I’ve been surprised at the lack of comments about the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) mid-term review of their Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with ICANN. With the political uncertainty of an election year in the US, the NTIA response to its consultation was always going to be cautious. However, it is disappointing that it does’nt really say much at all and gives little guidance on the way forward - but the challenge is there for ICANN: “you’ve heard the comments and concerns, now work out how to address them.”

A lot of the responses to the Notice of Inquiry were about the lack of adequate safeguards, in particular for those who are not well represented in ICANN. This must be addressed. As BITS/Financial Round Table said in its contribution, it is necessary to “ensure the views of organizations that rely on the Internet … are fully considered”. It will be important for ICANN to show how wider business, economic, social and political interests will be safeguarded.

I now believe that it is up to ICANN to respond by defining what the organisation should look like post transition and how effective accountability can be provided.

ICANN has a new Chairman and this provides an excellent opportunity for him to inject new thinking. In my humble opinion (IMHO), Peter Dengate-Thrush needs to respond to this challenge and lead the process. Time is short and we need to start working on clear proposals for what ICANN could look like post transition.

I’m still recovering from the recent ICANN meeting in New Delhi. As well as a hand injury from a fall at the airport (which started off the week well), I managed to catch a nasty cough while I was there that I’m still suffering from and I therefore did’nt really get out of the hotel (for those still under the false impression that international meetings are a complete jolly). I do know we were in India though, as there were some great curries on offer!

There was a very full ICANN agenda, but here is a brief summary of some of the key discussions we were involved in:

Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs)

The introduction of IDNs (domain names in non-Latin scripts) will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since its inception, so it is not surprising that policy making about IDNs could take a long time. The discussions in Delhi were another step forward on that journey and IDNs were on the agenda for a number of constituency meetings.

The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and country code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO) representatives met to discuss the issues regarding IDN two letter country code Top Level Domains and this discussion will continue at the next meeting. As part of its communiqué to ICANN, the GAC advised that the public policy principles it previously developed for ccTLDs are relevant also to IDN ccTLDs.

The discussion about a ‘fast-track’ process for introducing IDN ccTLDs in the near-term was also discussed in several meetings. As some will know, I’m not convinced how fast a ‘fast track’ will be able to act, particularly as the key policy decisions will need to be made via the formal (lengthier) policy development process. However, next steps were agreed and the working group will submit its final report to the ICANN board in June 2008.

New generic top level domains (gTLDs)

The process for introducing new generic top level domains (gTLDs) was discussed and there is some pressure from potential applicants who naturally want to know when they can submit bids and how much they will need to pay. There is also some pressure from potential accredited registries who want to become accredited so that they can partner with applicants, but don’t yet know the criteria they will need to meet as these are being developed. Work has been progressing on an implementation plan based on the policy development work done by the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) and ICANN apparently hopes to start accepting bids for new gTLDs by the end of 2008 at the earliest. I expect that date may need to slip, as there is much work to be done by ICANN and the various consultants before everything will be ready.

Joint Project Agreement
In the open session on the JPA review, the ICANN Chairman helpfully ‘clarified’ that the ICANN submission to the review was not seeking an immediate end to the JPA, but dialogue about what will happen when it ends in 18 months time. Many present seemed to agree that we should use the time to discuss what accountabilty and oversight will be needed for an independent ICANN. I suspect there will not be so much agreement about what form this should take. As I pointed out, this is actually quite a tight timescale for an international multi-stakeholder discussion and dialogue will need to develop rapidly if an acceptable solution is to be found.

The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) of ICANN have reported the results of their investigation into Domain Name Front Running (DNFR).  The conclusion, after a pretty thorough analysis, concurs with our findings that there are no provable cases of DNFR.  It also highlights the major issue that there is widespread confusion amongst registrants as to how the domain name industry works and their expectations are very different from reality.

One other very interesting part of the report is the figures given for the volumes of certain lookups done in the .com and .net.  For example in July 2007 there were 3.9 billion  WHOIS lookups for .com and .net !

The list of things that we’ll be discussing at the forthcoming ICANN meeting seems to be growing longer by the day. I’m travelling to Delhi tomorrow and you can bet that by the time I’ve landed there will be yet more last minute papers and additional meetings. For the time being, my topic list includes:

- The draft ICANN 2009 budget (just issued on Monday) which has expenses rising by $15m or 36% to $57m. One of the first things to strike me is that the cost of new gTLDs in 2009 is over $12m, but spend on security and stability is only $3.5m! It feels the wrong way around to me.

-  The NTIA request for comment and the ICANN approach to the mid-term review. Like a number of others, we’re calling for discussions about the possible transition during the remaining 18 months of the agreement. ICANN are in full lobbying mode though and are encouraging standard emails (for which they’ll helpfully provide the template) directly to the US Government calling for them to deliver on previous promises. I’m surprised at this approach, which has been amusingly labelled ‘astroturfing’ in Brett Fausett’s blog.

- The possible accreditation of registries. In theory, minimum standards for registry providers has to be a good thing for registrants and registrars, but the devil will be in the detail of course.

There will also be the latest on the new gTLD process, domain name tasting, IPV4 address exhaustion, domain name front running, DNSSEC and increasing participation. A busy week ahead then…..

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the United States Dept of Commerce has called for comments on the transition to the private sector of the technical coordination and management of the Internet’s domain name and addressing system. This is in the form of the mid-term review of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the NTIA and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

This isn’t the sort of consultation where a 3 line comment would be appropriate and our response extends to almost 3 pages. Our view is that:

- there is more to be done to improve participation in and effectiveness of the ICANN supporting structure.

- the operational checks that the NTIA currently perform should ultimately be integrated fully into ICANN/IANA functionality.

- there should be in-depth discussions amongst all relevant stakeholders over the remaining eighteen months of the JPA to develop a shared vision of a post-transition ICANN. In particular, what will ICANN’s accountabilities be and to whom?

I’m reminded of the TS Eliot quote “if I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”!

The link to our full response is here:

http://www.nominet.org.uk/news/latest/?contentId=4767

Yesterday ICANN announced that they are proposing to remove their five-day ‘Add Grace Period’ which previously allowed registrars to rectify errors when registering new domain names without cost. Due to serial abuse of this facility by speculators testing the profitability of domain names through advertising revenues, ICANN will instead debit the payment as soon as the domain name is registered.

Although this change will clearly deter tasters from registering high volumes of domains speculatively, it will also make the process of registering less flexible for registrars. It remains to be seen exactly how the new process will work, but it is probably safe to assume that if the registrar has to pay these costs upfront they will ultimately be passed to their customers.

When we took steps against domain tasting in August 2006, we decided to introduce limits on the number of domains a registrar could delete. Our limit for deletions to rectify spelling errors etc is five domains or 5% of the total number of domains registered but not yet invoiced (whichever is higher) but the limit for practices such as domain tasting is zero, and the limits form part of our registrar agreement, the formal contract that all our registrars sign up to. We believe this solution is neater, as it effectively counters the practice of domain tasting but at the same time allows some flexibility for registrars where genuine errors have occurred.

In a separate move, Google announced last week that they will start to monitor domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within the current five-day grace period, and exclude them from their AdSense program. Such a move would clearly strike at the heart of the problem. If tasters stop receiving revenues for pay-per-click ads associated with the domains they are testing, they will soon stop trying.

Both proposals have their merits, and it is encouraging to see that concerted efforts are being made from various sectors within the industry that could herald the beginning of the end of this practice.

Domain Name Front Running (DNFR) is a new buzzword acronym for the alleged practice of monitoring someone’s intentions to register domain names and then jumping in and registering them first.

Every now and again we get complaints about this sort of thing and we’ve investigated some of those in some depth in the past.  Our conclusion is that DNFR does not happen but that there are important characteristics in the way domains names are sought that many people do not know about that lead them to believe in something like DNFR.

You can read our full position paper here.

This is an issue that has recently been passed to the ICANN SSAC for them to study but it may turn out to be a waste of their valuable time.

In amongst all of the preparations for the IGF this week, we managed to snatch a quiet moment to draft our formal response to the request for comments on ICANN’s draft Strategic Plan.

There was a packed room in Los Angeles just the other week when we made some verbal inputs on the plan and the future direction of ICANN seems to be a hot topic at the IGF. Increasing participation in ICANN and improving ICANN’s transparency and accountability have been popular themes. So why then are there only 2 comments (of which ours is one) on the most recent draft?

The link to our input is here:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/stratplan-2008/index.html

We’ve just released a position paper on signing the root. There is quite a lot to this but I thought I would attempt to summarise the paper for those of you who don’t want to read the full seven pages.

Read more

I see that there have been a few stories in the press regarding ICANN investigating the practice of registering a domain name based on the search someone has done on that domain name. As far as we are aware this practice is not widespread in the UK. Read more