Blog: Peter Dengate-Thrush

I’m very pleased to report that Minds + Machines’ parent company, Top Level Domain Holdings, Ltd., today appointed Peter Dengate Thrush, former Chairman of ICANN, as its Executive Chairman.

Here’s the TLDH press release in full:

Peter Dengate Thrush appointed as Executive Chairman of TLDH

The Directors of Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (AIM: TLDH.L), the only publicly traded company focused exclusively on acquiring and operating new generic top-level domains (“gTLD”), are delighted to announce that Mr Peter Dengate Thrush has been appointed Executive Chairman of the Company with immediate effect. Mr Dengate Thrush was until recently the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”), where in June 2011 he led the ICANN Board to approve the programme to create new gTLDs. (more…)

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. — Matthew 19:6

The ICANN Board has just voted to get rid of all co-ownership restrictions between registries and registrars. This is major news, with far-reaching consequences. ICANN’s announcement says:

“In the absence of existing policy or new bottom-up policy recommendations, the Board saw no rationale for placing restrictions on cross-ownership;” said Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of the Board. “Any possible abuses can be better addressed by properly targeted mechanisms. Co-ownership rules are not an optimal technique in this area.”

This is the only principled decision the ICANN Board could have come to, and they deserve a lot of credit for doing it. By “principled,” I mean taking ICANN’s stated institutional principles and following them to their logical conclusion.

The decision is a surprise (more below on that) and will fundamentally change and liberate what has become a stagnant commercial ecosystem. Restrictions put in place to break up the monopoly of Network Solutions had long since become a burdensome and pointless legacy. ICANN has restored the issue of competition to where it belongs by reserving to themselves the ability to “refer issues to relevant competition authorities.”

The decision has all kinds of consequences, most of them good:

• VeriSign or any other registry can now run a registrar (at least in theory), while GoDaddy and other registrars can run a registry.
• Brand owners that start branded TLDs won’t have to navigate a ridiculous obstacle course just to register their own names for themselves.
• Small cultural-linguistic TLDs will now be able to set up a public-facing registrar to service their customers in their own language, instead of going begging to registrars to carry their small-volume TLDs.
• Most important, it means that new TLDs will be able to market themselves. For many new gTLDs, this ruling will mean the difference between slow death and a profitable business.

This last critical point needs explanation. Any Internet business, which is most businesses these days, relies on being able to drive traffic to their site and converting a percentage of visitors into paying customers. Under the rules that separated registries from registrars, this would not have been allowed for new gTLDs, because registries would not have been allowed to sell directly to the public, and any marketing money spent on promoting their new gTLD would have had to be purely of the “awareness and branding” variety, which is very expensive, difficult to measure, and of uncertain effectiveness. The new ruling now makes it possible for new gTLDs to devise marketing plans that send customers directly to a website where they can actually buy the domain name being promoted. This change may well be the difference between life and death for many new gTLDs.

As for existing gTLDs, they will be able to play in this new reality, with some exceptions:

ICANN will permit existing registry operators to transition to the new form of registry agreement, except that additional conditions may be necessary and appropriate to address particular circumstances of established registries.

The decision was a surprise because betting men were giving odds that the Board would institute a cross-ownership restriction limiting registrars and registries to owning between 2% and 15% of each other. The two percent figure is what the Board voted for in March 2010, a vote widely understood to be a warning to the so-called ICANN community to reach an agreement on the issue. The fifteen percent figure is what had been lobbied for heavily by various powerful incumbent players, who buttressed their position with the argument that this was what had been done in the past. But the Board (rightly) cast that argument aside:

Whereas, historical contract prohibitions on registries acquiring registrars do not provide a compelling basis for principled decision-making….

The new landscape will require everyone in the domain name business to re-examine their business, their partners, their strategy. It will have consequences between those I enumerated above. It will re-invigorate the industry, and it will help establish the respect that ICANN has lacked for so long.

Those of us who have grown cynical from years of contrasting and comparing ICANN’s principles with its actions are feeling an uncomfortable sense of possibility — uncomfortable because in the past that feeling has always been a precursor to a cruel letdown. Let’s hope instead that this proper and even slightly courageous decision is actually a sign of ICANN growing up into the organization many of its founders hoped it could become. If so, this Board will be remembered as a group of people who loved the Internet and did what they could to help it prosper.

I would be remiss if I didn’t recall what was to me the spark for the spinefulness the Board has shown, and probably for the entire new gTLD process: the remarks by ex-Board member Susan Crawford during the debacle of the original vote on .XXX in March 2007, which she rightly called “weak and unprincipled” — using “unprincipled” in exactly the same sense that the current ICANN Board has acted in a principled way today. Both her stinging dissent and her later remarks set out all of the weaknesses and hypocrisy of the ICANN approach to gTLDs at that time. Her voice against ICANN’s culture of political meddling, censorship, ad-hoc policy-making, and craven concessions to intellectual property lobbyists was a lone one. But she said what many of us were thinking, and I think her cogency, reasonableness, and above all the plain-spoken rigor of her arguments was a spur to the reform of which we may finally be reaping the benefits. Thank you Susan.

The ICANN Board met on September 24-25 2010 in Trondheim, Norway, to consider and act on the impediments still in the way of the new gTLD program. They passed a number of resolutions that provide very clear indications of how things are going.

The short version is that the news is good for new gTLDs. ICANN is nailing down the final outstanding issues and the timetable is clearer than ever.

Predictions

1. The Board will make the new gTLD program happen by March 2011.
2. The official announcement will be at the ICANN meeting in March in San Francisco.
3. The final Applicant Guidebook will be published before the San Francisco meeting, which means that we’ll know a lot even before the official announcement.

The Board is determined to make gTLDs happen soon

On a number of contentious issues, the Board resolutions gave some finality. In general, they stuck with what they had already decided. Some highlights:

• Fees: fees will remain the same at $185,000 per application. No price breaks for anyone.
• Root Scaling: ICANN estimates that they can add 1000 new gTLDs to the root per year. Of course, they can take many more applications than that, but this is the number they think they can safely introduce into the wild. Most estimates put the number of new gTLD applications at 500 or under.
• Trademarks: trademarks will need to have “substantive review.” As with most things trademarkian, this is a little complicated, but in practice it means that you can’t just go register a trademark and then use it to challenge registrations: you must also have used it in trade.
• Morality and Public Order: On this issue, where the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) essentially vetoed the previous procedure, the Board was less than clear. A working group (which I participated in) came up with some recommendations, and the Board said that they would use “recommendations that are not inconsistent with the existing process.” So we don’t know exactly what this will look like. Unless you’re planning to inflame social hatred, however, your application is unlikely to be affected no matter what the outcome.
• Vertical Integration: The Board noted that the working group tasked with sorting this out (which I also participated in) could reach no consensus, and that they (the Board) would make a decision.
• San Francisco: the next ICANN meeting after December in Cartagena will be March in San Francisco. This is the big news that makes the timeline clear.

To give a sense of the Board’s determination, here’s an excerpt from ICANN’s post-retreat bulletin:

The detailed Board discussion was guided by recent community input and provided direction in the implementation of trademark protections, the new registry agreement terms, measures to mitigate malicious conduct, and ensuring root zone stability. The resolutions indicate that many important issues have been addressed, including trademark protection, morality and public order, and vertical integration.

Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush indicated that “The board made considerable progress on the remaining issues and has asked staff to prepare additional working papers and a modified applicant guidebook for public review prior to the upcoming ICANN meeting in Cartagena in December 2010. The meeting results represent a key milestone after years of work by the ICANN community as we prepare for community discussion and debate in Cartagena.”

Reviewing the Board direction, President and CEO Rod Beckstrom stated, “ICANN is prepared to implement this important new offering to increase consumer choice and to promote competition.”

The official kick-off will be at ICANN San Francisco in March 2011

The March meeting will take place in the front yard of the tech industry, which in general pays little attention to the domain name world. This time, they will be watching, and therefore this is a perfect place for ICANN leaders to cover themselves in glory and boast of their achievement in finally getting gTLDs going. It doesn’t require much of a crystal ball to predict that this is where and when the new gTLD program will get its final blessing.

Applicants will have plenty of information before March

It seems that the plan is to publish a version of the Applicant Guidebook before Cartagena, take comments, then release a final version sometime after the December ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia. Since this will be the final guidebook, it should include all the information pertinent to an application, including the dates of the application window. The San Francisco meeting is likely to be a coronation, not an election. To the extent possible, everything will already have been decided, and everything will be choreographed. Which means we’ll probably hear about stuff well in advance.

Summary

We all know better than to say “sure thing” when it comes to ICANN, right? Right…

Still, the momentum is palpable and the timeline is clearer than it has ever been. The main risk factor is new obstructionism by GAC, fueled by lobbying by trademark owners, who continue to claim that the program will be too expensive for them. But it looks as if the ship is edging into the destination harbor at last.

What’s ICANN without acronyms? Here’s a new one: IRT. That’s not Interborough Rapid Transit, the subway on the west side of Manhattan, it’s the Implementation Recommendation Team. Their job is to come up with a plan to address the concerns of trademark holders in connection with the introduction of new TLDs.

What’s brilliant about this move is that the team is comprised of people who suggested solutions to the trademark quandary during the public comments to the last version of the guidebook. Those who simply said “hurrah” or “harumph” will not be asked for any more of their opinions.

Nicely played, ICANN.

Mexico City, Mexico… March 7, 2009: ICANN’s 34th International public meeting in Mexico City has drawn to a close after the organization’s Board of Directors approved the establishment by staff of an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT) comprised of an internationally diverse group of people to develop and propose solutions to the over-arching issue of trademark protection in connection with the introduction of new generic top level domain names (gTLDs).

“The Board has clearly heard and believes strongly that the concerns of trademark holders must be addressed before this process is opened for applications,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN. “The establishment of this team, is an attempt to get proposed solutions from the people with skill in trademark protection and other issues.”

The IRT will be comprised of people who put forward solutions in the first public comment period on the new GTLD Applicant Guidebook. The IRT has been asked to draft a report by 24 April for comment and to produce a final report no later than 24 May so it can be considered at ICANN’s Sydney meeting in June.