The Pirate Bay likely to be sunk as .org adopts “UDRP for copyright”

Controversial piracy site The Pirate Bay is likely to be the first victim of a new industry initiative being described as “UDRP for copyright”.
The Domain Name Association today published a set of voluntary “healthy practices” that domain registries can adopt to help keep their TLDs clean of malware, child abuse material, fake pharmacies and mass piracy.
And Public Interest Registry, the company behind .org, tells DI that it hopes to adopt the UDRP-style anti-piracy measure by the end of the first quarter.
This is likely to lead to thepiratebay.org, the domain where The Pirate Bay has resided for some time, getting seized or deleted not longer after.
Under its Healthy Domains Initiative, the DNA is proposing a Copyright Alternative Dispute Resolution Policy that would enable copyright holders to get piracy web sites shut down.
The version of the policy published (pdf) by the DNA today is worryingly light on details. It does not explain exactly what criteria would have to be met before a registrant could lose their domain name.
But PIR general counsel Liz Finberg, the main architect of the policy, said that these details are currently being finalized in coordination with UDRP arbitration firm Forum (formerly the National Arbitration Forum).
The standard, she said, will be “clear and convincing evidence” of “pervasive and systemic copyright infringement”.
It’s designed to capture sites like The Pirate Bay and major torrent sites than do little but link to pirate content, and is not supposed to extend to sites that may inadvertently infringe or can claim “fair use”.
That said, it’s bound to be controversial. If 17 years of UDRP has taught us anything it’s that panelists, often at Forum, can take a liberal interpretation of policies, usually in favor of rights holders.
But Finberg said that because the system is voluntary for registries — it’s NOT an ICANN policy — registries could simply stop using it if it stops working as intended.
Filing a Copyright ADRP complaint will cost roughly about the same as filing a UDRP, typically under $1,500 in fees, she said.
Penalties could include the suspension or transfer of the domain name, but monetary damages would not be available.
Finberg said PIR chose to create the policy because she wasn’t comfortable with the lack of due process for registrants in alternative methods such as Trusted Notifier.
Trusted Notifier, in place at Donuts and Radix, gives the Motion Picture Association of America a special pass to notify registries about blatant piracy and, if the registry agrees, to have the domains suspended.
While stating that .org is a fairly clean namespace, Finberg acknowledged that there is one big exception.
“The Pirate Bay is on a .org, we’re not happy about that,” she said. “If I were to say what’s the one .org that is the prime candidate for being the very first one out of the gate, I would say it’s The Pirate Bay.”
Other registries have yet to publicly state whether they plan to adopt this leg of the DNA HDI recommendations.

Afilias retains .org back-end deal

Public Interest Registry is sticking with Afilias to run the .org registry back-end.
The announcement came yesterday after a open procurement process that lasted for most of 2016.
Over 20 back-end providers from 15 nations — basically the entire industry — responded to PIR’s February request for proposals, we reported back in March.
Afilias retaining the contract is not a huge surprise. The bidding process was widely believed to be a way for non-profit PIR to reduce its costs, believed to be among the highest in the industry.
PIR said yesterday:

Afilias was selected as the best value solution based on the objective criteria and requirements set forth in Public Interest Registry’s procurement process. It is anticipated that Afilias will commence operations under the new contractual agreement on Jan. 1, 2018.

It’s very likely that the new deal will be worth a lot less to Afilias than the current arrangement, which costs PIR about $33 million per year.
In 2013, the last year for which we have Afilias’ financials, .org brought in $31 million of its $77 million revenue.
It’s believed that PIR is currently paying about $3 per domain per year, but Kieren McCarthy at The Register, citing unnamed industry sources, reckons that’s now been bumped down to $2, saving PIR about $10 million per year.
The .org gTLD has about 11.2 million domains under management, but its numbers have been slipping for several months, according to registry reports.

Nominet has sights set on .org after M+M deal

Nominet chief Russell Haworth is hopeful that its new outsourcing deal with Minds + Machines will help it win a much more lucrative back-end contract — .org.
The company is among the 20-plus companies that have responded to Public Interest Registry’s request for proposals, as its back-end deal with Afilias comes to an end.
Nominet is one of a handful of companies — which would also include Verisign, Afilias, CNNIC and DENIC — that currently handles zones the size or larger than .org, which at over 10 million names is about the same size as .uk.
It, like PIR, is also a not-for-profit entity that donates excess funds to good causes, which could count in its favor.
But Haworth told DI today that showing the ability to handle a complex TLD migration may help its bid.
“I personally think that it would stand us in good stead, but we’ll have to see how the process plays out,” he told DI today. “With .org there’s 19-odd players pitching for that, so it’s a fairly competitive field.”
If the migration were to happen today, we’d be looking at around 300,000 domains changing hands. It’s likely to be a somewhat larger number by the time it actually happens.
Collectively, it will be one of the largest back-end transitions to date, though the largest individual affected gTLD, .work, currently has fewer than 100,000 names in its zone.
Haworth said that the plan is to migrate M+M’s portfolio over to Nominet’s systems one at a time.
He was hesitant to characterize the migration process as “easy”, but said Nominet already has such systems in place due to its role as one of ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operators.
Earlier this year, Nominet temporarily took over defunct dot-brand .doosan, in order to test the EBERO process.
A back-end migration primarily covers DNS resolution and EPP systems.
It sounds like the EPP portion may be the more complex. Some of M+M’s gTLDs have restrictions and tiered pricing that may require EPP extensions Nominet does not currently use in its TLDs.
But the DNS piece may hold the most risk — if something breaks, registrants names stop resolving and web sites go dark.
Haworth said Nominet is also talking to other new gTLD registries about taking over back-end operations. Registries signed three, five or seven-year contracts with their RSPs when the 2012 application round opened, and some are coming up for renewal soon, he said.
Nominet says it will become a top ten back-end after the M+M migration is done.

Over 20 companies fighting for .org contract

More than 20 companies want to take over the back-end registry for the .org gTLD, according to Public Interest Registry.
PIR put the contract, currently held by Afilias, up for bidding with a formal Request For Information in February.
It’s believed to be worth north of $33 million to Afilias per year.
PIR told DI today that it “received more than 20 responses to its RFI for back-end providers from organisations representing 15 countries.”
That represents a substantial chunk of the back-end market, but there are only a handful of registry service providers currently handling zones as big as .org.
.org has about 11 million names under management. Only .com, .net and a few ccTLDs (Germany, China and the UK spring to mind) have zones the same size or larger.
PIR said it would not be making any specific details about the bidders available.
The non-profit says it plans to award the contract by the end of the year.

$33 million .org contract up for grabs

Public Interest Registry, operator of .org, has put its back-end registry services contract up for grabs.
The deal could be worth around $33 million a year, judging by its current relationship with incumbent back-end Afilias.
PIR said in a statement today:

The organisation desires to contract with a qualified back-end registry services provider that shares a similar reputation and holds itself to the highest operational and ethical standards. The selected back-end registry service provider should be a “valued business partner” – an organisation that combines outstanding qualifications in service delivery with the ability to engage Public Interest Registry in a business relationship that seeks strategic and innovative approaches to enhance the capability and efficiency of service delivery.

The contract was actually supposed to end in January, according to the Internet Society resolution that approved it back in 2010.
According to PIR’s most recent available tax return (pdf), Afilias was paid $33.2 million in 2014.
It was paid $31 million in 2013 when its total revenue for the year we know to be $77 million. So it’s a pretty big deal for Afilias.
The payments are mainly, but not exclusively, for domain name registry services, according to PIR’s tax returns.
Afilias also operates a few additional services related to PIR’s expansion in the non-governmental organization market, such as a database of NGOs used for validation purposes.
But if we over-simplify things, a roughly $33 million annual payout for a 10-million-domain zone works to something in the ballpark of $3 per name per year.
Given some of the numbers I’ve heard thrown around over the last few years, I expect there are a few back-end providers out there that would be more than happy to offer a cheaper deal.
It will be the first time Afilias has had to fight for the .org contract since 2010, thought PIR has done a couple of analyses over the last few years to make sure it’s getting a fair deal in line with market prices.
Since 2010 the number of back-end registry providers has exploded due to the advent of the new gTLD program, so there will be more competition for the .org contract.
That said, none of the new providers are yet proven at the scale of .org, which has over 10.6 million names at the last count.
PIR expects to award the contract before December 2016.
Interested vendors have until March 5 to express their interest on this web site.

PIR goes live with three non-Latin .org gTLDs

The internet has its first IDN versions of legacy gTLDs.
Public Interest Registry had three new gTLDs delegated over the weekend, all non-Latin versions of its flagship .org.
The gTLDs were .संगठन, which means “organization” in Hindi, and the Chinese .机构 and .组织机构, which seem to be two ways of saying “organization” too.
They’re not strictly speaking transliterations, as they represent whole dictionary words conceptually related to .org, rather than trying to approximate the spoken sound of “org”.
The .com equivalents Verisign has applied for in other scripts are actually meant to sound the same as “com” without actually meaning “commercial” or “company” in their language.
Because PIR has taken a different approach, there’s no grandfathering for existing .org registrants.
These three new gTLDs will be unrestricted, according to PIR’s applications, but will have slightly stricter rules on abuse — no porn will be allowed, for example.

PIR rebrands, talks up “Facebook-like” new gTLDs

Public Interest Registry is dropping the .org from its primary branding in preparation for the launch of its new gTLDs.
CEO Brian Cute said that branding the registry around .org “made a lot of sense when we were a single product company”, but that the time has come to put the PIR name front and center.
The new logo incorporates “Your”, as a result of focus groups, testing and because Cute says “really reflects to us our commitment to the communities we serve”.
PIR has applied to ICANN for .ngo, for Non-Governmental Organization, along with Latin equivalent .ong and four transliterations of .org in Cyrillic, Hindi and Chinese.
Cute told DI that the plan for .ngo and .ong is to have a space in which, unlike .org, the identities of the registrants have been validated.
There’s going to be a searchable directory, a portal, and a “Facebook-like” service for registrants, he said.
“We’re going to have profile pages, so if a registrant doesn’t want to stand up a full website, there’ll be a Facebook-like profile they can populate,” he said.
It sounds like PIR is thinking about a template-driven approach to getting content on .ngo domains, somewhat similar to how .tel works (though it won’t be mandatory in .ngo) or Employ Media’s .Jobs Universe.
But Cute said neither of those concepts inspired PIR, which is building its profile service from scratch.
It’s an interesting way to market a TLD, and I’m positive that PIR won’t be the only new gTLD applicant to do something along these lines.

Three gTLD contracts to be renewed next week

ICANN is set to belatedly renew the .info, .org and .biz Registry Agreements next week, according to the just published agenda of its board of directors’ next meeting.
The .info and .biz contracts expired last year, while .org’s expired in April. All three were extended while ICANN and the registries — Afilias, Neustar and PIR — figured out how much of the new gTLD Registry Agreement to incorporate into the renewed deals.
They wound up agreeing to, among other things, mandating the use of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement in all three gTLDs, but only on the condition that Verisign agrees to the same terms for .com and .net.
The three contracts didn’t go far enough for some, such as the Intellectual Property Constituency, which wants new gTLD rights protection mechanisms such as Uniform Rapid Suspension to be added.
The approval of the three renewals is on the consent agenda for the ICANN board’s August 22 meeting, so it seems unlikely that there will be any huge changes to the previously published draft contracts.
Also on the agenda for next week are the redelegations of the ccTLDs for Botswana (.bw) and Portugal (.pt).

Soon Verisign could sell .com domains direct

With little fanfare, ICANN last week formally approved new rules that could allow incumbent registry operators to own registrars that sell domains in their own gTLDs.
The policy would give the likes of Verisign, Neustar and Afilias the right to become affiliated with registrars that sell .com, .biz and .info names respectively.
These registries would have to sign up to the standard new gTLD registry agreement first, or submit to contract renegotiation in order to drop their current cross-ownership bans.
In either case, they would become bound by the new registry Code of Conduct, preventing them from offering preferential terms to their affiliated registrars.
The new rule came into effect following the ICANN board meeting on Thursday, at which this resolution was passed.
ICANN had already dropped cross-ownership restrictions for new gTLD registry operators, but held back from bringing in the same rules for incumbents due to concerns from competition authorities.
After exchanges of letters with the European Commission and US Department of Commerce, these concerns appear to have dried up, however. ICANN said in its resolution:

it appears that there is no longer any reason against extending the approved process to existing registry operators for their own TLDs.
This action will be an advantage for the ICANN community, as it will provide the opportunity for treating all registry operators equally with respect to cross-ownership restrictions.

Registries would have their requests for contract changes referred to competition authorities for comment before ICANN would approve them.
Based on previous comments, Verisign might have a struggle with respect to .com but the other incumbents might have an easier time renegotiating their deals.
Neustar has been particularly outspoken in its desire to get rid of the contractual language preventing it owning a .biz registrar, so we might see that company first to get into talks.
Both .biz and .info contracts are up for renewal before the end of the year.

Domainers not welcome in one-character .org auction

The Public Interest Registry is to auction 85 one and two-character .org domain names, but only to organizations that promise to use them in a manner consistent with the .org brand.
The sell-off, branded Project94, will be handled by Go Daddy and eNom, which have each been provided with half of the available portfolio.
Discounting legacy registrations, 94 domains were released when PIR amended its contract with ICANN earlier this year, but nine of them are being held back because they match ccTLDs.
It’s going to be a straightforward auction, but to get a chance at bidding your idea will have to be vetted first.
“We want to see these names used in a way that reflects the brand attributes and the values of .org,” PIR CEO Brian Cute told DI today.
“Before getting into the auction there will be a filter where the applicant has to say the purpose to which they’re going to put the .org that they’ll be bidding on,” he said.
People wondering whether the .org auction is a park-and-flip opportunity seem to be out of luck.
I believe it’s the first time that a TLD registry has merged the RFP and auction phases of their allocation process when they release previously reserved one and two-character domains.
PIR, which is a non-profit, says it will earmark the auction funds for special projects, such as encouraging deployment of new technologies like DNSSEC.
The full list of names being sold can be found at Project94.org