To convey, not to judge (was: Calif. AG mentions ALAC advice in note to ICANN re: PIR)
On Tue, 5 May 2020 at 18:09, David Mackey <mackey361@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Evan,
Thank you for the summary.
Do you have any suggestions on how our process could be improved to produce outcomes which better "filter, judge, vet or micromanage the global end user response to DNS-related issues" and help us "discover, understand, articulate and advance it" better too?
I think you misread the intent of what I said. I *don't* want ALAC to better "filter, judge, vet or micromanage". I don't want ALAC doing those things *at all*. Who the hell are we in At-Large to judge that a mass commenting campaign is stupid or ill-informed, simply because their participants use the same form letter? We should be celebrating that there is so much external engagement rather that claiming monopoly on which public engagement is "well informed" and which are not. Americans in particular should by now be sensitized to the repercussions of calling whole swaths of public opinion "deplorable"; such elitism tends to end badly. Have we not learned the lessons? 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. Meanwhile, when an issue of substantial public interest comes up -- one that gets the attention of the mainstream press, NGOs and lawmakers around the world -- ALAC sits back in judgment, sneering at the masses and chock-full of its own self-righteousness, unreasonably loyal to the status quo. Leadership of this committee has denigrated both the volume and the quality of the opposition to the Ethos sale for reasons I cannot fathom. Sure it's an angry mob, but it's OUR mob and we ought to be understanding it and channelling its passion within ICANN rather than dumping on it (every other constituency in ICANN is quite able to do that already). So .... when the world depended upon us, ALAC absolutely failed the ICANN by the conscious design of its leadership. But we're right on top of the EPDPs and RPMs. 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 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 know that Heidi Ullrich, the ICANN VP in charge of At-Large, has a PhD in Policy Development from the London School of Economics? Indeed, many of ALAC's support staff over the years have brought immense policy talents within reach, yet are wasted on petty bureaucracy and internal politics. They feed ALAC's incessant need for insufferable meetings at ICANN events with their large U-shaped tables and moving cameras and interpreter booths like we're the freaking united nations. At such events people let their egos run amok and waste three seconds of every comment with "This is [name] for the transcript record".... as if anyone is ever going to read transcripts of ALAC meetings. So three times a year 25 ALACers get to feel utterly self-important, speaking into lit microphones and getting interpreted into a half-dozen languages and always running out of time debating trivia, while the public interest outside our doors gets completely ignored. The term "bikeshedding" is extremely appropriate. 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 - 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) - Whether domain names need regulation or just the basic sanity checks now on offer - The balance between privacy and law-enforcement access to reduce abuse 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. Nobody told ALAC that we had to apply all that bureaucracy to our own workings and yet we do, to the detriment of what really matters to our community. If you don't agree with what I think the public wants from us above, fantastic! Let's find out! What we *ARE* highly likely to find is that the public doesn't give a damn about any of the topics currently on the plate of this WG. I'm not sure I've answered your question, David. But at least I hope I've offered a window into how I see ALAC's horribly misplaced resources, both financial and human, and what is needed to get back on track. - Evan
Intriguing. Why the sudden awakening? Foo On Wed, 6 May 2020, 8:54 pm Evan Leibovitch, <evan@telly.org> wrote:
On Tue, 5 May 2020 at 18:09, David Mackey <mackey361@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Evan,
Thank you for the summary.
Do you have any suggestions on how our process could be improved to produce outcomes which better "filter, judge, vet or micromanage the global end user response to DNS-related issues" and help us "discover, understand, articulate and advance it" better too?
I think you misread the intent of what I said.
I *don't* want ALAC to better "filter, judge, vet or micromanage". I don't want ALAC doing those things *at all*.
Who the hell are we in At-Large to judge that a mass commenting campaign is stupid or ill-informed, simply because their participants use the same form letter? We should be celebrating that there is so much external engagement rather that claiming monopoly on which public engagement is "well informed" and which are not. Americans in particular should by now be sensitized to the repercussions of calling whole swaths of public opinion "deplorable"; such elitism tends to end badly. Have we not learned the lessons?
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.
Meanwhile, when an issue of substantial public interest comes up -- one that gets the attention of the mainstream press, NGOs and lawmakers around the world -- ALAC sits back in judgment, sneering at the masses and chock-full of its own self-righteousness, unreasonably loyal to the status quo. Leadership of this committee has denigrated both the volume and the quality of the opposition to the Ethos sale for reasons I cannot fathom. Sure it's an angry mob, but it's OUR mob and we ought to be understanding it and channelling its passion within ICANN rather than dumping on it (every other constituency in ICANN is quite able to do that already).
So .... when the world depended upon us, ALAC absolutely failed the ICANN by the conscious design of its leadership. But we're right on top of the EPDPs and RPMs.
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 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 know that Heidi Ullrich, the ICANN VP in charge of At-Large, has a PhD in Policy Development from the London School of Economics? Indeed, many of ALAC's support staff over the years have brought immense policy talents within reach, yet are wasted on petty bureaucracy and internal politics. They feed ALAC's incessant need for insufferable meetings at ICANN events with their large U-shaped tables and moving cameras and interpreter booths like we're the freaking united nations. At such events people let their egos run amok and waste three seconds of every comment with "This is [name] for the transcript record".... as if anyone is ever going to read transcripts of ALAC meetings. So three times a year 25 ALACers get to feel utterly self-important, speaking into lit microphones and getting interpreted into a half-dozen languages and always running out of time debating trivia, while the public interest outside our doors gets completely ignored. The term "bikeshedding" is extremely appropriate.
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 - 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) - Whether domain names need regulation or just the basic sanity checks now on offer - The balance between privacy and law-enforcement access to reduce abuse
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. Nobody told ALAC that we had to apply all that bureaucracy to our own workings and yet we do, to the detriment of what really matters to our community.
If you don't agree with what I think the public wants from us above, fantastic! Let's find out! What we *ARE* highly likely to find is that the public doesn't give a damn about any of the topics currently on the plate of this WG.
I'm not sure I've answered your question, David. But at least I hope I've offered a window into how I see ALAC's horribly misplaced resources, both financial and human, and what is needed to get back on track.
- Evan
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Hi Fouad, On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 12:04, Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa@gmail.com> wrote:
Intriguing. Why the sudden awakening?
For me it's never been sudden. The catalyst right now is the recent rejection of ISOC's attempt to convert PIR from nonprofit to for-profit and then sell it off. There has been a substantial contrast between the substantial public opposition to the sake and ALAC's advice on the matter. Since ALAC's single bylaw mandate is to advise the Board on what end-users need/want, the gap between ALAC and the public mood is unfortunate and (to some including me) needs to be addressed. - Evan
What I am missing in this conversation - and I have difficulties in crafting myself - a a bullet point list on what was missing in ALAC’s paper and (more importantly) what was wrong. I am saying this without any polemic attempt - I have participated to the drafting with a couple of ideas, and I am very much interested in what should have been different. About the overarching questions on whether ALAC is representative, on how to consider the copy-paste of comments, and all other similar issues, I have to confess that they might well be extremely important topics, but at this point in time for me not worth spending time in repeating what I have basically argued over the years. On the other hand, I am very much interested in learning if something in the ALAC paper was not felt to be aligned with the feelings of the user community. The follow up question will be how to fix it, but I refuse to discuss how to fix something that we have not defined yet. Cheers, Roberto On 06.05.2020, at 18:51, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org<mailto:evan@telly.org>> wrote: Hi Fouad, On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 12:04, Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa@gmail.com<mailto:fouadbajwa@gmail.com>> wrote: Intriguing. Why the sudden awakening? For me it's never been sudden. The catalyst right now is the recent rejection of ISOC's attempt to convert PIR from nonprofit to for-profit and then sell it off. There has been a substantial contrast between the substantial public opposition to the sake and ALAC's advice on the matter. Since ALAC's single bylaw mandate is to advise the Board on what end-users need/want, the gap between ALAC and the public mood is unfortunate and (to some including me) needs to be addressed. - Evan _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.
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 **********************************************************
On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 17:24, John McCormac <jmcc@hosterstats.com> wrote:
If ALAC doesn't speak up then who will?
The California AG, fortunately. At least so far.
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?
I was involved in the prep for the CCT-RT. It was a sham from the beginning, with industry lobbyists pushing to include questions to point to a desired predetermined set of answers. Anything else was argued to be out of scope. I was fighting with the GNSO until the day I dropped out to actually put some useful questions in that survey, such as whether the public trusted "memorable" domain names as much as search engines to find what it wanted on the 'Net. Does a proliferation of TLDs mean that there's more to choose from? Yes, but it's a dumb question designed to produce an obvious answer. ICANN's vested interest have proclaimed the very creation of new TLDs as an innovation of which we should all be proud. What a crock. There was no expertise on measuring web usage or other important industry
metrics on that team.
That's why I said that ALAC needs people skilled at this kind of analysis. This skillset may not be readily available from among ALAC volunteers, but that's what support staff (that is truly there to support ALAC rather than to assert ICANN culture on it) is there for. 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.
Agreed. How would this R&D and these global surveys be any different The resource shift I ask for above assumes that ALAC would be the steward of the R&D and the surveys, that it would be able to set the questions and guide the data analysis independently of ICANN's wishes. I believe that ICANN management would be quite fearful of a the public's answer to properly-posed questions about public trust in Internet domains and how they are governed. But if ALAC is to do its job these issues need to be known.
* 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?
What I mean by this is that the global trademark system generally abides by the "use it or lose it" rule. Asserting ownership of a trademark is not sufficient it to qualify for protection, you need to retain a history of its use. Otherwise a challenge can be successful. Also; you have outright ownership of a trademark and can but and sell at will as an asset. Renewal fees are either every 10 years or five based on whether you want it internationally enforced. Domains are the opposite. Even if you don't use them you can hold on so long as you pay the annual fee. And you don't own your domain because if you don't pay your rent it just goes back in the pool. 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.
Again, this differs from trademark practice, where is rationale is irrelevant. If a name is asserted as a trademark but not put into use (or under provable development), it can be successfully challenged by other would-be users. You can't just collect a stable of undeveloped trademarks the way you can for domains. If you have a trademark that you want to keep but aren't using right now, you have to apply for an explicit exemption. I mention these differences because, to me, ICANN's approach to domain names is a sideways attempt to redo trademark practice in that it provides a way for people to own unique identifiers. The difference, though, is that trademarks were invented to protect consumers from confusion, while domain name allocation and maintenance rules exist to maximize revenue for the domain industry. And we have seen some strange situations when the two realms collide. The IPC in the GNSO exists to protect the rights of trademark holders (as best they can), but nobody is doing the necessary job of protecting the name-protection from consumers' PoV. In the fight over .amazon I argued in favour of the bookstore over the governments, which is an easy position to take when considering the end-users PoV and seeing it like a trademark issue. Maybe I'm really getting off-track here, But in other ways I'm helping to demonstrate the public-intrerest areas where ALAC should be focusing in the face of So Many Distractions being thrown at 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%.
That suggests to me that more than four in ten .COM domains either belonged to business ideas that didn't survive their first year, or were considered unworthy of being maintained in a domaining portfolio. I would also surmise that some significant portion of the 57% are sites without existing commercial use but were deemed worthy to be maintained for speculative purposes. 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.
I don't really care about that. I've spent quite a lot of effort over the last few years helping colleagues find a suitable domain name. Almost all the time their first five choices (or so) point to a PPC that gives instructions on how to buy the name. None of them have ever pointed to an auction site. Regulation? What people inside the ICANN bubble don't realise I go under the assumption that the industry is smarter than it lets on in public, promoting all these garbage TLDs but knowing the numbers and realizing the reality. Now... people inside the bubble but outside the industry -- like ALAC -- might be taken in by the hype but I sure hope not. What astounds me is that knowing how poorly the last cohort of TLDs has done, the industry pushes for more expansion. Truly astounding.
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 my experience, the public doesn't know the difference. There is no awareness that the way to report abuse is different for .com than .co, even though the latter is marketed as a drop-in alternative ("if you didn't get your first choice in .COM but don't know any better"). When I tell people the link between bit.ly and Libya most people are genuinely astonished. Whose job is it to educate the public -- both people buying their first domain or end-users -- about these distinctions?
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.
Been pretty simple to me. Entities that want to be seen as global go for .com or .org, else stay national with a ccTLD. This isn't a kind of Balkanisation of gTLDs and ccTLDs. It is unexpected
obselescence for some gTLDs.
Unexpected by who? ;-) 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's still my experience that all the good ones are gone. What was given back might have been the crap that came out of algorithms and typosquatting etc Many newcomers these days, in my experience, are using fudges such as hyphenated names in .com, and most refuse to even approach the name-squatters on princiiple.
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.
Unfortunately, some like it that way because of ALAC's political design. I have known many ALAC leaders who achieved their positions through savvy political skills rather than subject-matter expertise. Once onboard they mask their lack of expertise (or lack of interest) by focusing on process to the exclusion of all else. 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.
Agreed, which is why independent mining and analysis of data is IMO something ALAC needs far more than its mock-UN bureaucratic trappings. Cheers, -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56
It really does seem that what we are trying to do is reinvent the wheel. There is a long established system for dealing with trademarks. It includes criteria for what names can be fenced off from other users and what cannot, and for dealing with conflicts. Was there a rationale for ignoring that, and trying to invent our own system for doing the same thing with domain names? Bill Jouris On Thursday, May 7, 2020, 12:26:15 AM PDT, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote: On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 17:24, John McCormac <jmcc@hosterstats.com> wrote: If ALAC doesn't speak up then who will? The California AG, fortunately. At least so far.
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? I was involved in the prep for the CCT-RT. It was a sham from the beginning, with industry lobbyists pushing to include questions to point to a desired predetermined set of answers. Anything else was argued to be out of scope. I was fighting with the GNSO until the day I dropped out to actually put some useful questions in that survey, such as whether the public trusted "memorable" domain names as much as search engines to find what it wanted on the 'Net. Does a proliferation of TLDs mean that there's more to choose from? Yes, but it's a dumb question designed to produce an obvious answer. ICANN's vested interest have proclaimed the very creation of new TLDs as an innovation of which we should all be proud. What a crock. There was no expertise on measuring web usage or other important industry metrics on that team. That's why I said that ALAC needs people skilled at this kind of analysis. This skillset may not be readily available from among ALAC volunteers, but that's what support staff (that is truly there to support ALAC rather than to assert ICANN culture on it) is there for. 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. Agreed. How would this R&D and these global surveys be any different The resource shift I ask for above assumes that ALAC would be the steward of the R&D and the surveys, that it would be able to set the questions and guide the data analysis independently of ICANN's wishes. I believe that ICANN management would be quite fearful of a the public's answer to properly-posed questions about public trust in Internet domains and how they are governed. But if ALAC is to do its job these issues need to be known.
* 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? What I mean by this is that the global trademark system generally abides by the "use it or lose it" rule. Asserting ownership of a trademark is not sufficient it to qualify for protection, you need to retain a history of its use. Otherwise a challenge can be successful. Also; you have outright ownership of a trademark and can but and sell at will as an asset. Renewal fees are either every 10 years or five based on whether you want it internationally enforced. Domains are the opposite. Even if you don't use them you can hold on so long as you pay the annual fee. And you don't own your domain because if you don't pay your rent it just goes back in the pool. 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. Again, this differs from trademark practice, where is rationale is irrelevant. If a name is asserted as a trademark but not put into use (or under provable development), it can be successfully challenged by other would-be users. You can't just collect a stable of undeveloped trademarks the way you can for domains. If you have a trademark that you want to keep but aren't using right now, you have to apply for an explicit exemption. I mention these differences because, to me, ICANN's approach to domain names is a sideways attempt to redo trademark practice in that it provides a way for people to own unique identifiers. The difference, though, is that trademarks were invented to protect consumers from confusion, while domain name allocation and maintenance rules exist to maximize revenue for the domain industry. And we have seen some strange situations when the two realms collide. The IPC in the GNSO exists to protect the rights of trademark holders (as best they can), but nobody is doing the necessary job of protecting the name-protection from consumers' PoV. In the fight over .amazon I argued in favour of the bookstore over the governments, which is an easy position to take when considering the end-users PoV and seeing it like a trademark issue. Maybe I'm really getting off-track here, But in other ways I'm helping to demonstrate the public-intrerest areas where ALAC should be focusing in the face of So Many Distractions being thrown at 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%. That suggests to me that more than four in ten .COM domains either belonged to business ideas that didn't survive their first year, or were considered unworthy of being maintained in a domaining portfolio. I would also surmise that some significant portion of the 57% are sites without existing commercial use but were deemed worthy to be maintained for speculative purposes. 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. I don't really care about that. I've spent quite a lot of effort over the last few years helping colleagues find a suitable domain name. Almost all the time their first five choices (or so) point to a PPC that gives instructions on how to buy the name. None of them have ever pointed to an auction site. Regulation? What people inside the ICANN bubble don't realise I go under the assumption that the industry is smarter than it lets on in public, promoting all these garbage TLDs but knowing the numbers and realizing the reality. Now... people inside the bubble but outside the industry -- like ALAC -- might be taken in by the hype but I sure hope not. What astounds me is that knowing how poorly the last cohort of TLDs has done, the industry pushes for more expansion. Truly astounding. 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 my experience, the public doesn't know the difference. There is no awareness that the way to report abuse is different for .com than .co, even though the latter is marketed as a drop-in alternative ("if you didn't get your first choice in .COM but don't know any better"). When I tell people the link between bit.ly and Libya most people are genuinely astonished. Whose job is it to educate the public -- both people buying their first domain or end-users -- about these distinctions? 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. Been pretty simple to me. Entities that want to be seen as global go for .com or .org, else stay national with a ccTLD. This isn't a kind of Balkanisation of gTLDs and ccTLDs. It is unexpected obselescence for some gTLDs. Unexpected by who? ;-) 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's still my experience that all the good ones are gone. What was given back might have been the crap that came out of algorithms and typosquatting etc Many newcomers these days, in my experience, are using fudges such as hyphenated names in .com, and most refuse to even approach the name-squatters on princiiple.
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. Unfortunately, some like it that way because of ALAC's political design. I have known many ALAC leaders who achieved their positions through savvy political skills rather than subject-matter expertise. Once onboard they mask their lack of expertise (or lack of interest) by focusing on process to the exclusion of all else. 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. Agreed, which is why independent mining and analysis of data is IMO something ALAC needs far more than its mock-UN bureaucratic trappings. Cheers, -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada@evanleibovitch or @el56_______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.
Just a quick comment, to provide a historic perspective. “Traditional” trade marks are governed by a systems that have jurisdiction at the core - while the DNS is global. Also, most trade mark systems use the concept of “class” to identify categories, so that trade marks are applied for a specific class of products. This allows, for instance, to make a distinction between Apple - the fruit, Apple - the recording company, Apple - the computer, and so on. The example that has been made from the beginning of these discussions in the Internet community is that if multiple companies apply for .apple, each of them belonging to a different class, the traditional way goes in tilt. Cheers, R. On 07.05.2020, at 19:22, Bill Jouris via CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> wrote: It really does seem that what we are trying to do is reinvent the wheel. There is a long established system for dealing with trademarks. It includes criteria for what names can be fenced off from other users and what cannot, and for dealing with conflicts. Was there a rationale for ignoring that, and trying to invent our own system for doing the same thing with domain names? Bill Jouris On Thursday, May 7, 2020, 12:26:15 AM PDT, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org<mailto:evan@telly.org>> wrote: On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 17:24, John McCormac <jmcc@hosterstats.com<mailto:jmcc@hosterstats.com>> wrote: If ALAC doesn't speak up then who will? The California AG, fortunately. At least so far.
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? I was involved in the prep for the CCT-RT. It was a sham from the beginning, with industry lobbyists pushing to include questions to point to a desired predetermined set of answers. Anything else was argued to be out of scope. I was fighting with the GNSO until the day I dropped out to actually put some useful questions in that survey, such as whether the public trusted "memorable" domain names as much as search engines to find what it wanted on the 'Net. Does a proliferation of TLDs mean that there's more to choose from? Yes, but it's a dumb question designed to produce an obvious answer. ICANN's vested interest have proclaimed the very creation of new TLDs as an innovation of which we should all be proud. What a crock. There was no expertise on measuring web usage or other important industry metrics on that team. That's why I said that ALAC needs people skilled at this kind of analysis. This skillset may not be readily available from among ALAC volunteers, but that's what support staff (that is truly there to support ALAC rather than to assert ICANN culture on it) is there for. 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. Agreed. How would this R&D and these global surveys be any different The resource shift I ask for above assumes that ALAC would be the steward of the R&D and the surveys, that it would be able to set the questions and guide the data analysis independently of ICANN's wishes. I believe that ICANN management would be quite fearful of a the public's answer to properly-posed questions about public trust in Internet domains and how they are governed. But if ALAC is to do its job these issues need to be known.
* 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? What I mean by this is that the global trademark system generally abides by the "use it or lose it" rule. Asserting ownership of a trademark is not sufficient it to qualify for protection, you need to retain a history of its use. Otherwise a challenge can be successful. Also; you have outright ownership of a trademark and can but and sell at will as an asset. Renewal fees are either every 10 years or five based on whether you want it internationally enforced. Domains are the opposite. Even if you don't use them you can hold on so long as you pay the annual fee. And you don't own your domain because if you don't pay your rent it just goes back in the pool. 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. Again, this differs from trademark practice, where is rationale is irrelevant. If a name is asserted as a trademark but not put into use (or under provable development), it can be successfully challenged by other would-be users. You can't just collect a stable of undeveloped trademarks the way you can for domains. If you have a trademark that you want to keep but aren't using right now, you have to apply for an explicit exemption. I mention these differences because, to me, ICANN's approach to domain names is a sideways attempt to redo trademark practice in that it provides a way for people to own unique identifiers. The difference, though, is that trademarks were invented to protect consumers from confusion, while domain name allocation and maintenance rules exist to maximize revenue for the domain industry. And we have seen some strange situations when the two realms collide. The IPC in the GNSO exists to protect the rights of trademark holders (as best they can), but nobody is doing the necessary job of protecting the name-protection from consumers' PoV. In the fight over .amazon I argued in favour of the bookstore over the governments, which is an easy position to take when considering the end-users PoV and seeing it like a trademark issue. Maybe I'm really getting off-track here, But in other ways I'm helping to demonstrate the public-intrerest areas where ALAC should be focusing in the face of So Many Distractions being thrown at 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%. That suggests to me that more than four in ten .COM domains either belonged to business ideas that didn't survive their first year, or were considered unworthy of being maintained in a domaining portfolio. I would also surmise that some significant portion of the 57% are sites without existing commercial use but were deemed worthy to be maintained for speculative purposes. 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. I don't really care about that. I've spent quite a lot of effort over the last few years helping colleagues find a suitable domain name. Almost all the time their first five choices (or so) point to a PPC that gives instructions on how to buy the name. None of them have ever pointed to an auction site. Regulation? What people inside the ICANN bubble don't realise I go under the assumption that the industry is smarter than it lets on in public, promoting all these garbage TLDs but knowing the numbers and realizing the reality. Now... people inside the bubble but outside the industry -- like ALAC -- might be taken in by the hype but I sure hope not. What astounds me is that knowing how poorly the last cohort of TLDs has done, the industry pushes for more expansion. Truly astounding. 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 my experience, the public doesn't know the difference. There is no awareness that the way to report abuse is different for .com than .co, even though the latter is marketed as a drop-in alternative ("if you didn't get your first choice in .COM but don't know any better"). When I tell people the link between bit.ly<http://bit.ly/> and Libya most people are genuinely astonished. Whose job is it to educate the public -- both people buying their first domain or end-users -- about these distinctions? 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. Been pretty simple to me. Entities that want to be seen as global go for .com or .org, else stay national with a ccTLD. This isn't a kind of Balkanisation of gTLDs and ccTLDs. It is unexpected obselescence for some gTLDs. Unexpected by who? ;-) 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's still my experience that all the good ones are gone. What was given back might have been the crap that came out of algorithms and typosquatting etc Many newcomers these days, in my experience, are using fudges such as hyphenated names in .com, and most refuse to even approach the name-squatters on princiiple.
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. Unfortunately, some like it that way because of ALAC's political design. I have known many ALAC leaders who achieved their positions through savvy political skills rather than subject-matter expertise. Once onboard they mask their lack of expertise (or lack of interest) by focusing on process to the exclusion of all else. 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. Agreed, which is why independent mining and analysis of data is IMO something ALAC needs far more than its mock-UN bureaucratic trappings. Cheers, -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56 _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.
On Thu, 7 May 2020 at 14:00, Roberto Gaetano <roberto_gaetano@hotmail.com> wrote:
“Traditional” trade marks are governed by a systems that have jurisdiction at the core - while the DNS is global.
Search "Madrid System". With roots as far back as 1891 I *think* it predates the use of domain names.
Also, most trade mark systems use the concept of “class” to identify categories, so that trade marks are applied for a specific class of products. This allows, for instance, to make a distinction between Apple - the fruit, Apple - the recording company, Apple - the computer, and so on. The example that has been made from the beginning of these discussions in the Internet community is that if multiple companies apply for .apple, each of them belonging to a different class, the traditional way goes in tilt.
There are multiple ways to deal with this tilt. The trademark system approaches such conflicts in the best way to protect consumers. The domain name system approaches such conflict in the best way to maximize revenues for ICANN and the domain industry. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56
The trademark system approaches such conflicts in the best way to protect consumers. The domain name system approaches such conflict in the best way to maximize revenues for ICANN and the domain industry. Could that be because the trademark system was worked out by governments? Whereas the folks working on the domain name system appear to take it as a given that significant government involvement would be a Bad Thing. Not entirely sure why, but it definitely appears to be an article of faith. Bill Jouris On Thursday, May 7, 2020, 01:06:07 PM PDT, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote: On Thu, 7 May 2020 at 14:00, Roberto Gaetano <roberto_gaetano@hotmail.com> wrote: “Traditional” trade marks are governed by a systems that have jurisdiction at the core - while the DNS is global. Search "Madrid System". With roots as far back as 1891 I *think* it predates the use of domain names. Also, most trade mark systems use the concept of “class” to identify categories, so that trade marks are applied for a specific class of products. This allows, for instance, to make a distinction between Apple - the fruit, Apple - the recording company, Apple - the computer, and so on. The example that has been made from the beginning of these discussions in the Internet community is that if multiple companies apply for .apple, each of them belonging to a different class, the traditional way goes in tilt. There are multiple ways to deal with this tilt. The trademark system approaches such conflicts in the best way to protect consumers. The domain name system approaches such conflict in the best way to maximize revenues for ICANN and the domain industry. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada@evanleibovitch or @el56
participants (5)
-
Bill Jouris -
Evan Leibovitch -
Fouad Bajwa -
John McCormac -
Roberto Gaetano