On 06/05/2020 16:53, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
When ALAC expresses an opinion that's unpopular with the domain industry we are invariably greeted by "who the hell are you and what gives you the right to speak on behalf of the billions of the world's Internet users?" On reflection, they're right. We have about 25 At-Large leaders (give or take a few liaisons) attending each ICANN meeting, elected or appointed by RALOs and other self-selected volunteers, who really have absolutely no authority or rationale to act as a filter for the public sentiment. We keep busy by chasing ICANN public comments and the agendas of others, carefully crafting commentary on things that mean a great deal to the domain industry but not a shred to the outside world. And by and large we avoid issues that would collide with ICANN's highly-corrupted goals, so as not to incur the "who the hell are you?" retort.
If ALAC doesn't speak up then who will?
How to fix? Needs to start from the ground up, bandaids won't fix this mess. ICANN At-Large needs to be designed to highlight researchers and writers, not petty politicians and lobbyists. I would personally trade
So does that mean that lobbyists should be red flagged as being such?
almost every dollar spent on ALAC attending ICANN meetings for a decent R&D budget and the ability to do global surveys. How many people here
And produce the a kind of CCT product filled with great aspirations and good intentions? There was no expertise on measuring web usage or other important industry metrics on that team. The CCT web usage measurement attempt (don't think the attempt at measuring web usage made it to the final report) gave the new gTLDs a glowing report. The reality was different. And within about a year, many of the domain names in these wonderfully used new gTLDs were deleted. Webspam and parked pages were considered as being actively used. Some new gTLDs were doing relatively well. The problem was that ICANN and the CCT did not understand how TLDs develop or how domain names are used. ICANN, being the customer for the CCT report, had a flawed view of the new gTLD market's development. As for global surveys, they sound nice and very impressive. The problem is that the domain name market has a small global market and many country level markets. In many of those country level markets the gTLDs are only a second choice for new domain name registrants. As for Africa and Latin America, there are hardly any ICANN accredited registrars in those regions but many of those countries have strong local ccTLDs. The domain name world changed while ICANN wasn't looking. The opinion poll surveys commissioned by the CCT to see if people had heard of the new gTLDs were even funnier though they were methodologically sound as opinion polls. Some parts of the CCT report were on much firmer ground but the new gTLDs did not turn out as ICANN expected. The people in the domain name industry, the ordinary domain name registrants and people on the street knew that well before ICANN. As for ICANN's expectation of over 30 million registrations in the first year, I really wonder about how they come up with those figures but it must have involved some psychedelic grade ICANN Koolaid. No wonder those ICANN meetings are so popular. How would this R&D and these global surveys be any different?
The UN-like meetings and fake self-importance need to stop. Our main job is to listen to and understand, not act as a gatekeeper for, what the world is saying on DNS issues. Our prime task is to make sure that ICANN is aware of the public PoV, as accurately possible, regarding:
* The (to many needless and abuse-generating) expansion of TLDs
From what I've seen, and I actually run web usage surveys on gTLDs and ccTLDs, the majority of abuse occurs when the business model of a gTLD fails and the registry has to adopt discounting as a business model in order to survive. That brings in tens of thousands or even millions of low quality registations (robot registrations where the domain name is generated by an algorithm) filled with webspam and sites built from scraped content. These domain names have a renewal rate of under 5% so the registry has to keep discounting to replace the deleting domain names with new registrations. Some new gTLDs are being used for websites and e-mail. The credibility of the TLD also collapses and new development and usage in the TLD ceases.
* The ability of registrants to assert rights protections in domain space that are disallowed globally for trademarks * The utility of "memorable" domain names versus search engines and social media * The practise of domain hoarding and speculation (also illegal under international trademark regime)
How can this "international trademark regime" decide what is legal and what is illegal? Are they like the Spanish Inquisition? This is a highly problematic issue in that a lot of the assumptions about what is "hoarded" or speculated is wrong. The logic generally seems to be that because someone registered a domain name first and the domain name has no active website, everyone else who wants that domain name thinks that the registrant is hoarding it. In the last fifteen years or so, registrars have been parking undeveloped domain names on PPC services. So if someone sees a domain name on PPC, the assumption is often that it is "hoarded". The reality is that the majority of domain names in both gTLDs and ccTLDs have no developed websites. The first year renewal rate for .COM is approximately 57%. In 2004, it was running at around 70%. The registries generally publish blended renewal rates that represent all renewed domain names rather than first year renewals. The reality, as demonstated by the 01 May 2020 stats for .COM is that 5,888,117 domain names (approximately 4% of .COM) are on major auction/sales sites. There are other smaller auction sites and DIY For Sale sites and webpages that are not included in this figure. Some of these domain names have been registered for decades or have been put on these sites by their registrants. Others have been reregistered when they are deleted. Then there are the sales sites where people come up with "brandable" domain names. The secondary market is complex. The .ORG percentage was 2.4%.
* Whether domain names need regulation or just the basic sanity checks now on offer
Regulation? What people inside the ICANN bubble don't realise is that apart from the USA where the .COM is the de facto ccTLD the domain name the market is shifting away from gTLDs to ccTLDs. In many countries where there is a strong ccTLD, growth in the gTLDs has plateaued with the main volume of new registrations being in the local ccTLD. Some of the legacy gTLDs in these markets are existing only on brand protection registrations. Regulation, in a wider context, is being gradually removed from ICANN's hands. This isn't a kind of Balkanisation of gTLDs and ccTLDs. It is unexpected obselescence for some gTLDs. The funniest thing about the rise of the ccTLDs is that it was ICANN's attempts to deal with Domain Tasting that accelerated the shift away from gTLDs towards ccTLDs. Between 2005 and 2007, over one billion .COM domain names were deleted. That's over 1,000,000,000 domain names. The monthly numbers are in the free to read section of the Domnomics book on Amazon and they constitute a horrifying illustration of a failure to regulate. (I think that he ALAC/GNSO paper on Domain Tasting only focused on the first month that the AGP deletion figures were made available.) ICANN and the constituencies discussed the matter and even tried to figure out what was going on with all these registrations but ICANN and the constituencies failed. It took external action to bring the matter to a conclusion and that was the Dell law suit. ICANN was plodding along with various discussions about how to deal with it and even managed to get some new rules to stop the abuse of the AGP. But it was from Domain Tasting and the artificial scarcity it created that the idea that there was a demand for new gTLDs emerged. The problem was that it was based on a misunderstanding of the impact of an artificial scarcity of "good" domain names on the domain name market. The new gTLD train was rolling off down the tracks by the time that large-scale Domain Tasting was ended 2009. The expectation (or Astrological prediction) of over 30 million registrations in the new gTLDs for the first year of operation was just another example of ICANN bubble thinking. The CA AG intervention was yet another example of the ICANN bubble being burst by external action. In some respects, ICANN only evolves only when there is external intervention. Even the first new gTLDs in the early 2000s were a response to a perceived "all of the good names are gone" meme from the late 1990s. In early 2000, the DotCOM bubble burst and the demand for some of these first new gTLDs disappeared as million of .COM and .NET domain names flooded back into the market. It is like the ICANN bubble assumes that the domain name market evolves steadily. It does not and external forces play a much larger part than the ICANN people (and even those in some of the constituencies) realise.
* The balance between privacy and law-enforcement access to reduce abuse
Now that's a can of worms! The GDPR might have seemed like a good idea to those involved but trying to apply a theoretically perfect solution to an imperfect world was bound to fail. It even made a complete mess of WHOIS. This is the same tool that largely functioned before the abject stupidity of deleting all fields for "privacy". In the interests of making things better, things were made magnitudes worse and now they even facilitate abuse. And now GAC even wants to introduce completely clueless "uniform" anonymous e-mail addresses. The whole point of anonymity is that it is not possible to burn through that anonymity by analysing the algorithm used to generate the anonymous addresses and the plaintext of hundreds of millions of existing e-mail addresses. A "uniform" system is also extremely difficult to introduce across hundreds of TLDs, thousands of registrars and hundreds of millions of e-mail addresses. It was like whoever came up with that GAC statement didn't understand the concepts of basic cryptography or the reality of the real world. It was just an excercise in buzzword bingo.
But look elsewhere in this list and you'll find none of those things being the focus our work. Instead good people are caught up in endless development processes about development processes, success metrics etc.
That does make it sound like a kind of middle-management Hell. But the real problem, when it comes to domain names and their markets, is that if you can't define what you are trying to measure, then you won't know whether it is a success or failure. That's one of the persistent weaknesses of ALAC and ICANN in that both the definitions and the data are not readily available. It isn't just due to organisational information silos that exist in large organisations like ICANN. It is often down to data being commercially sensitive. What happens is that the gaps are filled by the assumptions of well-meaning people (as with the CCT) rather than hard data. Those assumptions quickly gain the status of being "metrics" by equally unaware and well-meaning ICANN management. It seems more like the development of an organised religion than a business with data-free assumptions quickly becoming doctrine. And as for the policy development and processes, there's a great phrase from the movie "The Outlaw Josey Wales" that describes it: "endeavour to persevere". And it doesn't look like ALAC will be declaring war on ICANN any time soon. Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com **********************************************************