Entries tagged with “policy” from Domains / Internet Technology News - DNS News

Nominet, the registry operator for co.uk, have published the summary and analysis report on their recently held consultation on the release of reserved short domains.

The document, which runs to 25 pages, covers the background of the consultation process as well as providing an overview of the feedback received.

The consultation was open from March 8th 2010 to June 8th 2010 and during that time over 150 responses were received.

You can download the document from the Nominet site here

Over the last couple of years several of the gTLD registry operators have requested contractual changes with ICANN.

In many cases the change was small enough that it fit into what is called the Registry Services Evaluation Process (RSEP), which is the case of "new services" such as Verisign's Registry Lock.

In other cases, however, the requested change is much bigger and requires that ICANN open it up to public comment.

Such was the case with the proposed "Phased Allocation Program in .JOBS". which has been open to public comment.

You can read the proposal here (PDF), but in essence it broadens the usage scenarios and the possible registrants of .jobs domains quite significantly. Under the current regime companies are restricted to registering their company name or a close derivative. Under the proposal all those restrictions are gone out the window. From a registrant perspective that may seem appealing at first, but the way that this is being pitched could lead to only a very narrow number of registrants actually gaining at any level. Ultimately, however, the only entity that stands to gain would be the registry.

If you have the time take a read over some of the comments - they are quite revealing!

Over the last couple of years several of the gTLD registry operators have requested contractual changes with ICANN.

In many cases the change was small enough that it fit into what is called the Registry Services Evaluation Process (RSEP), which is the case of "new services" such as Verisign's Registry Lock.

In other cases, however, the requested change is much bigger and requires that ICANN open it up to public comment.

Such was the case with the proposed "Phased Allocation Program in .JOBS". which has been open to public comment.

You can read the proposal here (PDF), but in essence it broadens the usage scenarios and the possible registrants of .jobs domains quite significantly. Under the current regime companies are restricted to registering their company name or a close derivative. Under the proposal all those restrictions are gone out the window. From a registrant perspective that may seem appealing at first, but the way that this is being pitched could lead to only a very narrow number of registrants actually gaining at any level. Ultimately, however, the only entity that stands to gain would be the registry.

If you have the time take a read over some of the comments - they are quite revealing!

Several people have made comments about how ICANN has been losing staff over the last few months.

The most recent departure is their head of compliance - David Giza. His interim replacement will be Pam Little.

What makes this departure noteworthy is the level of activity in the compliance department over the past 18 months - the number of registrars whose accreditations were terminated due to non-compliance increased by several hundred percent

Several people have made comments about how ICANN has been losing staff over the last few months.

The most recent departure is their head of compliance - David Giza. His interim replacement will be Pam Little.

What makes this departure noteworthy is the level of activity in the compliance department over the past 18 months - the number of registrars whose accreditations were terminated due to non-compliance increased by several hundred percent

AFNIC, which runs the .fr cctld, has opened a public consultation on the future of .fr from now until September 11th 2010.

The consultation is in the form of a questionnaire covering various aspects of .fr domain name policy on the registration process and how this might be changed to deal with an opening up to all European Union residents.

Under the current proposed policy, for example, they will still require an admin contact with an address in France.

Full details of the consultation - including the editable PDF for the questionnaire are available on the AFNIC site

Nominet, the registry operator that manages *.uk, is planning on releasing both single and two character domain names.

In common with a lot of other ccTLD registry operators, Nominet had blocked single and two character domain names from being registered. However they are now planning on releasing them to the public in a phased plan.

The exact details of "how" the domains will become available have not been decided, which is why the registry is now conducting a consultation period with the public.

The current proposal is not drastically different to the kind of methodology used by several of the gTLD registry operators to handle similar scenarios, although there are a few extra twists. To start with Nominet is speaking of the entire project in terms of "cost recovery", whereas other registries have used this kind of release as a revenue generator. The other thing which is quite interesting is how they plan to differentiate based on the second level ie. org.uk domains, according to their proposal, should be given to charities and not for profits, while co.uk should go to business users. While this is very logical it's still interesting to note that they've "gone back to basics" in some respects.

You can view full details of what Nominet are planning on their site and share your thoughts.

It will be interesting to see how the Nominet registrars and the public react to this news.

Nominet, the registry operator that manages *.uk, is planning on releasing both single and two character domain names.

In common with a lot of other ccTLD registry operators, Nominet had blocked single and two character domain names from being registered. However they are now planning on releasing them to the public in a phased plan.

The exact details of "how" the domains will become available have not been decided, which is why the registry is now conducting a consultation period with the public.

The current proposal is not drastically different to the kind of methodology used by several of the gTLD registry operators to handle similar scenarios, although there are a few extra twists. To start with Nominet is speaking of the entire project in terms of "cost recovery", whereas other registries have used this kind of release as a revenue generator. The other thing which is quite interesting is how they plan to differentiate based on the second level ie. org.uk domains, according to their proposal, should be given to charities and not for profits, while co.uk should go to business users. While this is very logical it's still interesting to note that they've "gone back to basics" in some respects.

You can view full details of what Nominet are planning on their site and share your thoughts.

It will be interesting to see how the Nominet registrars and the public react to this news.

ICANN has terminated DNGlobe LLC's ICANN accreditation effective February 22 2010.

In a letter to DNGlobe ICANN outlined why the registrar's accreditation is being pulled. Apart from anything else they do not have a WHOIS server accessible on port 80 ie. via a browser. Their website is currently unreachable as well, which is not a good sign.

They also owe ICANN fees, though not as much as some registrars recently culled.

What's also interesting is the registrar in question obviously hadn't been paying their registry bills with Verisign, as the letter mentions that Verisign may begin suspending domains immediately.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ICANN Culls Three More Registrars (isquattedyour.eu)
• Bulk Transfer of Hosting365 Inc Domains To Blacknight (blacknight.com)
• New ICANN policy stops domain tasting (news.cnet.com)

Again on the subject of new TLDs ....

One of the "issues" that concerned a number of people is the concept of "vertical separation".

The basic idea is that registries and registrars should be kept separate.

While that is a wonderful Utopian ideal, the reality is that in the real world companies own other companies, people trade in stocks and shares etc., etc. So it's far from being a simple "cut and dried" situation.

It's also a situation that I personally think has been blown out of all proportion. And of course the people who are pushing it hard are the current registry operators. Can you say "monopoly"?
Or how about "fear"?

Be that as it may, the debate has been going on for months. During the Seoul meeting there was a public debate where both sides of the argument were able to "have it out", but while that may have helped clarify things for some people it didn't resolve it.

Fast forward to January 2010.

The GNSO council has now voted that the only way to resolve this issue once and for all is via  a PDP - which is ICANN speak for a quite drawn out policy development process:

A set of formal steps, as defined in the ICANN bylaws, to guide the initiation, internal and external review, timing and approval of policies needed to coordinate the global Internet's system of unique identifiers.

In many cases a PDP can take years to go through the full process, though there have been some exceptions in the recent past (think "tasting").

The motion that the GNSO council approved sets very clear limits on the PDP, but whether or not it will be possible for a policy debate as contentious (for some people) as this to be resolved in the 16 weeks mentioned or not is a different matter.

One of the topics that keeps coming up in ICANN policy discussions and as part of the new TLD application process is "transparency".

ICANN, and the internet community in general, has had plenty of issues in the past with "bad actors" who have caused a lot of issues for everyone (think of many of the registrars who have lost accreditation in the last couple of years for example).

On more than one conference call or policy discussion the issue of a company or a person's track record has come up.

Now while I personally think that anyone who has been knowingly involved in criminal activity OR who has knowingly been involved with a serious breach of ICANN policy (or any of the contracts) should be barred from any further involvement with the DNS, a blanket ban is not without its own set of issues.

The larger the company the more likely it will have been involved with litigation or criminal law suits at some point or other in the past.

And who is pushing for all these "checks and balances" within the ICANN processes? In many cases it's the big brand owners, who live in fear of "squatters" and other "evil doers".

So why do I raise this?

Well George Kirikos has, yet again, managed to dig up some quite revealing data about some of the companies that likely to be involved in new TLDs in the future and who have been very vocal in the ICANN "space" over the last few years.

You can read the full text of what George uncovered here, but suffice to say that a lot of the big brands and companies aren't as "clean" as they'd like us all to be (and no that wasn't a typo).

Unilever, Disney, Coca-Cola, Time Warner, Yahoo! and Telstra are all named and, if you'll excuse the cliche, shamed...

In an interesting move several members of the ICANN community formed an "informal" Working Group to discuss the concept of "expressions of interest" in new TLDs. This all happened very quickly, which is more or less the opposite to how most ICANN related activities progress.

Earlier this evening the group submitted its report / paper to ICANN

The report, which runs to about 11 pages, is concise and seems to have covered most of the areas of interest. What's also interesting to note is that the people involved came from a variety of areas and probably give a reasonably good cross-section of the ICANN community.

If you have a few minutes the document is definitely worth reading and is a nice example of how a group of people can get things done quickly and efficiently when needed.

Now if only the rest of the ICANN processes were this quick to reach consensus!

(Maybe pigs flying is more likely!)

The independent review of the ICM Registry bid for .xxx was held towards the end of September in Washington and the documents from this are now available online

I'd love to summarise them, but there is a very large volume of information (hundreds of pages)

If you have the time to read over them all they include witness statements from Vint Cerf, Milton Mueller, Paul Twomey and several others.

PIR, which is behind the .org (dotOrg) registry, has issued a call for statements of interest from people interested in joining their board.

According to the announcement on the ISOC site PIR is looking for two directors for the period covering July 2010 to July 2013.

Full details of what they're looking for and the application process may be found here

While the announcement does go into plenty of detail about what is required, it's a bit lacking in terms of compensation details.

Are PIR board members renumerated?

Presumably the expenses associated with travelling to the various meetings are covered, but again, there are no details.

ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, explains in plain English what the new "arrangement" for ICANN means both for the organisation and for the global internet community:

ICANN has opened a public comment period on the "Inter Registrar Transfer Policy" (IRTP)

You can read more about the announcement here

What makes this comment period a bit different is that the request for comments has been published in the 6 UN languages ie. English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

ICANN's latest announcement concerns the three registrars who recently lost their accreditation.

The process is now underway to transfer the domains to other registrars....

ICANN has announced that three more registrars have lost their accreditation due to non-compliance with the RAA.

The three registrars have been informed that their agreements with ICANN will not be renewed.

South American Domains (NameFrog), Simply Named and Tahoe Domains have been sent letters by ICANN outlining the decision and the reasons for it.

So what now?

On the plus side, as ICANN's compliance team is becoming more active in pursuing non-compliant registrars the processes for handling the domains held by de-accredited registrars is becoming more finely tuned.

Expect to see an announcement very shortly asking for other registrars to takeover the various portfolios, though this time round they are incredibly small.

According to the latest figures I was able to access the breakdown would be as follows:

• Namefrog appears to have less than 300 gTLD domains
• Simply Named about the same number
• Tahoe less than 250

So why did they lose their accreditations?

• Namefrog did not have a whois server
• Simply Named wasn't escrowing registrant data and hadn't paid their ICANN fees
• Tahoe no data escrow and owed fees to ICANN
  

In related news, Lead Networks are now seeking arbitration!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lead Networks Lose ICANN Accreditation (isquattedyour.eu)
• Tucows Takes Over Parava's Domains (isquattedyour.eu)

So what does a ccTLD operator do when they're worried about cashflow?

They go off and spend thousands on a glossy annual report obviously!



The IEDR's annual report and review for 2008 is the glossiest one they've produced to date. As usual it contains plenty of fluff while ignoring anything of substance.

In the Chairman's introductory statement they reveal that:

"The board has agreed terms of reference for a Policy Advisory Committee (PAC) to advise on .ie namespace policy matters, the membership to be representative of relevant stakeholder organisations"

Well that's charming.
The document that was being discussed between the IEDR and its resellers was firmly slanted in the IEDR's favour and had not been accepted by the reseller community.
So now it looks like the IEDR have done what they always do and unilaterally implemented a change without accepting feedback from the companies that pay their bills (registrars / resellers) or those that give them a raison d'etre (registrants).

Scanlan goes on to infer that the IEDR have been appointed as the registry operator for the .ie namespace permanently. This is not the case, unless whoever wrote the Comreg documents is a very bad communicator, which I somehow doubt.

Making repeated reference to the Comreg report is annoying, as Comreg did not actually publish the report of the external consultants. All that was published was the result of the public consultation - and even that was months behind schedule and did not reveal anything really meaty.

So what about the rest of this year's report?

Well it has got lots of plenty glossy photos of IE registrants (Why aren't they using this in publications that the public see???) there isn't a huge amount of substance.



The report states the following about the aftermarket which underlines the level of their ignorance

".. Furthermore, there is no secondary market for .ie domains, which reduces the incentive for 'domainers' to engage in cybersquatting and domain warehousing"

So all "domainers" are "cybersquatters"?

Why does the IEDR have such a ridiculous fear of the secondary market?

Other registry operators such as AFNIC, which also restricts registrations to some degree, do not see aftermarket activity in such negative terms.

It could also be argued that the registry's restriction on trade in domains is unlawful

One could also argue that the IEDR's current "managed registry" model, whatever that is exactly, contravenes Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In case you're not familiar with that specific article here it is:

"ARTICLE 10

   1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
   2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. "

Has anyone ever challenged the consitutionality of the IEDR's stance?

As a body that draws its powers from Comreg's regulation and Irish legislation it cannot continually use the excuse of being a private company.

But I still fail to see how the IEDR can justify the expense of a glossy report like this yet be incapable of communicating an important policy change to its stakeholders (sole traders may now register their surname). Spending money on improving their communications with stakeholders would appear to be a better way of investing their funds.

Do Comreg care enough to actually act?

Or will they sit idly by while the IEDR cherrypick which voices to hear and implement policy changes with little or no real input?

UPDATE: I've attached the full report (4.2 MB PDF):
IEDR AN Report 08-web.pdf

Lead Networks, who I mentioned a few weeks ago, have lost their ICANN accreditation.

The ICANN announcement includes some of the details and ICANN are currently seeking expressions of interest from other registrars to take over the portfolio of domains (approximately 70 - 80 thousand names according to ICANN)

According to ICANN Lead Networks was escrowing data, so the registrant details are thought to be both complete and accurate. This makes a very pleasant and welcome change compared to some of the situations that have arisen with previous de-accreditations, where registrant data was not being escrowed and was not supplied by the registrar.

ICANN's compliance team seems to be working flat out at present, which is probably a good thing for the industry as a whole!

It's also interesting to note that the number of accredited registrars is dropping, as companies either merge or sell out.