ICANN's Board met on August 5th and approved a number of resolutions, including one that must have been particularly pleasing for Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush. Even before he became Chair, Dengate Thrush has always argued for some kind of compensation for that position.

Now approved, this will be paid on a pro-rata basis starting on August 6, 2010.

I think this is one of the sanest decisions the ICANN Board has taken in years. The amount of work asked of ICANN volunteers, specially the Board and its Chair, is enormous. Chairing the ICANN Board has become a full-time job and if the body in charge of coordinating the Internet's naming and numbering system wants to keep drawing quality people to its top volunteer positions, it must be ready to compensate them.

At all levels, there's a terrific amount of volunteer goodwill within ICANN. Taking one group I am currently involved in as an example, the Vertical Integration Working Group, I am stunned by the dedication of its members. With 2 teleconference meetings a week (each lasting from 1.5 to 2 hours) and numerous position papers and other reports drafted, the sixty plus members of the group have spared no effort in their quest to find a solution that will then benefit the whole community as part of the new gTLD program.

Being on the Board is even more demanding. And it requires complete impartiality. I know of several people who have both the expertise and the will to serve as Board members but to do so, would be required to give up their day jobs. The question then becomes: how can ICANN expect them to give up their salary and maybe even a long-term career just for the "honour" of serving a 3-year term on the Board?

Compensating the Board Chair is clearly a sensible decision and a step in the right direction, but it does generate its own sets of problems. Why only the Chair? In fact, why stop at Board members?

These are questions that ICANN will also have to look at in the near future. 

COM and NET registry Verisign has just reported its results for the second quarter of the year. Analyst expectations were for revenue figures somewhere around $166.5 million. Helped by its naming operations, Verisign beat those forecasts at $168.7 million.

The company ended its second quarter (from April to June 30th) with a profit of $35.2 million, up from $34.9 million for the same quarter a year ago.

The bulk of Verisign's business is now centered around domain names, in particular its management of the COM and NET namespaces. The company claims 101.5 million active domain names in those two suffixes at the end of Q2, a 9% increase year-over-year.

In May, Verisign inked a deal with Symantec to sell its authentication business for about $1.28 billion in cash. A purchase which should complete 3 months after the sale date of May 19.

The comment period for the 4th version of ICANN's Draft Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program closed yesterday (July 21).

Although as it stands, the DAG is nearly finished, a couple of grey areas remain. One is the issue of morality and public order (MAPO), and who should judge, according to what criteria. The other is about separation between registrars and registries.

It is INDOM's view that the strict separation requirements introduced in the DAGv4 are both unfair and anti-competitive. We said as much in the comment we sent to ICANN a few days ago. We are encouraged to see others (here and here for example) picking up on our comments and agreeing with them.

The final version of the guidebook is scheduled to be released before the next ICANN meeting (Cartagena in December). It is our hope that it will not contain rules that prohibit ICANN-accredited registrars from being involved, in any way whatsoever, in a TLD.

As we wrote in our comment to ICANN: "With the Guidebook as it is currently written, those with in-depth domain name expertise are excluded, except existing registries.  Entities without this expertise would be accepted.  This is akin to giving a license to provide medical services to anyone except doctors."

We posted our comments on the latest draft of the Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs yesterday.

They can be read here.  For those who don't have time to go to the ICANN website to read them, here's an excerpt giving the general gist of what we said:

"We feel the forced exclusion of ICANN-accredited registrars from the new gTLD program is unfounded, detrimental to consumer and applicant choice and would lead incumbents in the registry market to enjoy unfair protectionism. It must not be implemented in the Final Guidebook."

So sex.com is once again making headlines. Sedo has just announced that it has been retained by Escom LLC, the owner of the domain, to handle its sale through its second-hand domain sales platform.

The name will be sold along with two related trademark registrations, making this a pretty complete package for any interest buyer.

There's little doubt the name will sell, but at what price? Just how valuable is it on today's Internet? Enough to see Escom cover some (if not all) of the $14 million loan it took out to buy the domain in 2006 and has since been unable to repay?

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom during the Brussels meeting opening ceremony. (INDOM Photo).

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom's speech at the Brussels meeting opening ceremony has elicited a strong reaction from the team tasked with reviewing ICANN's accountability and transparency.

And in what is a clear display of transparency, that reaction has been posted on the ICANN website.

In his presentation to ICANN's GAC (Government Advisory Committee), ICANN Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz indicated that root scaling and economic study issues were the main ones remaining to be solved before a final Applicant Guidebook could be published.

His presentation was made today in Brussels, in the run-up to ICANN's 38th international meeting which starts on Monday June 21. The GAC and the GNSO (Generic Names Supporting Organisation – the policy-making body for gTLDs) traditionally hold working sessions during the weekend before an ICANN meeting.

Pritz went on to say that if the aforementioned issues can be resolved in the coming months, the Board could be in a position to approve the final guidebook in December. Presumably, that would require the final guidebook to be published several weeks before the December ICANN meeting in Cartagena so that there would be time for public comment before the Board came to vote on it.

I naturally keep a close watch on all domain name related topics. One of fun side effects is seeing fan and geek sites scramble for clues about upcoming films or products as soon as a new domain is registered. Media and entertainment companies must have a hell of a time hiding their new projects while at the same time protecting their intellectual property by registered the relevant domains…

I especially love leaks like FantasticFourReborn.com, a domain spotted by fan sites as being registered by Fox, and hence the source of some speculation that the Fantastic Four movie reboot will be entitled "Reborn".

Could be, although it must be said that movie studios are becoming more and more adept at generating buzz around "false positives", i.e. domains that are registered as realistic possibilities just to throw people off the scent. So far, there's no working website behind www.FantasticFourReborn.com. But that could change.

Spotted this great article the other day about Gary Kremen, the guy who first registered Sex.com before it was stolen. 46-year-old Kremen (also the founder of Match.com) is a serial entrepreneur with business interests as wide as they are numerous.

But the numbers that caught my eye are the dollar amounts Kremen eventually made from Sex.com. I already knew that after recovering the stolen domain, he sold it for $14 million. I did not know that Kremen also got a $15 million settlement from Verisign, the company who bought Network Solutions, the registrar that was involved in the actual mechanics of the Sex.com theft. The article also explains that Kremen sold a house for $4 million last year. Ownership of the house, which belonged to the Sex.com thief, was transferred to Kremen as part of the legal proceedings surrounding the case.

Without a doubt, $33 million is a very tidy sum. But consider this: Kremen probably ended up loosing out. If he hadn't lost so many years fighting to recover his stolen domain name, Kremen might have been able to built it up into an even more lucrative business…

The Icann rumour mill is on overdrive today as the fourth version of the Draft Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program is expected to be published at some point during the day.

This latest instalment of the rules a prospective new gTLD applicant would have to follow is greatly anticipated. Icann staff have claimed that this version should be considered as almost final, with only minor tweaks needed to transition to the definitive Applicant Guidebook due to be published in December 2010.

Proponents and opponents of new gTLDs therefore wait with baited breath for the DAGv4 to come out. The former to check that the program is indeed nearing conclusion while the latter are no doubt already looking opportunities to generate further delays.

If the rumours are right, we should know more in a few hours…

As anticipated, the latest draft of the ICANN new gTLD Applicant Guidebook was published a few hours ago.

The new DAG includes models for trademark protection such as the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) and the Trademark Clearinghouse (TM Clearinghouse). Other changes include a new proposal on registry-registrar separation for the registry agreement (the contract future registries will sign with ICANN), which is also the subject of ongoing work in the GNSO, ICANN's policy development body for generic TLDs (Top Level Domains).

DAGv4 will be at the centre of discussions in Brussels, from June 20 to 25, during ICANN's second international meeting of 2010.

Just in from Russia, it would seem that the Cyrillic version of .RF, ?? (or xn--p1ai in coded form) has now been inserted in the Internet root. This means that .RF domains can now function on the Web.

This is the 4th IDN ccTLDs to be activated by ICANN. The others are non Latin versions of .EGYPT (??? or xn--wgbh1c), .ALSAUDIAH (???????? or xn--mgberp4a5d4ar) and .EMARAT (?????? or xn--mgbaam7a8h).

The Russian Federation domain has already started its launch period and we have already begun taking orders for .RF names.

We recently heard from Doug Brent, ICANN's COO, that he will be leaving after 4 years with the body responsible for coordinating Internet domain names. Having worked with Doug in the course of my duties as a member of ICANN's GNSO Council and more recently as Vice Chair of that Council, I can say that he will be missed. Doug was as helpful as he was professional, and always managed to make you feel like no problem was insurmountable. Quite a feat in the ICANN environment.

I hear that other members of staff may be leaving soon. Some, it appears, have already left.  VP, Global and Strategic Partnerships Theresa Swinehart for example, who was an ICANN veteran having joined the organisation way back in 2001. I also worked with Theresa, when she was on then-VP Paul Levins' team. I have not seen an official announcement from ICANN on Theresa's departure, which seems odd, but she is no longer shown on the staff list.

Another major staff member about to leave, so I am told, is IANA boss David Conrad. Although I do not know David personally, I have heard several people credit him for a marked improvement in the way IANA has performed over the last few years. IANA is a key element of ICANN's job as steward of the Internet's naming system as it allows new domains to be added to the Internet root. For instance, in order for several new non-Latin script Internet domains to become active recently, they had to be "delegated" by IANA.

So all this leaves me with one question. What's going on at ICANN at the moment for some many key staff members to be leaving? I've also heard a rumour that Nick Ashton-Hart, Senior Director Participation and Engagement, may soon be on his way…

Reports of a major resolution failure on the .DE zone are coming out of Germany. It appears that for about 1.5 hours around lunchtime (in Europe) today, there was a problem with the nameservers used to support the .DE zonefile.

As a consequence, many .DE domains became unavailable causing disruptions to websites, email and other domain-related services. The German registry Denic apparently stepped in very quickly to correct the problem (which they may have caused by mistakenly reloading the zonefile with erroneous data), and the .DE zone now seems to be running normally again.

A statement on the problem has yet to be issued by Denic, but there are bound to be consequences. Denic runs the largest ccTLD in the world and this technical problem probably sets a new record for massive domain name disruptions. It is extremely rare, unheard of in fact, for such widespread disruption to occur at registry level on a major TLD.

I suppose it was inevitable that the recent scandal over the rigged domain name auctions at Snapnames would spill over into a major lawsuit.

According to an article published yesterday on OregonLive.com (Snapnames is based in Portland, Oregon), the company's new owners Oversee are suing Snapnames ex executive Nelson Brady for $33 million.

Brady is alleged to have spent years artificially inflating auction prices by bidding under an alias. This fraud is said to have impacted a whopping 36,000 auctions. When the scam became public, Snapnames (bought by Oversee in 2007) was forced to provide refunds to thousands of impacted customers.

Following the confirmation of Cartagena, Colombia for the December 2010 ICANN meeting, the ICANN Board has set aside a budget of US$2.126 million for that meeting, the last of the three ICANN traditionally holds each year in different regions of the world.

The amount, a maximum not to be exceeded, is inline with recent ICANN meeting costs.

Cartagena is scheduled to last for a week, from December 5 to 10, 2010.

ICANN practices regional rotation for the 3 international meetings it holds each calendar year, with the last one of 2010 planned for South America. Several venues were looked at but it now appears that the Colombian city of Cartagena has been selected.

Cartagena promises to be a landmark meeting for ICANN as the final version of the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook is scheduled to be released there. If that happens, then the first round of applications should start in Q1 2011, paving the way for an initial wave of new gTLDs to hit the Net in late 2011/early 2012.

Just been talking numbers with ICM Registry supremo Stuart Lawley, who is addressing the ICANN community in an open letter posted on CircleID.

And whatever opinions you have on the .XXX saga, you have to admit that the costs are simply staggering and show that there's obviously something wrong with the whole process when a business that was initially given a green light has to go though so much time and expense just to get what it was promised.

In saying this, I am merely repeating what ICANN's own Independent Review Panel thought a few months ago.

The costs of that review alone are staggering, for ICM and ICANN (i.e. the Internet community, or you and I if you prefer). "We spent $1 million in the first round in 2000," says Lawley. "Then another $1.5 million to get to the June 2005 approval stage. Then another $1.5 million to get to the Lisbon ICANN meeting. And the IRP review cost us over $5 million… so that's $9 million plus already."

Incredible isn't it. Lawley says that total costs for ICM have now risen above $10 million. "And the clock still keeps ticking," he adds.

ICANN's legal costs on the .XXX review are said to be around $2 million.

The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse has puzzled me for a long time. They claim to be "dedicated to ending the systemic domain name abuses that plague the Internet today". A very worthy cause on paper, except the CADNA people seem to be confusing constructive criticism with constant ranting.

Their latest is entitled "ICANN's gTLD launch costs businesses $746 million, increases cyber crime". What are these people on? And how do they get major brands to back their coalition's press releases?

Their pitch: new gTLDs will force businesses to defensively register, and therefore cost them. Never mind the fact that the ICANN community has been working for years now on refining a new gTLD program that incorporates powerful new brand protection measures. And so what if said program has been delayed time and time again precisely because the ICANN community, in a responsible and cautious approach, is making sure that it gets as many aspects of the new gTLD launch right as it can.

Innovation always means pushing the boundaries and leaping into the unknown. But the new gTLD program has been in preparation for years and it is being carefully thought out by many talented people. ICANN community volunteers within the GNSO (generic Names Supporting Organization) first drew out a set of recommendations. The ICANN Board (also volunteers) then approved them and asked ICANN Staff (also talented) to draft a model from them. The first iteration of that model came out in October 2008. The 4th is scheduled to be released this June. In between, there has been constant consultation, analysis and drafting. That is not haphazard experimentation. That is careful planning.

The new, ultra-restrictive registrations rules recently introduced by the Chinese authorities seem to be having quite an impact on .CN registrations.

According to Chinese registry CNNIC's latest figures, .CN has gone from around 13.5 million names last December to 9,353,120 names at the end of February.

This steep drop in volume sees Germany's .DE regain its status as the world's best-selling country code domain, with around 13.5 million names registered.

Sex.com was due to be auctioned yesterday, but the proceedings were cancelled. Creditors of the domain's current owner Escom filed for the firm to be declared bankrupt, thereby blocking any sale of Escom assets.

The creditors are thought to have considered that sex.com would not have been sold for a high enough amount at auction. It is now unclear what the next episode in this saga will be.

So intense was the sex.com saga that my good friend Kieren McCarthy, ex ICANN manager of public participation, even wrote a book about it. Will the last chapter of this story be written tomorrow, when the name comes up for auction in New York?

Domain name and Internet watchers around the world will no doubt focus their attention on New York tomorrow, where sex.com is set to come up for auction.

The most famous domain name in the world is more Hollywood than geek. Sex.com was first registered by Gary Kremen (who later went on to launch match.com) in 1994 with what was then the world's only registrar for .COM, Network Solutions.

The following year, Kremen realized that he was no longer listed as the owner of the name. A guy called Stephen Michael Cohen has simply sent a forged fax to Network Solutions asking for the name to be transferred, and Netsol has done so without even checking!

A drawn out legal battle ensued, Cohen even went as far as fleeing the US to avoid getting caught, but Kremen eventually won the rights to his domain back. Sex.com was by then an extremely valuable piece of Internet real-estate. It is said that at one point, the name bringing in $15,000 a day!

In 2006, he sold sex.com to a company called Escom LLC for a reported $14 million, although the actual amount has never been officially confirmed. Escom made the deal with a loan from DOM partners, and was then unable to repay.

To try and get some of their money back, DOM Partners are putting the name up for auction. To take part, potential buyers must stump up a $1 million certified cheque.

How much will the name go for? In today's economy, are people prepared to speculate millions of dollars on a domain name? All will be revealed tomorrow…

ICANN's 37th international meeting doesn't officially get underway until Monday, but for many attendees work has started already. I got to the meeting venue in Nairobi this morning and I'm happy to report that apart from some truly horrendous traffic, the Kenyan capital looks like being a very pleasant place to be in.

But I won't have much time for sightseeing over the next few days. This meeting promises to be challenging. Not just for me, although it will be that as well. The GNSO Council Chair Chuck Gomes is not making the trip over to Nairobi, so his chairing duties should have been split evenly between me and fellow GNSO Vice Chair Olga Cavalli. However I learned this morning that Olga is also unable to make the trip for personal reasons. I will therefore be chairing all the GNSO meetings, including the open Council meeting on Wednesday and the Council wrap-up on Thursday. Talk about being unexpectedly thrown in at the deep end…

But this meeting will also present several challenges for ICANN itself. First and foremost, will the organisation be able to keep this meeting relevant even though many of the usual suspects have chosen to stay away? The Board has some key topics on its agenda, not least a possible reconsideration of the .XXX application and the need to decide whether to okay the proposed Expressions of Interest for new gTLDs. It is imperative that this work not be slowed or delayed because there are less people physically present than usual. Otherwise the whole rationale for having this meeting could be questioned.

One way to ensure this will be to guarantee a high quality of remote participation for those not physically in Nairobi but who still wish to take part. Remote participation hasn't been a strong point at past ICANN meetings. Most of the time, remote participants have been relegated to the role of silent observers due to the inherent difficulties in making themselves heard in a room full of people onsite. For this meeting, the remote participants will definitely want to speak and be active. A lot of them are regular ICANN attendees and they have no qualms at all about speaking publicly. If their voices can be heard, Nairobi will be a more productive meeting.

AFNIC, the incumbent French registry, will continue to operate .FR. Minister for Industry Christian Estrosi today signed a 7 year contract with AFNIC to run the French top level domain.

In January 2009, the French authorities started a tender process to determine if AFNIC should be allowed to stay on as registry for .FR. As an AFNIC Board member, I've known for a while that AFNIC would most likely be awarded the contract, but I was sworn to secrecy.

Estrosi says that in order to get the registry contract, AFNIC has had to commit to spending at least 5% of its revenue on strengthening the .FR infrastructure to improve its load and request management capabilities.

During the first half of 2010, AFNIC will also open .FR to French nationals living abroad (right now an address in France is required to register a .FR domain name).

Following a ruling in its favour by ICANN's Independent Review Panel (IRP), would-be .XXX operator ICM Registry is pushing ICANN to honour the 2007 contract which should have allowed it to run .XXX for the last 3 years.

ICM Chairman Stuart Lawley has written to ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate Thrush. "I sincerely hope you share (…) the view expressed by so many (…) that the completion of the first ever Independent Review Process following the issuance of the Panel’s recent ruling is a defining moment for ICANN," writes Lawley.

Lawley told me recently that he expects his legal fees alone to exceed USD 6 million. But ICM is not asking ICANN reimburse these or even make reparations for the loss of revenue ICM has undoubtedly suffered from not being able to launch .XXX in 2007. What ICM is asking for, however, is that it be considered a part of the 2004 application round and not be amalgamated into the new gTLD program. "Nothing in the declaration would justify a decision to reconsider the ICM application in connection with the upcoming new gTLD round," Lawley argues. "Nor is there any principled reason to apply new rules or requirements to a proposal that was already determined to comply with the rules and procedures governing the 2004 sTLD round."

Lawley will be making the trip to Nairobi next week for ICANN's 37th international meeting, where he is hoping to meet with Dengate Thrush and ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom and to see the ICANN Board revisit the .XXX issue.

China is fast becoming the benchmark for strange and exotic ways of managing a national namespace.

The latest rumour to come out of the country suggest that authorities will require an in-person meeting with any prospective website operator behind a .CN domain name to green-light it.

The applicant would be required to show some kind of ID to ensure that the authorities can act against him should his website be used to display illicit content at any time.

Since last December, China has embarked on a fight against undesirable web content such as pornography. It started by closing off the very liberal .CN (used to be that anyone, from any country, could register) and limiting access to Chinese companies only.

The next step was excluding those foreign registrars that had been active on .CN ever since the Chinese government reached out to them in 2003 when .CN was first opened. As if blocking companies that had invested to add .CN to their registration systems and offer them to their customers wasn't enough, China then decided that any new .CN registration request would have to be made with heavy supporting documentation, thereby ending any hope for a relatively simple and cheap registration chain.

Problems for non-Chinese registrants and registrars alike have been compounded by the tendency for new rules to be announced only a few hours before coming into effect, giving all very little time to adapt.

Should this new requirement for website operators to meet with Chinese authorities in person be confirmed, it will be just one more example of this apparent lack of regard for .CN users and registrars worldwide.

The ICANN Board met yesterday and reconfirmed its commitment to the 37th international ICANN meeting in the Kenyan capital Nairobi from March 7 to 12.

Security concerns expressed by some participants in recent weeks combined with a recent terrorist alert on the convention center where the meeting is to be held have contributed to many of the usual attendees deciding not to come.

That includes whole groups, such as the GNSO's intellectual property constituency (IPC) or the gTLD registries. The IPC and the registries are even planning alternative meetings in "safer" locations such as New York during the Nairobi meeting week. Sensibly, the Board has said that no funding would be available from ICANN for such meetings.

ICANN staff and the Board have been working in recent weeks to gauge the true extent of any security threat and ensure that if the meeting did go ahead, it would do so in relative safety. Various reports, both from governments, people onsite and recent visitors to Nairobi, show that the terrorist threat is actually not very credible and that the level of security on the street is no worse than at many other major cities. Touch wood… I hope no-one finds out otherwise in a couple of weeks!