News Review: ICANN Busy Proving IANA Transition Was A Terrible Mistake

Domain Mondo's weekly review of internet domain news (pdf):

Feature • Only ninety days since the IANA contract expired, ICANN is busy proving the IANA transition was a terrible mistake:

1. Caveat Emptor Domain Name Registrants re: ICANN Base New gTLD RA: "There is now no question that ICANN, post-IANA transition, is a domain name industry-captured organization and does not operate in the global public interest, but completely disregards the interests of domain name registrants. Ted Cruz may have been right, the IANA transition may have been a terrible mistake, premature at best. Maybe Trump can do something ..."

2. ICANN CDAR Internet Root Server System Stability Draft Report Comments: "Having already made the worst mistake in its organizational history in the way it implemented the new gTLDs program, ICANN appears content to continue in its misguided ways until it wrecks the internet and/or domain name system, global public resources over which ICANN is not, and never has been, a good steward ..."

3. New gTLD AFRICA Redux: DotConnectAfrica Trust v. ICANN and ZACR: On Thursday, December 22, 2016, California Superior Court Judge Howard L. Halm [updated January 3, 2017] denied the motion for a preliminary injunction filed by African nonprofit DotConnectAfrica Trust (DCA), but indicated he would assign the case to a trial date at the case management conference on January 23, 2017.

4. Confusing New gTLDs | CircleID.com: "This is my list of confusing new gTLDs" by Jean Guillon.

5. Can't Find Anything on ICANN.org? You Are Not Alone--"I am unable to find evidence that the relevant CWG has in fact been started, but I can never find anything on the ICANN website, so that's no guide as to whether it's happened."--Andrew Sullivan, Chair of Internet Architecture Board, active in IETF and ICANN.

6. Ever wonder how those hundred or so people who comprise the entire regular "ICANN community"--those whose names you see over and over again on ICANN.org, mail lists, etc.--ever find the time to participate in all those 'working groups' and attend all those ICANN meetings, even if their travel and per diem (food, lodging) expenses are paid by ICANN?

"I can testify that participating in both CWG [Stewardship] & CCWG [Accountability] is not a matter of having 'that kind of money.' I can do it because I am mostly unemployed and have no life." -- Avri Doria.

Doria was the first winner of ICANN's Multistakeholder Ethos Award and also co-chair of the working group that produced the flawed domain name transfer policy referenced below.

7. Following up on GNSO Admits Domain Name Transfer Policy Flawed, Blames ICANN Staff: "the implementation of parts of this [ICANN] Policy may create an undesirable situation for some [domain name] registrants"--Letter from Goran Mabry (pdf) highlighting added--

8. ICANN is this a joke OR is ICANN the joke? Identifier Technology Health Indicators: Definition | ICANN.org open comment period closes 9 Jan 2017 23:59 UTC. Brief overview:

Purpose: ICANN would like to solicit feedback from the community on the description of five diseases that could affect the health of the name part of the system of unique Internet identifiers.

Current Status: ICANN presented these five diseases at ICANN57.

Next Steps: Once the community provides input on the disease descriptions, the Identifier Technology Health Indicators (ITHI) initiative will move on to define actual metrics to measure those diseases.

Comments submitted as of Dec. 31, 2016:

This is a non-starter: Talking about "the health of a system" might be reasonable, but I personally find the "health science" terminology (Datamalgia, Abusitis, Magnitudalgia, Perfluoism, Datafallaxopathy) rather artificial and can take the slides mentioned as the relevant resources hardly seriously.--jaap akkerhuis
Is this a joke?: There are recorded cases in child development literature of twins developing a language which only they can understand in order to communicate with each other. ICANN operates in a multi-national multi-lingual environment. It is already difficult enough that there is a profusion of anodyne acronyms regularly used within the ICANN community. Adopting a sophomoric and untranslatable faux medical nomenclature to define areas of study is unhelpful in that context. Unless one "gets the joke", then the joke is on whomever should unhappily run across this ridiculous nomenclature.--John Berryhill, Ph.D., Esq.

Other Internet Domain News:

• 2016: The year the Internet of Things (IoT) broke the internet--"... the connectivity of IoT devices will put the internet infrastructure under strain ... specially on the Domain Name System ... around 150,000 IoT IP addresses his team tracked made between them over half a billion DNS lookups every day ... an angry teen can break the internet by weaponizing the IoT"--cyberscoop.com

•   ICYMI: ICANN Litigation Update: .AFRICA, IRP & CEP Status Report .WEB.

• China renews calls for tighter cyberspace security: Cybersecurity Administration of China (CAC) | Reuters.com

• Domain abuse notice email from ICANN (SCAM?) | GoDaddy Community | GoDaddy.com: "The message from "icann-monitor.org" is a scam/phishing attempt. Please report receipt of this or similar suspicious email to ICANN at tech-support @ icann.org. If possible, include copy of suspect email message with full headers.--Geoff Bickers, ICANN Security Team." See also: What You Should Do If You Receive A Suspected Fraudulent ICANN Email | ICANN.org: "... Phishing and scam emails typically use deception such as forging a trusted sender’s address or domain or using a similar or lookalike domain. Scam messages typically ask for the reader to reply, call a phone number, click a link or open an attached file to steal personal information. If you receive a suspicious email, please FORWARD it to globalsupport @ icann.org. Our team can take a look to determine if it's a fake. If it is, we'll work to get the source of the email shut down if possible. Reporting these emails helps protect the entire ICANN community. Note: Please FORWARD the suspect email –– don’t cut and paste the contents, because valuable tracking information about the source will be lost ..."

• Why you should think twice before posting photos of your children on Facebook | dailymail.co.uk

• ICYMI: Prenda Law “copyright trolls” Steele and Hansmeier arrested | ArsTechnica.com: "The defendants in this case are charged with devising a scheme that casts doubt on the integrity of our profession. The conduct of these defendants was outrageous—they used deceptive lawsuits and unsuspecting judges to extort millions from vulnerable defendants. Our courts are halls of justice where fairness and the rule of law triumph, and my office will use every available resource to stop corrupt lawyers from abusing our system of justice."--US Attorney Andrew Luger

•   Satellite-based internet services as soon as 2019 | TechCrunch.com: "Weeks after Tesla asked the U.S. Government for permission to launch a service powered by thousands of satellites above the Earth, rival project OneWeb has raised $1.2 billion in new funding to get things rolling as soon as 2019."

•   High-speed Internet as a basic service: Canada's telecom regulator CRTC shifts its regulatory focus from voice to broadband, declares internet an essential service, mandates 50Mbps down, 10Mbps up for all, creates $750M fund to subsidize rural rollout--FinancialPost.com

• All of the ICANN Public Comment Periods that close January through February 1, are listed below with the close dates indicated for each respectively (close time: 23:59 UTC):

• Follow-up on Verisign's prediction for Q4 2016 .COM and .NET registrations: see News Review: DomainMondo.com 30 October 2016: "Verisign said at the end of September (Q3) the domain name base in .com and .net was 144.1 million consisting of 128.4 million .com registrations and 15.8 million .net registrations, an increase of 6.6% year-over-year and a net increase of 0.9 million domain name registrations from the end of the second quarter. In addition, Verisign reaffirmed its previous guidance on Q4 registrations:

"Also, as discussed the last three quarters, we still expect the fourth quarter of 2016 to be somewhat unique ... as the volume of domain name registrations up for renewal in the quarter will have a larger-than-normal percentage of first-time renewing registrations as a result of the strong performance during Q3 and Q4 of 2015. While it is difficult to assess what the renewal characteristics of these registrations will be, due to the large upcoming Q4 2016 expiring base we still expect fourth-quarter deletions to be elevated with many of these deletions occurring towards the end of the fourth quarter. Based on these and other factors, we expect the full-year 2016 domain name base growth range of between 1% and 2% despite a net decrease to the domain name base of [.COM + .NET] between 1.5 million and 2.8* million registrations in the fourth quarter."--VeriSign's (VRSN) CEO James Bidzos Q3 2016 Results, Earnings Call Transcript, Oct 27, 2016 | SeekingAlpha.com.

Domain name base .COM and .NET registrations as of Dec 31, 2016:
.COM 126.937,648

.NET 15,295,741

TOTAL: 142,233,389 = actual net decrease in Q4 of 1.9 domain name registrations, which is at the lower end of the guidance given in the Q3 earnings call*. Also note .COM and .NET had a combined total of approximately 139.8 million domain name registrations at the end of the fourth quarter of 2015. Therefore the YOY net growth in .COM + .NET registrations was approximately 2.4 million registrations.

As of Dec. 31, 2015, the base of registered names in .COM equaled 124 million names, while .NET equaled 15.8 million names according to Verisign (pdf). Based on the above, .NET registrations are now in decline (from 15.8 million at the end of 2015 to 15.3 million at the end of 2016) while .COM registrations are still growing on an annual basis (from 124 million at the end of 2015 to 126.9 million at the end of 2016, or a net annual growth rate of 2.3%.

• Most popular posts (# of pageviews Sun-Sat) this past week on DomainMondo.com:

*This is the first time on Domain Mondo that a Saturday posting jumped to the top of the weekly "most popular" list (# of pageviews Sun-Sat), in less than 24 hours!

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo

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2017-01-01

News Review: ICANN Busy Proving IANA Transition Was A Terrible Mistake