ICANN slashes staff and domain prices could rise

ICANN has laid off 33 people, about 7% of its 485 staff, and has raised the specter of increased domain name prices, as it struggles to balance its budget.

The job losses are effective today and come “across all functional areas and regions”, acting CEO Sally Costerton wrote.

The Org said this evening that it made the decision to lose the employees as part of a broader cost-cutting effort that it hopes will help close a $10 million hole in its budget. At the end of April, it had said it was looking for $8 million in savings.

Costerton said ICANN will also look at reducing travel expenses and doing more work from its cheaper regional offices, as well as finding other efficiencies.

But it is also “evaluating ICANN’s fee structure to ensure it scales realistically with inflation”, Costeron wrote.

This will be of great interest to domain registrants, particularly those on a tight budget or with large portfolios, as any increases in the transaction fees ICANN charges registries and registrars will inevitably be passed on to their customers.

Registrars currently add a $0.18 per-domain-per-year ICANN fee at their checkouts, and registries pay $0.25 for every add-year, renew-year and transfer. The fees have not changed in at least the 15 years I’ve been writing this blog.

For ICANN community members and the domain name industry, the cuts will selfishly beg the questions of which services ICANN provides could suffer as a result, and whether it means delays to already overdue projects such as the new gTLD program.

The budget shortfall has arisen due to inflation and sluggish domain sales from the likes of Verisign, ICANN’s biggest funding source. Verisign’s outlook for the year is pretty bearish, with a low estimate of a 1.75% decline in domains under management.

I believe it’s the first time ICANN has been forced into a mass layoff, having reliably swollen its ranks almost every year until quite recently.

Alibaba off the naughty step

Chinese registrar Alibaba is no longer at risk of losing one of its ICANN accreditations, according to a notice on the Org’s web site.

Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce, one of Alibaba’s four registrars, failed to respond to abuse reports and missed ICANN payments, according to its March breach notice.

But the company has now provided ICANN with documents sufficient to bring it back into compliance with its contract, according to the notice.

Alibaba has over six million domains under management across its three active accreditations, making it one of the largest registrars to come under the scrutiny of ICANN Compliance.

ICANN to kill auction fund bylaws change

A controversial proposed amendment to ICANN’s bylaws is set to be killed off after the community flexed its muscles over the board of directors.

The amendment, which sought to give ICANN a switch to turn off its accountability mechanisms under certain circumstances, is now likely to be replaced by one that limits accountability only when it comes to ICANN’s $220 million Grant Program.

News of the board’s change of heart came during a Monday call between the GNSO Council and the two GNSO appointees on the board.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the bylaw that was put together and circulated is not going to pass the Empowered Community,” board member Becky Burr told the Council “So we need to go back and and revisit that.”

The community had wanted an amendment that makes the Independent Review Process and Request for Reconsideration mechanisms unavailable to organizations applying for grants and those that oppose them, to avoid splurging money on lawyers rather than good causes, but the board had floated text that would have made it easier to turn these mechanisms off in future scenarios too.

ICANN’s amendment was supported by the At-Large Advisory Committee, but every other community group, in a rare example of across-the-aisles agreement, reckoned it was overly broad and risked weakening ICANN’s accountability.

The board’s decision to revert to what the community originally wanted appears to be a reluctant one. Burr said that the IRP needs to be looked at in future because the way the bylaws are written now invites over-use.

“As they are currently written, a disappointed bidder, an engineering firm in response to an RFP, could use those, could bring an IRP,” she said. “At some point we’re going to have to look at this more holistically.”

The were also calls from the Council to take a look at the RfR process, or at least how RfRs are handled by ICANN’s legal team. RfRs are too often seen as an adversarial exercise where ICANN lawyers are simply try to “win” against the requester rather than solve the problem at hand, they said. This has led to a situation where dozens of RfRs have been filed over the year, almost all of which are dismissed.

Community revolts over ICANN’s auction proceeds power grab

Parts of the ICANN community have revolted over ICANN’s move to make it easier to turn off the mechanisms used to appeal its decisions.

Both registries and registrars, along with their usual opponents in the business and intellectual property communities, have told the Org that a proposal to change its foundational bylaws are overly broad and creates new powers to diminish ICANN’s accountability.

Meanwhile, the Intellectual Property Constituency seems to have escalated its beef with ICANN related to the proposals, entering into a Cooperative Engagement Process with ICANN. CEP is usually, but not always, a precursor to an expensive, quasi-judicial Independent Review Process case.

The row relates to the Grant Program, which launched a month ago and will see ICANN hand out $217 million it gained from auctioning registry contracts during the 2012 new gTLD program application round.

The rules of the program were developed by the Cross-Community Working Group on New gTLD Auction Proceeds.

The CCWG was afraid that ICANN might wind up frittering away most of the money on legal fees unless unsuccessful grant applicants, and third parties, were banned from appealing grant decisions they didn’t like. So its Recommendation 7 proposed a bylaws amendment that would prevent the Independent Review Process and Request for Reconsideration process from being used with reference to the Grant Program.

What ICANN came up with instead is a bylaws amendment that could be applied not only to the Grant Program, but also potentially to any future activities.

Specifically, ICANN’s proposed amendment gives future CCWGs, assuming they have sufficient community representation, the ability to recommend exceptions to the accountability mechanisms, which ICANN could then accept without having the amend the bylaws every time.

But almost every constituency that has filed an opinion on the proposals so far thinks ICANN has gone too far.

The IPC said says ICANN’s proposal is “unacceptably broad and exceeds what is necessary to give effect to Recommendation 7” adding:

The IPC is also concerned that making such a broad Bylaws amendment could have the consequence of normalizing the idea of removing access to accountability mechanisms, rather than this being an exceptional event. This is not something that should be encouraged.

The Registries Stakeholder Group said the proposal “creates an alternative path for amending the Bylaws that contradicts the existing amendment processes”

“The Accountability Mechanisms are foundational to ICANN’s legitimacy. Access to Accountability Mechanisms should be prevented only in rare circumstances with the clear support of the Empowered Community,” it added.

The Registrar Stakeholder Group concurred, writing:

Robust Accountability Mechanisms are a lynchpin of ICANN’s broader accountability structure. They should only be disallowed, if ever, in very specific circumstances, and as a result of the full bylaw amendment process. The proposed bylaws amendment vests CCWGs with the power to disallow Accountability Mechanisms which we believe is inappropriate.

Several commenters pointed out that CCWGs are less formal ICANN policy-making structure, with fewer checks and balances than regular Policy Development Processes.

The only dissenting view came from the At-Large Advisory Committee, which said it “strongly supports” ICANN’s proposed amendment, writing:

Although any limitation in accountability is potentially onerous, the ALAC is comfortable that the three conditions proposed in the amendment only allow such limitations in situations where a more specific Bylaw limitation would also be approved by the Empowered Community.

In a related development, the IPC has taken the highly unusual move of entering CEP with ICANN, suggesting it is on the IRP path.

The IPC had filed a Request for Reconsideration late last year, at a time when it appeared that ICANN had outright rejected Recommendation 7 (having previously approved it), but ICANN’s board threw it out mostly on the grounds that the IPC could not show it had been harmed, which the IPC found curious.

If the IPC were to go to IRP, it would be unprecedented. The mechanism has only ever been used by companies defending their commercial interests, never by one of ICANN’s own community groups on a matter of principle.

.com still shrinking because of China

Verisign’s .com gTLD shrunk by over a quarter million domains in the first quarter due to softness in China and US registrars’ pesky habit of putting up prices and the pain is likely to continue for the rest of the year, according to Verisign.

There were about 159.4 million .com domains and 13.1 million .net domains at the end of March, down a combined 270,000 from the end of 2023, Verisign said during its first-quarter earnings call on Thursday. Most of the decline appears to be in .com.

Registrations from Chinese registrars, which are about 5% of the total, were down about 360,000 in the period. Not ideal, but a lot less sharp of a drop than the 2.2 million it lost in Q4.

There were 9.5 million new registrations across both zones in the quarter, compared to 10.3 million in the year-ago period.

But CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that competition from low-priced new gTLDs, some of which sell year one for under a dollar, is likely harming .com’s growth among cost-conscious Chinese registrants.

But he said the company is also seeing “softness” from US registrars, which he said are increasingly focused on increasing average revenue per user and putting up retail prices. This leads to fewer new registrations and renewals.

Bidzos said Verisign expects to introduce new marketing programs in the second half of the year — around the same time as the company’s base .com wholesale fee goes up from $9.59 to $10.26 — to help offset these declines.

The renewal rate for Q1 is expected to be about 74% compared to 75.5% a year ago. Bidzos said the total domain base shrinkage could be worse in Q2 due to the larger number of names coming up for renewal.

The company lowered its guidance for the year to between 0.25% growth and negative 1.75%. In February, it had guided flat, with a 1% swing in either direction.

Verisign’s top and bottom lines continue to grow during the quarter, with revenue up 5.5% at $384 million and net income up from $179 million to $194 million.

ICANN publishes its Woke Manifesto. Here’s my hot take

ICANN’s antics rarely surprise me after close to a quarter-century of coverage, but today it’s published what I can only describe as its “Woke Manifesto” and while reading through it this afternoon I pretty much peeled my uvula raw and ragged, alternating as I did between howls of outrage and uncontrollable fits of incredulous laughter.

On the latest step of its descent into solipsistic pomposity, Org has released its Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit, an interactive web page and associated documents and survey templates designed to help the ICANN community’s various constituencies become more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

“It is designed to empower our community groups in assessing, measuring, and promoting diversity within and across their membership,” ICANN wrote in its introduction, attributed to outgoing policy VP David Olive.

A laudable goal in theory, but in practice what ICANN has come up with is often hilarious, poorly sourced, badly edited, baffling, hypocritical, self-contradictory, and condescending to both the people it wants to include and the people it perceives are already over-included. In parts, sadly, it’s borderline misandrist and maybe a little bit accidentally racist.

The Manifesto is the result of ICANN’s work to implement the recommendations of the Final Report (pdf) of the Cross Community Working Group on Accountability, the most-recent phase of one of ICANN’s interminable navel-gazing exercises.

Recommendation 1.6 of that report states:

ICANN staff should provide support and tools for the SO/AC/Groups to assist them in assessing their diversity in an appropriate manner. ICANN should also identify staff or community resources that can assist SO/ACs or other components of the community with diversity-related activities and strategies.

Or does it? If we believe the new Manifesto, Rec 1.6 actually states:

ICANN staff should provide support and tools for the SO/AC/groups to assist them in assessing their diversity in an appropriate manner. ICANN should also identify staff or community resources that can assist SO/ACs or other components of the community with diversity-related activities and strategies.D&I requires equity to succeed.

The emphasis in that second pull-quote is mine. The lack of a space after the period before the last sentence is ICANN’s error.

It looks like at some point, possibly quite recently, ICANN has sneaked in the reference to “equity”.

If you’re triggered by the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) abbreviation, best look away now. The Manifesto contains all the other zeitgeisty buzz-words you probably also hate.

Microaggressions? Check. Privilege? Check. Identity? Check. Intersectionality? Check. Unconscious bias? Check. Psychological safety? Check.

An easily overlooked footnote seems to explain why “equity” has made its way into the document:

In this toolkit we refer to “diversity” and “inclusion,” but “equity” is also a significant concept to understand. Equity refers to fairness and justice, recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must therefore make adjustments to imbalances; for example promoting the inclusion of people from marginalized/underrepresented populations. It is distinguished from equality, which means providing the same to all.

I take no position on whether this is a good or bad way to tackle inequality of outcome, if it exists, at ICANN, but let’s be honest, this is just another way of describing what has been known as “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action” in other contexts.

But while affirmative action usually refers to issues of race in North America, such as in the ongoing debate about university admission policies, ICANN’s Manifesto is notable for containing no direct references to skin color whatsoever.

ICANN’s “7 key elements of diversity”, which come from the CCWG-Accountability’s report, are: geographical/regional representation, language, gender, age, physical disability, diverse skills, and stakeholder group or constituency.

Let’s look at what the Manifesto says about some of these identity categories. Yes, I’m going there.

“You were so worried you came from Iran”

Possibly the most egregiously condescending and baffling part of the Manifesto is “Ideas for indivdual action” (pdf) (the misspelling of “individual” is in the original, in the title, on the cover page), which offers suggested language to avoid offending people on the basis of gender, age, disability, or geography.

I’ve no idea to whom this document is addressed (I infer it’s able-bodied, Anglophone men), but it seems ICANN thinks it has a problem with people referring to East Asian community members as “Orientals”. Because apparently it’s the 1950s. In the same breath, it suggests that “whitelist” — a term commonly used in the security industry to refer to lists of explicitly permitted domains — is as offensive as “Chinaman”.

It’s worth noting that the word has been used repeatedly by ICANN itself, including quite recently. Under October 2023 terms, you can’t even apply to be an accredited registrar without agreeing to “whitelist” ICANN’s domains.

In a glorious example of accidental misogyny, the document (six years in the making) later says that people should avoid using forms of address such as “Mrs” or “Ms” because: “This language implies that having a disability is not an ordinary aspect of being human”.

The document is all over the place on issues of gender, on some pages directly contradicting ICANN’s own current practices and on others internally contradicting itself.

At one point, it says “there is no need to mention gender, i.e. saying ‘a female lawyer’ diminishes the professional status of that person”. This from the organization that put out this press release celebrating its two “female leaders”, last year.

At another point, it says we should use “Ombudsperson” instead of “Ombudsman”, while ICANN itself recently made the switch to “Ombuds” instead.

The document is also confused about whether biological reality exists. It tells us that we should accept that “that we are all biased by virtue of our biology” and a couple pages later admonishes against terms such as “biologically male” because “These terms imply that gender is a biological and binary fact that can only be changed through surgery — if at all”.

The most jaw-dropping gender-related moment comes when the document attempts to explain the concept of “privilege” and offers some suggestions as to how those who possess it may overcome it to increase the inclusiveness of their communities.

I swear I’m not making this quote up:

If you have male privilege: Hold back, and allow female community members to speak before you do. If they do speak and are not acknowledged, call this out and give credit for their input.

ICANN wants to make “Ladies first” official doctrine? Perhaps it is the 1950s.

While I don’t doubt there are some women in the ICANN community who would whoop with delight at the chance of automatically getting first dibs at the mic, I know there are many others who will find the suggestion that men should give them special treatment, and subsequently pat them on the head for their contributions, deeply offensive.

“I hear you’re a racist now, Father”

It’s not just gender and age where the Manifesto seems to trip over its own desire to virtue signal without thinking through whether what it’s actually saying is internally consistent.

We’re told to avoid “Asking people of a different appearance where they are from” and a few pages later to “Show an interest in other people’s cultures and backgrounds, ask questions with sincere and respectful curiosity”.

How, ICANN, how?! How can I show an interest in this new friend’s culture if I’m not allowed to ask him where he’s from? Am I only supposed to show an interest in his culture if he shares my “appearance”. Can I only talk to people of the same race? Is that what you want, ICANN?!

We’re talking largely about ICANN meetings here, remember. People from over 100 countries on every continent flock into a drab, windowless conference center three times a year. It’s the most natural thing in the world, unwinding at an after-hours cocktail reception, to ask somebody where they’re from.

If, in the hotel bar after eight hours of patiently not interrupting anybody you think you might not fully intersect with, somebody asks you “Where are you from?”, regardless of whether you share common visual characteristics, chances are it’s because your lanyard has flipped over and they’re asking the name of your employer in order to quickly triage business opportunities.

Speaking as somebody who was an immigrant in the US for the best part of a decade, I know it can be irritating after the hundredth time you’re asked your nationality, but I never found it to be, as ICANN would have us believe, an “aggression”, micro or otherwise.

“I’m Disabled!”

The document defines a microaggression as “the everyday messages we send to other people through our language and behavior that cause them to feel devalued, slighted, discouraged or excluded”. We’re told: “What makes microaggressions offensive isn’t the exact words or actions but, instead, the underlying meaning that reveals bias”.

The first example ICANN gives of a microaggression?

A weak handshake with insincere smile.

I find this hugely offensive on a personal level.

My lived experience is as an effete Englishman with a congenitally pathetic handshake, also suffering from the effects of decades of underfunded NHS dentistry and still recovering from an ischemic stroke that rendered my hand-shaking hand about as strong as a sloth’s yawn.

There’s nothing I find more macroaggressive at an ICANN meeting — apart from perhaps a French woman I barely know attempting to kiss me on the cheek — than an American with a $5,000 suit and teeth the color of a Grand Wizard’s hood trying to tear my arm off at the hip when he or she moves to greet me.

But apparently, under ICANN’s rules, the combination of my disability and nationality makes me the bigot. Thanks ICANN, I’m going to feel really psychologically safe at my next meeting.

“What exactly does IT stand for?”

On a professional level, what really boils my piss is this directive, which appears under a section entitled “Use respectful language”:

Avoid jargon: Minimize your use of jargon, shorthand and acronyms that may not be understood by newcomers or people with different experience and skillsets

I totally agree, of course. It’s long since past the point that even some ICANN community veterans often have no clue what ICANN is talking about without a quick google or reference to a glossary.

So why in the Jiminy Cricket is ICANN introducing this package of Orwellian social guidance with the sentence “I am thrilled to announce the launch of ICANN’s Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit, a pivotal resource to support the implementation of the Work Stream 2 (WS2) recommendations.”

Work Stream 2? Work Stream 2 of what? The blog post doesn’t say, and you have to get several clicks deep into the Manifesto itself before you’ll find a reference to, or link to, the CCWG report.

Who is this aimed at? Insiders. Nobody else could possibly understand this stuff.

Germany crosses 10,000 dot-brand domains milestone

The number of domains registered to Germany-based dot-brand registries crossed the 10,000 mark in the last few weeks, thanks to a handful of enthusiastic registrants.

That’s almost half of all the domains currently showing up in dot-brand zone files, which stands at just over 21,000, according to my database.

German companies have been the most-prolific users of dot-brands, with the financial services company Deutsche Vermögensberatung (DVAG) currently accounting for over 7,500 domains.

As well as having several corporate web sites on .dvag domains, DVAG gives out firstname-lastname.dvag domains to its network of financial advisors, with each domain redirecting to a personalized, template-driven digital business card on dvag.de.

Car-maker Audi, part of Volkswagen, is the second-biggest user, with over 1,700 current .audi domains connecting its network of dealerships and many domains for individual car brands. Its dealers also get template-driven brochureware web sites, but there’s no redirect to a different TLD.

Fellow car-maker BMW and retailer Schwarz Gruppe, owner of the Lidl supermarket chain, are among the other dot-brands with hundreds of domains to their name.

Freenom shuts down 12.6 million domains — report

Dying free-domains registry Freenom has shut down at least 12.6 million domains across three of its TLDs, according to research from Netcraft.

Netcraft’s latest web server survey shows that the domains — across .tk, .cf and .gq — no longer resolve, according to the company.

That’s 98.7% of the resolving domains Freenom had a month earlier, Netcraft said.

Freenom, also known as OpenTLD, said in February that it was to exit the domains business entirely as part of its settlement with Facebook owner Meta, which had sued it for alleged cybersquatting.

It had already lost its ICANN registrar accreditation and its government contracts to run its portfolio of ccTLDs.

The company’s business model was to offer most domains for free and then monetize them when the registrations expired or were suspended for abuse. It attracted a lot of abusive registrants.

Interestingly, Netcraft notes that the deletions meant that Cloudflare saw a 22% drop in its total hosted domains (with Cloudflare acting as host, not registrar) over the month.

GlobalBlock blocking 2.5 million domains

GoDaddy-led brand protection project GlobalBlock says it is already blocking over 2.5 million domains, just a couple of weeks after its formal launch.

The GlobalBlock web site reports that 2,569,815 domains are currently being blocked across 559 extensions (a mix of ccTLDs, gTLDs, third-level domains and blockchain names), for an average of just under 4,600 per extension.

It’s difficult to extrapolate much useful information about rapid market demand for the service from this one number, for a variety of reasons.

First, the more-expensive GlobalBlock+ service can block well north of 10,000 domains, mostly homographic variants of a trademark, for a single fee, which could mean as few as just a couple hundred customers have signed up so far at the most pessimistic interpretation.

Second, GlobalBlock offered pricing incentives to existing customers of GoDaddy’s AdultBlock and Identity Digital’s Domain Protected Marks List, both of which are over a decade old, in the months-long run-up to launch.

The vanilla, single-brand GlobalBlock service retails for about $6,000 per year, with GlobalBlock+ going for closer to $9,000.

Microsoft moving its cloud apps from .com to .microsoft

Microsoft is planning to move all of its Microsoft 365 apps off a multitude of .com domains and consolidate them all under .microsoft, its dot-brand gTLD.

The company says it will move Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 web apps to the cloud.microsoft domain. They currently use domains such as outlook.office.com, teams.microsoft.com and microsoft365.com.

It first announced the move in April last year and this week reminded developers of apps that use its cloud platform that they need to support the new domain.

Explaining the move to the dot-brand last year, the company wrote:

Consolidating authenticated user-facing Microsoft 365 experiences onto a single domain will benefit customers in several ways. For end users, it will streamline the overall experience by reducing sign-in prompts, redirects, and delays when navigating across apps. For admins, it will drastically reduce the complexity of the allow-lists required to help your tenant stay secure while enabling users to access the apps and services they need to do their work.

Microsoft plans to launch the teams.cloud.microsoft domain in June but run the two domain schemes in parallel for a while, so as to not unnecessarily break apps in its developer ecosystem.

It’s not going to dump microsoft.com altogether, saying that it plans to use it for “non-product experiences such as marketing, support, and e-commerce.”

The cloud.microsoft domain is already one of the more visible dot-brand names out there, ranking in the top 20 most-visited, according to Majestic rankings.

Hat tip: The Register.