“Criminal” domain suspensions drop again in .uk but thousands of pandemic domains frozen

Nominet suspended thousands fewer suspected criminal domains in 2020 than last year, according to the registry’s latest annual update.

For the 12 months to the end of October, Nominet took down 22,158 domains, is down from 28,937 in the year-ago period.

As usual, suspected intellectual property crime made up almost all the takedowns — the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit was behind 21,632 requests, down from 28,606.

Notably, despite the reported uptick in scams related to the coronavirus pandemic, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency made just 13 takedown requests, down from 31.

This is perhaps due to Nominet taking a proactive approach, putting domains containing certain related keywords on hold at the point of registration. It froze 3,811 such domains this year, later releasing 1,568.

Eight domains were suspended for criminal activity related to Covid-19, the company said.

There were no suspensions related to banned “rape” domains, despite over a thousand new registrations being flagged for manual review. Nor were there any takedowns of domains hosting child sexual abuse material.

It’s the second year in a row that suspensions have been down. In the 2017/18 period Nominet took down 32,813 domains.

WIPO handles 50,000th UDRP case as coronavirus drives complaints

The World Intellectual Property Organization handled its 50,000th UDPR case on November 20, the organization has announced.

It’s taken WIPO, which designed the policy and was the first to administer it back in 1999, over two decades to reach this milestone.

WIPO said that the 50,000 cases cover almost 91,000 domains, with complaints and respondents from over 180 countries.

The organization believes the coronavirus pandemic this year has driven growth, with an 11% increase in cases recorded between January and October. There were 3,405 cases over this period.

Erik Wilbers, director of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, said in a press release:

With a greater number of people spending more time online during the pandemic, cybersquatters are finding an increasingly target-rich environment. Rights owners, meantime, are stepping up their brand enforcement on the Internet as they further shift to marketing and selling online.

Vaccine agency to get more domain takedown powers next year

The UK’s health regulator is going to be added to a Nominet pilot program enabling the speedy takeover of suspected criminal .uk domains next year, according to the registry.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency will become the second government agency after the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police to be added to the program.

The program is an expansion of the years-old takedown procedure coordinated between Nominet and law enforcement agencies, under which domains suspected by LEA of being used in criminal activity such as counterfeiting are promptly suspended by the registry.

In the pilot, when a domain is suspended it will bounce users to this informational image, rather than merely not resolving.

MHRA is the agency responsible for approving vaccines for, among everything else, COVID-19, so it’s bound to see nefarious activity next year as vaccines actually start hitting the market.

The news of its involvement was first announced in March as the pandemic took hold of the country but, like so much else in the UK government’s technology response to coronavirus, it looks like it’s going to be a year late and a quid short.

ICANN may not meet again for a looong time

The grim reality of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic seems to be sinking in at ICANN.

Management and board all but confirmed yesterday that ICANN 70, currently still scheduled for Cancun, Mexico next March, will instead take place online via Zoom.

“We would all like to get back to face-to-face, but at this moment Cancun is not looking good for now,” chair Maarten Botterman said during a community discussion about meetings at ICANN 69, also online-only.

CEO Goran Marby said that there’s a “high probability” that Cancun will be virtual.

The session, “Board/Community Focus on ICANN Meetings” was notable for being extremely depressing rather than merely boring.

Several participants spoke in terms of ICANN meetings being virtual “for the foreseeable future”.

“With the world as it is right now, it’s very hard to say when we come back to full-fledged physical meetings,” CEO Göran Marby said.

He said there’s a possibility of “hybrid” meetings, where a face-to-face gathering could take place in a part of the world where the pandemic was under control, but he noted that this would put online participants at a disadvantage.

The overall vibe of the session was that things probably aren’t going to be back to “normal” for some time.

Even though coronavirus vaccines are already reportedly rolling off the presses right now and will be in the hands of governments by the start of 2021, many experts say the logistical problem of distributing vaccine widely enough to ensure herd immunity is tough enough that the “return to normal” is still a long way off.

Meeting participant Susan Anthony predicted that airline fares will be sky-high next year, limiting the ability of many would-be participants, particularly the smaller, less well-funded ones, to show up in person.

She said virtual or hybrid meetings could be around for “the indefinite future”.

Afilias director Jonathan Robinson concurred, saying “the world may have changed immeasurably and somewhat permanently”.

ICANN director Tripti Sinha later compared the post-pandemic world to the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

There was lots of talk about dumping 2020’s practice of holding the meetings during the time zone of the originally planned host country — the Hamburg time zone has been particularly tough on those in the Americas, who have to start their working day at about midnight — in favor of a utilitarian approach that is least inconvenient for the largest number of participants.

It seems to me that one reason that ICANN has yet to formally cancel Cancun — it’s not even on the board’s agenda this week — is that it’s toying with longer-term plan that may mean standard face-to-face ICANN meetings are a long way off indeed.

It’s difficult to believe that it was only June when some ICANN directors thought Hamburg would be sufficiently safe to return to face-to-face meetings this week.

Lockdown bump was worth $600,000 to ICANN, but end of Club Med saves 10x as much

The coronavirus pandemic lockdowns and the resulting bump in domain name sales caused ICANN’s revenue to come out $600,000 ahead of expectations, up 4%, the org disclosed last week.

But ICANN saved almost 10 times as much by shifting two of its fiscal year 2020 public meetings to an online-only format, due to travel and gathering restrictions.

The organization’s FY20 revenue was $141 million, up by $5 million on FY19, against a rounded projection of $140 million. ICANN’s financial years end June 30.

ICANN said it is “uncertain if these market trends will continue”.

Back in April, the organization lowered its revenue forecast for FY21 by 8%, or $11 million.

Expenses were down $11.1 million at $126 million, 8% lower that expectations and $4 million lower than the 2019 number.

That was mostly due to a $6.2 million saving from having two public meetings online-only.

ICANN typically spends $2 million per meeting funding over 500 travelers, both ICANN staff and community members, but that was down to almost nothing for the first two meetings of this year.

Pre-pandemic, ICANN expected these meetings, slated for Cancun and Kuala Lumpur, to cost $4.2 million and $3.4 million respectively, but the switch to Zoom brought them in at $1.4 million and $0.4 million.

ICANN would have occurred some pre-meeting travel expenses for the Cancun gathering, which was cancelled at the last minute, as well as cancellation fees on flights and hotels.

The org has previously stated that the switch away from face-to-face meetings could save as much as $8 million this calendar year.

The rest of the savings ICANN chalked down to lower-than-expected personnel costs, with hiring slowing during the pandemic.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering about the headline above, it’s a reference to a notorious 2009 WSJ article, and outrage about ICANN’s then $12 million travel budget.

Eleven years later, the FY20 travel budget was $15.7 million.

Delay .org deal because of… coronavirus? Gimme a break

Opponents of Public Interest Registry’s proposed acquisition by Ethos Capital are now claiming that ICANN should delay approval of the deal due to coronavirus.
A statement, released yesterday by digital rights group Access Now with the apparent approval of several other like-minded groups, outlines a few reasons why coronavirus means ICANN should reject, or at least delay its consideration of, the deal.
ICANN is currently working towards a March 20 deadline to deliver its verdict.
Peter Micek, general counsel for Access Now, said in the statement:

Far from routine, this transfer would further imperil crucial channels of trusted information in a precarious time. From Médecins Sans Frontières to Wikipedia to many of the world’s hospitals, organizations that disseminate accurate health information and connect affected communities with public resources depend on the .ORG domain. Now is not the time to shift the ground beneath their online activities.

Could a $0.97 increase in the cost of wikipedia.org this year see Wikipedia’s hive mind crumble and turn into the digital equivalent of Jenny McCarthy’s brain? Will it prompt MSF volunteers to retreat, screaming, from the front lines? I don’t think so.
The statement goes on to suggest that China would be able to use its substantial financial and political clout to lean on Ethos’ secretive backers to something something something coronavirus. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch said:

The Chinese government routinely uses economic pressure to censor critics or inconvenient information, such as about its disastrous early cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak. Investors in the private equity firm that wants to buy the .ORG domain inevitably will have economic interests that Beijing could threaten.

While there may well be a nugget of truth in there, I fail to see how it applies to the current pandemic. Is the argument that China will pressure Ethos’ billionaire money men to close down domains belonging to organizations disseminating accurate Covid-19 information? It seems a stretch.
China already has substantial powers to shut down domains within its own borders, and requires registries operating in the country to comply with Draconian censorship rules. I’m not aware of any cases of these existing powers being exercised against domains globally.
A third argument is that ICANN is using coronavirus as a convenient smokescreen to quietly approve the acquisition while everyone else is busy ram-raiding corner stores for toilet paper.
Daniel Eriksson, head of technology at Transparency International, said in the statement:

If this transfer goes ahead during the current crisis as planned, we’ll look back on it as an example of vested interests taking advantage of the extraordinary situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic to further their own concerns at the expense of the broader good of society. We need to be vigilant against any such actions, and this is precisely the role of many civil society organizations that have a watchdog function. We need maximum transparency and integrity around the sale of .ORG, and that is simply not possible if the sale is rushed through at a moment when peoples’ attention is elsewhere.

Again, this seems like a stretch. The announcement of the acquisition predates the discovery of Covid-19 by weeks, and it has been subject to intense scrutiny, engagement, comment and unprecedented — albeit imperfect — levels of transparency ever since. This is an acquisition being negotiated to a large extent in the public square.
I’ll be generous and suggest a fourth explanation: this is probably just a poor-taste (but, let’s face it, successful) attempt to grab headlines by linking the #SaveDotOrg campaign, however thinly, to the pandemic currently occupying the world’s collective conscious.
There are plenty of good arguments that could be — and are being — made in favor of further delay and scrutiny of the deal, but I don’t think coronavirus is one of them.