Category Archives: ICANN

.vla TLD: not so fast, says Flemish governement

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 20 March 2009 None comments
Share

As reported last July, there is a proposal from some Flemish politicians to create a .vla top level domain under the new gTLD process launched by ICANN. The proposal further elaborated that the Flemish government would have to cover the costs.

Not so fast, says the Flemish government. According to this press article, it wants to be sure the market is large enough to justify pouring all that money into the ICANN process.  They will hire a consultant to study the market and come up with a business case. Or not.

In this period of economic downturn, even wealthy communities like Flanders want to avoid expensive and risky investments.  ICANN does not yet understand the message that it has to adapt its RFP to the actual economic context.

Some possible ideas:

  • stop dreaming about recovering past expenses on the gTLD program;
  • fractioning the payment of the application fee in several installments, which would make it easier to negotiate with investors;
  • postpone for two or three years the collection of the annual registry fee, to allow new gTLD operators to start operating in a financially sound context, with no loans and other debts that may compromise their existence.

I am well aware the above-mentioned article is quite misinformed in that it mixes up registry operators with registrars. Still, the core element of the cost vs risk of the new gTLD process is symptomatic of the concerns I heard from  several wannabee registry operators.

At-Large Summit news from ICANN Mexico

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 4 March 2009 None comments
Share

I was appointed to the ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee recently and I am very proud of that. This group of esteemed security experts are a crucial element of the ICANN community, because their task is to identify threats to the good working fo the Internet and suggest possible remedies. This is not a glamourous position, but rather behind the scenes work in the interest of the Internet user community at large.

On a similar note, I had the pleasure to co-chair the At-Large working group on DNS security issues, with came up with a statement we were reasonably happy with.  The best part was actually today, where we received kudos from other parts of the community, which tend to view the At-Large more as a political obligation of ICANN that a really useful component.

I hope this will both help the recognition of the At-Large as serious players in the ICANN context, but also motivate the At-Large members, who are often depicted as jerks and end up believing they are.

I’m on You Tube

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 4 March 2009 None comments
Share

It’s not every I make it to You Tube, so I wanted to share with you this shameless self promotion.

Whois, my friend

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 10 February 2009 None comments
Share

One of my relatives moved into a new house the other day. No big news, except he is a registrant of a generic domain name.

He spent a lot of his time to inform utility companies, banks, insurance companies, administrations, etc of his address change, BUT he did  not tell his registrar.

You see, his registrar sends him every two or three years an e-mail asking to pay for the renewal. He then gets the invoice through e-mail. No postal mail is sent at all. That is all he knows about the domain name he uses. Other than that, it just works. E-mail to his domain gets delivered,  his web site is reachable. What else should he care about ?

As it stands, he should really care about updating his records with his registrar. A whois query on his domain name now returns a false postal address. This honest citizen now has the crowds of those hideous people who leave false information in the whois. Surely, law enforcement authorities may think of him as a terrorist covering his tracks. Intellectual property lawyers may think he is stealing somebody’s trade mark. According to term 3.7.7.2 of the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement, he risks seeing his domain cancelled.

The sad truth is that this nice guy actually does not even know his $10/year domain is at risk. In the unlikely event his domain name gets cancelled, pleading the good faith will not help a lot. He may not notice it until he gets a phoen call telling himl the e-mails to him are undelivered.  It will be too late to react, because human errors by uninformed customers are not taken into account in ICANN policies. So, before he says  “I should have known” maybe I should tell him.

Commentaires à propos du cahier des charges pour les nouveaux TLD

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 18 December 2008 2 comments
Share

Commentaires envoyés à l’ICANN concernant les nouveaux noms de domaines

Comme de nombreux autres intervenants, je m’interroge au sujet du coût lié tant à la soumission qu’à l’exploitation d’un TLD attribué dans le cadre de cet exercice.

De fait, les coûts figurant actuellement dans le cahier des charges induisent le choix politique de gTLD vendant les noms de domaine en nombre. Il n’y a pas de place dans le processus actuel pour des gTLD visant une communauté limitée. Il semble difficilement imaginable qu’un registre vendant moins de 200.000 noms de domaine par an puisse survivre, compte tenu de la concurrence sur les prix entre TLD.

Par ailleurs, il peut s’écouler plus d’un an entre la soumission du dossier et le lancement de l’exploitation commerciale du TLD. Cela implique une lourde charge financière, qui suppose que les soumissionnaires disposent d’une solide trésorerie. Ce n’est pas le cas des start-ups. Cela pose donc une barrière à l’entrée qui favorise les acteurs historiques, qui ne devront pas supporter de tels coûts, puisqu’ils disposent déjà de tout le nécessaire: personnel, infrastructure et revenus réguliers

Ailleurs dans le document, il est demandé de présenter dans le dossier de candidature les comptes annuels d’exercices précédents. Cela implique à nouveau que des start-ups, ou des sociétés non-encore légalement formées ne pourront pas soumissionner.

Notons également que la nécessité de présenter dans le dossier de candidature l’infrastructure technique qui sera utilisée.  La conséquence est que le soumissionnaire devra choisir, dès le départ  un gestionnaire technique (backend registry services provider).  Du point de vue commercial, il serait pourtant avantageux que la mise en concurrence des prestataires techniques puissent se faire après la première ou la deuxième phase du processus d’acceptation du dossier par l’ICANN. Cela offrirait une position de négociation plus avantageuse au soumissionnaire.

Dans le contexte économique et financier actuel, il est plus que probable que de nouveaux entrepreneurs ne seront pas en mesure de concurrencer les opérateurs établis et donc d’offrir de véritables alternatives si l’ICANN ne révise pas fondamentalement à la baisse tant le droit de soumission que la contribution annuelle.

A ce titre, je soutiens la proposition citée dans les commentaires de dotCities ( http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/msg00086.htm ) et ajoutant que cela peut s’appliquer à de nombreux cas de TLD visant des communautés limitées en nombre.

Il convient également d’éclaircir et de chiffrer le montant du remboursement possible si le soumissionnaire décide de retirer son dossier.  Il est important pour tous les candidats qu’ils soient en mesure de présenter un plan financier clair à leurs bailleurs de fonds. Dans ce domaine, le cahier des charges doit être limpide, y compris, et surtout pour les différentes phases d’évaluation que l’ICANN fera sous-traiter auprès de consultants externes, que les candidats devront rémunérer directement.

Concernant la problématique de la “moralité et de l’ordre public”, il est nécessaire  d’insister sur le fait qu’en cette matière l’ICANN doit strictement se limiter à la chaine de caractères constituant le TLD. Toute présomption concernant les domaines de second niveau qui pourraient être enregistrés sous ce TLD, ou sur le contenu de sites web utilisant ce TLD, seraient clairement en dehors du mandat de l’ICANN.