ODP, which addressed Whois reform, seemed to result in ICANN attempting to kill off community recommendations may be worried by how Lenzt described the new ODP:

The purpose of this ODP, which began on 3 January, is to inform the ICANN Board’s determination on whether the recommendations are in the best interests of ICANN and the community.

I’d be hesitant to read too much into this, but it’s one of the clearest public indications yet that subsequent application rounds are not necessarily a fait accompli — the ICANN board could still decide force the community to go back to the drawing board if it decides the current recommendations are harmful or too expensive.

I don’t think that’s a likely outcome, but the thought that it was a possibility hadn’t seriously crossed my mind until quite recently.

Lentz also refers to “the work required to prepare for the next round and subsequent rounds”, which implies ICANN is still working on the assumption that the new gTLD program will go ahead.

The ICANN board has give Org 10 months and a $9 million budget, paid out of 2012-round application fee leftovers, to complete the ODP. The output will be an Operational Design Assessment, likely to be an enormous document, that the board will consider, probably in the first half of next year, before implementation begins.

A decade after the last new gTLD round, Marby starts the clock on the next one

The next new gTLD application is moving a step closer this month, with ICANN chief Göran Marby promising the launch of its Operational Design Phase.

But it’s still unclear whether the ODP has officially started, and many community members are angry and frustrated that the process is taking too long, some 10 years after the last application window opened.

Marby published a blog post December 20 stating “the org has advised the Board that it is beginning the ODP”, but he linked to a December 17 letter (pdf) that told the board “the org is now transitioning to launch the ODP formally as of January”.

We’re well into January now, so does that mean the ODP has officially started? It’s not clear from what ICANN has published.

It seems either ICANN doesn’t yet want to pin down an exact date for the ODP being initiated, which starts the clock on its deadline for completion, or it’s just really bad at communications.

In September, the board gave Marby $9 million and 10 months for the ODP to come up with its final output, an Operational Design Assessment.

The project is being funded from the remaining application fees from the 2012 application round, rather than ICANN’s regular operations budget.

The text of the resolution gives the deadline as “within ten months from the date of initiation, provided that there are no unforeseen matters that could affect the timeline”.

Assuming the “date of initiation” is some point this month, the ODA would be therefore due to be delivered before the end of November this year, barring “unforeseen matters”.

The document would then be considered by the ICANN board, a process likely to be measured in a handful of months, rather than weeks or days, pushing a final decision on the next round out into the first quarter of 2023.

For avoidance of doubt, that’s the decision about whether or not to even have another new gTLD round.

As a reminder, the 2012 round Applicant Guidebook envisaged a second application round beginning about a year after the first.

Naturally, many would-be applicants are incredibly frustrated that this stuff is taking so long, none more so than the Brand Registry Group, which represents companies that want to apply for dot-brand gTLDs and the consultants that want to help them do so.

Overlapping with ICANN’s December 17 letter to the board, BRG president Karen Day wrote to ICANN (pdf) to complain about the lack of progress and the constant extensions of the runway, saying:

The constant delay and lack of commitment to commencing the next round of new gTLDs is unreasonable and disrespectful to the community that has worked diligently… these delays and lack of commitments to deliver the community’s work is an increasing pattern which risks disincentivizing the volunteer community and threatens the multistakeholder model

Day asked the board to provide more clarity about the ODP’s internal milestones and possible delaying factors, and called for future work to begin in parallel with the ODP in order to shorten the overall roadmap.

It’s worth noting that the ODP may wind up raising more questions than it answers, delaying the next round still further.

It’s only the second ODP ICANN has conducted. The first, related to Whois privacy reform, ended in December (after delays) with a report that essentially shat all over the community’s policy work, predicting that it would take several years and cost tens of millions of dollars to implement for potentially very little benefit.

The board is expected to receive that first ODP’s report in February and there’s no telling what conclusions it will reach.

While Marby has publicly indicated that he’s working on the assumption that there will be another new gTLD round, the ODP gives ICANN a deal of power to frustrate and delay that eventuality, if Org is so inclined.

Whois reform to take four years, cost up to $107 million A YEAR, and may still be pointless

ICANN’s proposed post-GDPR Whois system could cost over $100 million a year to run and take up to four years to build, but the Org still has no idea whether anyone will use it.

That appears to be the emerging conclusion of ICANN’s very first Operational Design Phase, which sought to translate community recommendations for a Standardized System for Access and Disclosure (SSAD) into a practical implementation plan.

SSAD is supposed to make it easier for people like trademark owners and law enforcement to request personal information from Whois records that is currently redacted due to privacy laws such as GDPR.

The ODP, which was originally meant to conclude in September but will now formally wrap up in February, has decided so far that SSAD will take “three to four years” to design and build, costing between $20 million and $27 million.

It’s calculated the annual running costs at between $14 million and $107 million, an eye-wateringly imprecise estimate arrived at because ICANN has pretty much no idea how many people will want to use SSAD, how much they’d be prepared to pay, and how many Whois requests they will likely make.

ICANN had previously guesstimated startup costs of $9 million and ongoing annual costs around the same level.

The new cost estimates are based on the number of users being anywhere between 25,000 and three million, with the number of annual queries coming in at between 100,000 and 12 million.

And ICANN admits that the actual demand “may be lower” than even the low-end estimate.

“We haven’t been able to figure out how big the demand is,” ICANN CEO Göran Marby told the GNSO Council during a conference call last month.

“Actual demand is unknowable until well after the launch of the SSAD,” an ICANN presentation (pdf) states. The Org contacted 11 research firms to try to get a better handle on likely demand, but most turned down the work for this reason.

On pricing, the ODP decided that it would cost a few hundred bucks for requestors to get accredited into the system, and then anywhere between $0.45 and $40 for every Whois request they make.

Again, the range is so laughably broad because the likely level of demand is unknown. A smaller number of requests would lead to a higher price and vice versa.

Even if there’s an initial flurry of SSAD activity, that could decline over time, the ODP concluded. In part that’s because registries and registrars would be under no obligation to turn over records, even if requestors are paying $40 a pop for their queries.

It’s also because SSAD would not be mandatory — requestors could still approach contracted parties directly for the info they want, for low or no cost, if they think the price of SSAD is too high or accreditation requirements too onerous.

“There’ll always be a free version of this for everybody,” Marby said on the conference call.

In short, it’s a hell of a lot of money for not much functionality. There’s a better than even chance it could be a huge waste of time and money.

An added complication is that the laws that SSAD is supposed to address, mainly GDPR, are likely to change while it’s being implemented. The European Union’s NIS2 Directive stands to move the goalposts on Whois privacy substantially, and not uniformly, in the not-too-distant future, for example.

This is profoundly embarrassing for ICANN as an organization. Created in the 1990s to operate at “internet speed”, it’s now so bloated, so twisted up it its own knickers, that it’s getting lapped by the lumbering EU legislative process.

The ODP is set to submit its final report to ICANN’s board of directors in February. The board could theoretically decide that it’s not in the interest of ICANN or the public to go ahead with it.

Marby, for his part, seems to be thinking that there could be some benefit from a centralized hub for submitting Whois requests, but that it should be simpler than the current “too complex” proposal, and funded by ICANN.

My take is that ICANN is reluctant to move ahead with SSAD as it’s currently proposed, but because top-down policy-making is frowned upon its hands are tied to make the changes it would like to see.

ICANN budget: staff bloat making a comeback

ICANN plans to ramp up its headcount starting next year to support the development of the new gTLD program.

Newly published budgeting documents show that average headcount is expected to rise to 406 for the year ending June 30, 2022, from 395 at the end of this June, with an even steeper increase to 448 a year later.

That’s after several years in which staffing levels have been fairly stable, even sometimes declining a little.

The main culprit is the Operational Design Phase for the next new gTLD round(s), which is expected to kick off soon.

ICANN expects to hire or assign nine people to manage the ODP before the end of June 2022, ramping that up to an average of 22 over the following year. The amount of non-ODP operational staff is expected to rise by 28 over the same period.

ICANN currently advertises 31 open positions on its web site, having added eight listings just this week.

This chart shows the expected growth:

At the time of the last new gTLD application round, in 2012, ICANN had 152 staffers, nine of whom were assigned to new gTLD project — and that was after the programs rules had already been developed, implemented and the application window opened and closed.