Tag: ODP

ICANN74 between lessons of the pandemic and awareness of the richness of the Internet

Between ICANN66 in Montreal, Canada and ICANN74 in The Hague, Netherlands, thirty-two months and seven summits will have passed exclusively online. In 2020, the prospect of a return to face-to-face meetings was already being discussed under the heading of ‘hybrid mode’, a mixture of face-to-face and remote meetings. The question remained as to when this could be implemented. A more favorable health context was needed, with all the questions posed by covid variants and its repeated waves, and sufficient guarantees of security for the participants, who generally come from the four corners of the world. The 74th edition, which was held last month in The Hague, was finally chosen to experiment the ‘hybrid mode’.

The return of face-to-face meetings with the lessons learned from the pandemic

A return to face-to-face sessions in The Hague, but nevertheless extremely constrained, due to health security. Pre-registration was compulsory for all sessions, with a limited number of places per session. This meant that some sessions were already fully booked well before the summit. The compulsory pre-registration led participants to pre-register for sessions they were not sure they would attend in order to reserve a place. Each participant also had to be able to prove that their vaccination status was up to date. Tests were provided on site as well as temperature taking. Finally, masks and distancing measures were mandatory, hence the limited number of places per session. The organization also decided that everyone should go through the video conferencing medium, including those present on site, an idea that aimed to ensure that all participants could interact equally. For those connected remotely, it was also noted that, as promised, the organization planned shorter sessions, generally not exceeding one and a half hour and very often even one hour. The conditions were therefore met to guarantee safe conditions for those present and good conditions for those connected remotely.

Two ODP processes running in parallel

The subject of the next series of new generic extensions has been discussed in sessions of various bodies. The project is now in the Operational Design Phase (ODP), which consists of an assessment of the risks, tasks and resources required, and which is to be concluded with an Operational Design Assessment (ODA). A related subject, that of closed generic extensions, has entered a new sequence. The principle of a so-called “Small Team”, which includes representatives of the GAC, the body representing governments, the ALAC, which represents end-users, and the GNSO, the body in charge of generic policies, has been validated in order to discuss this subject and see if a compromise can be found to envisage next steps. In the 2012 round, it was not possible to create such extension models. The question is therefore whether such extension models will be possible in the next round. Regarding the ODA, the GNSO, which estimates its publication on 31 October, has mentioned a possible postponement of six to eight weeks due to another ODA that is also mobilizing many people on the creation of a Standardized Domain Name Registration Data Access System for legitimate purposes. The SSAD ODA with contrasting conclusions, particularly with regard to its number of potential users and its particularly high cost, was delivered on 25 January. Its findings are still being evaluated. The next step on this second subject is the creation of a sort of prototype called “SSAD Light” which could be based on technologies mastered by ICANN teams to limit delays and costs. The latter would help to validate or not the implementation of an SSAD with, in this case, a prior implementation phase.

Accuracy of registration data, an important issue

Among the many issues currently being examined, the accuracy of domain name registration data is an important one for Europeans. Indeed, it is the Regulation on the Protection of Personal Data, the GDPR, which has prompted ICANN to call for the removal of personal data from registration directories and which, in turn, explains the aforementioned SSAD project and the accuracy of data. How can we ensure that masked data is accurate?  In October 2021, a Scoping Team began a mission to evaluate the obligations related to the accuracy of registration data. It planned to verify the effectiveness of the accuracy of the data. Their findings were expected in June, but the measurement of effectiveness has been hampered by the difficulty of obtaining the necessary data, which is stored at the registrars. Transmitting all registration data to ICANN for research purposes requires a legal basis. The Scoping Team is thus put on hold.

This is particularly important because, as EURALO, the European part of the At-Large body representing end-users, has pointed out, Europe is about to adopt the NIS2 Directive. The directive is due to be voted on in the plenary session of the European Parliament in September before being published in the Official Journal and transposed in the 27 European states. EURALO recalled that NIS2 provides for specific obligations notably on domain name registration data, storage, access and verification and therefore interferes with the role of the regulator ICANN. Moreover, if specific measures apply only to European providers, this creates a disparity of obligations between players, not to mention that the transposition of the text could be unequal in the states. Accuracy at the ICANN level can help harmonize future obligations for all players regardless of their location.

The impact of regulations and disasters

At ICANN73, which followed the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, ICANN had the good idea of creating a session dedicated to geopolitical, regulatory and legislative aspects. This meeting highlighted the risks of fragmentation of the single Internet model advocated by the organization. This meeting was repeated at this summit and allowed to note that the initiatives of the States are increasingly interfering with ICANN’s role as regulator.

EURALO had the good idea of completing this panorama with a session on governance and multipartyism in times of emergency. This session consisted mainly of a round-up of At-Large representatives from different continents. The representative from Ukraine logically started the session. In a moving speech about the tragedy in her country, she reminded us that the Internet infrastructure in her country has been heavily impacted. For the Asia-Pacific region, the representative mentioned the volcanic eruption in Tonga in January 2022, which cut the submarine cables and caused a five-week blackout on the islands. She also mentioned the situation in Myanmar where the Internet has been cut off since a coup in February 2021. The representatives of the two American continents spoke of natural and climatic disasters such as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, which had knocked out telecommunications antennas and the electricity network. For part of the population, electricity and Internet access had been cut off for several months. Finally, the representative of Africa recalled that today at least 60% of Africans do not have access to the Internet.

Our comments

The return to face-to-face meetings was not an easy task for ICANN. While many participants felt that the proposed framework was too restrictive, it seems that the organization worked quite well overall in allowing everyone to attend the sessions fairly. The protection measures also seem to have dissuaded many participants from coming, including the speakers scheduled for the week of exchanges who assumed to participate remotely. Indeed, the figures given by the organization indicate 1817 participants from 101 countries, half of whom attended remotely. A good point for the planet but the limit was the possibility to interact outside the sessions.

On the ongoing policy development and review processes, the sessions during the week of the event reminded us that there are a lot of issues being dealt with in parallel, undoubtedly too many issues. This inevitably makes it difficult to keep track of them and causes delays, such as the two ODPs being conducted simultaneously on SSAD and the next round of new generic extensions. However, the overall feeling is that the topics are moving forward, even if the finish line is often unclear.

The last day provided a break from policy issues as geopolitical and regulatory issues and the impact of disasters reminded us that the governance model and access to the Internet are two particularly fragile critical aspects. While NAMESHIELD offers you solutions to the risks associated with compromised names and malicious registrations, we must also remember that we are not all equal when it comes to accessing the Internet. In addition to stricter legislation, other risks such as armed conflicts or climate change must indeed also be considered.

Image source : ICANN’s website

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

ICANN72, between prioritisation needs and fragmentation risks

ICANN72, between prioritisation needs and fragmentation risks

At the end of October, the 72nd ICANN summit was held, devoted to the development of policies that impact the domain name system (DNS) and the global Internet community. As already announced during the past summer, this latest annual meeting was to be held by videoconference in the time zone of Seattle in the United States. “Sleepless” were therefore not in Seattle but rather in Europe.

ICANN72, between prioritisation needs and fragmentation risks

The thorn in the side of the next round of new generic extensions

A month before this summit, ICANN announced the schedule for the Operational Design Phase (ODP) for one of the most anticipated topics by the contracting parties: the organisation of a future round of applications for new generic extensions. The ODP is a new mechanism now linked to the policy development process (PDP). It is similar to a project scoping exercise as it aims to identify the steps, risks, costs and resources to be allocated to implement a project, in this case a new round of generic extensions. The PDP was conducted between 2015 and 2020, with the submission of a final recommendations report to the ICANN Board in March of this year. However, it is not until February 2023, almost two years later, that the Board should consider these recommendations, the time to let the ODP conduct. Indeed, ICANN confirmed before the opening of ICANN72 that this scoping phase should last sixteen months in its entirety, including ten months for the conduct of the ODP, three months upstream to initiate the latter and in particular to constitute the teams that will conduct it and three months downstream to conclude the work. This timetable surprised many of the contracting parties and gave rise to much discontent. These discontents were particularly expressed through the Brand Registry Group that represents and promotes the interests of its members, dotBrand owners. For most members, things are not moving fast enough and the ODP would even be partly useless since some aspects overlap with the work already conducted during the previous PDP. Another aspect pointed out was the cost of the ODP estimated to $9 million, which is not a small amount.

The clouds are gathering as are the processes underway

As the other sessions scheduled during the week-long summit progressed, it was clear that the clouds continued to gather in the weather of ICANN’s policies. For example, the announcement of the launch of an expedited policy development process (ePDP) to review the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which allows for the recovery of disputed domain names, caused a great deal of misunderstanding, given that a review of all rights protection mechanisms (RPMs) has already been conducted between 2016 and 2020 and its final recommendations have not yet been examined by the ICANN Board. Now this review to validate the recommendations is scheduled to take place at best in the summer of 2022, by which time the aforementioned ePDP should be finalised. This example illustrated the gap that is being created between the community’s expectations for decisions and ICANN’s decision-making bodies, which seem to be overwhelmed by the policy negotiation processes that are piling up and stretching out over time, risking rendering decisions obsolete if they are made too late. According to some participants, this even affects ICANN’s ability to continue to carry out its mission as set out in its founding documents: To preserve and enhance the operational stability, reliability, security and global interoperability of the Internet.

“Prioritisation”, the word is out

On the first day of the sessions, ICANN CEO Goran Marby defended himself against the idea that the Board was slow to make decisions. He pointed out that the Board had recently examined 228 recommendations from the Competion Consumer Choice & Consumer Trust (CCT), which had just conducted a review to assess the extent to which the expansion of generic TLDs, gTLDs, had promoted competition, consumer confidence and consumer choice. 166 have been approved to date, 44 placed on hold and 18 rejected. Many of these measures are correlated with research and data collection to better understand market trends for new gTLDs.

Goran Marby also justified the delays in decision-making by the large number of ongoing and overlapping issues and by the fact that ICANN sometimes needs additional expertise to make decisions. In response to the criticisms, he also indicated that ICANN is now working on some form of prioritisation, a wish expressed by NAMESHIELD that seems to have been heard. However, Marteen Botterman of the Board nuanced this by specifying that prioritisation is not the Board’s responsibility, as it must ensure that the multi-stakeholder model is respected and must therefore maintain a certain neutrality on the subjects submitted to it.

A risk of fragmentation

From an organisation that has difficulty in making decisions, to its questioning, there is only one step. From the first day of the sessions, Goran Marby, who was particularly involved in the exchanges, spoke of “threats to ICANN”. ICANN is working on a risk management framework for the organisation. He also spoke of the need to talk more closely with governments as the current governance model is being challenged. Indeed, one only has to look at Russia to see that in November 2019, the Russian government introduced new regulations that create a legal framework for centralised state management of the internet within Russia’s borders. Russia has also proposed to hand over the management of the root servers to BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) member states. Proof that the States are going on the offensive in terms of their legislation, recent European directives also have an impact on the governance model, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the forthcoming NIS2 (Network and Information Systems) directive, subjects which were also recalled at the summit. In China, for example, a law strengthening controls on digital services operated in China has just been adopted.

The failure of the ICANN governance model, if confirmed, could lead to a fragmentation of the DNS as we know it today, a fragmentation which takes shape as ICANN becomes bogged down in sterile debates. This summit has highlighted that the community and ICANN leadership have identified this major risk. The challenge for the future is to address it. We will watch the next ICANN summit scheduled in March 2022.

The observation that DNS regulation policies are bogged down, particularly at ICANN72, was widely shared by NAMESHIELD well before this summit. In particular, NAMESHIELD had expressed the need to prioritise topics in agreement with the community during the ICANN72 preparatory sessions. NAMESHIELD, which participates in working groups working on recommendations in the context of the periodic reviews conducted by ICANN, also advocated for re-enchanting voluntary work and helping diversify representatives in these working groups, in particular from small structures. Indeed many volunteers are now overwhelmed by the increasing volume of topics to be considered as the processes accumulate and decisions do not follow. New participants are discouraged from taking an interest in these topics by lengthy and cumbersome processes.

Image source : David Mark via Pixabay