Did Whois blow the lid off a Labour leadership coup, or is this just pig-fuckery?

A British Member of Parliament has been forced to deny he was behind the registration of several domain names promoting him as a future leader of the Labour party.
Clive Lewis, until recently a member of the shadow cabinet, told the Guardian yesterday that he did not register the batch of domains, which included cliveforleader.org.uk, cliveforlabour.org.uk and their matching .org, .uk and .co.uk domains.
“None of this is true: I haven’t done this,” he told the paper, following a Huffington Post article revealing the names had been registered June 29 last year, just a couple of days after he was appointed shadow defence secretary.
Lewis resigned from the shadow cabinet three weeks ago after refusing to vote in favor of triggering the Article 50 process that will take the UK out of the European Union.
The Labour Party has been dogged by stories about potential leadership challenges ever since Jeremy Corbyn — popular among grassroots party members, unpopular with voters — took over.
Questions about Corbyn’s leadership reemerged last week after a disastrous by-election defeat for the party.
The domains were taken as an indication that Lewis had been plotting a coup for many months, which he has denied.
The Whois records do not support a conclusion one way or another.
Under Nominet rules, individuals are allowed to keep their phone number, postal and email addresses out of Whois if the domains are to be used for non-commercial purposes, a right the registrant of the names in question chose to exercise.
Public Whois records show the .uk names registered to “Clive Lewis”, but contain no contact information.
They do contain the intriguing statement “Nominet was able to match the registrant’s name and address against a 3rd party data source on 29-Jun-2016”, a standard notice under Nominet’s Whois validation program.
But Nominet does not validate the identity of registrants, nor does it attempt to link the registrant’s name to their purported address.
The statement in the Whois records translates merely that Nominet was able to discover that a person called Clive Lewis exists somewhere in the world, and that the postal address given is a real address.
The .org and .com domains, registered the same day by the same registrar, use a Whois privacy service and contain no information about the registrant whatsoever.
Lewis himself suspects the batch of names may have been registered by a political opponent in order to force him to deny that he registered them, noting that fellow MP Lisa Nandy had a similar experience last July.
His initial statement to HuffPo, on which he reportedly declined to elaborate, was:

A lesson from LBJ [US President Lyndon B Johnson] in how to smash an opponent. Legend has it that LBJ, in one of his early congressional campaigns, told one of his aides to spread the story that Johnson’s opponent f*cked pigs. The aide responded: ‘Christ, Lyndon, we can’t call the guy a pigf*cker. It isn’t true.’ To which LBJ supposedly replied: ‘Of course it ain’t true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it.’

Since then, along with his denial to the Guardian, he’s told his local Norwich newspaper that he’s tasked his lawyers with finding out who registered the names.
“I have instructed a solicitor to go away and look at this. They can try and make sure we find the identity, the IP address and the payment details,” he told the Eastern Daily Press.

Complaints about registrars dip in 2016

There were slightly fewer complaints about domain name registrars in 2016, compared to 2015, according to newly published ICANN data, but complaints still run into the tens of thousands.
There were 43,156 complaints about registrars to ICANN Compliance in 2016, compared to 45,926 in 2015, according to the data (pdf). That’s a dip of about 6%.
The overall volume of complaints, and the dip, can be attributed to Whois.
About three quarters of the complaints directed at registrars in 2016 were for Whois inaccuracy — 32,292 complaints in total, down from 34,740 in 2015.
The number of complaints about gTLD registries was pretty much flat at 2,230, despite hundreds of new gTLDs being delegated during the year.
The vast majority of those gTLDs were dot-brands, however, with nowhere near the same kind of potential for abuse as generally available gTLDs.
The biggest cause for complaint against registries, representing about half the total, was the Zone File Access program. I’ve filed a few of these myself, against dot-brands that decide the ZFA policy doesn’t apply to them.
Formal, published breach notices were also down on the year, with 25 breaches, four suspensions and four terminations, compared to 32 breaches, six suspensions and eight terminations in 2015.
That’s the second consecutive year the number of breach notices was down.

Thick Whois policy for .com is now live

The domain name industry is kicking off one of its most fundamental shifts in its plumbing this week.
Over the next two years, Verisign and every registrar that sells .com domains will have to rejigger their systems to convert .com from a “thin” to “thick” Whois.
This means that by February 1, 2019, Verisign will for the first time control the master database of all Whois records for .com domains, rather than it being spread piecemeal across all registrars.
The switch comes as a result of a years-in-the-making ICANN policy that officially came into force yesterday. It also applies to .com stablemates .net and .jobs.
The first big change will come August 1 this year, the deadline by which Verisign has to give all of its registrars the ability to submit thick Whois records both live (for new regs) and in bulk (for existing ones).
May 1, 2018 is the deadline for all registrars to start submitting thick Whois for new regs to Verisign, but they can start doing so as early as August this year if they want to.
Registrars have until February 1, 2019 to supply Verisign with thick Whois for all their existing registrations.
There’s a process for registrars who believe they would be violating local privacy laws by transferring this data to US-based Verisign to request an exemption, which may prevent the transition going perfectly uniformly.
Some say that the implementation of this policy may allow Verisign to ask for the ability to ask a for an increase in .com registry fees — currently frozen at the command of the US government — due to its inevitably increased costs.
Personally, I think the added costs will likely be chickenfeed compared to the cash-printing machine that is .com, so I think it’s far from a slam-dunk that such fee increases would be approved.

Registrars off the hook for silly ICANN transfer policy

Domain name registrars have been assured that ICANN Compliance will not pursue them for failing to implement the new Transfer Policy on privacy-protected names.
As we reported late November, the new policy requires registrars to send out “change of registrant” confirmation emails whenever certain fields in the Whois are changed, regardless of whether the registrant has actually changed.
The GNSO Council pointed out to ICANN a number of unforeseen flaws in the policy, saying that vulnerable registrants privacy could be at risk in certain edge cases.
They also pointed out that the confirmation emails could be triggered, with not action by the registrant, when privacy services automatically cycle proxy email addresses in the Whois.
This appears to have already happened with at least one registrar that wasn’t paying attention.
But ICANN chair Steve Crocker told the GNSO Council chair last week that ICANN staff have been instructed to ignore violations of the new policy, which came into effect December 1, in cases involving privacy-protected domains (pdf).
It’s a temporary measure until the ICANN board decides whether or not to defer the issue to the GNSO working group currently looking at policies specifically for privacy and proxy services.

Survey says most Whois records “accurate”

Ninety-seven percent of Whois records contain working email addresses and/or phone numbers, according to the results of an ongoing ICANN survey.
The organization yesterday published the second of its now-biannual WHOIS Accuracy Reporting System reports, a weighty document stuffed with facts and figures about the reliability of Whois records.
It found, not for the first time, that the vast majority of Whois records are not overtly fake.
Email addresses and phone numbers found there almost always work, the survey found, and postal addresses for the most part appear to be real postal addresses.
The survey used a sample of 12,000 domains over 664 gTLDs. It tested for two types of accuracy: “syntactical” and “operability”.
Syntactical testing just checks, for example, whether the email address has an @ symbol in it and whether phone numbers have the correct number of digits.
Operability testing goes further, actually phoning and emailing the Whois contacts to see if the calls connect and emails don’t bounce back.
For postal addresses, the survey uses third-party software to see whether the address actually exists. No letters are sent.
The latest survey found that 97% of Whois records contain at least one working phone number or email address, “which implies that nearly all records contain information that can be used to establish immediate contact.”
If you’re being more strict about how accurate you want your records, the number plummets dramatically.
Only 65% of records had operable phone, email and postal contact info in each of the registrant, administrative and technical contact fields.
Regionally, fully accurate Whois was up to 77% in North America but as low as 49.5% in Africa.
So it’s not great news if Whois accuracy is your bugbear.
Also, the survey does not purport to verify that the owners of the contact information are in fact the true registrants, only that the information is not missing, fake or terminally out-of-date.
A Whois record containing somebody else’s address and phone number and a throwaway webmail address would be considered “accurate” for the survey’s purposes.
The 54-page survey can be found over here.

Thick Whois coming to .com next year, price rise to follow?

Verisign could be running a “thick” Whois database for .com, .net and .jobs by mid-2017, under a new ICANN proposal.
A timetable published this week would see the final three hold-out gTLDs fully move over to the standard thick Whois model by February 2019, with the system live by next August.
Some people believe that Verisign might use the move as an excuse to increase .com prices.
Thick Whois is where the registry stores the full Whois record, containing all registrant contact data, for every domain in their TLD.
The three Verisign TLDs currently have “thin” Whois databases, which only store information about domain creation dates, the sponsoring registrar and name servers.
The model dates back to when the registry and registrar businesses of Verisign’s predecessor, Network Solutions, were broken up at the end of the last century.
But it’s been ICANN consensus policy for about three years for Verisign to eventually switch to a thick model.
Finally, ICANN has published for public comment its anticipated schedule (pdf) for this to happen.
Under the proposal, Verisign would have to start offering registrars the ability to put domains in its thick Whois by August 1 2017, both live via EPP and in bulk.
It would not become obligatory for registrars to submit thick Whois for all newly registered domains until May 1, 2018.
They’d have until February 1, 2019 to bulk-migrate all existing Whois records over to the new system.
Thick Whois in .com has been controversial for a number of reasons.
Some registrars have expressed dissatisfaction with the idea of migrating part of their customer relationship to Verisign. Others have had concerns that local data protection laws may prevent them moving data in bulk overseas.
The new proposal includes a carve-out that would let registrars request an exemption from the requirements if they can show it would conflict with local laws, which holds the potential to make a mockery out of the entire endeavor.
Some observers also believe that Verisign may use the expense of building and operating the new Whois system as an excuse to trigger talks with ICANN about increasing the price of .com from its current, frozen level.
Under its .com contract, Verisign can ICANN ask for a fee increase “due to the imposition of any new Consensus Policy”, which is exactly what the move to thick Whois is.
Whether it would choose to exercise this right is another question — .com is a staggeringly profitable cash-printing machine and this Whois is not likely to be that expensive, relatively speaking.
The proposed implementation timetable is open for public comment until December 15.

Registries rebel against ICANN’s Whois upgrade decree

Registry operators are challenging an ICANN decision to force them to launch a new Whois-style service, saying it will cost them too much money.
The Registries Stakeholder Group has filed a Request for Reconsideration — a low-level appeal — of a decision asking them to launch RDAP services to complement their existing Whois.
RDAP, Registration Data Access Protocol, is being broadly touted as the successor to Whois.
It offers the same functionality — you can query who owns a domain — but the data returned is more uniformly structured. It also enables access control, so not every user would have access to every field.
The RySG now claims that ICANN is trying to sneak an obligation to implement RDAP into its registry agreements through a “backdoor” in the form of the new Consistent Labeling and Display Policy.
That policy, which originated in a formal, community-driven GNSO Policy Development Process, seeks to normalize Whois (or Registration Data Services, in its generic not protocol-specific wording) output to make it easier to machine-read.
It applies to all gTLDs except .com, .net and .jobs (which are “thin” registries) and would come into effect February 1 next year.
Registries appear happy to implement the CL&D policy, but not as currently written. It now contains, almost as an aside, this requirement:

The implementation of an RDAP service in accordance with the “RDAP Operational Profile for gTLD Registries and Registrars” is required for all gTLD registries in order to achieve consistent labeling and display.

The RySG argues in its RfR (pdf) that implementing RDAP was never part of the community-endorsed plan, and that it is not “commercially feasible” to do so right now.

The 2012 new gTLD Registry Agreement specifies that implementation of the protocol now known as RDAP be commercially feasible before it’s required. The RySG can’t even respond as to whether it’s feasible or not since no reasoning to that regard was provided in the notice to implement such services.
Furthermore, some of our members are on record stating that since the RDAP profile replicates the known deficiencies of WHOIS – which is currently being studied by a PDP WG – so it’s not commercially feasible to deploy it to mimic a flawed system.
The introduction of RDAP represents an additive requirement for Registries to operate a new (additive) service. As there are no provisions for the sunset of the legacy Whois service, it’s unclear how this additional requirement can be considered commercially feasible.

In other words, the registries think it could be too costly to deploy RDAP and Whois at the same time, especially given that RDAP is not finished yet.
It’s yet another case of domain companies accusing ICANN the organization of slipping in requirements without community support.
Whether the RfR will be successful is debatable. There’s only been a few Reconsideration requests that have been approved by the ICANN board in the history of the mechanism.
However, the board may be feeling especially diligent when it comes to look at this particular RfR, due to the spotlight that was recently shone on the Reconsideration process by an Independent Review Process panel, which determined that the board just rubber-stamped decisions written by house lawyers.

Patent troll hits registrars with $60m shakedown

A patent troll that claims it invented email reminders has launched a shakedown campaign against registrars that could be worth as much as $62 million.
WhitServe LLC, which beat Go Daddy in a patent lawsuit last year, is now demanding licenses from registrars that could add as much as $0.50 to the cost of a domain name.
According to registrar sources, registrars on both sides of the Atlantic have this month been hit by demands for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in patent licensing fees.
The legal nastygrams present thinly veiled threats of litigation if the recipients decline to negotiate a license.
WhitServe is a Connecticut-based IP licensing firm with connections to NetDocket, which provides software for tracking patent license annuities.
It owns US patents 5,895,468 and 6,182,078, both of which date back to the late 1990s and cover “automating delivery of professional services”.
Basically, the company reckons it invented email reminders, such as those registrars send to registrants in the weeks leading up to their domain registration expiring.
Three years ago, GoDaddy, defending itself against WhitServe’s 2011 patent infringement lawsuit, compared the “inventions” to the concept putting “Don’t forget to pick up milk” notes on the fridge: utterly obvious and non-patentable.
In December 2012, GoDaddy implied WhitServe used its patent expertise and exploited a naive 1990s USPTO to obtain “over-broad” patents.
It was trying “to monopolize the entire concept of automatic Internet reminders across all industries, including domain name registrars”, according to a GoDaddy legal filing.
But the market-leading registrar somehow managed to lose the case, opting to settle last August after its last defense fell apart, for an undisclosed sum.
Now, WhitServe is using that victory to shake loose change out of the pockets of the rest of the market.
It’s told registrars that GoDaddy and Endurance International (owner of Domain.com, BigRock and others) are both currently licensing its patents.
The deal it is offering would see registrars pay $0.50 for every domain they have under management, a number that seems to be based on .com registry numbers reported by Verisign.
The fee would be reduced to $0.30 per name for each name over one million, and $0.20 for each name over five million, I gather. That’s still more than registrars pay in ICANN fees.
If WhitServe were to target every .com registrar (which I do not believe it has, yet) its demands could amount to as much as $62 million industry-wide, given that .com is approaching 125 million names right now.
It’s not clear whether these fees are expected to be one-time payments or recurring annual fees.
It’s a trickier predicament for registrars than the usual patent shakedown, because registrars are legally obliged under their contracts with ICANN to send email reminders in a variety of circumstances.
The Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires them to email renewal reminders to customers at least twice before their registrations expire.
There’s also the Whois Data Reminder Policy, which obliges registrars to have their customers check the accuracy of their Whois once a year.
These are not services registrars are simply able to turn off to avoid these patent litigation threats.
Whether registrars will take this lying down or attempt to fight it remains to be seen.

Pirates lose privacy rights under new ICANN rules

People operating piracy web sites would have a harder time keeping their personal information private under new ICANN rules.
ICANN’s GNSO Council last night approved a set of recommendations that lay down the rules of engagement for when trademark and copyright owners try to unmask Whois privacy users.
Among other things, the new rules would make it clear that privacy services are not permitted to reject requests to reveal a domain’s true owner just because the IP-based request relates to the content of a web site rather than just its domain name.
The recommendations also contain safeguards that would allow registrants to retain their privacy if, for example, their safety would be at risk if their identities were revealed.
The 93-page document (pdf) approved unanimously by the Council carries a “Illustrative Disclosure Framework” appendix that lays out the procedures in some depth.
The framework only covers requests from IP owners to proxy/privacy services. The GNSO was unable to come up with a similar framework for dealing with, for example, requests from law enforcement agencies.
It states flatly:

Disclosure [of the registrant’s true Whois details] cannot be refused solely for lack of any of the following: (i) a court order; (ii) a subpoena; (iii) a pending civil action; or (iv) a UDRP or URS proceeding; nor can refusal to disclose be solely based on the fact that the Request is founded on alleged intellectual property infringement in content on a website associated with the domain name.

This fairly explicitly prevents privacy services (which in most cases are registrars) using the “we don’t regulate content” argument to shoot down disclosure requests from IP owners.
Some registrars were not happy about this paragraph in early drafts, yet it remains.
Count that as a win for the IP lobby.
However, the new recommendations spend a lot more time giving IP owners a quite strict set of guidelines for how to file such requests in the first place.
If they persistently spam the registrar with automated disclosure requests, the registrar is free to ignore them. They can even share details of spammy IP owners with other registrars.
The registrar is also free to ignore requests that, for example, don’t give the exact or representative URL of an alleged copyright infringement, or if the requester has not first attempted to contact the registrant via an email relay service, should one be in place.
The registrant also gets a 15-day warning that somebody has requested their private details, during which, if they value their privacy more than their web site, they’re able to relinquish their domain and remain anonymous.
If the registrant instead uses that time to provide a good reason why they’re not infringing the requester’s rights, and the privacy service agrees, the request can also be denied.
The guidelines would make it easier for privacy service operators to understand what their obligations are. By formalizing the request format, it should make it easier to separate legit requests from the spurious requests.
They’re even allowed to charge IP owners a nominal fee to streamline the processing of their requests.
While these recommendations have been approved by the GNSO Council, they need to be approved by the ICANN board before becoming the law of the ‘net.
They also need to pass through an implementation process (conducted by ICANN staff and GNSO members) that turns the recommendations into written procedures and contracts which, due to their complexity, I have a hunch will take some time.
The idea is that the rules will form part of an accreditation program for privacy/proxy services, administered by ICANN.
Registrars would only be able to use P/P services that agree to follow these rules and that have been accredited by ICANN.
It seems to me that the new rules may be quite effective at cracking down on rogue, “bulletproof” registrars that automatically dismiss piracy-based disclosure requests by saying they’re not qualified to adjudicate copyright disputes.

ICANN confirms domain privacy is for all

Commercial entities will not be excluded from buying domain privacy services, ICANN’s GNSO Council has confirmed.
The Council last night voted unanimously to approve a set of recommendations that would make it compulsory for privacy and proxy services to be accredited by ICANN for the first time.
The recommendations govern among other things how privacy services are expected to behave when they receive notices of trademark or copyright infringement.
But missing is a proposal that would have prevented the use of privacy for “transactional” web sites, something which caused a great deal of controversy last year.
The newly adopted recommendations clearly state that nobody is to be excluded from privacy on these grounds.
The Council voted to adopt the final, 93-page report of the Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues (pdf) working group, which states:

Fundamentally, P/P services should remain available to registrants irrespective of their status as commercial or non-commercial organizations or as individuals. Further, P/P registrations should not be limited to private individuals who use their domains for non-commercial purposes.

The minority view that web sites that process financial transactions should not be able to use privacy came from intellectual property, anti-abuse and law enforcement community members.
However, opponents said it would infringe the privacy rights of home business owners, bloggers, political activists and others.
It could even lead to vicious “doxing”-related crimes, such as “swatting”, where idiots call in fake violent crime reports against rivals’ home addresses, some said.
It also turned out, as we revealed last November, that 55% of US presidential candidates operate transactional web sites that use privacy on their domains.
Two separate registrar initiatives, one backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started letter-writing campaigns that resulted in over 20,000 comments being received on the the PPSAI’s initial report last July.
Those comments are acknowledged in the PPSAI final report that the GNSO Council just approved.
The adopted recommendations (which I’ll get into in a separate article) still have to be approved by the ICANN board of directors and have to undergo an implementation process that puts the rather broad policies into concrete processes and procedures.