Category Archives: Internet

At-Large Summit news from ICANN Mexico

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 4 March 2009 None comments

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

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

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

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.

The ICANN new generic TLD process (Las Vegas edition)

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 16 December 2008 None comments

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.