Category Archives: ICANN

The ICANN new generic TLD process (Las Vegas edition)

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 16 December 2008 None comments
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I have not submitted any comments on ICANN’s new gTLD process, mostly because many other people have said more diplomatically what I think, but I thought I could blog about it.

My main concern from the beginning was that the process should allow any serious candidate to run with a reasonable chance to be able to actually start running a gTLD. This includes small and medium sized communities and startup companies with little seed money.  This also includes registry models that may not favour mass registrations. For all these, the current model is flawed.

Communities based on values, whether cultural or ethnic are by definition limited in scope. So are communities based on geography, although they could larger.  These communities could get their TLD, if they have strong political support and  the attached financing. It this case, the short term profits are not the registration fees themselves, but the prestige linked to a community having its own TLD. I bet the application for the  .VLA TLD will succeed, because it has the strong political support of a wealthy community.

For the startup registries wishing to enter the gTLD arena and compete to a certain degree with the incumbents, the skies are cloudy, to say the least. First and foremost: you need money. A lot of it. Anthony Van Couvering  at Names@Work has a timeline, which details the associated costs. However, a lot of the costs are not appearing. My personal estimation is that the whole process, up to the contract signing ceremony with ICANN,  is USD 1 million at the very minimum. More realistically, you need  50% more to be on the safe side.

400K will go to ICANN and its subcontracted  evaluators. The associated costs with the evaluations can quickly add up.  At this stage, there is no way to know exactly how much they will cost, because there are many parameters.  ICANN tells you these costs will be payed directly to the evaluators, not through ICANN.  This will make it even more opaque.

The rest needs to cover consultants,  lawyers, salaries, ICANN meeting sponsorships, meetings with your community leaders to gain support for your application (and everything that goes with it: profits sharing, gadgets, gourmet dinners, escorts, you name it) and travel to ICANN meetings for you and your staff.

On top of that, ICANN wants you to be able to guarantee the operation of the TLD for 3 years, even if your TLD is not a success.

Note that this will not guarantee at all that your application will succeed.  But at least it will guarantee one an a half year of hard work and travel to exotic places for two or three people, and others on a as-needed basis.  Now go out and tell your banker, if he has not gone bankrupt already.

If you are lucky enough to reach the contract signing stage, the real work begins: hire staff, build an infrastructure, convince registrars to carry your TLD, set up a sunrise period . These are another four or five months without a single cent falling on your bank account.  In conclusion, this whole new gTLD process will be most profitable for established actors, who will not have to cover many of the above-mentioned costs, or have the reserves to cover them.

Even if ICANN revises parts of their RFP, I am not sure it will attract the 500 applications it expects. This RFP should have been published 8 years ago, at the height ofthe Internet bubble, when everything related to the Net received full funding. Now, in this recession period, investors and bankers are cautious. It will not be easy to find partners who are willing to potentially loose USD 1.5 million, if it cannot be demonstrated with certainty they can recoup their investment in less than two years.

Good luck. May the farce be with you.

The ALAC’s theething problems

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 16 December 2008 None comments
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It has been three months now I have been elected to ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee.  The 15 of us do not always share the same view and that is healthy. All these unpaid volunteers deserve, I think, a lot of respect for their commitment. Unlike other people in the ICANN circus, most of them are not into Internet governance issues as a part of their day job. However, the fact they are not full time Internet policy professionals is also the root cause of the ALAC’s theething problems.

There is a lot happening within the ICANN community. It ranges from technical issues to legal and political ones. Obviously, no-one can pretend to be an expert in all  matters. Still, the ALAC is presumed to be able to have an opinion on any matter. The amount of documents to read is daunting. It is by itself a half time job to process  them all, further complicated for those who do not have a fluent English reading.

One of the great features of the ICANN process is the possibility to submit comments. It of course takes time to read the documents, understand them, reach out to the At-large community, summarize point of views, reach consensus and finally draft a statement. All this within 30 days.  Often, the ALAC misses the deadline.

This is further complicated by the global nature of the community. There is no way one could identify a convenient time slot to hold teleconferences that would suit all participants.  The inconvenience is shared. For those in the Asia Pacific region, they need to call when they should actually go to bed. Europeans and Africans have to call during business hours. North Americans need to wake up early and arrive late at work.  However, at the end of the day, people look at who is signing  their paycheck. And it is not ICANN or a company that has a business interest in participating.  This may explain why some people cannot attend all meetings, however committed they are.

Some of the above issues are part of the report on the  review of the ALAC currently going on. If the board addresses the recommandations in the report, it will greatly help making the ALAC more efficient.

I once objected to seeing the ICANN board members compensated for their time.  I changed my mind on this. This is a real, full time, job.  I would think that Veni Markovski’s statistics on his time spent on ICANN board business are under-estimated, based on conversations I had with current board members.

On a similar subject Stéphane Van Gelder echoes his experience as a GNSO councillor and asks how long such a model built on volunteering can last. This is indeed a good question, because when volunteers will no more be able to participate effectively, only those who are ICANNing for a living will be able to call the tune.

ICANN to Auction new generic top level domains

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 9 August 2008 1 comments
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ICANN has just published a paper from its contractor PowerAuctions LLC, regarding the use of auctions to award new TLD strings in case of contention.

I can understand what ICANN wants to avoid. In the past, it has been criticized for using the “beauty contest” model with the redelegation of the .net TLD. It was finally “redelegated” to its incumbent operator, although it was obvious to many industry observers that other bidders were as good, if not better on several points. There was a large part of subjectivity in the decision, simply because beauty criteria are a very personal matter.

However, the auction model is based on the idea that whoever wins the auction will be able to recoup its investment on the sale of domain name, and that the goal of the gTLD operator is to sell as many names as possible. It also promotes a capitalistic model, where only those with the most money will be granted generic strings, regardless of other considerations. There is no room for gTLDs wishing to remain purposely small.

It is not clear yet if the auction model will be the only one used by ICANN for all new gTLDs. It would be unfortunate if it were, because there are different TLD models and communities. Not all potential gTLD operators are looking to “get rich quick”. Some may even care about the community they wish to serve, and actually put societal values before profits. How naive they are. What will matter is not how you are going to serve your community, but how much you are willing to pay ICANN for it.

By announcing it will go to an auction model, ICANN is actually creating potential for contention. After all ,it may be a wise investment decision for wealthy copycats to simply watch what early proposers of new gTLD strings are doing and how much support their proposal gets. Those early proposers have spent a lot of time and money over the last two years in participating in ICANN processes to launch this new TLD round. They have done all the dirty work.  In the meantime, copycats have been silently watching.  Once the auction opens, early proposers will have burnt all their cash and will not be able to compete with the copycats.

Advice to those early proposers: keep some cash to pay your lawyer’s fees and get some undisputable proof your came up with the idea first. There’s going to be blood, sweat and tears. Those who are going to steal your idea will hold no quarter.

A public forum has been established. Comments should be submitted to auction-consultation@icann.org

ICANN consultations on the Registrar Accreditation Agreement

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 15 July 2008 None comments
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ICANN has started a new round of consultations with regard to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. The consultation is open through 4 August 2008. I submitted the following comment:

3.3 Public Access to Data on Registered Names

This section of the RAA has been left untouched, although it is well known to ICANN and its community that this contravenes several national and international laws.

See http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2003/wp76_en.pdf
and http://www.icann.org/correspondence/schaar-to-cerf-12mar07.pdf

Quoting this last letter: “Privacy issues stemming from the making available of personal data in the context of the operation of the WHOIS services should be solved through amendments to the registrar accreditation agreement that would offer at least to those registrars located in EU member countries to comply with EU data protection legislation in accordance with the basic principles of data protection and privacy.”

How can ICANN justify that it forces, by contract, other parties to break the law ?

Of course, one could say that it is customary in most European countries laws that contract clauses which go against the laws are considered void. As an example, both the French and Belgian Civil Codes define in article 1133 that “La cause est illicite, quand elle est prohibée par la loi [...]“. Hence, European registrars could invoke the legal requirement to not publish data about individuals in their whois database , and to inform ICANN they are not able to fully comply with article 3.3.  Most don’t, but rather have registrants accept terms by which they agree to see their data published. This lack of courage has always amazed me.

Gartner on new Generic Top Level Domains

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 11 July 2008 None comments
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Gartner, the well known IT consulting company, has published a report on the new top level domains that will appear some time next year.

The report totally misses the mark. In a pure US centric vision, it focuses on “.com” as the must-have TLD, totally overlooking the fact that a “.com” is mostly worthless e.g. in Germany, where “.de” is the TLD one must have to succeed locally. There are many countries where the local TLD has much more value than a “.com”.

The report is also clueless in that it states that “proposals previously rejected by ICANN, such as the creation of “.xxx” for adult-oriented sites, are also likely to be commercially successful“, when everybody but Gartner knows that the newly adopted rules were designed to precisely avoid the “.xxx” debacle to happen again.

Going further down the path of ignorance, Gartner also states that : “we would expect that an extension such as “.movie” would have similar value“. I am afraid “.movie”, just like “.travel” or “.name” will only have modest success, because they are focused on the English speaking market, and have little value outside North America. In this specific case, my British colleagues usually use the word “film” rather than “movie”. Looks like “.movie” will not even be able to cross the Atlantic.

How much credit you give to this report depends on the credit you give to Gartner, of course. I am afraid this one is not going to help the company’s track record. Sometimes, silence is better.