Tag: ICANN

ICANN73 or the difficult equation of preserving a weakened global model

ICANN73 or the difficult equation of preserving a weakened global model

In recent years, ICANN, the regulator of a “universal resolution” of the Internet for all Internet users, has been confronted with new difficulties that are weakening the body and its model. Its mode of operation has had to be adapted to an unprecedented global pandemic and its model of a global Internet is now being questioned by the growing desire of states to emancipate themselves from it, with the tragic conflict in Ukraine pushing the Urals a little further away from the Rockies. But the difficulties also come from its immediate environment with the rise of alternate roots. It is in this context and following a previous edition marked by tensions around the subjects that make up its topicality and which are struggling to move forward, that the 73rd summit opened with great expectations.

For once, the 73rd ICANN meeting did not kick off on a Monday, the day scheduled for the first working sessions. On Sunday 6 March, ICANN published a communiqué stating that its Board of Directors had decided to allocate an initial sum of US$1 million in financial assistance to support access to the Internet infrastructure in emergency situations in Ukraine. This was a way to launch an edition where the conflict in Ukraine was bound to be on everyone’s mind and in many debates.

The conflict in Ukraine in the background

Indeed, on Monday afternoon the very first plenary session of the summit, that of the GAC, the body representing governments, began with a condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Several members of the GAC, including France, took the floor.

Two weeks earlier, Ukraine was hit by the first Russian strikes. Ukraine, through Mykhailo Fedorov, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, asked ICANN to target Russia’s access to the Internet by revoking specific country code top-level domains operated from Russia, revoking SSL certificates associated with the domain names and shutting down a subset of root servers located in Russia. ICANN responded negatively to this request in a letter from Goran Marby, ICANN’s CEO, to the Minister, reminding that ICANN’s mission is to take steps to ensure that the Internet operates in a global and non-politicised manner. ICANN is a neutral body, Goran Marby repeated at the Public Forum that closed the summit.

Prospects for ongoing policy development processes

During the previous ICANN summit, tensions were palpable in certain bodies, especially the one representing the registries, due to policy development processes that have become longer with additional stages such as the ODP (Operational Design Phase) that now intervene between the return of final recommendations and the Board’s vote on them.

The first subject to be affected by the ODP stage is the Standardised System for Access to domain name Data. This system, known as SSAD, has been under discussion for more than three years as part of a policy development process known as ePDP, of which SSAD is part of phase 2. It is intended to return to a more uniform model of access to domain name registration data for legitimate requests. However, the ODP, which has just been finalised six months later than the initial estimated timetable, has highlighted the difficulty of framing this project. The number of users is in fact estimated at between 25,000 and 3 million to address 100,000 to 12 million requests, values that lead to a particularly wide range of implementation and maintenance costs (from 34 to 134 million US dollars) and consequently to access costs for the future system that are very difficult to evaluate, the idea being to finance the system exclusively with access costs. At ICANN73 , a way out was suggested: Create a pilot project to limit the risks, in other words, envisage a small-scale SSAD before considering the next steps.

It has been noted that regarding phase 1 of the aforementioned ePDP there is now a finish line. It is estimated to be completed by the end of 2022. This phase aims to create a perennial policy to replace a Temporary Specification that addressed the GDPR in the domain name eco-system in 2018.

The other major topic is that of a next series of new generic extensions. Let’s remember that the previous series will celebrate its ten years in 2022. Since then, it has been a policy development process (PDP) that stretched from December 2015 to February 2021 when the body representing generic policies, the GNSO, adopted the final recommendations report. Last September the ICANN Board decided to initiate an ODP process that could last until early next year. This topic has been the subject of much criticism as the finish line seems to be getting further and further away, even though it has been ten years since the last round. Nevertheless, one option was discussed at ICANN73, that of starting the implementation work without delay, a proposal that, while it rather displeased the ICANN CEO, was rather positively received by the ICANN Board, which should however only vote on the recommendations of the final report of the PDP process after the end of the ODP.

Geopolitical, legislative and regulatory aspects – a new feature

Among the novelties of this summit was a plenary session devoted to geopolitical, legislative and regulatory aspects. This session provided an overview of the many initiatives coming from institutions such as the United Nations, the International Telecoms Union, the Council of Europe and the OECD, as well as from States such as Russia with its digital sovereignty law and China with its law on cybersecurity and data security. This session also allowed to clarify perceptions such as ICANN’s position on the European NIS2 directive. Goran Marby indicated that ICANN does not have an official position on this issue.

The return of the GDD/GDS summit?

Until 2019, ICANN proposed a more operational summit called GDD Summit in addition to the three policy summits. This was abandoned in the context of the global pandemic and has not been mentioned since. The possibility of relaunching this mechanism was put on the table at ICANN73. There could therefore be a fourth annual ICANN meeting as early as the end of this year, with November being mentioned as a possible date. However, between now and then, there will be ICANN74 in June and ICANN75 in September, two events where the hybrid mode, face-to-face and remote, should be in place.

Nameshield Comments

ICANN 73 was undeniably marked by the conflict in Ukraine. A conflict that paradoxically allowed to find a semblance of unity with the outline of solutions as the fact of allowing the Ukrainian registrars to derogate from the ICANN policies through a device called “extraordinary circumstances” and to recall the ICANN to its fundamentals, an apolitical body working for a global Internet. By mapping out the geopolitical, legislative and regulatory contexts, the body also seems to have realised that the world ahead may make it even more difficult to preserve its model of a globalised internet. The feeling after this summit is that more concrete proposals and perspectives have been given on some of the subjects discussed.

For the next round, it is the threat of alternative roots to the DNS that could give an unexpected boost to the current process. These roots that tend to develop could cause collisions between requests if one day identical TLDs cohabit in two environments, a risk that is all the more increased if ICANN marks the step on a future round. Another risk is to be challenged for the allocation of regulatory TLDs when an identical TLD would exist on an alternate root.

Image source: ICANN’s website

New document : 5 minutes to understand who manages the Internet

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - Who manages the Internet - Nameshield

There is a multitude of players involved in the management of the network of networks !
Its management is the responsibility of a decentralized and international multiparty network of independent groups from civil society, private sector, governments, academic and scientific communities, and national and international organizations.

Find out in this “5 minutes to understand document”, available for download on the Nameshield’s website, who manages the Internet, what are the roles of ICANN, registries and registrars.

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ICANN71: GAC in the spotlight

ICANN71: GAC in the spotlight
Image source : icann.org website

Some 56 sessions were scheduled as part of the 71st ICANN Summit in The Hague. Held once again exclusively by video conference due to the global health situation, no less than a quarter of these sessions were organised by the GAC, the governmental advisory committee that advises ICANN on public policy issues related to ICANN’s responsibilities in the domain name system. The GAC has been very active on all current ICANN policy issues and has clearly made its mark.

The GAC currently has 179 members, representing a majority of the world’s countries. This gives it a good representation on a global scale to speak to a global governance body. The GAC is highly organised and precedes ICANN meetings with preparatory meetings that enable it to gather opinions at local level and then relay them to the governance body. Once again, this summit highlighted the fact that there are really a lot of policy issues going on at ICANN level.

The fight against DNS abuse

The topic of abuse has almost become a chestnut at ICANN summits, as it has been at the center of concerns for almost two years. While registries and registrars are already subject to a battery of obligations on this topic, many stakeholders consider these to be insufficient to really address the issue. The year 2020 has indeed seen an explosion in cybersecurity breaches, particularly as a result of the global pandemic, which has seen even more consumption via the web, particularly due to confinements, and where working methods have had to be reinvented in favour of the remote. It is clear that little has been achieved to date on that issue.

A thorough initiative rich in proposals was formulated by the SSAC (Security and Stability Advisory Committee) which, in its 24 recommendations transmitted to the ICANN Board, put forward the idea of initiating an expedited Policy Development Process (ePDP) with a view to developing an anti-abuse policy. Their report to the Board three months ago has not been acted upon to date. The second and more recent initiative comes from the Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG). It has finalised, with input from the GAC, a framework aimed specifically at botnets, attacks that use forms of Trojan horses to take control of computers to form networks of computers to carry out further attacks. Its principle is to allow voluntary registries to join a scheme that requires them to preemptively block bulk names generated via DGAs (Domain Generation Algorithms), algorithms used to periodically generate large numbers of domain names that can be used as rendezvous points with their command and control servers. The large number of potential rendezvous points makes it difficult for law enforcement to effectively counter botnets, as infected computers will attempt to contact some of these domain names every day to receive updates or commands. The principle here is therefore preventive. In return, the registries would benefit from incentives and would not have to pay the tax collected by ICANN when a domain is created. This initiative is to be welcomed, but it is carried out more directly by the RySG and is therefore not consensual, hence its voluntary nature and therefore its very limited impact.

The reason the DNS abuse issue is so stalled is that it is confronted with other ongoing and upcoming policy development processes and competing interests between bodies, the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) for example being very concerned about access to contact data in domain name directories, the RySG about the launch of the next round of new gTLDs that they want to see move forward.

The impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on domain name registration data

Recall that to replace the Temporary Specification, which was put in place on 17th of May 2018 just a few days before the GDPR came into effect, an ePDP process was initiated. This process, described as expeditious, seemed to be far from being finalised at this new ICANN summit, even though three years have passed.

Segmented into three phases, phase 1 aims to provide a perennial policy that should frame the management of personal data of domain names to replace the temporary Specification that notably redacted personal data from domain name directories (via the Whois and RDAP protocols). Its drafting is progressing but no date is known for its finalisation and therefore possible implementation. The delay is partly due to the difficulty of transcribing certain recommendations, one of which was in conflict with an existing policy, the Thick Whois Transition Policy, which provides for the systematic transfer of detailed contact data from registrars to registries. Another pitfall is that the policy overlaps with other existing policies, which therefore also require ongoing adaptation.

Phase 2 concerns the establishment of a harmonised system of access to redacted name directory data for “legitimate” interests. This system is now known as the Standardised Data Access System (SDAS). The first hurdle was that the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the policy-making body for generic names, had surprisingly approved all of the recommendations in the Final Report, even those that did not achieve consensus. The recommendations to create this system were therefore all transmitted to the ICANN Board, which rather than pronounce and vote on their application decided to first initiate an Operational Design Phase (ODP). Initiated at the end of March by the Board, it should last six months and aims to identify the stages, risks, costs and resources to be allocated, with a consultation of the community once a milestone has been reached. It is therefore a form of project scoping. The publication of a Request for Information is planned for June for a first consultation of the community.

A Phase 2a additional layer of the PDP aims to assess the possibility of unbundling the contact data of publishable legal entities from non-publishable natural persons. Initiated in December 2020, it resulted in five recommendations in an initial report open for comment until 19th of July 2021. The first recommendation, which was much commented on at ICANN71 , finally recommends that nothing should be changed by allowing players who so wish to make this differentiation. This process will continue with a final report of recommendations expected in the second half of the year.

The GAC considers that improvements are needed in both of the above-mentioned topics. In particular, it considers that the system does not go far enough to protect consumers and increase their confidence. It also regrets that the evolution of the system over time has not been framed and fears that the cost, since access is subject to an accreditation system, could be a deterrent, particularly for those involved in the fight against security breaches who need access to registration data. On DNS abuse, the GAC reiterates the need to address this issue. It has already made several proposals at previous summits.

What about the next round?

The next round is still undecided. We just learned that the ICANN Board, which has just received the last inputs on the recommendations for the next round of new gTLDs, has confirmed that it will start an Operational Design Phase (ODP) to estimate the steps, risks and resources necessary to implement these recommendations. Not yet planned, the Board said it had asked ICANN org to prepare a document to frame the ODP in order to draft the resolution that will formalise it. This resolution will set a deadline for completion of the ODP, possibly six months as with the SSAD. 

The GAC, for its part, recalled the issues of specific concern to its members. These include: predictability, voluntary and mandatory registry commitments including how to address DNS abuse, its desire to see support for new applicants better adapted, particularly for less favoured areas, its opposition to closed generic TLDs, the consolidation of its ability to evaluate all applications in order to issue advices and warnings, and its opposition to private auctions to decide between applicants for the same gTLD. It also wishes to support non-profit community applications.

Other issues carried by the GAC are very committed

Other policy development processes are underway, such as the one on Governmental and Non-Governmental Organisation Identifiers (IGOs, INGOs), a process on the rights protection mechanisms, or in the initial phase a PDP on domain transfers and on the launch pad a PDP on IDNs. The GAC did not fail to recall the central issue of accuracy of registration data which is considered insufficiently addressed by the current obligations espacially due to the impact of GDPR. This topic will indeed be central in the perspective of the future NIS2 directives and the Digital Services Act currently being drafted at the European level. The GNSO was challenged by the GAC on the examination of this topic, which has not really started, and apologized for having too many topics in progress. Tensions that the GNSO has sought to alleviate by spending time reviewing its liaison with the GAC to improve it, a decidedly offensive and active GAC.

What About Future Summits?

ICANN summits usually end with a public forum where the public can directly question the Board. As a sign of a (temporary?) improvement of the health state on the covid, the traditional forum was dedicated to the future ICANN summits to know if they should be held in person. From this session it emerged that the answer is not obvious. At issue were the different levels of vaccination and access to vaccines in different countries, the currently restricted conditions of entry to the USA, ICANN72 being held in Seattle and the evolution of the pandemic which remains uncertain. This forum provided an opportunity to comment on a recent survey conducted by ICANN which showed that the majority of those interested in ICANN events considered that face-to-face meetings should be reactivated (54%). At the end of this session, ICANN committed to arbitrate during July. The format of ICANN72 could be hybrid, with limited on-site representation and the continuation of the remote format.

A notable feature of this summit was the large number of ongoing issues and the impression that things are moving forward with difficulty. This has resulted in notable tensions between bodies and discontent expressed, for example, by the group of representatives of geographical extensions, the geoTLDs. If for some, the return to face-to-face meetings seems to be the solution to improve things, through our presence in certain bodies and our participation in working groups, we think that it is rather a problem of visibility due to too many subjects being launched in parallel, some of which overlap with a clear lack of prioritisation. The ODP, the new tool which aims to frame the implementation of a harmonised system of access to registration data and which is now being applied in the next round, may go some way to improving these perceptions. Another aspect to be considered is the diverging interests between bodies. Here, facilitated exchanges can perhaps improve things.

ICANN70: At the crossroads of different policy development processes

Initially scheduled to take place in Cancun, Mexico, like ICANN67 , the recent summit on Internet governance was once again held entirely by videoconference due to the global health situation. The PDPs, the Policy Development Processes, were the main thread of this summit.

ICANN 70
ICANN70 was the fourth summit held remotedely

The PDP, Policy Development Process, is the central community mechanism used by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (Gnso), the body responsible for policy developments on generic domain names, to propose new requirements and revise existing rules to update them. Each PDP results in a series of reports that are ultimately forwarded to the ICANN Board of Directors, which decides on the fate of the recommendations they contain. 

News on the PDP of the new generic extensions

It is with this mechanism that ICANN launched a program of new generic extensions that led to 1930 applications in Spring 2012 and 1233 delegated extensions by the end of 2020. The opportunity to consider a new round of applications was materialized by a PDP initiated by Gnso in late 2015. Five years later, this process to review and improve the Gnso recommendations for the 2012 cycle has entered its final stretch. It is now up to the ICANN Board to decide on the recommendations of the working groups that worked on this PDP. The Board of Directors should launch a last phase of consultations of the community before pronouncing on the continuation of their works. The community was expecting an announcement at this summit or perhaps even a timetable to mark out the next steps until the next round of applications, but we have to admit that hopes have been dashed. Indeed, no announcements were made, even though we know that the prospect of a future round of applications is now approaching fast. Regarding the content of the recommendations this time, the elements discussed mainly during ICANN70 were about a pre-evaluation of the future registries, the improvement of the predictability to evaluate the future applications and the ways to improve the applicants’ support.

The PDP: A solution to the impasse over malicious use of the DNS?

Another topic, related to the implementation of the PDP mentioned above, is the malicious uses of the DNS, a topic commonly referred to as DNS abuse.

ICANN’s monitoring of malicious practices in generic names covers some 205 million domain names, of which barely 11% are from the cycle of extensions created since 2012. The observation made through their analyses shows that around one million domains concentrate these infringements, that is to say 0.5% of them. Another notable fact is that the new generic extensions are more used for malicious practices than the historical generic extensions like .COM, .NET, .ORG, .BIZ and .INFO. In fact, ICANN indicated that in February 2021, 35% of security breaches came from names created in the new generic extensions against 65% in the historical extensions, a ratio that even rose to 40% in November 2020. ICANN also said that 90% of malicious practices in the new extensions were concentrated in 23 extensions. As for the most common types of attacks, spamming is involved at 85%, phishing at 8.4%, botnets (malicious programs that operate remotely) at 3.9% and malware at 2.7%. The new generic extensions concentrate more spamming and phishing practices. Although DNS abuse has been a central topic of discussion between the bodies representing the stakeholders of the Internet community for five summits now, positions still diverge on the measures to be taken to curb these harmful practices. Here again, the expectations of the community at this summit were high.

The GAC, the body that represents governments, has already supported the idea of a dedicated PDP on this topic. It advocates for a holistic approach that addresses all extensions, existing and future. GAC highlighted the work of the SSAC, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which advises the community and the ICANN Board on issues related to the security and integrity of the Internet’s naming and addressing systems. Indeed, it published an advisory prior to ICANN70 urging the Board before launching the next round of new gTLDs to commission a study of the causes, responses and best practices for mitigating domain name abuse proliferating in the new gTLDs in the 2012 round. To their credit, they also made a series of recommendations to the ICANN Board, ranging from the systematic presence of security experts in all future contract negotiations to an ePDP (expeditive Policy Development Process).  As for Gnso, it is continuing consultations for the moment without ruling out the use of a PDP.

And the ePDP phase 1 and 2 on access to registration data

Another topic, another PDP process, the ePDP in connection with the GDPR for access to domain name registration data. Initiated in 2018, it was intended to replace a Temporary Specification that involved redacting personal data from freely available registration data of generic names. Phase 1 of the ePDP, not finalized at this time, is intended to replace the Temporary Specification with a future-proof provision. Phase 2 aims to create a standardized data access system for legitimate applications commonly referred to as SSAD. This phase has now reached the end of the roadmap, as it is now in the hands of the ICANN Board of Directors after the Gnso has approved all the provisions formulated by the working groups that have worked on this subject, even those that did not reach consensus. The Gnso assumed this position under the pretext that it was necessary to take its responsibilities and that the recommendations were a whole, a breach of the process of creating new policies that normally wants to be consensual and that led the ALAC (At-Large Advisory Committee) that represents the end users to express concerns, the IPC (Intellectual Property Constituency) that represents the interests of the intellectual property community even going so far as to ask not to continue with the review of the recommendations. The ICANN Board has simply launched an Operational Design Phase to consider the operability of the future system and intends to take a position on the recommendations at a later stage.

A new PDP on domain name transfer policies

Another PDP process was officially launched at ICANN70 to revise the rules for domain name transfers: transfers between registrars and transfers between two registrants. The latter aims to simplify, secure and make name transfers more efficient. A vast project that could extend over several years…

Concerns about the concentration of the sector

Indicative of the concerns of the Internet community, the public forum this year was marked by many questions around the concentration that is accelerating among the players of domain names. The latest is Ethos Capital, a private equity firm founded in 2019, which after buying the operator of .ORG, PIR, has just taken over Donuts, which manages no less than 242 new generic extensions and had recently acquired Afilias, which is among other things manager of the extension .INFO. The community has expressed concerns about these new players whose expectations are not necessarily in line with one of ICANN’s totems, which is to defend competition, trust and consumer choice. ICANN, for its part, does not see a problem in this phenomenon, which has become a trend, because these mergers trigger very closely supervised procedures for analyzing and approving the changes that are brought about. 

ICANN70 has highlighted the fact that ICANN is looking at a number of potentially high-impact topics in domain name management, most of which are about to be materialized into new policies that Nameshield will implement for its customers. Beyond this framework, Nameshield, an independent French player, has already implemented solutions that provide answers to the problems that some of these policies must address. Do not hesitate to reach your consultant with your needs so that we can study together the solutions that we can already bring.

.ORG News – ICANN rejects the sale of the .ORG Registry to Ethos Capital

Sale of .ORG registry - PIR Public Interest Registry - dot ORG - Nameshield

The news came on 30 April through a press release from the ICANN Board announcing that it had taken the decision to reject the sale of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .ORG registry, to the private equity firm Ethos Capital.

For reminder, at the end of 2019, the announcement of the sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital created a real debate and caused several concerns from NGOs, such as the increase of .ORG prices and the implementation of rights protection policies that could lead to a form of censorship (Find all the articles on this subject on the blog).

In mid-April, while the organization had to decide whether or not to approve the sale of the registry, the transaction was still pending. ICANN allowed itself additional time to complete its review, after receiving numerous letters of opposition, including one from California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra.

The decision to reject this deal was finally announced on Thursday 30 April “as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty over the future of the third largest gTLD registry”.

One of the main reasons for this decision is the “change from the fundamental public interest nature of PIR to an entity that is bound to serve the interests of its corporate stakeholders, and which has no meaningful plan to protect or serve the .ORG community.”

Among the reasons for this rejection is also the issue of financing, since this transaction could compromise the financial stability of the registry. Indeed, the proposed sale would change PIR from a not-for-profit entity to a for-profit entity with a $360 million debt obligation, which would not benefit PIR or the .ORG community, but the financial interests of Ethos and its investors.

Furthermore, the PIR proposal to implement a “Stewardship Council“, which aimed to make the entity more accountable to the community, did not convince ICANN either. According to the organization, this council “might not be properly independent“.

ICANN’s decision is therefore a victory for the .ORG community and Electronic Frontier Foundation, which does not stop there and adds “the .ORG registry still needs a faithful steward, because the Internet Society has made clear it no longer wants that responsibility. ICANN should hold an open consultation, as they did in 2002, to select a new operator of the .ORG domain that will give nonprofits a real voice in its governance, and a real guarantee against censorship and financial exploitation.”

.ORG News – ICANN delays again the sale of the .ORG Registry

Sale of .ORG registry - PIR Public Interest Registry - dot ORG - Nameshield

A few months ago, in previous articles, we mentioned the sale by Internet Society of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .ORG registry, to Ethos Capital, a private equity firm.

The .ORG is the reference extension for non-profit organizations and the .ORG registry represents more than 10.5 million domains. For reminder, the announcement of the sale of the registry caused several concerns in the NGO community.

In front of these many complaints, ICANN had already postponed the approval of the .ORG registry’s sale to Ethos Capital and requested additional information from Internet Society.

Further postponement of the .org registry’s sale after the intervention of the Attorney General of California

On Thursday 16 April, when the ICANN Board was to decide whether or not to approve the sale of the registry, it was finally decided at that meeting, to postpone it again until 4 May 2020. This fourth postponement was caused by a letter received the day before from California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, asking ICANN to reject the sale. He explains that it “raises serious concerns that cannot be overlooked“.

“Empowering a for-profit entity that could undermine the accessibility and affordability of the .org domain, which serves nonprofits, should concern all of us” the Attorney General’s office told The Register.

The secret nature of Ethos Capital is a source of concern

In his letter, the Attorney General expressed several concerns about the transaction, including the secret nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital: “Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries“. Ethos Capital is criticized for its unusual corporation structure (the purchase involves six different companies, all of which were registered on the same day in October 2019) and its lack of transparency regarding its future plans.

In its notice published last Thursday, ICANN affirms having listened to the community and having demanded greater transparency and more guarantees from PIR. According to the organization, the Attorney General’s letter does not take into account the recent work that PIR has done regarding Public Interest Commitments, to make the entity more responsible to the community. ICANN requested PIR to strengthen these commitments, and a draft of the revised Public Interest Commitments has been provided to ICANN.

ICANN’s behavior and Internet Society criticized

ICANN has also been subject to a number of criticisms during the entire process, particularly as it appeared that the organization’s staff was pushing for approval of the transaction despite near universal opposition to it from the Internet community.

In addition, early last week, ICANN’s founding CEO Michael Roberts and original Board Chair Esther Dyson wrote a letter to Xavier Becerra criticizing the transaction and accusing their successors of abandoning ICANN’s core principles.

According to the Attorney General, this transaction will have an impact on ICANN’s reputation given the way the organization has handled the situation.

Not only ICANN and Ethos have been criticized by the Attorney General’s office, Xavier Becerra also blames the Internet Society for proposing the sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital: “ISOC purports to support the Internet, yet its actions, from the secretive nature of the transaction, to actively seeking to transfer the .ORG registry to an unknown entity, are contrary to its mission and potentially disruptive to the same system it claims to champion and support“.

Xavier Becerra’s letter does not threaten ICANN with action if it does approve the sale. However, it does indicate that the Attorney General of California holds significant authority over the organization and is prepared to act, particularly since this sale could affect hundreds of thousands of other non-profit organizations.

“Given the concerns stated above, and based on the information provided, the .ORG registry and the global Internet community – of which innumerable Californians are a part – are better served if ICANN withholds approval of the proposed sale and transfer of PIR and the .ORG registry to the private equity firm Ethos Capital. This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community.”

In a notice published last Thursday, ICANN thus declared the postponement of its decision: “We have agreed to extend the review period to 4 May 2020, to permit additional time to complete our review.”

ICANN67 – COVID19 : 0-1

ICANN67 - COVID19 : 0-1
Image source: geralt via Pixabay

The 67th annual ICANN Summit, a summit dedicated to Internet naming regulations, was to be held in Cancún, Mexico, from 7th to 12th March. Often referred to by the acronym ICANN67, it is finally another acronym COVID19 that designates the now famous coronavirus that forced ICANN to reconsider all the logistics of this major event.

Since 1999, ICANN has organised three annual meetings devoted to the regulations applicable to Internet naming and a fourth devoted to more operational aspects, often referred to as the GDD Summit (Global Domain Division Summit). These meetings are an opportunity for participants from some 150 countries to discuss live the hot topics related to the Domain Name System (DNS).

For the past few weeks, however, world attention has focused on a completely different subject: the ongoing spread of the coronavirus, which according to the latest figures available has contaminated some 75,465 people in mainland China and caused the death of 2,236 people since its emergence in December in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province. While South Korea also now has more than 150 confirmed cases, the list of countries with confirmed cases keeps growing. More than 30 countries are now in this situation.

Quite logically, in recent weeks, behind the scenes of the ICANN organization, coronavirus has been rising as a major concern for the players in the domain name industry. More and more potential participants were talking about the fact that they would prefer not to travel for this event, which is important to them, while others were asking whether it was appropriate to hold this event in such a context. Recent cancellations of similar events have indeed echoed their concerns. Earlier this month, the GSMA, the organizers of the world’s largest mobile industry exhibition, Mobile World Congress 2020, effectively cancelled the event after more than 30 exhibitors and sponsors withdrew due to the outbreak. The Fintech Festival of India (IFF 2020) organised by the government of Maharashtra, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Fintech Convergence Council also similarly announced this week that it would postpone the event to a “more appropriate time” due to coronavirus-related issues. The event was scheduled to take place on 4-5 March 2020.

At the 19 February session of the ICANN Board, which was extended by one hour, ICANN finally decided :

« Resolved (2020.02.19.01), by virtue of the public health emergency of international concern posed by COVID-19, the daily evolving developments, and the high global risk still identified, the Board directs the ICANN President and CEO, or his designees, to take all necessary actions to not hold ICANN67 as an in-person meeting in Cancún, Mexico.

Resolved (2020.02.19.02), as the Board has determined to not proceed to Cancun, Mexico for ICANN67, the Board directs the ICANN President and CEO to move ICANN67 to ICANN’s first fully remote public meeting. »

The ICANN Board communiqué confirms that the summit, which is usually held in person, will for the first time be entirely managed remotely with means still to be clarified.

If the holding of such event in a remote mode is unprecedented, it should be noted that in the past ICANN has already changed the organization of its meetings for similar reasons. Indeed in June 2016, for example, ICANN decided to move ICANN56 from Panama City to Helsinki in Finland because of the Zika virus. The only difference is that their decision could have been anticipated earlier.

This is why ICANN has already taken up the subject for the holding of the following events : the GDD Summit planned in Paris in May and then the ICANN68 planned in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia in June.

ICANN66 at Montreal – A contrasting summit

During the first half of November, the 66th ICANN Summit was held in Montreal, Canada. This third and final annual summit devoted to policies applicable to Internet naming was eagerly awaited as the topics under discussion are numerous. At its closing, however, it left many participants a little bit disappointed.

A preview of the topics and postures during the weekend before the official launch of the Summit

The weekend before the official opening of the Summit is usually an opportunity to get an overview of the topics and postures involved. Not surprisingly, the expedited Policy Development Process (ePDP) which aims to develop a consensus rule to specify future conditions of access to personal data that are no longer published in the WHOIS, the domain name search directory, due to GDPR, is one of the major topics.

Among other related topics, the replacement of the same WHOIS by the RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) probably next year for generic domain names. This replacement is not insignificant when we know that WHOIS has been in use for nearly 35 years.

The body representing governments, the GAC, has weighed up the issue of domain name abuse, which has taken off considerably on the new generic extensions launched in 2012. When we know the rise of Internet practices aimed at weighing on elections in certain countries and the economic impact of computer attacks and hacking, we understand that this subject is being pushed by the GAC. While one of ICANN’s topics is to clarify in their texts the notion of malicious uses, this term refers to domains registered for phishing, malware, botnets and spam, the other part concerns the means to stem them. The existence of abusive domains indeed threatens the DNS infrastructure, impacts consumer safety and threatens the critical assets of public and commercial entities. Finally, and not surprisingly, the subject of a future round of new generic extensions has also been on many lips.

ICANN66 at Montreal - A contrasting summit
Cherine Chalaby at the ICANN Summit held in Montreal

“The best ICANN summit”, really?

During the traditional opening ceremony, which brings together all the guests for one hour (2500 according to Goran Marby, ICANN CEO) in a huge room to listen to various speakers, including Martin Aubé of the Quebec Government’s Ministry of Economy and Innovation, Cherine Chalaby, one of the ICANN Board members whose term ends at the end of the year, told his audience that ICANN66 would be the “Best ICANN summit”. It must be said, however, that at the end of the week of debates and meetings, which followed one another at a sustained pace, while the subjects under discussion are really numerous, the feeling regarding this assertion was more than mixed for many participants.

First, the expeditious process for access to WHOIS non-public data is progressing with a framework constrained by ICANN and the Personal Data Protection Authorities. The outcome of this process is envisaged between April and June 2020 and it is currently a centralized model where ICANN would allow the future lifting of anonymity of data that are now masked due to GDPR which holds the line.

Then the subject that was probably most often mentioned during this new summit week concerned abuses with domain names. For ICANN, the subject is central because it is directly correlated to its totem: the stability of the Internet for which they are the responsible. Since February 2019, ICANN has been publishing some metrics on malicious practices identified through DAAR, their Domain Abuse Activity Reporting.

Their latest report presented in Montreal shows that 364 extensions (mainly new generic extensions from the 2012 round) revealed at least one threat posed by one of the domain names activated on these extensions. More worryingly, new generic extensions would still account for nearly 40% of malicious uses, compared to 60% for historical generic extensions. This figure should be highlighted with the volume of these two categories of extensions. Indeed, out of just over 200 million generic names, new generic domains represent only 15% of the total number of registered names. ICANN therefore wants this subject to be taken up by the entire community present in Montreal.

Proposals were made by the various bodies present, some of which went so far as to request a policy development process (PDP). This last proposal, if it were to obtain ICANN’s approval, would have the unfortunate consequence of postponing the hypothetical schedule for a next round of new extensions, a subject that interested many of the guests present in Montreal. Indeed, for ICANN, the problem of the concentration of malicious practices in the new generic extensions must be solved before any future round, so that the PDP still in progress on the review of the last round of 2012 has gone almost unnoticed.  

If the rules are slow to evolve on malicious uses, your Nameshield consultant can already provide you with adapted solutions to your needs on this key matter.

50 years after Arpanet, the Internet’s ancestor

Arpanet - Internet’s ancestor - Nameshield Blog
Image source: geralt via Pixabay

On October 29, 1969 UCLA sends the very first e-message to Stanford Research Institute through Arpanet network (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) laying the foundation for today’s networked world.

Arpanet, the Internet’s precursor 

Arpanet is the first data transfer network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which belonged to the U.S. Defense Department.

The first Arpanet node was set up at UCLA on August 30, 1969, the second node, at the Stanford Research Institute, was set up on October 1st 1969. The first message was sent between the two institutions on October 29 1969 by the UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock who wished to send the word “login” but the system crashed so only two letters, “l” and “o”, were transmitted, the complete word will only be transmitted 1 hour later.

Arpanet connected some universities and research institutes: first, UCLA and Stanford Research Institute, followed by UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. At the end of 1969, Arpanet counted 4 nodes, in 1971, 23 nodes were created and 111 nodes in 1977.

In 1983, Arpanet has been divided in two networks: one military, the MILnet (Military Network) and the other academic, the NSFnet.

On January 1st 1983, the name “Internet” already in use to define all of Arpanet, became official.

World Wide Web turns 30 years old

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher working for the CERN, proposed a hypertext system working on the Internet. This system was originally developed for scientists working in universities and institutes around the world, so they could instantly share information. His vision of universal connectivity became the World Wide Web, which sent Internet usage skyrocketing.

In 1993, Mosaic, the first popular web browser was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric J.Bina, two students of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois. It was not the first graphical web browser but Mosaic was particularly fast and allowed the users to display images inside web pages instead of displaying images in a separate window, which has given it some popularity and contributed to increase the World Wide Web’s popularity.

Internet Protocol – From IPv4 to IPv6

The Internet Protocol (IP) is a set of communication protocols of IT networks developed to be used on the Internet. IP protocols allow a unique addressing service for all connected devices.

IPv4 the first major version was invented in the 70’s and introduced to the public in 1981. It is still the dominant protocol of the Internet today. Twenty years ago, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) started predicting the depletion of IPv4 addresses and began working to create a new version of the Internet Protocol: IPv6.

IPv4 uses a 32-bit addressing scheme to support 4.3 billion devices, while IPv6 possesses a much larger address space. Indeed, IPv6 uses a 128-bit address allowing 3.4 x 1038 possible addresses.

DNS – Domain Name System

At the request of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Defense Department, the DNS (Domain Name System) was invented in 1983 by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris, in order to associate complex IP addresses with humanly understandable and easy-to-remember names. Thus a logical address, the domain name, is associated to a physical address, the IP address. The domain name and IP address are unique.

In 1998, is created ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the regulatory authority of the Internet. Its main purpose is to allocate the Internet protocol addresses spaces, to attribute the protocol identifier (IP), to manage the domain name system of top level for generic codes (gTLD), to assign the country codes (ccTLD), and to carry out the functions of the root servers’ system management.

With 351.8 million domain names registrations in the first quarter of 2019, domain names registrations continue to climb, but with the increase of the number of threats aiming the DNS at the same time.

The emergence of cyber threats

Considered as one of the first cyberattacks and certainly the first to attract the media’s attention, the Morris Worm was launched in 1988 by a student of the Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris. Originally, the malware developed by the student didn’t have for purpose to cause damage but simply to estimate the extent of the Internet. However this worm affected about 60 000 computers estimated connected to the Internet and the cost of the damages was about 100 000 to 10 million dollars. This event marks the turning point in the field of online security.

Today, cyberattacks are abundant, frequent and more and more sophisticated. The evolution of techniques and the arrival of new technologies make cyberattacks increasingly complex and offer new opportunities to attackers.

There are various types of cyberattack like attacks aiming the DNS: DDoS, DNS cache poisoning, DNS spoofing, Man in the Middle… (In 2019, according to IDC – International Data Corporation, 82% of companies worldwide have faced a DNS attack over the past year) or attacks directly aiming users and having for purpose to obtain confidential information to steal an identity (phishing).

The consequences for victimized companies can be significant. For example, today the cost of a data breach is 3.92 million dollars on average according to IBM Security, this cost has risen 12% over the past five years.

An IP traffic estimated in 2022 more important than the one generated from 1984 to 2016

With more than 5 billion Google searches made every day, e-commerce continuing to thrive, social media growing in popularity and the increasing number of connected objects, the traffic volume on the Internet has risen considerably.

Indeed, in 1974, daily traffic on the Internet surpassed 3 million packets per day. According to a Cisco’s research in 2017, the global IP traffic reached 122 exabytes per month, the company estimates that this volume should reach 396 exabytes by 2022.

“The size and complexity of the Internet continues to grow in ways that many could not have imagined. Since we first started the VNI Forecast in 2005, traffic has increased 56-fold, amassing a 36% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) with more people, devices and applications accessing IP networks” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager of Service Provider Business at Cisco.

Today, 50 years after the birth of the Internet’s ancestor, Arpanet, there are more Internet connected devices than people in the world. In 2022, the web users will represent 60% of the world’s population and more than 28 billion devices will connect to the Internet.