Blog: Rod Beckstrom

ICANN has been quiet lately, very quiet. It has been making everyone nervous and leaving the field open to ICANN’s enemies, which has in turn encouraged domain industry hacks to resort to long “think pieces” in the absence of news — always a cause for concern.

Today, though, ICANN released a number of results and initiatives that are quite newsworthy. There’s a lot to digest and report on, which should keep the journalists a safe distance away from Wondering What It All Means.

Among the releases from ICANN:

• A new updated Applicant Guidebook. It is missing the important word “final,” but does nail down some dates and clarifies some GAC issues. Still unanswered, in the guidebook or elsewhere, are questions about the Continuing Operations Instrument (a ham-fisted business-killer that has raised many concerns). Nonetheless, for those thinking of applying, a must-read. ICANN unfortunately did not publish a red-lined version to quickly see the changes from the last version, though there is a Summary of Changes to the Applicant Guidebook.
• A new web site devoted to the gTLD program. Until today, looking at the main ICANN homepage, you’d never guess that the major undertaking of ICANN’s history was about to get underway. Now, however, the photo of CEO Beckstrom and the guys from .BR, which looked like it was lifted from the annual report of a Minsk tractor factory, has been pushed down to make way for the headline “New gTLD Program In High Gear,” accompanied by some stock photography of a woman looking determined and competent. On the gTLD mini-site, there’s a section with videos of “experts” (some are, some aren’t) as well as an FAQ, knowledgebase, latest materials, and so on. It’s still in development, and that’s ok. Let’s hope it keeps developing.
• The final report of the contentious and dysfunctional JAS Working Group concerning support for disadvantaged applicants. You can’t read the report yet (at least I can’t) but it should be made public soon. This has been listed as one of the major issues left unsolved from the Singapore meeting in June. If you’re a serious ICANN geek, you can listen to the working group session (thanks to Joly MacFee of ISOC NY)

It’s good to see ICANN breaking their radio silence and providing a useful resource to applicants.

I think we are finally getting somewhere: ICANN is no longer fluttering flusteredly whenever a lobbying group sends a nastygram over the transom.

Case in point: a letter from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) that arrived a few days ago, full of bombast and muscle-flexing, demanding that ICANN immediately stop the new gTLD program until a long list of demands from the ANA were met, or else the ANA would be forced to take some Very Scary Actions:

Should ICANN refuse to reconsider and adopt a program that takes into account the ANA’s concerns expressed in this letter, ICANN and the Program present the ANA and its members no choice but to do whatever is necessary to prevent implementation of the Program…”

The ANA is also featuring on its website an unintentionally hilarious video of ANA chief Bob Liodice mangling facts, grammar, vocabulary, good sense, and Internet architecture as he warns about “an insidious problem that is about to take place within the Internet domain.” And that’s just the first sentence.

Mr. Liodice betrays no sense of embarrassment as he sounds the alarm about this Terrible Thing he has just discovered, even though the ANA has had five years, seven guidebook drafts, dozens of ICANN meetings, and easy access to ICANN Board members and staff to say something about the program before now. Barn door… horse… bolted… oh well. I suspect Paul Revere was not an ANA member.

ICANN, though, has responded forcefully, albeit after the ANA had the ear of the press for five days of unopposed scare-mongering. In a long and substantive reply to ANA’s letter, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom takes Mr. Liodice to school and raps him on the knuckles for shoddy scholarship:

Your letter also claims that the program represents “unrestricted expansion” or allows “virtually any word or phrase.” These statements demonstrate a lack of understanding of Program details. More research on your part would have revealed: (i) restrictions on delegation rates; (ii) string requirements and limitations; (iii) required applicant background, financial and technical qualifications; (iv) objection processes for infringing and other inappropriately applied-for strings; and (v) standing registry operator obligations in the registry agreement.

Your quotations from the economic studies are highly selective and lead to an unsupported conclusion that more domain names will lead to cyber security lapses or consumer privacy violations. Your claim of “enormous financial burdens” and other broad statements are offered without supporting data or rationale.

ICANN is unyielding in its commitment to the public interest, and the new generic top-level domain Program is only one expression of this commitment.

Please be advised that ICANN will vigorously defend the multi-stakeholder model and the hard-fought consensus of its global stakeholder participants, its duty to act in accordance with established bottom-up processes, and its responsibility to the broad public interest of the global Internet community, rather than to the specific interests of any particular group.

It’s good to see ICANN find its feet and its voice. The approval of the new gTLD program is already having some collateral benefits.

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.

Minds + Machines’ parent company, Top Level Domain Holdings (AIM: TLDH), today sent out a press release summarizing our take on the recent ICANN Nairobi meeting from the TLDH perspective. The full text follows:

On Friday, 12 March 2010, at a meeting in Nairobi of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”), ICANN’s Board of Directors clarified and progressed further the framework for the introduction of generic top level domains (“gTLDs”).

The ICANN Board resolved that there should be no cross-ownership between domain name registries and registrars. This prohibition will prevent existing ICANN-accredited registrars from owning or operating new gTLDs, thus limiting the number of prospective applicants. This continues a trend of increasing the barriers to application for non-experts as ICANN adds additional requirements and restrictions to the framework for the introduction of gTLDs. TLDH is unaffected by this policy and the Board of TLDH therefore expects that TLDH will benefit from this continuing separation between registrars and registries.

The ICANN Board also resolved that ICANN should focus on the full introduction of gTLDs later this year rather than implement an intermediate step by adoption of the Expressions of Interest/Pre-Registrations Proposal. The ground rules for application for new gTLDs are expected to be published by early summer 2010. Accordingly, as ICANN approaches the point where it will be able to proceed with full applications, the Expressions of Interest (“EoI”) program becomes unnecessary. ICANN staff reported during the Nairobi meeting that the next draft of the Draft Applicant Guidebook, expected to be issued in June, will be near final, and subject only to a final comment period.

While we were supportive of the EoI proposal, we welcome ICANN’s focus that the main objective should be to speed up the gTLD process, and the intermediate step of EoIs is unnecessary if ICANN is close to resolving the final details prior to the launch of new gTLDs.

With our substantial cash resources, low operating costs and our significant interests in prospective applicants for .eco, .nyc, .berlin, .bayern and .gay amongst others, and also with the restriction on competition that has been placed on existing registrars, we believe that TLDH is well positioned ahead of the start of the gTLDs application and award process.

Following the ICANN Board meeting, Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s chief executive, provided further details on the gTLD process, which is available on-line at http://bit.ly/buru8z.

Yesterday, at the .ORG Forum, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said,

There’s a clash of models going on in the world. It’s a clash of this decentralized multi-stakerholder model versus traditional government top-down model or centralized models. And this model we’re working on is different, it’s a mix. Governments are stakeholders, but they’re not the only stakeholders. They’re participants, but they’re not dominant. And trying to maintain that balance is one of the great challenges all of us face, particularly when there are those who would that seek to control things. And the question we should always be asking is ‘What’s best for the public?’

And at the ICANN Studienkreis last week in Barcelona, I asked a panel that included Fiona Alexander from the U.S. NTIA how the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) saw its responsibilities to listen to the ICANN community now that the GAC has an effective veto on ICANN policy. Ms. Alexander told me that I was entirely mistaken to think that the GAC had a veto.

Officially, then, governments are just one group of many that participate at ICANN. If so, ICANN and the GAC need to get the word out, because the rest of the domain name world is treating a letter from GAC head Janis Karklins as if it were the thunderous voice of God.

This letter, which warned the ICANN Board not to consider the Expressions of Interest proposal until the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, has been greeted with such headlines as Governments Deliver Another Blow to New Top Level Domain Timeline, and privately ICANN Board members have told us that it’s now “impossible” to support Expressions of Interest prior to the Nairobi meeting for fear of annoying the GAC.

In contrast, the unanimous vote of the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) in favor of Espressions of Interest has attracted no notice at all. The ALAC, which represents individual users of the Internet, has in in principle the same weight as any other advisory committee (such as the GAC), but apparently some equals are more equal than others.

The new Affirmation of Commitments, the “charter” for ICANN, clearly sets up an expanded role for the GAC. It is responsible (in part) for choosing the people who will conduct reviews of ICANN, and it is repeatedly mentioned in the Affirmation, while other ICANN groups are not.

The question is, does the new role of the GAC give them a veto power over ICANN? Formally, the answer is no. In practical terms, however, judging from the reaction to their “advice,” mere grumbling from the GAC can upset ICANN timelines.

It’s up to the ICANN Board and the CEO to determine where they are going to draw the lines with GAC. It’s up to the ICANN community to insist that as an important part of that community, the GAC not only injects its opinion into the debate, but listens as well. The stakes are high, because as Rod Beckstrom correctly notes:

The Internet has not been successful because one company or five companies got together and formed a cartel, and said “this is going to be the standard,” or a government said “this is going to be the standard”…. Mankind is facing global issues that have to be managed on a global basis. What we’re doing here [at ICANN] is an exciting and important new model for what can be used for addressing and solving many of these problems.

Whether the new model is “exciting,” as Mr. Beckstrom says, or depressing, as many fear, will turn in large part on determining the influence of governments within ICANN. The first indications will come from ICANN’s Board of Directors at their next meeting in February.

Sixty-one businesses, organizations, and individuals, including many of the domain industry’s major players, yesterday sent a letter to ICANN, detailing the reasons why new top-level domains are required without delay.

If you’re interested in top-level domains, or if you just want to understand why they are important to the Internet, this letter lays out the reasons clearly and succinctly, with a minimum of jargon.

The letter focused on why top-level domains are needed, and soon:

• Growing consumer demand
• Sky-high prices for decent domain names
• Additional safeguards against Internet crime, built into new top-level domains
• The frightening prospect of a split root and multiple internets that don’t work together
• Foster innovation in the domain namespace and create thousands of jobs

Finally, the letter calls on ICANN to follow its founding mandate to create competition and choice in the domain namespace by creating new top-level domains.

The signatories include domain name registries, registrars, domain name aftermarket companies, ccTLD operators, venture capitalists, academics, members of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee, new top-level domain applicants, and business owners and entrepreneurs from outside the domain name industry, representing 16 countries:

Paul Stahura – CEO, eNom (USA)
Jonathon Nevett, Senior Vice President, Network Solutions (USA)
Elliot Noss – CEO Tucows (CANADA)
Rob Hall – CEO, Momentous (CANADA)
Adrian Kinderis, CEO, AusRegistry International (AUSTRALIA)
Hirokatsu Ohigashi, Director, GMO Internet (JAPAN)
Anthony Harris, Exec. Dir., eCOMLAT (ARGENTINA)
Stephane Van Gelder, General Manager, INDOM (FRANCE)
Marcus Faure, Chair of the Executive Committe, CORE Internet Council of Registrars (SWITZERLAND)
Dirk Krischenowski, CEO, dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG (GERMANY)
George T. Bundy, CEO, BRS Media Inc., Administrator of .FM Top-Level Domain (USA)
Alexander Schwertner, General Manager, ePAG (GERMANY)
Bhavin Turakhia, CEO, DirectI (INDIA)
Patrick Vande Walle, Secretary, ISOC-LU; ISOC Trustee; and Member, ICANN SSAC & ALAC (LUXEMBOURG)
Michele Neylon, CEO, Blacknight (IRELAND)
Ben Crawford, CEO, CentralNIC (UK)
Massimo Ralli, CEO, DotRoma (ITALY)
Mickey Beyer-Claussen, CEO, Pervasive Media (USA)
Minor Childers, Founder, Dot Eco LLC (USA)
Christopher Ambler, CEO, Image Online Design (USA)
Emiliano Pasqualetti, CEO DomainsBot (ITALY)
Misha Halvarsson, Managing Director, South Asian Resources, Inc. (USA)
Joe Dolce, Executive Director, Dot Gay Alliance (USA)
Alexander Schubert, General Manager, Dot Gay LLC (LATVIA)
Caspar von Veltheim, Managing Director, Bayern Connect (GERMANY)
Dan Mandell, President, Neutral Space (USA)
Fred Krueger, CEO, Top Level Domain Holdings (UK)
Gertrude E. Allen, Venture Partner, Inventages (USA)
Steven Kelley, CEO, Far Further (USA)
Dr. Henrik Örnebring, Research Fellow in Comparative European Journalism, Oxford University (UK)
Bill Mushkin, CEO, Name.com (USA)
Ivan Pope, CEO, Snipperoo (UK)
Oscar Robles Garay, Director, NIC Mexico (MEXICO)
Dr. Liz Williams, New Top Level Domain Strategist (UK)
Neal Marshad, CEO, Marshad Technology Group (USA)
Tim Denton, Commissioner at Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CANADA)
Jim Dufour, Oceanographic Engineer, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Chief Environmental Officer, Dot Eco LLC (USA)
Eric Leinberg, CEO, International Data Preservation (USA)
Stephen Deerhake, .AS Top-Level Domain, CEO, GDNS Inc. (USA)
Richard Lau, Owner, DomainManager.com (CANADA)
Paul Shafi, .GS Top-Level Domain, Director, Atlantis North Ltd. (UK)
Jennifer Johnson, CEO, Hashtag Media (USA)
Alexei D. Leshnikov, Director, RU-CENTER (RUSSIA)
Bill MacDonald, Film and Television Producer (“Rome” + “The Saint”) (USA)
Larry Rees, CEO, Strategy HQ (UK)
Clive Flory, CEO, Ostiary (USA)
Dr. Peter Ayton, Professor in Cognitive Psychology, City University London (UK)
Josh Elliot, former IANA staff (USA)
Thomas Keller, Director Domain Services Worldwide, 1&1 Internet AG (GERMANY)
Richard Wilhelm, Board Member, Central Registry Solutions, Member ICANN SSAC (USA)
Dayna Landry, CEO, City Mommy, Inc. (USA)
Adina Reichardt, Chair, dotBayern e.V. (GERMANY)
Herald Summa, CEO, ecoVerband der deutschen Internetwirtschaft e.V. (GERMANY)
Johannes Lenz-Hawliczek, CEO, .HOTEL Top-Level-Domain GmbH (GERMANY)
Katrin Ohlmer, CEO, DOTZON GmbH (GERMANY)
Brette Borow, CEO, Girls Guide To (USA)
Marcus Eppensperger, Board Member, United-Domains AG (GERMANY)
Seth Jacoby, President, FirstLook (USA)
Thomas Lenz, CEO, dotKöln Top-Level-Domain GmbH (GERMANY)
Tom Barrett, President, Encirca (USA)

I also signed the letter on behalf of Minds + Machines.