ion (internet of names): issue #5 @ icann buenos aires

Issue #5

JULY 2015

this issueq EXIT THROUGH THE RIFT SHOP 18q GROWING ORGANICALLY 14q SIGN OF THE TIMES 32q YOUR BRAND SUCKS 26

latest industry newsICANN budget reviewcorporate registration trendsuniversal acceptance

Chinese domains overviewINTA president talks

.Vote Ted Cruz?Dot-rocks vs dot-sucks

Why Fadi? Also: who’s next?

news analysis opinion interviews events humor cartoons

January 10-13,2016

featured04 News in brief08 Registration trends14 Growing organically16 Legal names18 Fadi Chehade26 Your brand sucks32 China and domains37 Universal acceptance38 ICANN spending

regular QandA 09 Interview 10 From the editor 11 Opinion 12 Humor 40 Viewpoint 42

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38

37

26

contents

ION MAGAZINE JULY 2015 3

January 10-13,2016

4 ION MAGAZINE JULY 2015

Nominet has decided to commission another review of its membership structure - the third in just seven years. At its May meeting, the Board approved hiring ex-head of the BBC Trust Sir Michael Lyons (pictured)to look into “the current stakeholder model and to advise whether this forms the most appropriate foundation for the company’s future.” Previous efforts to change the dot-uk registry operator’s structure have resulted in widespread dissatisfaction and the resignations of its chair, CEO, two Board members and two senior staff.

Nominet was also the center of another controversy when almost the entire staff and Board of its Nominet Trust resigned within days of each other. The full reasons why chief executive Annika Small, chair Lord Knight of Weymouth, five of its six trustees and most of its senior staff, decided to quit are not yet known and Nominet itself has said nothing about the situation. It did however appoint its two outgoing Board members as the new chair

and a trustee. The trust receives all of its money from excess profits from Nominet, amounting to £6m in 2014.

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Chair of new gTLD registry Minds+Machines, Fred Kreuger (not pictured) was unexpectedly removed from his position, with the news broken in the company’s first full-year results. Kreuger was surprised by the action noting in his resignation letter “the decision to move on was unexpected - for me at least - but I am OK with it.” In a subsequent blog post, he said the biggest benefit of leaving will be no longer having to attend ICANN meetings. Kreuger is the second executive chairman to be booted out of at short notice: Peter Dengate Thrush was fired in October 2012, just a year after he controversially moved to the company within weeks of having approved the new gTLD program as ICANN chair. Minds+Machines reported a profit of $22m but revenue of just $1.9m in 2014. The publicly listed company has received $33.7m in auction proceeds from losing bids for new TLDs to other companies.

Kreuger was replaced in a non-executive capacity by existing director Keith Teare.

ICM Registry launched its dot-porn and dot-adult top-level domains into general availability and claimed it had beaten its annual sales expectations in the first day. Just over 10,000 dot-porn and 8,000 dot-adult domains were registered, putting the registries in the top quarter of new gTLDs. The majority of the domains were registered in sunrise or through a “domain matching” program associated with ICM’s existing dot-xxx registry. The company has a current monopoly on adult-themed top-level domains. It will launch dot-sex later this year.

More suckingThe issue of very high “premium names” under new registries continues to rumble past the recent dot-sucks controversy with representatives from ICANN’s intellectual property constituency and business constituency complaining that registry operators are “taking advantage” of rights holders by putting trademarked names on special sunrise premium lists and then charging well above market price for them. As just one example, Instagram.love was priced at $17,610. While the groups acknowledge that the pricing does not break ICANN’s rules, they claim it damages

ICANN’s reputation, harms consumers and goes against the public interest.

ICANN published its first report into awareness and trust in new gTLDs and claimed that 46 per cent of consumers were aware of the new extensions - something that caused raised eyebrows from the rest of the industry. The methodology used to ascertain awareness was not exactly watertight, with the TLDs dot-email and dot-link scoring highest in recognition, suggesting that those surveyed may not have understood the question. ICANN COO Akram Atallah admitted as much in the report, noting: “While some of the drivers may be linked to familiarity and general association versus awareness of the extension, we believe it’s a signal that people are receptive to the names.” The true figure is more likely to closer to awareness of the largest new gTLD: dot-xyz with just five per cent.

Google sold its rights in dot-car to a joint venture of Uniregistry and XYZ.com - which runs dot-xyz. Cars Registry Ltd will launch an automobile bundle of dot-cars, dot-car and dot-auto later this year. Google was the only applicant for dot-car but filed objections over the three applications for dot-cars (with an ‘s’) claiming they were too similar. It won two of those objections but lost the third. Its decision to

News in briefCountry code

5ION MAGAZINE JULY 2015

then hand over the dot-car registry confirms what many have suspected for some time - that Google is scaling back its original broad new gTLD plan to focus on just its brand names and generic words that closely align with its existing products. Of the 101 names that it originally applied for, Google has let 40 of them go in auctions. The search engine giant has only strongly bid for four generic names: dot-map, dot-app, dot-search, and dot-phd.

A number of dot-brands have tentatively entered the market. As well as the obligatory ‘nic’ second-level domain, Everbank has launched ‘about.everbank’ as a slick front-end to its financial services. Chinese financial institution Citic seems to have dropped what was the first brand TLD domain ‘limited.citic’ domain and relaunched at ‘group.citic’. Meanwhile, another financial institution, Barclays has said it will gradually move all of its website across to its dot-barclays and dot-barclaycard extensions. It has launched a front end at ‘home.barclays’. Meanwhile Google had some fun by launching ‘com.google’ on April Fools’ Day in which all the text and graphics on the page were back-to-front. Meanwhile, one of the companies hoping to offer its expertise to brand clients, Neustar, has launched on its namesake TLD, with its team featured at ‘registry.neustar’.

Security

The latest figures from the Anti-Phishing Working Group showed that phishing had stopped growing in the second half of last year, although the number of domains used to do so had increased by over eight per cent. Dot-com remains the most popular registry used by scammers, with dot-com domains featured in more than half of all phishing attacks. The worst offenders in terms of percentage of domains used for phishing remain the same as in previous reports: dot-cf, dot-pw and dot-tk. New gTLD, dot-xyz also entered the list, carrying two-thirds of the malicious domains under new extensions. The connection between the

most phished registries? Their domains are offered for free or at very low cost.

In an unusual turn of events, ICANN explicitly named dotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski as being the only person it felt may have improperly accessed the records of other new gTLD applicants. ICANN’s staff improperly configured its gTLD portal software, unwittingly leaving everyone’s applications and communications open to any user that carried out an advanced search. Despite first claiming there was no evidence of a breach of data, ICANN later admitted that there were more than 300 possible instances. It then revised that figure to “over 60 searches, resulting in the unauthorized access of more than 200 records, were conducted using a limited set of user credentials”. While not naming Krischenowski publicly, ICANN did do so in private letters sent to those who had had their applications accessed.

Krischenowski has denied “acting improperly or unlawfully”.

Gotta shape upICANN suffered a 10-hour outage on its trademark clearinghouse, leading to concerns that domains may have been registered without receiving a claim notice: something ICANN subsequently said was not an issue. The domain name overseer is investigating the downtime. The failure is another embarrassing mark on ICANN’s systems record, having admitted to wrongly configuring its gTLD portal, leaving confidential data accessible, and having suffered a spear phishing attack that saw its blog, GAC site and zone file access system compromised. Late last year, Verisign produced a report containing a long list of technical and security problems at ICANN and noted a “growing list of examples where ICANN’s operational track record leaves much to be desired”.

ICANN’s first report into consumer awareness and trust in new gTLDs produced unexpected - and unreliable - results.

Continued on next page >


Governance

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) responded to a letter from ICANN asking whether the dot-sucks pricing structure was breaking any laws by pointedly highlighting that ICANN has repeatedly ignored its advice on that and related issues. “The questions you have posed regarding Vox Populi’s .sucks rollout raise important and broader consumer protection issues that the Commission previously highlighted prior to the launch of ICANN’s new gTLD program,” noted chair Edith Ramirez (pictured). She also highlighted ongoing disagreement between ICANN and GAC over greater verification for “sensitive” TLDs. Ramirez didn’t directly answer the question of whether dot-sucks pricing was illegal but did highlight the fact that others had noted the $2,500 fee for trademark holders when the normal price is $10 was within ICANN’s existing rules.

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade unexpectedly quit, saying that he would step down in March 2016. He has a job lined up in the private sector, according to ICANN, that is outside the domain name industry. Chehade

said he would reveal more details toward the end of the year. Chehade contract was due to expire in July 2016 - giving the organization plenty of time to finalize the IANA transition and various accountability measures due to be implemented in the next year. It’s not clear whether he will be CEO when the IANA transition finally happens. For a full analysis see our feature in this issue “Exit through the rift shop” starting on p18.

The Defending Internet Freedom Act has been reintroduced to the US Congress. The bill (H.R. 2251) specifically covers transition of the IANA contract and was first introduced last year but failed to get out of committee. While the first version was largely prescriptive, the revised version provides significant back-up to the internet community’s current

working groups looking at the transition and ICANN accountability, even going so far as to name them. The bill includes a range of conditions before any transition of the contract can occur, most significantly that freedom of speech and expression be guaranteed, that governments have no official say in ICANN, including as a director of the organization, and ICANN sign up the Freedom of Information Act. The likelihood of the bill becoming law remains low but it does mark a significant and positive change in how Congress views the current plans.

Groundhog DayThe ICANN Board is publicly resisting many of the proposed changes outlined by the two community working groups looking into the IANA transition. In formal responses to two public comment periods,

the Board gives begrudging acceptance to the compromise position of an affiliate of the organization being set up and handed control of the IANA contract. However it insists that ICANN have full control of every aspect of its functioning. That position is not supported by the majority of commenters, most of whom wish to see some degree of autonomy in the proposed PTI (post transition IANA) body. Likewise, the Board has pushed back against proposals to create actual members and allow the community in certain circumstances to veto or reverse Board decisions. In an argument put forward by new Board member Markus Kummer at a recent conference, the Board also claims an effective veto over any proposed changes since if it does agree with them it would not met the necessary consensus requirement.

News in brief

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In mid-2013, when companies were preparing for the launch of new gTLDs, some were speculating that domain

name portfolios would grow exponentially in an effort to protect brands online. And while some companies have registered core brands across many TLDs, the majority of companies have taken advantage of blocking, and have registered selectively.

In fact, with regards to new gTLDs, corporate portfolios have grown in size by less than two per cent, on average.

Unfortunately, costs associated with domain management since the launch of new gTLDs have been significantly higher than two per cent of total budgets, due to trademark clearinghouse submissions and renewals, sunrise application costs, and blocking fees.

But the question is, where have companies decided to register?

Most companies spent considerable time reviewing the lists of new gTLDs before any of them were ever actually made available, and they looked for those that presented the greatest risks to their brands. It is easy to understand why brands had chosen to register in the TLDs such as .reviews, .support. .website and .global, given their generic nature, and potential for abuse. Also, the geographical TLDs like .London and .NYC, which were highly anticipated, were also favored by corporations.

It is interesting to note that .xyz, which is by far the most

successful new gTLD to date (in terms of numbers) with over 850,000 registrations does not even crack the top 10 most popular TLDs registered by corporations. But that too makes sense given that prior to its launch, .xyz would never have been identified as posing a risk to brand owners.

Certainly there are still some very highly anticipated new gTLDs such as .web, .site and .blog which may be of interest to corporations which have not yet launched. It will be interesting to see if those

make it to the top 10 list, or whether companies will even have an appetite for more registrations. n

Let’s take a look at corporate new gTLD registration trends

Elisa Cooper is vice president of domain product marketing for MarkMonitor. She is an expert in online brand protection and chair of ICANN’s business constituency.

Top 10 new gTLDs registered by corporations*

1 .reviews2 .公司(business

organization)3 .support4 .网络(network)5 .london 6 .website 7 .clothing 8 .solutions 9 .nyc10 .global

Top 10 new gTLDs by registration figures*

1 .xyz2 .网址(web

address)3 .club4 .berlin5 .wang 6 .realtor 7 .science 8 .link 9 .top10 .nyc

* Figures correct as of March 2015


Q>So the big talking point in terms of new gTLDs at the

moment is dot-sucks. What do you make of it and is it a good or a bad thing for the domain name industry?

A<I like dot-sucks. If it’s curated correctly. I like the idea of

there being a portal site, protest sites. That was the idea behind all this [the creation of thousands of new top-level domains]; to change the game. But it is definitely polarising. There are lots of ‘sucks’ sites under dot-com but it’s a rag-tag group and there’s no business behind it. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, here is a potential platform for people, and they [the registry operator, Vox Populi] are investing in that. It could be inspiring for people. If curated correctly.

Q>As CEO of Uniregistry you are now running multiple new

registries. How do you see the future of domain names and the registry market?

A<So I think the namespace is expanding - but not that

much. It is expanding just enough to keep up with demand. Let’s say my company is Prodigy Ventures, I might get ‘prodigy.venture’ and probably ‘prodigy.ventures’ if it exists, and then maybe ‘prodigy.finance’ but then it gets thin fast. There are only so many domains that will really be that useful. I do think the namespace will expand: from 200 million today to, say, 400 million. But we won’t see the same expansion in number of companies registering; I think more companies will own more names. Some will be redirected but I think businesses will use them to provide a choice.

Q>AUniregistry CEO and owner of 350,000 dot-com domains, Frank Schilling was recently voted “the Most Influential Person in the Domain Name Industry”. He talks to us about dot-sucks, the growth of domain names and why the only way is up.

Q>Registration figures for new internet extensions have

been far below expectations. Should everyone prepare for the worst?

A<I do think that Donuts’ approach of having a large

portfolio of names is the right model. There is not enough cash flow to sustain a business otherwise. We at Uniregistry are just big enough but I expect that some registries will soon be people operating out of their bedrooms. Many of the new names just don’t work. That said, I believe to my core that people will start using these new endings. At some point people will want to look hip and that will mean not dot-com. I’m not sure how that will play out - none of us are sure - but a lot of these new names just look better. And I am a staunch dot-com supporter - I have 350,000 dot-coms so I have a giant hedge and I would do much better if dot-com

Q>What do you hope to achieve with Uniregistry both as a

registry and selling domains as a registrar?

A<I have a dream that names will be easier to use, easier

to sell, easier to trade, buy, manage. Registrars at the moment are structured on profit, it’s all up-sell. There is no one to help you use your name. That’s what we are trying to aspire to. There are others trying to do this as well but that’s what we want to do. And I have, you know, three artists who are working on the front-end, figuring out how we can make this look more Apple-like. I think it’s

going to be a bit like a glacier, it moves very slowly but suddenly it’s upon you. In three years, I don’t think any of us will recognize this space. And that’s exciting.

continues to do well and new gTLDs fail. But there are so many tasty, tasty names that are not taken yet. There is a big boon ahead based on what has already happened. When word gets out, it will be like wildfire. Next year with the be year of the name.

Q>And what about the coming introduction of dot-brands:

how is that going to change things?

A<I think with dot-brands, maybe in 10 years, they may

move and find viable uses for them. Companies will use them in some informed, structured way to get to their market. They will figure out some way to add utility to the names themselves and will begin investing in infrastructure. I think there will be people that copy what we are doing now [with generic top-level domains]. There is lots of growth coming, lots of investment.

IMG© ICANNWIKI


Q>You were one of the key people behind the creation

of many of the rights protection mechanisms in the new gTLD process, including the trademark clearinghouse. Do you feel they have worked well?

A<Well as a repository of verified information, I think

the Trademark Clearinghouse has worked very well. It has done exactly what it was supposed to: relieve the administrative burden on companies and produce a uniform system that reduces cost and aggravation.

But it’s not really a rights protection mechanism, it’s more of a convenient mechanism to use in the domain sunrise period. As for URS [the uniform rapid suspension system], the I think the jury is still out on that one. Domains have been suspended but when they go back into the public domain, it could become another

Q>A

whack-a-mole situation. We won’t know for sure for some time whether it has been effective.

Q>The number of defensive registrations in new gTLDs is

much lower than in the past - why do you think this is, and is it the end of the sunrise period?

A<I think quite simply that trademark holders are

exhausted. You’ve had 500, 600 of these coming out at a time whereas in the past you had four or eight. So I think companies are simply not buying defensive registrations in the way they were in 2000 and 2004. The real estate has become so large that trademark holders are simply being much more selective.

The value of the sunrise to a registry owner has gotten far smaller. But I still think a sunrise period has a lot of value to trademark holders.

Q>The launch of dot-sucks has been the big topic of

conversation among trademark holders recently - what is your take?

A<It’s basically extortion wrapped in free speech.

US law is pretty clear: because “sucks” has a communicative message, it’s free speech. Now if a dot-sucks domain is used for nefarious purposes, I think you can get it back. But the best way to handle a dot-sucks situation would be to engage with that person in a positive fashion.

Sometimes criticism forces you to do a better job. But why would you buy ‘adobe.sucks’ when someone can buy ‘adobereally.sucks’?

But I do think it’s abysmal the way they’ve set up their business practice. I’m kind of offended by it.

Q>What could trademark holders and the domain name industry

learn from each other?

A<A lot of people in the intellectual property industry

see all domainers as cybersquatters - and I think we need to learn that there’s a differentiation. So long as no one has a prior right in that string that’s not problematic. What brand owners can also learn is how to run their own registries.

I don’t think brand owners have a concrete idea of what they are going to do. A lot of them [registered their own dot-brand] for fear that they wouldn’t be able to and now they don’t know what to do with it. And that’s concerning: they need to talk.

Registries and registrars should also want to team up with trademark holders and brand owners because what we are trying to do is clear up the marketplace so that the people that are playing by the rules get all the business.

Q>Are you happy with how things are working on a more

macro ICANN level?

A<We definitely have some problems. What ICANN has

never quite got right is that many times the people that actually run the registries or registrars are also market based participants and that’s dangerous. It’s not just making money, it’s also manipulating the markets to make additional money. That’s where we have never gotten together and understood the value of self-policing. It’s difficult when there’s so much money to be made.

J Scott Evans is a leading authority on domains and intellectual property. He was an author of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP), chair of ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency and is President of the International Trademark Association (INTA).


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EDITORIAL Editor: Kieren McCarthy Email: [email protected]

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COPYRIGHTAll material appearing in IoN magazine is copyright unless otherwise stated or it may rest with the provider of the supplied material. IoN takes all care to ensure information is correct at time of printing, but the publisher accepts no responsibility or liability for the accuracy of any information contained in the text or advertisements. Views expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the publisher or editor.

Is it any wonder that Fadi Chehade has decided to hang up his CEO hat and head off to new pastures? The job is, quite simply, impossible for one person to do. At any given time, ICANN’s chief executive

is assumed to be representing three entirely different groups: the staff, the Board and the internet community.

It’s hard enough being the head of a company, but having to deal with a Board that continualy over-involves itself while believing itself to be the ultimate arbiter of all that is good for the internet? That’s the stuff of nightmares. When Chehade complained he couldn’t even change the brand of coffee in the ICANN break room without Board approval, he was only partly joking.

And then of course there is the ICANN ‘community’. A loose gathering of warring tribes only occasionally brought together to stop something from happening or to agree on the best restaurant for that evening. The community has a terrible tendency to build its CEOs up in order to knock them down. Rod Beckstrom, don’t forget, was greeted with a standing ovation and gushing praise when he first arrived on the scene.

This impossible intersection of roles has tended to have the same impact on ICANN

CEOs as it does on heads of state: they become increasingly power-crazed and paranoid, the first slowly feeding into the second. Fadi - just Fadi, of course, not Mr Chehade - was showing worrying signs of this disease. He probably didn’t recognize himself as the man in the video claiming that the expert volunteers in the IANA transition group “don’t know what they are talking about”.

For a man who prides himself on being humble, it must have come as an unpleasant surprise to find himself acting increasingly like an emperor - pushed into the role by ICANN’s impossible dynamics.

His leaving more than a year early puts ICANN into a difficult position however. It will need a new head at the exact same time it is taking over IANA and introducing long-needed reforms. Maybe it was the fervency expressed over these two very insider considerations that finally woke Chehade up to the fact that far from building the internet of the future, he would likely spend the next two years of his prime refereeing internal squabbles. Best to get out while you can.

And it’s that decision that marks him out as the best CEO that ICANN has had.

Kieren McCarthyEditor, IoN Magazine

When quitting is the best option

from the editorInternet of Names


We’ve been busy at Rightside. We’ve accomplished a lot over the last 18 months: gaining independence

from our former parent company, enduring the rigors of going public, building out an awesome portfolio of 39 TLDs (we just added dot-live, dot-family, and dot-studio to the mix), launching most of our TLDs, and driving the market development effort behind them. Just last month we passed the 250,000 registration threshold!

What we haven’t had time to do - besides breathe - is leverage our innate passion for TLDs and the knowledge we’ve gained from these experiences to find our voice as thought leaders within our industry.

We can do better. Both as a company and as an industry.New TLDs are branding tools. Much has been written

about new TLD registrations as a necessary evil: something to purchase for brand protection and then forgot about, except to occasionally suffer a twinge of annoyance at wasted money. And this shouldn’t be the case.

Given the incredible creative and branding potential hidden within each of these hundreds of new TLDs, people should be excited. But it’s our job to get them there. We have allowed our industry to be hijacked by this defensive way of thinking, exemplified by the fact that dot-sucks has dominated the narrative. And not even the story about how dot-sucks could be used to send the message that www.cancer.sucks or www.bullying.sucks. Not to toot our own horns, but we think dot-rocks exemplifies the celebratory, creative spirit of the new way. There is no more perfect juxtaposition for dot-sucks than dot-rocks. And in the future we’re going to be a lot more aggressive about pointing that out and educating consumers about all the cool things they can do with a new domain extension.

We need to be more consumer friendly. Put simply, it’s just too hard to buy and use a domain name. Our industry is not sufficiently approachable to folks who are not tech savvy. We could make it easier on people by reaching out via social media, social commerce, and blogging platforms like WordPress, Etsy, Facebook, and Tumblr to help spread the word about new TLDs and the ways they can be used to enhance their experiences on these platforms. But by and large we haven’t. The fact that people find it easier to build a website via WordPress or SquareSpace than to simply buy a domain name is perhaps the greatest testament to improvements we need to make.

New TLDs are a huge opportunity for the domain name industry. It’s all but impossible to go on the internet without at least occasionally suffering the disconcerting

impression of having already been there and done that. New TLDs are an opportunity to revitalize and reinvigorate an Internet that can sometimes feel just a little too familiar. It’s an excuse to talk about domains, to raise awareness, to innovate. And we’re all in this together. Raising awareness of new TLDs can only serve to grow the domain name industry and benefit and inspire us all. When dot-rocks succeeds, dot-coffee is only more like to succeed with it. The same goes for dot-vote, dot-yoga, dot-space, dot-tattoo, dot-science, etc.

We think we’ve got some cool stuff to share but that doesn’t mean we’re going to pontificate from our high-backed leather smoke chair while sipping a glass of expensive brandy. At the end of the day, we’re still the registry that brought you dot-ninja.

We are going to connect the dots across our vertically integrated supply-distribution chain and be really transparent about all that we’ve learned. From data that educates to product ideas and initiatives that inspire, we’ll share our successes (and failures) to offer insight into why and how we are where we are today. We hope these stories help drive the industry forward, or at a minimum, get the conversation started. And, maybe, entertain and make you laugh along the way.

So here’s what we need from you. (Yes, this is a two-way street. At least, it is if we want to collectively succeed.) Share our stories with your friends/colleagues/enemies/neighbor’s-second-cousin-who-you-happened-to-bump-into-at-the-grocery-store.

Give us your feedback. Whether you agree or disagree, let us know. And if you have ideas, hit us up. There’s a good chance we’ll be able to work together. n

A version of this article was first published on Rightside’s corporate blog at http://rightside.co/news/blog.

Advancing the industry with new TLDs

Taryn Naidu is CEO of Rightside, a publicly listed company that currently runs 36 new top-level domains. He’s also an avid sports fan.


Growing organically“Look them up: the Rodale Institute. R-o-d-a-l-e. They’ve been doing organic gardening since the 40s.”

Speaking enthusiastically about the farm-turned-research center in Pennsylvania is Roland La Plante, Afilias’ chief marketing officer.

He knows about them and their founder J.I. Rodale for two reasons: first, Rodale popularized the term “organic” meaning food grown without pesticides; and second, they have registered and launched a website at ‘rodaleinstitute.organic’ - one of the new gTLDs that La Plante is in charge of promoting.

Given the Rodale Institute’s reputation, having them on a dot-organic domain is a huge ‘get’. But it is also as pure a sign of the new realities facing the domain name industry as you can imagine. Because with so much competition, domain names have now become about finding your audience, your market sector and customer base and connecting with them. The value of the top-level domain “organic” is clear and obvious. But you can’t assume that simply by existing online that the real-world community of organic growers and

sellers will come running. They won’t. And La Plante knows it. Which is why, despite being one of the largest companies in the domain name industry, Afilias is taking a very organic approach to its latest internet extension.

“We set up to be a place only for certified organic entities,” he explains. “We always believed that would add meaning. We were acutely aware of the need to protect the TLD from ‘organic washing’.”

And so Afilias did what used to be shorthand for commercial death in the domain name industry: it set up a strict verification process. “You register a domain and you get an email with a link to an organic verification portal, and there you have to answer questions: who is your certifier? (We have about 900 on our list.) What is your certification number? We have access to those certifier files so if they match up, your registration moves forward. If not, you go through a manual process.”

La Plante readily admits that this is the hardest part in getting the domain sale - that extra step. But the company has also come to realize it adds the most value. “We have brand managers out in the market, going to the shows, and recently we’ve heard people saying ‘yes, we’ve heard about dot-organic; one of my friends tried to see if he could grab one and you turned him down’. And they mean that in a good way; that it

Afilias is one of the domain name industry’s largest players but it is taking a slow-yet-focused approach on two new gTLDs: dot-organic and dot-vote. Why? Because in the brave new domain world, differentiation and community is what it’s all about.

15ION MAGAZINE JULY 2015 15

wasn’t possible just to get one without being a proper organic business. It’s a credibility builder, and it’s word of mouth. As awareness grows, adoption grows.”

This approach has also put Afilias in the position of having to listen to its potential customers in a way that seems almost ludicrous to the high-volume, low-margin traditional world of domain selling. “We got a lot of pushback in the early days,” La Plante reveals. “The verification process was a little rough. So we listened and we’ve made it much better. It still requires a lot of hand-holding but now almost all of them get through it.”

The name has not proved popular with big trademark holders - yet. “We’ve not had much traction with the big companies, but then this is the market. It’s grassroots. If you

can get them using it, have some legitimate players in the field on board, you can become a standard. And then the big brands will want to get involved.”

Whole Foods have already purchased ‘wholefoods.organic’ but as of right now, they’re not using it. You know that when that domain goes live, the dot-organic team will know they are over the hill.

And that leads to another, entirely different top-level domain that Afilias also owns and runs: dot-vote.

Dot-vote has a much lighter approach - no need to have been certified with an official ‘vote’ accreditor. But, you are required to accept the registration policy which prohibits deceptive and disparaging names and requires a connection between the domain name and the registrant’s political activities.

“We are going to have a team on duty towards the end of the year,” La Plante says with purposeful understatement. The 2016 US Presidential election is already starting to pick up and when we speak Republican Ted Cruz has announced just days earlier that he

was intending to run for the nomination. Almost immediately, a series of Ted Cruz domains appear - none of which support the candidate. The obvious one, TedCruz.com, points to a website that simply says: “Support President Obama. Immigration reform now!” TedCruzForAmerica.com redirects to, er, Healthcare.gov. TedCruz.ca is a website dedicated to the fact that the presidential candidate was actually born in Canada, and uses that to criticize his immigration policy. And TedCruz2016.com was eventually handed over to the senator’s election team in an undisclosed agreement after it was the focus of significant media attention. It now redirects to the official website at TedCruz.org.

“This is sort of the perfect story for dot-vote,” says Afilias’ La Plante. “If anyone but Cruz’s team was to register TedCruz.vote, they would be violating our terms and if they failed to correct it, we would take it down.”

“The fact is,” he continues, “misleading websites have become a part of our political landscape. It’s confusing for consumers and people are sick of this sort of negative campaigning.” For so long, registries have been catch-all spaces, making it simply infeasible for them to have policies to cover every eventuality. Dot-vote hopes to change that with a protected political space. “We’ll see,” says La Plante. “I hope we don’t get a lot of chicanery.” In American politics, it’s hard to imagine anything

else. n

“It’s word of mouth. As awareness grows, adoption grows”

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And your legal name

It’s safe to say lawyers are a skeptical bunch. While most in the internet policy world are excited about the possibilities of hundreds of new internet extensions, lawyers’ attitudes have typically ranged from doubtful to downright aggressive.

And that’s even the case when it comes to names focused not on their clients but themselves, of which there are now six: .associates, .attorney, .esq, .legal, .law and .lawyer. Why so many? Because the internet is now the first place people go to find themselves a lawyer.

A survey last year by FindLaw.com found 38 per cent of people use the internet first; with 29 per cent asking a friend or relative. The same survey in 2005 found just seven per cent of people would look first online, compared to 65 per cent asking for a referral.

Online presence is now a huge deal for lawyers, but even so, many remain skeptical: dot-coms have greater prestige; Google will downrank you if you change; new addresses are untested; even, incredibly, the new legal names are too expensive (cost per year: less than 15 minutes client billing time).

So we asked the company behind the two most successful legal domains at the moment, Rightside, what they had discovered so far by selling new legal names.

“We’ve found that it breaks down on generational, or maybe more accurately, experience lines,” explains Mark Gross, Rightside’s director of corporate communications. In talking to dozens of lawyers and legal associations, the company has found that younger lawyers are much more open to the idea of a personal legal name. “They feel it is something that can follow them through their career and that they control.” Older laywers, especially those that have been at the same law firm for many years, just don’t see the point.

“There is another main group though,” says Gross. “And that’s established lawyers at

some of the larger firms. But what they are after is more geographic terms or practice terms, like ‘atlantatruckinjury.attorney’.”

The reason? Google. With the right terms in your name, you are more likely to land higher in the search rankings.

As a result of its findings, Rightside has started focusing its attention toward law

‘‘With the right terms in your name, you are more likely to land higher in the search rankings’’

The internet is now the first place people go to find a lawyer. We talk to the company that hopes its .lawyer and .attorney domains will be the first place legal professionals go to get noticed.


students in their final year or heading to graduation. “It’s a very competitive market out there, so they are very keen to differentiate themselves, to make their resumé look as good as it can,” explains Gross. “Plus, they want to look more professional than using their Gmail address, and of course they can no longer use their law school .edu email addresses anymore.”

Many of these new laywers are registering dot-lawyer domains and using them for email while redirecting the web address itself to their Avvo or LinkedIn profile.

Which leads to the question: .lawyer or .attorney? “It’s a personal preference, we market them together,” says Gross. “Anecdotally, some lawyers say they think ‘attorney’ sounds more professional but a lot of people buy both.” And, in fact, there are more dot-lawyer domains: 12,000 compared to 8,00 dot-attorneys.

That’s not to say Rightside is giving up on the older generation. They are sponsoring American Bar Association events, working with Case Briefs and have even signed up high-profile civil rights lawyer Lisa Bloom - daughter of the even better known Gloria Allred - as an advocate.

Bloom has registered several choice domains including ‘divorce.attorney’, ‘civilrights.attorney’ and ‘employment.attorney’. Each address points to a variation of her website that is focused on that specific side of her law practice.

“She’s very eloquent about why these names matter,” says Gross. "And you have to admit, if you’re looking for a divorce lawyer and they have the name ‘divorce.attorney’, it does tell you that they probably know what they’re doing.”

Nevertheless, Gross recognizes that it will be a gradual process. “If you try to jump too quickly to the hard sell, it doesn’t work. People have to get used to a domain; it starts with awareness.”

As for the missing segment of established lawyers, a different company thinks it may have the solution. Dot-law will launch in the summer and recently announced it will take a

different approach to its competitors: verifying every dot-law domain.

Minds+Machines paid an undisclosed sum - at least several million dollars - for the rights to dot-law. It then hired former chair of Bloomberg Law, Lou Andreozzi, as CEO and pitches itself as the “prestigious TLD for the legal industry”. Only accredited lawyers and law firms will be allowed to register a dot-law: something some lawyers have expressed a preference for. Whether that translates to actual registrations remains to be seen. And then there is the upcoming “.esq” run by Google, expected in the next few months.

If you are a lawyer, you’re spoilt for choice. But the bigger question at the moment remains: do you choose to get a new domain at all, especially if you’re happy with your current dot-com? n

Name Company No. domains*.lawyer Rightside 11,948.attorney Rightside 7,962.legal Donuts 3,916.associates Donuts 1,771.law Minds+Machines n/a.esq Google n/a

Lisa Bloom: Advocate for civil rights and new internet domains

* As of 7 June 2015


It came as a big surprise when Fadi Chehade announced that he would be

leaving as CEO of ICANN in March 2016, a full 15 months before his contract was due to expire, in order to “move into a new career in the private sector”.

That’s some thanks to a Board that only eight months earlier had extended his contract by two years, along with a healthy 12.5 per cent pay rise. But what’s more troubling is that Chehade’s will be leaving the organization in the

it differed from that given to CEO Paul Twomey back in 2006. Back then, Twomey was given a two-year extension with the option of a third year but ICANN spoke of it as three-year contract. Chehade opted just for the two years, even at his elevated pay rate. The sense he was tiring of the job after just two years was expounded recently when ICANN’s chairman Steve Crocker mentioned publicly that he was concerned Chehade would not stay.

Which leads to the question: why? Why did Chehade decide to jump ship before his contract was up? And why did he not hang around long enough to claim the legacy of moving control of the top level of the internet away from the US government?

It’s highly unlikely that Chehade or the ICANN Board will give any clear

lurch, without a CEO at possibly the most crucial time in its history.

When he heads off, in March 2016, ICANN will either just have finished or being about to complete two huge changes: the assumption of the IANA contract, which lends ICANN most of its authority as the domain name system’s overseer; and widespread accountability changes that could change the very structure of the organization and how it makes its decisions.

It’s hard to imagine worse timing: something that the Board itself recognized when it extended Chehade’s contract to last until 30 June 2017. “Taking this action will help ensure the stability in leadership that it is important for ICANN to have, particularly during this time,” read the relevant Board resolution.

What was notable in Chehade’s contract extension however is how

Exit through the rift shop

explanation as to what led to his decision, but there are many pointers along the way. We also asked you, our readers, what you thought about the situation.

Just as important as the question ‘why?’ is ‘what now?’ The new CEO will walk straight into a situation of extraordinary flux. What they decide to do, or not do, will have an enormous impact on both ICANN and the broader internet. So who should it be? And what skills do they need? Again we asked you to provide your thoughts.

But before we get to that, let’s go back to June 2012 and ICANN’s 44th public meeting in Prague where Chehade was first introduced as the

organization’s new CEO. Even though Rod Beckstrom was still CEO and Chehade was not due to take over the role for another three months, he was given the stage during the opening ceremony and promptly delivered a barn-storming 20-minute speech.

“I think many of you want to know who am I? Well, I was born to Egyptian parents, grew up in a very French part of Beirut but in the afternoon I became completely Arabic.” He talked of his experience “growing up in a worn-torn country” before telling an extraordinary personal tale. “I was whisked out of Beirut at a very difficult time. My dad found out some of my friends were telling me how to use guns


at age 13 so he put me on a boat and shipped me of to Damascus and told me not to come back… I arrived in the United States at 18 - I did not speak English. My first job was to peel onions - I did that for seven months - it was remarkable - try to do that for three days - it’s painful.”

But Chehade learned English, got accepted at Stanford University - with his bills paid for by AT&T - and ended up with jobs at Bell Labs and IBM. This experience, he told his audience, he helped him “grow to learn of the generosity of the world”. And then bringing it back to his audience, he noted: “This is the generosity that I will bring - this community has been



everyone has the same access.“The second thing is that all the

things I can say are meaningless if ICANN does not operate with excellence. We can not be expected to do less than the commercial world - we must do five times better, ten times better than the commercial world. It is very important that no one doubts the operational excellence that ICANN is providing everyday.”

Looking back three years later, this manifesto laid the groundwork for Chehade’s successes, his failures and ultimately his decision to leave.

Unlike his four predecessors, Fadi Chehade will be leaving on a high note. Of those we polled - just under 50 people from across the community - 44 per cent of them felt that Chehade had done an “excellent” job. A further 36 per cent that he had done a “good” job: an 80 per cent job approval.

By way of comparison, in a list of the highest rated CEOs in 2014, according to Glassdoor, 50th was Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer with 79 per cent approval. Given the demands of the job and its global community perhaps a more accurate measure would be the job approval rating of the US president, which, over the past 60 years has averaged 54 per cent. Whichever way you look at it, Fadi Chehade has been the most successful CEO of ICANN to date.

A big part of that success may be due to him largely sticking to his vision. His first focus that ICANN “must strive to make itself international” is reflected in the fact that 67 per cent of respondents identified “international understanding” as the biggest positive

nothing but generous to this world. What you have given to this world - the internet - is a wonderful gift.”

The result was a long line of relived and happy looking people leaving the ballroom, glad that ICANN at last seemed to have found its man. But personal tale aside, what Chehade told the

audience that day about what he

planned to do with ICANN is surprisingly prescient and helps explain his decision to leave the job much sooner that anyone expected.

Vision outlined“I am driven by building consensus,” Chehade said. “I love doing this - bringing communities that on the face of it could never be brought together is something that I strive to do - this is what drives me.

“I am all about inclusion. I will listen and include everyone that needs to be in ICANN - this is in my DNA.

“I come from a business mindset. And I will make decisions clearly, deliberately and in a strong approach. I care much more about getting things done than in figuring out who should get the credit.”

Chehade said he did not have a specific strategy right then but that there were “two things that I must bring up today, that are very important. First, ICANN is an international organization and we must strive to make it international. That is not an office in another country, that is not that I speak four languages; being international is understanding how other cultures think, how other people manage and understanding that not

attribute Chehade has brought to the organization.

Previous CEOs paid lip-service to the idea of ICANN as a global organization but Chehade opened new offices in Turkey and Singapore and made them “hub offices” on a par with the headquarters in Los Angeles. The existing offices in Brussels and Washington DC were more accurately described as “engagement offices” and new ones were opened in Beijing,


Chehade told people what they wanted to hear. Photo: ICANN


Geneva, Montevideo and Seoul. New staff were hired around the world from a range of cultures and backgrounds. In many respects, the very strong American culture of ICANN that has dogged the organization for a decade has been tempered.

Likewise, Chehade’s stated goal to make ICANN more professional and ensure that “no one doubts the operational excellence that ICANN is providing everyday” is reflected in the fact that 56 per cent of our respondents say that he has brought “greater professionalism” and 44 per cent that he has “improved operations” at ICANN. Tied with his self-proclaimed “business mindset”, 44 per cent also say that Chehade has brought “business savvy” to the organization.

It is there that the extent of Chehade’s vision starts to tail off however. He promised that he would bring in people that needed to be in ICANN from the outside and that building consensus “is what drives me” but just 31 per cent of people noted as a positive that he had “brought in fresh blood” and just 22 per cent that he had “improved community

relations”. In his speech, Chehade made a point of saying that “everything I do will be transparent… super-transparent… is there a bigger word? Extra transparent”. Yet just 20 per cent identify Chehade as having brought “greater openness”. Of the other positive attributes he brought that you highlighted were: risk taking, energy and out-the-box thinking.

And now the bad newsOf course that leads to criticisms of the man that has led ICANN for three years and will do so for nine more months.

Top of the list, with 70 per cent of you highlighting it was that Chehade “tended to say whatever people wanted to hear”. That tendency is closely connected to the third highest-voted criticism: “Didn’t listen to people’s concerns sufficiently” - something that 46 per cent of you agreed with.

Chehade highlighted his previous experience with bringing disparate parties together as a key qualification for the job but his style of providing different answers to different groups in order to get them closer together did not work well in the unusual

ICANN environment. In ICANN, all the very different groups are also on good personal terms with one another thanks to the organization’s small size and its seemingly endless opportunities to socialize three times a year in stunning locations.

A big part of Chehade’s dynamism is his drive to find a solution as soon as possible and move on, and to do that he has a tendency to sympathize with whatever group he is currently talking to. At times this caused mild irritation but over time it started to diminish trust. Occasionally it did much worse damage, such as when he told a panel in the French Senate that ICANN’s new European office could lead to moving ICANN’s headquarters outside the United States; only to say the exact opposite when in Washington DC just a few weeks later.

Chehade finds the job enormously frustrating. “I will make decisions clearly, deliberately and in a strong approach,” he told the ICANN community at the very start. “I care much more about getting things done than in figuring out who should get the credit.”

With old friend and ICANN COO Akram Atallah in Prague where Chehade was first announced as the new CEO. Both are critcized for hiring old friends and colleagues.

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Except ICANN is not a typical CEO-led organization; it comprises many different groups that often prefer no change to change they are unsure about. The result is an infuriating tendency to stop progress of any sort until everyone feels they have been adequately consulted, and that same culture is reflected inside the organization. At one meeting, Chehade joked that he couldn’t even change the brand of coffee in ICANN’s break room with getting approval from the Board. Of course, many a truth lie in jest.

This frustration led directly to all of the other main criticisms of his time in power: 43 per cent of you said he tried to move too quickly; 41 per cent that he tried to do too much; 34 per cent that he didn’t try to fix organizational problems; and a striking 57 per cent said that he hired too many old friends and colleagues into roles at the organization.

It’s not what you knowThat last part was particularly problematic, if understandable. Frustrated at the internal culture of meetings over movement and papers over progress, Chehade and COO Akram Atallah - who are old friends - brought in more and more of their own people in an effort to shift the culture. Not all of them were best suited or qualified, but real frustration developed when jobs were filled without the job even being posted internally.

Nora Abusitta-Ouri, a former classmate of Chehade’s, became vice president of public responsibility programs. Former neighbor Susanna Bennett became Chief Operating Officer. Former co-worker Chris Gift became vice president of online community services. Former co-worker Allen Grogan became chief contracting counsel and then when that job finished, chief contract compliance officer.

Neighbor of Atallah, Elizabeth Hoover became HR manager. Former co-worker Cyrus

Namazi became vice president of industry engagement. Old friend Ashwin Rangan became chief innovation and information officer. The wife of a former co-worker, Maguy Serad, became vice president of contractual compliance. Another former neighbor, Christine Willett, became vice president of gTLD operations.

In all, only one member of the C-suite hired since Chehade came on board has not been a friend or former co-worker - and that was ICANN’s former CTO David Conrad hired back into his old position. Every new vice president based in the Los Angeles headquarters has been a friend or former co-worker.

Frustrated with the community intransigence, Chehade hired from within the community to deal with the community, while his group in Los Angeles became increasingly separated from the broader organization and began to think of themselves as almost a separate company.

Fame and vaingloryBut in order to understand why Chehade is moving on, it’s necessary to look at what happened after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the depth of US government spying over the internet.

As IANA operator, ICANN was immediately pulled into the global political arena. Chehade saw an opportunity and took it. Within three months, he was meeting with Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff and from

that meeting the idea of an international conference grew and was settled. Just one month before the NetMundial conference, the US government announced it would hand over control of the IANA contract and that ICANN would be in charge of running the process. Suddenly, the world’s attention was on Chehade.

From 1 July 2013 to 1 July 2014, he managed to rack up travel costs of $363,000 - more than $30,000 a month. The impact was significant: to many, Chehade appeared

Every new vice president at the headquarters is an old friend or colleague

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Community members respond to Chehade’s decision to quit on Twitter.


increasingly aloof, even disparaging toward the ICANN community. As he flew around the world in an endless series of meetings with top officials, he started talking about his role in a way that led even seasoned diplomats to call him “the Pope of the internet”.

Somewhere along the way, Chehade decided he needed to extend the NetMundial conference into a permanent body that would help tackle broader internet governance. The NetMundial Initiative (NMI) was born and Chehade invested enormous amounts of personal capital into the project, teaming up with the Brazilian government and the World Economic Forum and redirecting ICANN’s resources to make it happen.

But the project was a disaster from day one. The internet community was skeptical of the inclusion of the World Economic Forum and the creation of “permanent seats” for Chehade and his new friends was distinctly un-internety. The community turned on the project and by extension on Chehade.

Meanwhile frustration with the slow pace of the IANA transition process led him to make disparaging remarks about a number of well-respected members of the internet community. When a video of the remarks was posted, he was forced to personally apologize. But by then the damage was done.

And then the man who said “all the things I could say are meaningless if ICANN does not operate with excellence” was forced to deal with the fact that five of its systems - one of them storing confidential financial details of many of the world’s largest companies - had been compromised, thanks to amateurish software installation and sloppy security practices.

Amid all this Chehade was offered a job, a way out, “in the private sector (outside the domain name industry)” according to the official announcement. He said he would announce further details at the end of the year. Most expect it to be a company closely aligned with the World Economic Forum, around which Chehade has spent much of his time recently.

For Chehade it will mean the ability to take a vision and move forward on it. Faced with the alternative of dragging an unwilling organization and ungrateful community toward an unimpressive goal, it will be like a vacation. n

What you told us:Poll results

46 people responded to our online survey from staff/Board to contracted & non-contracted parties.

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There has never been a quiet period in ICANN’s 16 years but this will

likely go down as its busiest. Along with the launch of hundreds

of new internet extensions, the IANA transition has put the internet community in a global spotlight to decide a critical aspect of the entire internet infrastructure. At the same time ICANN itself will undergo some significant changes - we don’t know what yet for sure - to improve its accountability and decision-making.

The importance of the IANA transition is all-encompassing: when asked what Fadi Chehade’s main focus should be for the next nine months, 72 per cent of you said the IANA transition. Finishing up the new gTLD program came a distant second with just 9 per cent.

Some of you felt Mr Chehade should leave immediately; others that he should focus on his own transition - bringing in a new CEO that can handle the enormous workload that will exist from day one.

It took the CEO Search Committee eight months last time to complete its work, which means the process needs to start immediately: if not at the Buenos Aires meeting then very soon

after. So we asked you who you thought should become the sixth CEO of ICANN.

Should the organization look outside itself as with the past two CEOs? Or does the timing and impending organizational changes mean that the natural choice is to go with an insider? Or does it not matter either way? You were quite clear: 60 per cent of you think an insider is needed; 29 per cent think finding the right person is more important.

But who is the right person and what skills do they need?

We asked you to ranked a range of attributes and that produced some surprising results (see below).

The top requirement is ‘openness’. Back-room deals are a no-no from now on. Reflecting the changes coming, ‘understanding of ICANN’ ranked second. Interestingly, technical knowledge came below business and political experience, and they all came below patience and determination. And everyone one of these lands between important and very important. It truly is a demanding job.

The least important attribute? Being a US citizen. Maybe ICANN has finally grown up. n

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So what... and who... next?

What attributes will be most important in the next CEO?We asked you rate importance by: very important (1); important (2); not important (3); and irrelevant (4). The figures show the average of all responses.

1. Openness 1.22. Understanding of ICANN 1.43. Patience 1.54. Determination 1.75. Business experience 1.86. Political/diplomatic experience 1.97. Technical knowledge 2.28. US citizenship 3.4


“We are very concerned about any possible illegality resulting from alleged illicit actions of the registry and accordingly reach out to you to see if you can offer guidance on this matter.”

So read a highly unusual letter from domain name overseer ICANN following several weeks of controversy over the launch of the dot-sucks top-level domains. The April 9 letter was sent to the US Federal Trade Commission and Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs

company had already ruffled feathers shortly after winning the rights to dot-sucks by claiming it would charge trademark owners $25,000 for their domains - a far cry from the typical domain name prices of $10-50 and the typical sunrise costs of $100-200.

Brand protection company MarkMonitor even begrudgingly

making it the first time ICANN has asked anyone but its own lawyers to decide on the legality of something in the domain name space.

The fact that it did says a lot about how the rollout of hundreds of new internet extensions and even the domain name system itself continues to be managed. But let’s address that later. What the hell happened? And why did a new internet extension suddenly hit the mainstream news agenda?

Even before ICANN’s letter - in fact most likely prompting the letter - dot-sucks had hit a nerve. The company that had won the rights to the domain back in November 2014 for an undisclosed sum, Vox Populi, announced its plans for “sunrise” three weeks before launch and it came with a sting: all sunrise domains would cost $2,499. This in itself was not surprising, or problematic: the

Free speech or rule breach?

acknowledged that it would be advising its clients to get their brand name under ‘.sucks’ , while noting it would seek a change to the rules for the next round of extensions.

But as the industry dug further into the pricing structure, irritation turned to anger. Under a previously unheard-of category of “premium sunrise”, many brands names would continue to be priced at $2,499 even after the sunrise period. On top of

which, despite offering a block service where for a fee a particular name would be prevented from being registered, it became clear the block did not apply to any name under “premium sunrise”.

The unusual pricing structure lead to more questions and more uncomfortable answers. Names not on the list would cost just $9.95... so long as you weren’t an employee of the company included in the name. And the list itself was not being released, nor were the number of names on it.

And then Vox Populi released a promo video for the domain featuring

stock footage and a speech from Martin Luther King, wrapping the new domain name around the tradition of civil protest. It’s at that point that the wheels came off.

“Is .sucks just a domain name registry or a way to extort money from trademark owners?,” asked industry blog DomainIncite. “What a disgrace,” tweeted domaining website DomainNameWire. And usually that’s where the latest scandal within the domain name industry stops. But thanks to the dot-sucks name, it hit the tech press - ArsTechnica, Gizmodo,


Silicon Beat. And from there, the startup press - FastCompany, Inc. And then the mainstream press - the Huffington Press, Guardian, CBC, CNBC and NPR. The coverage alternated between explaining why brands should pay the price and castigating the registry for targeting them with high pricing. Often the articles argued both points at the same time.

In the meantime, ICANN’s intellectual property constituency was drawing up a furious letter denouncing the pricing structure as “predatory, exploitative and coercive” and demanding ICANN call a



Dot-sucks was not one of them.

It took 12 years for the idea to reappear after ICANN opened up the domain name space to any combination of letters. Three companies applied for dot-sucks. That fact alone sparked a furious letter from Congressman John Rockefeller, then the chair of the US Senate’s Commerce Committee. “Three companies have applied for this gTLD, claiming it will foster debate and benefit consumers. I view it as little more than a predatory shakedown scheme,” he railed to deaf ears on ICANN’s part.

The problem of course is that under the US Constitution, “sucks” is almost certain to receive strong free speech protections. And that means once the domain is gone, there’s no getting it back. “We believe that recovery of these domains using traditional methods will be extremely difficult,” MarkMonitor said in its note to clients, later published. The author of that note, Elisa Cooper, told us that their clients were “pretty upset” about the pricing but noted that it came down to what their tolerance to risk was. “Some took the position that they will not participate. They asked how this was

halt to the planned launch. By the time ICANN sent its letter to the FTC, it was on the Washington Post’s radar.

But you have to ask: so what? After the dust had settled, we spoke to the tired and slightly shell-shocked CEO of Vox Populi, John Berard, who had spent the past two weeks defending the company and the dot-sucks name. “You know that companies don’t have to buy the name?,” he asks rhetorically. He also highlights that despite having run the gauntlet for the past two years - including getting special attention from the world’s governments at ICANN - that the policies Vox Populi had put in place in its initial application had stood up to scrutiny. “We don’t allow spamming, porn, cyberbullying...”

As for the ‘sucks’ name, he points to the fact that Business Week recently featured a front page with the headline: ‘The IRS sucks’. “It’s no longer a perjorative,” Berard argues, “it’s a point of view. And a dot-sucks domain gives you a chance to be heard.”

read your historyIt’s worth noting that dot-sucks has never been anything but controversial. Back in 2000, when ICANN decided to create the first new extensions since the domain name system had been developed in 1984, consumer advocate Ralph Nader - most famous for introducing car seat belts to the United States - argued for introducing a dot-sucks domain.

The goal would be to “facilitate criticism of a firm or organization” and, critically, companies would be barred from owning their own name. Even then, Nader knew it would prove controversial. “We recognize the .sucks TLD will be offensive to some persons, but we do not think that this should exclude .sucks from being approved by ICANN. We believe the .sucks domain will be popular in the marketplace, and also generate important funding for the free speech rights of individuals and small organizations,” the letter argued. ICANN chose just seven new domains.

different to if someone has a ‘sucks’ in their dot-com. But others felt that they should spend $2,500 because it would be hard to get back. To be honest, it’s a tough one given the purpose of the domain: to provide feedback.” She also notes that there have been several other extensions with the same general purpose but which have not received the same attention: dot-WTF, dot-fail, and dot-reviews to name but three.

Cooper does accept however thatContinued on next page >


under the domain rules and in the courts, a ‘.sucks’ domain is going to end up being protected.

One man who knows more than most over how a ‘.sucks’ challenge would go down is one of the authors of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP), introduced in 1999 to deal with a wave of cybersquatters registering famous brand names and then holding them to ransom. J Scott Evans is Adobe’s Associate General Counsel and president of the International Trademark Association (INTA).

He doesn’t think there is much of a chance in getting back a ‘.sucks’ domain once it’s registered either through the UDRP or the law courts. “US law is pretty clear: if the site was being used for a communicative message then there is not likely to be any confusion.” That said, if it was being used for “nefarious purposes”, that protection would break down.

Vox Populi’s Berard feels as though dot-sucks is being unnecessarily targeted. “Much of the criticism is coming way too early. We believe its value will be slow at the start but grow over time.” He points to the fact that when corporate review site Glassdoor launched, it was met with a wave of criticism but soon companies came to realize the value in getting honest

feedback from

current and former employees

with some companies

even accepting that it had even helped them become better companies as a result. “My hope is that the companies that have registered their dot-sucks domains will actually use them,” he says.

Berard finds support in one of the key figures in the domain name industry - Frank Schilling - CEO of Uniregistry, which runs a number of new internet extensions and a renowed domain investor. “I like dot-sucks,” he told us. “But it is polarising. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, they are building a potential platform for people to speak their minds. Even when they were proposing that the domains would be $25,000, nobody got

that stirred up about it, you would have thought there would be more pushback.”

Schilling says his company will be be selling dot-sucks domains for just $5 - “I like the protest angle a lot. It could be the Wikipedia of protest, and cause

some disruption.” Even Schilling though has to admit that he “doesn’t think much” of the pricing structure.

INTA President Evans says he also has no problem with the idea of domains that provide a note of protest. “I think the best way to handle someone with a ‘sucks’ domain would be to engage them in a positive fashion. Sometimes criticism forces you to do a better job. I have no problem with a site that allows consumers to have a voice.

“But I do think they have an absymal set of business practices and to be honest, I’m kind of offended by it.”

Asked specifically about the $2,500 pricing, Berard argues that he feels it is a fair price for what the name represents. “I’m not sure it’s fair to say ‘so much’. This could be an extraordinarily powerful platform.” He even argues that the $2,499 fee may end up being in brands’ best interests. Since any registration is going to be hard to win back over free speech


issues, the high price could serve as a “check on misuse”.

That approach is unlikely to hold much water with companies who feel they are being purposefully targeted because of the free speech implications.

Which leads us back to the letter ICANN sent to the FTC. Aside from the unusual circumstances of ICANN asking anyone for legal advice over domain name practices, the letter which sparked ICANN’s response treads lightly on the question of any actual illegality.

While it complains of Vox Populi’s “shake down scheme”, it is very careful to include the words “may” when suggesting it has broken ICANN’s rules, and argues that the “spirit” of the rules has not been adhered to - hardly a claim of illegal activity.

When ICANN did receive its response from the FTC a few weeks later, its chair, Edith Ramirez, refused to be drawn on the question of legality but she did refer to the fact that no one was claiming the pricing rules did not follow ICANN’s rules. In fact, Ramirez pointed out, the FTC had been quite vocal about these

rules and a range of other aspects of the new gTLD program and had been almost

entirely ignored by ICANN. She

also took the opportunity to point out

that ICANN was also resisting calls from the world’s governments to put in place stronger protections over “sensitive” strings over consumer protection concerns: extensions such as ‘.kids’, ‘.loan’, ‘.doctor’ and so on.

So why did ICANN formally appeal to the FTC in the first place when it must have known the likely response it would receive?

Well, that could be something to do with the last point in the letter sent from ICANN’s intellectual property constituency to the domain name system overseer.

“Finally, we recently learned of a peculiar (and apparently unique) provision in Vox Populi’s Registry Agreement. The .SUCKS Registry Agreement calls for Vox Populi to pay ICANN (i) a one-time fixed “registry access fee” of US$100,000, and (ii) a “registry administration fee” of US$1.00 for each of the first 900,000 Transactions. Thus, if Vox Populi’s scheme succeeds, ICANN will receive $1 million more from .SUCKS than from any other registry with comparable success. The IPC is at a loss to understand why ICANN stands to receive this unique payout.”

As it turns out, ICANN had insisted on that clause to cover

debts incurred by unrelated

businesses owned by the same parent

company as Vox Populi, Momentous.

It took the opportunity

of the company’s interest in dot-sucks to write in

the $1m windfall as a condition

of signing the contract.

Which raises the question: just who is operating the shakedown scheme again? n

31ION MAGAZINE JULY 2015 31ION MAGAZINE MAY 2015

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Sign of the times

Here are some facts about China you may or may not know: it is now the world’s

largest economy - both online and offline; its language characters will soon be accepted as international trademarks by the World Intellectual Property Organization; it has a “first to file” trademark law; it has the most top-level domains outside English; and it has one timezone despite stretching across five.

All five of these facts help explain why the internet domain ‘.商标’ - Chinese for ‘trademark’ - has recently launched into an increasingly crowded field that includes ’.网址’ (web address), ‘公司’ (business organization), ‘.在线’ (online), ‘.网络’ (network), ‘.中文网’ (website), and ‘.集团’ (corporate group). And these are in addition to the terms for ‘shopping mall’, ‘world’, ‘mobile’ and ‘I love you’ - that last one requiring a little extra understanding of Chinese culture.

With China now the largest economy in the world, it has become increasingly important for companies large and small to enter the market, whether to take advantage of low-cost, high-volume production or to tap into a society that is increasingly affluent. This is especially true when it comes to the internet: Chinese consumers spend 31 per cent of their

disposable income online, compared with a global average of 22 per cent. All of the world’s largest internet companies - Google,

Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, eBay - are increasingly concerned by their Chinese competition

(respectively: Baidu, Renren, Tencent, Weibo and Alibaba).

That enormous growth and the threat to global players leads

to the second fact: that WIPO will soon accept Chinese characters as trademarks.

It is a common misconception that China does nothing to combat counterfeiting and trademark infringement. In fact, it has strict rules that it largely enforces. It also recently changed those rules to better reflect the

global economy that it now leads. The sheer size of the Chinese economy however makes it difficult to supervise, which in turn makes it an attractive market to target.

While all citizens are taught English in school, Chinese characters are really the only

way to communicate. As a result, many corporations have carefully translated their brands and trademarks into

Chinese characters that make sense to the average consumer. Coca-Cola is frequently held out

as the company that has done the best job of this, turning ‘Coca-Cola’ into ‘Kekoukele’ . Academic papers have even been written about the soda company’s “perfect” translation (basically it is easy to write, sounds good and has the broad sense of “good and fine drink”). But as you can see

Many large brands have carefully translated their brands and trademarks into Chinese characters

There are now a raft of Chinese-language internet domains, many aimed at business. But which is which, what do they actually mean, and which should you register under? Wonder no more with our guide to China’s top-level domains.

.网址

.商标


from the graphic to the right, there is no ® symbol after the name that millions of people now associate with a particular type of refreshing cola drink.

A few other examples: Nike: 耐克; Adidas: 阿迪达斯; Pepsi: 百事可乐; Microsoft: 微软; Google:谷歌; Gucci: 古驰; you get the idea.

WIPO’s decision is therefore simply catching up with the market.

Now, if you hold a Chinese trademark and wish to market in China, it makes little sense to advertise: ‘耐克.com’ in much the same way American consumers would be befuddled by a web address like ‘nike.在线’.

But before getting to the issue of Chinese domains, the third fact: the Chinese trademark system is a “first to file” system rather than the Western system of common law, where a person registering a trademark also has to show they’ve used, or plan to use the mark in business.

This approach has created a difficult, and often expensive situation

for Western companies who turn up in China to find that their

trademark is already owned, legally, by someone else.

Apple settled out of court for $60m over the trademark for ‘iPad’, after the company which owned the mark applied to have Apple’s iPads withdrawn from sale for infringing its rights. Tesla reached a similar settlement with businessman Zhan Baosheng. Some brands have even lost in court, including Pfizer’s Viagra brand. luxury retailer Hèrmes and whisky brand Chivas Regal.

And that’s how we arrive at Chinese-language domain names.

“In China you are more likely to

get traction with the courts if you have

as much evidence as possible that you do own

and control your brand name,” explains Simon Cousins of Allegravita, who specializes in advising Western companies about how to approach China. “If you have your brand in a Chinese domain name, it’s a point of evidence in court. It’s cheap insurance.”

And it is for this reason - as well as offering a portal to your Chinese customers - that Chinese-language domains are the second and fourth most popular new internet extensions for corporations (after ‘.reviews’ in first and ‘.support’ in third), according to brand protection company MarkMonitor (see page 8).

So, problem solved, you simply register your name under those two domains and your Chinese domain strategy is set, with the added bonus of additional trademark protection in case you go to court.

If only.China is renowned for not being a simple

country to understand, and in that respect, its domain names are no different.

The fifth fact at the start of this article was that China has a single timezone - Beijing time - despite the country stretching across five. China is globally unique in this. And this fact also helps explains a lot about how things work on the ground.

“If you have your brand in a Chinese domain, it’s a point of evidence in court”


.在线

.公司


The United States, for example, has six different time zones within its borders. Russia has nine (it used to have 11). China has one and that’s because what Beijing says, goes. The same is true for domains names.

The largest Chinese domain by number is ’.网址’ which roughly translates to ‘web address’. There are just over 345,000 .网址 domains - nearly ten times larger than the next most popular.

But there are some unusual facts about the registry. For one, every single domain is registered by the same company, ZDNS, which is the Chinese government’s internet infrastructure arm.

What’s more, in January this year, in the space of one week, the registry went from 100,000 to over 350,000 domains. Which is all the more remarkable since no one can currently register a ’.网址’ domain (although that may change at some point).

When asked about the trademarked names included in that 340,000, the company has

previously responded that it registered them “on behalf of brands” in order to protect them.

And just to add to the mix, the registry used

to be owned and run by the company that has now started ‘.商标’ - ‘trademark’, Hong Kong based Huyi Global. Huyi runs the Chinese equivalent of the Yellow Pages and so has access to a huge database of corporate information.

We spoke to Huyi’s senior VP of business development, Alex Lee, and he confirmed that Huyi was the applicant and ran the ‘web address’ registry for some time before control was handed over to Chinese government-run registry KNet.

Why was the Chinese government so interested in the registry? Because it already existed within China’s own country-wide internet and it was worried about conflicts

between its internal internet and the global internet. Some quick history: while domain name overseer, US non-profit ICANN, spent

years working on how to make non-English (ASCII) characters work with the domain name system, China went ahead and created its own internet that worked with Chinese characters. It used a browser plug-in and the most common domain ending in this internal system was ’.网址’ - web address.

When ICANN finally agreed on a solution and then subsequently launched the process for opening up the domain name system, Huyi applied for this address - seemingly without the permission of the Chinese government. When the application was approved and the domain went live on the global DNS, China decided it wanted control of both registries.

The reason it’s important to understand that history is because the bulk of the registrations for the second most popular Chinese extension - and the most popular

‘China went ahead and created its own internet that worked with Chinese characters

34

Name Rough translation Company Domains Price.网址 web address KNet 346,147 n/a.公司 business organization CNNIC 51,960 $40.网络 network CNNIC 34,022 $40.在线 online TLD Registry 17,117 $40.中文网 website TLD Registry 12,538 $50.商城 mall Zodiac 9.638 $325.我爱你 i love you Zodiac 7,331 $35.移动 mobile Afilias 2,761 $17.商标 trademark Huyi 2,715 $325.集团 corporate group Zodiac 655 $800

.集团

Figures accurate as of 7 June 2015


extension for Western businesses - ‘公司’ (business organization) - were derived in the same way - from legacy domains created when China had its own internal internet. Where ‘web address’ was used for general internet use, ‘business organization’ was China’s version of dot-com.

The global version of the ‘.公司’ registry, run by the Chinese government’s registry CNNIC, launched with 36,000 domains. Just a month after ‘web address’ jumped from 100,000 to 350,000 domains, ‘business organization’ also jumped, almost overnight, from 36,000 to 46,500. It currently stands just under 52,000.

The exact same situation exists for the second most popular Chinese domain for corporates: ‘.网络’ which roughly translates to “network” and was the Chinese development equivalent to ‘.net’. It is slightly smaller with 34,000 domains.

That is not to say that companies should not register under these names. Unlike ‘web address’ it is actually possible to register under these names and many Western brands have done so.

However the legacy aspect of the domains, and the lack of transparency that typically accompanies a Chinese government-run enterprise has led several companies to identify what they see as a market gap: new Chinese domains run according to common internet registrar practices. In other words, bring Chinese domains in the open market.

Each of these new domains have been pitching themselves to companies inside and outside of China as the domain space of the future. And with some success.

The registry ‘.在线’ which roughly translates to “online”, is currently third in terms of Chinese registry sales but comes top in terms of actual paid-for domains. The main reason is its simplicity and accessibility.

New internet extensions, such as ‘.club’ or ‘.guru’, have added hundreds of real words to the internet in addition to the well-known “com” and “net” abbreviations. The .在线 registry does the same but with two big advantages: it is just as short as the dot-com equivalent thanks to the way the Chinese language is structured; and second there

isn’t the huge legacy of dot-com in China that there is in much of the rest of the internet. China is virgin territory.

So if you want a website for your Chinese customers that is quick, easy to remember and highlights the fact you are selling over the internet then “online” is immediately understandable.

The same is true for the other extension run by TLD Registry: ‘.中文网’ which means “website” or, more accurately, “chinese

language website”. This is also useful for a company, especially a

Western brand, since it tells Chinese consumers they

can expect to find a Chinese-language website at the end of it - something that may be particularly useful in search

engine rankings.But while these endings may connect more

with the Chinese man in the street, would they be as useful in a trademark infringement court case than the “official” CNNIC-run domains ‘. 公司’ and ‘.网络’? It’s hard to say.

And that’s where the new kid on the block comes in: Huyi’s ‘trademark’ domain ‘.商标’. As Lee explains, every ‘.商标’ domain registration will be verified as an international trademark. “It must be an exact match and you must provide proof of your trademark,” he explains. “In other words, it extends your registration mark online.”

Lee hopes that this combination of trademark and free market economics will be a winner. “I’m not expecting hundreds of thousands of registrations,” he says. “But my goal is all the Fortune 1000.” n

.商城


Q>You are chairing a new steering group looking into

the issue of universal acceptance. How did you get involved and why is it important?

A<I was pulled into the issue somewhat unwillingly a long

time ago. When Afilias opened dot-info back in 2000, we immediately realized that nothing worked. Email was being blocked, browsers had a hard time and it was because we weren’t using the standard three-letter top-level domain. So we worked our way through that and a steady trickle of related issues. But now we are at a tipping point: there are a huge number of new TLDs and most of them have attributes that can result in problems of acceptance. And that is due to the fact that a lot of software is using outdated configurations.

Q>Is it true that all the technical standards to have new and

internationalized domain names working properly already exist?

A<The technology has been done for years now. The relevant

RFCs were laid to bed many years ago. But there’s not enough awareness or implementation of them. We need almost no new inventions.

Q>So what is the steering group’s gameplan to move

from where we are to where we want to be ?

A<When we got together first of all in early January, we pretty

quickly identified four main aspects to fixing the problem: internationalization - dealing with IDNs in email etcetera;

Q>AWe spoke to Afilias CTO and ICANN Board member Ram Mohan about the issue of ‘universal acceptance’ , what ICANN and the internet community is trying to do to fix the problem and why you need to get involved.

communication and messaging - community outreach - to make people aware and get them involved; measurement and metrics so we can see where it is working and not working; and a prioritization of initiatives and ideas - do we host a hackathon? Do we speak at this particular conference? Our first workshop at the ICANN meeting in Singapore rapidly morphed into 40-45 people saying they want to help so we set up the steering group and now ICANN is sponsoring it.

Q>How big a problem is this? Are we losing millions of emails

a day? Are websites not resolving? What does it look like?

A<That’s the big challenge here - no one has any idea whether

we are looking at a 10-foot pool or a 1,000-foot-deep ocean. I hope it’s the former. We need people to share their

Q>So what can those outside this new steering group do to

help fix the problem?

A<We are holding a full-day workshop at the ICANN

meeting in Buenos Aires and all are invited to come and brainstorm the most effective ways to move the needle. If this needs technical work - what areas need to be done? If we need metrics and surveys - what are there?

It is beyond any one group or organization to pull all this together - we need lots of people to help figure out what needs to happen next.

A lot of our success will depend on community engagement. In one sense, the problem is like a Rubik’s Cube - we need to be able to see all the different faces before we can figure out how the solve the puzzle.

knowledge so we can either panic quickly or calm down quickly.

The other big problem is that it is going to be difficult to get to the right solution. We have some big companies - Apple, Microsoft, Google - involved but Microsoft for example has a three-year development cycle, whereas some open source communities have a 2-3 week cycle.

We do have some test-beds: Coremail from CNNIC and the Horde email system has been customized and is working well. Plus Google has a strong commitment to make it work - at least inside Gmail. Microsoft has made the same commitment. But nobody has the full picture and that’s why we need as many people as possible to come along and help.


Swallow the money

If Mr Micawber was ICANN’s bookkeeper, his waistcoat buttons would be popping.ICANN’s 2014 tax return (IRS form 990)

shows a net trading loss. The true picture is somewhat masked by ICANN’s new gTLD cash windfall. In 2013, ICANN turned over $230 million and spent over $120 million, and made a slight profit in 2014. Result: happiness.

But ICANN prudently keeps new gTLD income and expenditure separate from its regular business. If you disregard new gTLD money, ICANN’s income in 2014 was $84 million, expenses $113 million. Result: misery.

Except it’s not misery, because ICANN still has a stack of cash ($340m in current assets) in the bank, and this seems to have loosened its financial stays.

In a recent paper for the Global Commission on Internet Governance1, I argue that ICANN

1 ICANN: Bridging the Trust Gap available at ourinter-net.org/#publications/icann-bridging-the-trust-gap

needs a membership in order to improve its accountability. The paper provides evidence that ICANN’s financial controls are weak. Sadly, the recently published tax form only increased those concerns.

Staff salaries - not your average not for profitThe average pay per staff member at ICANN in 2014 was over $187,000. Even excluding top executive pay, on average ICANN employees earned $169,000, an increase of $25,000 (10 per cent) per head since 2013. This is against a backdrop of continuing recession in US, and an inflation rate of less than one per cent.

Transparency concerns: gaps in senior team disclosureICANN’s tax return discloses the salaries of 34 people, including directors and some executives. US tax authorities require companies to disclose the salaries of directors, officers and key employees. It is surprising not to see some of the CEO’s direct reports in there - such as the Senior Advisors on Governmental Engagement, Strategy, Global Stakeholder Engagement, and the Chief Innovation and Information Officer. No reason is given for these omissions.

Women are short-changed (comparatively)Analysis of the top executive salaries that are disclosed, reveals a gender gap: ICANN’s top women are paid on average 35 per cent less than their male counterparts. The figures are skewed by the three highest earners (all male), but even excluding the top three, ICANN’s women executives earned on average $17,000 less than their male counterparts.

Salary bills are a risk to long-term viabilityStaff salaries are now 55 per cent of turnover (excluding gTLD income) posing potential threats for ICANN’s future financial wellbeing. ICANN’s staff salaries have never been such a high percentage of turnover. It’s true that ICANN has received a huge cash windfall in the form of gTLD applications, but it’s not prudent to increase annual outgoings on the

Annual income twenty pounds Annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, Result: happinessAnnual income twenty poundsAnnual expenditure twenty ought and six, Result: misery

Emily Taylor is an internet governance expert and research advisor to the Global Commission on Internet Governance.

Mr Micawber (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens)


basis of a one-off lump sum. Registrations in the new gTLDs that have launched are not yet generating enough fee income for ICANN to justify permanent increase in expenditure, such as commitment to staff salaries.

Travel and meetings expenses - through the roofAnother shocker is ICANN’s travel spend, which rose by a staggering 85 per cent in 2014 to $17 million. That’s 20 per cent of ICANN’s income. There is little detail in the tax return as to how the travel spend breaks down. Yes, ICANN relies on community volunteers, and travel support helps recognise this. My paper argues that travel support is an area where strict financial accountability should be observed, as “soft power” derived from such financial support is difficult to quantify.

In 2014, the average cost per ICANN public meeting was $6 million, compared with $3.2

million in 2013. The community needs to understand how this money was spent, and who the recipients of the extra travel and meeting costs have been.

What do the ratios say?Financial analysts have a toolkit of ratios which reveal a company’s profitability, capital growth and solvency. While, thanks to its substantial cash reserves, ICANN remains almost rudely solvent, its profitability ratios (excluding new gTLD income and expenses) have declined. Net profit margin, which indicates the effectiveness of its financial controls, has declined from 15 per cent in 2013, to -35 per cent in 2014. Return on capital invested decreased from around 10 per cent for 2009-2011 to -8 per cent in 2014, suggesting poor efficiency in use of capital

Why ICANN needs a membershipMembers of a non-profit exercise important governance functions, which are explored in “Bridging the trust gap”. These include residual financial oversight. Mostly, it’s

pretty formulaic. Occasionally, things kick off, like when British Gas shareholders brought a live pig to its Annual General Meeting in a protest against executive pay.

Importantly, membership rights provide the script for company meetings, forcing directors to explain the company’s financial performance to people who have the power to fire

them. All this is a valuable check on executive power. A

company that’s unable to balance its books, as Mr Micawber knew, is heading for misery. ICANN’s failure to take evasive action, and double digit percentage rises, are warning flags which indicate fragile governance controls. If ICANN is to be ready to cut its umbilical cord with the US Government, it needs to do better. n

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Dot-lavish celebrates 1st birthday with 49¢ domains By Reg Lowe Self-declared “Ferrari of the internet world”, registry dot-lavish is celebrating its first birthday with a special event in which its domains will be priced at just 49 cents.

Announcing the special pricing for a limited period of time, Dot-lavish CEO Hapi Fule said that foregoing the normal retail price of $5,000 was a decision he had taken in order to celebrate “surpassing expectations”.

“We have a renewal rate that is far above other new gTLDs and more in line with long established domain registries. I’m very proud of our 75 percent rate.”

Fule refused to be drawn though on the fact that that rate came after two domains were not renewed out of a total of eight sold in the past 12 months.

“Not everyone can have a Ferrari!” he told staff and invited guests at a special birthday event for the registry at his local T.G.I. Fridays. “But like Ferrari we are going to boost our annual production to 7,000 a year! So drink up and tomorrow we will drive into the future! Do please note that there is a one drink per peson maximum. Let’s go dot-lavishers!”

Net industry fury over ‘excessive’ .registry fees

By Owen MedisenA group of internet registries have lodged a formal complaint with DNS overseer ICANN over what they claim are “excessive” registration fees under the new dot-registry internet extension.

The top-level domain, run by a coalition of the world’s largest brands, announced its pricing system last week, and drew criticism when it priced some domains as high as $100,000.

The “premium” names, which include the brand names of many new internet registries had been calculated according to the dollar amount

brands have spent on each registry in defensive registrations, a spokesman for the coalition explained.

“We feel that the prices accurately reflect the value we place on each registry through the registration of our marks,” he said.

However, operator of the dot-blows registry claimed that the $100,000

price on ‘blows.registry’ was “unfair, excessive and deleterious”. The registry co-signed a letter to ICANN with the operators of dot-brand, dot-sunrise and dot-easymoney asking it to intervene in the matter.

ICANN has responded by asking the FTC, FCC, HSBC and girl group TLC for their advice on the matter.

Dot-com to shut down: we give up, it’s all over

By Kant StandiheetIn a shock announcement, dot-com register operator Verisign said earlier today it would be shutting down operations next year.

“We’ve had a good run of it,” declared senior VP Kat Pane, “but in the end we have no choice but to bow to the inevitable. It’s time to shut down dot-com.”

Despite having more domains than the next 25 largest registries combined, it is believed the final straw came when leading competitor Peanuts announced

renewal rates of nearly 70 percent. “That’s when the sh*t hit the fan,” spluttered industry watcher Bevin Curfew. “At that rate, it’s just a matter of years - about 100 years in fact - before dot-com is overrun. They were wise to chuck in the towel now before it just became embarrassing.”

By Alta KahntrolIn a strongly worded letter to the ICANN Board, the world’s governments have demanded a veto of all future uses of letters, numbers or characters in any domain names on the internet.

“Many GAC members use these letters and numbers in sensitive communications. It is imperative we assess each name before it is added to the internet,” read the papyrus scroll.

Governments demand veto on all names

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide -- Mahatma Gandhi


ICANNWiki is the independent, collaborative resource for the ICANN community.

A not-for-profit organization dedicated to the growth, development, and distribution of knowledge surrounding internet governance, ICANNWiki’s mission is to educate and give each person on the planet a voice in guiding the future of the Internet.

Edit-a-thon in Buenos Aires

We will be hosting an edit-a-thon at ICANN Buenos Aires on two days - 22 and 24 June - from 11.30am to 1pm.

ICANNWiki is a small team of editors and contributors. Our goal is to continue to create and collaborate on relevant and educational articles. An edit-a-thon is a small, but powerful tool to start, grow or edit the information on ICANNWiki, and build a community of contributors.

Changes can start small - create or fill in your personal or company page, fix a small error. Perhaps you have some insight into the new gTLD Program or IANA Transition? Come and choose your level of participation! Hashtag: #ICWEditathon.

p8

p12

p37

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ICANNWiki.com

Some relevant pages to check out (and improve on)* Universal acceptance. Making sure that IDNs work seamlessly across the internet: http://icannwiki.com/Universal_acceptance* IANA transition: The big topic of the moment: http://icannwiki.com/IANA_Functions_Stewardship_Transition* ICANN 53 -Buenos Aires. Constantly updated information on the meeting: http://icannwiki.com/ICANN_53_-_Buenos_Aires

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Framed by a striking backdrop of wood, steel, bolts and neon, this spring, digital entrepreneur Baroness Martha

Lane Fox made a passionate call for a British national institution dedicated to digital transformation.

Delivering the distinguished annual Dimbleby Lecture for the BBC, she said “the values of the internet have always been a dialogue between private companies and public bodies. And right now the civic, public, non-commercial side of that equation needs a boost: it needs more weight. It’s time to balance the world of dot com.”

Lane Fox’s solution, dubbed Dot Everyone, would be no normal public body, she argued. Its headline priorities would be threefold: digital inclusion; increasing the number of women in technology; and ethics. But what she was really arguing for was a concept, not details - a structure, like a radio transmitter - ready to be brought to life with the voices and actions of humanity.

With this eloquent manifesto - well-worth watching and experiencing in full - Lane Fox became the latest prominent figure to reach for public solutions to the manifold problems of the Net. In the UK, she joins web co-inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, with his Digital Magna Carta, and the BBC’s Sherlock and Mycroft - Tony Ageh and Bill Thompson - champions of the BBC Digital Archive and the broader notion of Digital Public Space.

Each of these figures is tuned to some of the blatant disappointments of our networked creation - most notably, rampant surveillance, blind consumerism, and deepening inequality. In a phrase, it is what Fordham law professor, Joel Reidenberg, has described as the perversely inverted reality of “transparent citizens, living in a world of non-transparent governments and corporations” - a condition that profoundly challenges democracy and the rule of law.

For these ills, each of these critics has laid particular charge at the internet giants and the blinkered profit-motive that is the driving force at each layer of the Net. They see an unhealthy symbiosis between the heavy hand of digital capitalism and the eviscerated state, latching onto technology as a quick-fix panacea to systemic societal challenges, from health and education, to community unrest and law enforcement.

Many who agree with the diagnosis of Lane Fox and her peers disagree with their solutions. They anticipate the compromises that might follow if there were indeed a public body, a public space, a public code of values for the internet. Such critiques do a disservice to the ideas being mooted. These compromises are precisely the issues to

which these figures have acquired sensitivity, through long and frank experience. And they are proposing puzzle pieces towards a better future - not claiming the whole picture.

Lane Fox can anticipate that the klaxon call of “child safety” should not justify a heavily filtered content layer. Equally, she can see that our laws and norms around personal data require fundamental reconsideration. Institutions do not need to come up with all the answers. They can set standards, lead by example, promote valuable work by others, and provide easy-access grants and support to community-driven projects.

Equally, Berners-Lee can anticipate that, unless states engaging in mass surveillance sign up to instruments such as a Digital Magna Carta, we cannot address the issue effectively. He can use one general idea - that lawlessness is undesirable in digital space - to advocate for fine-grained solutions, tailored to the contexts of individual countries and different cultural, political and legal traditions.

Ageh and Thompson can anticipate that draconian copyright laws are the thorn in the side of creative public space, of the kind that encourages and permits remixing and derivative cultural works.

Unshackled from the need to constantly attract the most eyeballs, the BBC can advocate more healthy accommodations of digital life. They can use the BBC’s world-class engineering capacity, coupled with public broadcasting experience, to devise platforms capable of serving the delicate, constantly-evolving balance between anonymity and identity, and between privacy and publicness, to encourage safe, open and progressive discussion and debate online.

There is no silver bullet to a spectrum of issues warranting a spectrum of solutions. But if we disregard the potential value of public-minded, civic, non-profit solutions for the digital equivalent of roads, parks, libraries, museums and elections, we deprive ourselves of a brighter future.

These are gateways that ought to provide the same liberal freedoms, norms and dependable safeguards as those essential elements of civic, public life. n

In defence of public space on the internet

Julia Powles is a researcher in law and technology at the University of Cambridge.

Martha Lane Fox before a 1920s radio transmitter, Science Museum, London

ion (internet of names): issue #5 @ icann buenos aires

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