[CPWG] CCOR

[Nat Cohen]

John,

Thank you for your in-depth contribution to the discussion.  I can't say
that I have fully digested it all, but a couple of points stood out.

There's a noteworthy contrast between how some ccTLD authorities handle
their responsibilities and how ICANN does.

ccTLD authorities for France, Australia, India and New Zealand, among
others, have put out tenders to registry service providers for operating
their respective ccTLDs.  As a result of competitive bidding among registry
service providers, the cost of operating the registries have fallen sharply.

Even though the ccTLD authorities are presumably a branch of the
government, and could directly set prices if they wished, they turn to a
competitive market to set price - thereby getting them out of the price
setting business.

ICANN in contrast treats Verisign and ISOC not as registry service
providers but as owners of the .com and .org name spaces.  Verisign and
ISOC do not need to compete with other registry service providers to
operate those name spaces.  They are thus free from competitive pressures.

The $1.35 billion that Ethos Capital is prepared to pay ISOC for .org is a
(low end) valuation of the ongoing harm imposed on registrants due to
ICANN's mismanagement of .org.  If .org was run at cost, there would be no
surplus for Ethos Capital to plunder.  It's an example of the road to hell
being paved with good intentions.  ICANN may have been motivated by good
intentions when it awarded .org as a sinecure to ISOC so that ISOC could
fund its operations by overcharging dot-org registrants.  But now that
power to overcharge .org registrants is worth over a billion dollars, and
now that ISOC wants out, ICANN has created the conditions for a private
equity firm to strip mine the nonprofit community of the charitable
contributions that they rely on to carry out their public service missions.

If ICANN does not want to be in the business of regulating prices, it
should have let the marketplace do that by putting the .com and .org
registries out for regular rebid.

That ICANN instead ceded a perpetual right to run the registries to
Verisign and ISOC is clear evidence of just how much under the thumb of the
registries ICANN is.

Even after granting a perpetual no-bid right to run the registries, ICANN
could still have looked to the current market prices charged by registry
service providers in other competitive bid situations to determine the
market price.  Here again, ICANN would not be a price regulator, they would
merely be applying the price as determined by the market.

But again ICANN swallowed the self-serving and entirely false position
pushed by the registries and their many lobbyists planted throughout ICANN,
that competition from new gTLDs would serve to constrain prices on .com and
.org.  That has been debunked in depth elsewhere, and I'd be glad to share
the articles with anyone still holding this view.

ICANN, acting as if it were a parasitic host whose brain had been taken
over by the registries, blindly swallowed the "we are not a price
regulator" and "competition with other gTLDs will hold down prices"
mantras, and lifted all price caps on .org.

If ICANN had been properly run from the beginning, a group like the newly
formed CCOR would be currently operating .org.  It would be run by a
non-profit, with respect for civil society principles written into its
by-laws, with certain funds clearly allocated to support IETF, but
otherwise operated at cost.

If this had happened, end users would not have seen hundreds of millions of
dollars that they had contributed to nonprofits over the years, needlessly
diverted to ISOC and PIR where ISOC and PIR adopted a wasteful approach to
this undeserved gusher of funding from controlling .org.

>From an end-user perspective, the choice between having .org controlled by
CCOR, subject to regular rebid, or controlled by Ethos Capital, subject to
resale to who knows what corrupt oligarch, is clear.

Regards,

Nat



On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 1:59 AM John McCormac <jmcc at hosterstats.com> wrote:

> On 07/01/2020 21:03, Jonathan Zuck wrote:
> > Thanks John, your posts are always informative. I know you have some
> > structural issues with the registry/registrar model which has
> > disadvantaged some smaller markets and gTLDs. Do you have specific
>
> The registry/registrar model is affecting the gTLDs at a local hoster
> level in developing markets, Jonathan,
> Basically what is a large hoster in some of these markets is not on the
> same financial level as an ICANN registrar and the logical progression
> isn't from hoster to ICANN registrar but hoster to ccTLD registrar. This
> is also seen in the mature/developed markets but for a different reason.
> In mature markets outside the USA, the momentum in new registrations is
> almost completely in the ccTLDs and the legacy gTLDs have plateaued.
> There was a good presentation on this from someone from the .ZA registry
> on trying to solve this developing markets problem at one of the ICANN
> meetings.
>
> ICANN and its economic reports got the competition angle on new gTLDs
> wrong. There was very little competition between gTLDs and it was
> ICANN's failure to act that created real competition between the gTLDs
> and ccTLDs rather than between gTLDs. People found that they could get
> the domain names they wanted in their local ccTLD. Now, the ccTLDs are
> competing with the gTLDs and largely winning.
>
> People are focused on the size of the total .COM rather than the reality
> that it is a composite of a small global market and many country level
> markets where .COM is either plateaued or declining. It is the US market
> that is driving .COM and it may be vulnerable to the ccTLD effect. The
> first indications of that in the US market will be a slight drift to the
> .US ccTLD. The .COM has been helped in the US market by the sheer volume
> of US .COM registrations and the inability of the .US ccTLD registry to
> cope with that scale of a competitor. Its discounting offers have also
> added a boom and bust element to its zone file.
>
> > thoughts on "individual end user" interests in the new .COM contract?
> > What points do you think would be most important for At-Large to make.
> > As you say, roundabout ways to dealing with different issues aren't
>
> This needs a lot of thought as ALAC has to choose its battles carefully.
>
> The price increases will have the most impact on end users. The focus on
> the impact of price increases on domainers is misleading as domainers
> only represent a small set of .COM domain names.
>
> The more expensive the .COM gets and the stronger the local ccTLDs get,
> the more likely it is that a new registrant will only opt for a ccTLD
> domain name rather than .COM as a primary brand. The .COM has benefited
> from being a "must register" TLD but the price rises will cause
> problems. People at a registrar/ICANN level generally think in wholesale
> costs but the .COM price increase will be multiplied by the time it gets
> to the end user. This will make the US market increasingly important for
> the .COM because it may begin to lose its market share in markets
> outside the US. The historical registrations should be OK for a while
> but it is in the new registrations volume where the effect will appear
> first. The renewal rates are very different on a country level basis.
> The price increases may have a greater impact on countries with weaker
> economies.
>
> Purely from the security and statistics side of things, the amended bulk
> access/zone file access section contains the 3 month blackout thing
> where zone file access is limited to three month periods before the CZDS
> user has to rerequest access to the zonefile. This was not part of the
> CZDS specification and was added by a person or persons in ICANN who
> were unaware of the damage it would cause to the cybersecurity and
> tracking. It is not an end-user issue but the cybersecurity aspect
> directly impacts end-users. Versign and some of the other legacy gTLDs
> on the CZDS have a more grown-up approach and do not use basic period of
> 3 months.
>
> > ideal and price caps to support defensive registrations doesn't seem
> > like the answer to defensive registrations. What would we like to see if
>
> A defensive registration can simply be a .COM registration where the
> registrant uses a website in another TLD as their primary brand. Bulk
> defensive registration activity (as in the Citibank example) is more
> easily identified as most of these registrations are hosted on
> specialist registrars and hosters. Ordinary defensive registrations are
> more often .COM/ccTLD pairs. The gTLD domain name is only one part of
> the puzzle.
>
> Strange as it seems, price increases reduce the requirements for
> defensive registrations because it becomes more expensive for a bad
> actor to target brands/IP in bulk. This is why the more expensive new
> gTLDs have lower levels of this kind of DNS abuse.
>
> The other aspect of DNS abuse is that it does not specifically cover
> webspam in its definition. The bulk of abusive registrations in Domain
> Tasting were monetising abusive registrations with PPC rather than being
> used for disposable e-mail spam and phishing purposes. Google's decision
> to stop monetising registrations less than five days old had a greater
> immediate impact on Domain Tasting than ICANN's initial move.
>
> > this contract goes forward beyond the commitments that have been made
> > already from the new contract and the investment in research and
> > education on SSR? DNS Abuse measures? Trusted notifier stuff like Donuts
> > has? What would you like to see given your facility with the numbers?
>
> Verisign has some excellent people working on these issues. The most
> effective way of hitting DNS and web abuse is by limiting the ability of
> a registry to discount. The problem is that it will also potentially
> limit the ability of the registry to survive.
>
> Discounting, whether people like it or not, is a legitimate business
> tool for registries and registrars. On the matter of DNS abuse, the
> report from Interisle.net on the matter should be read by everyone with
> an interest in the subject.
>
> The abuse measures are noble aspirations but the reality is that the
> threats change. Much of the the damage and abuse that has been seen with
> the highly discounted new gTLDs has largely been self-inflicted by the
> registries. The discounted regisration fee has made some models of DNS
> and web abuse economically viable. The CCT-RT report cited the Dutch
> report on this but the report concentrated mainly on reported incidents.
> This is a major shortcoming with dealing with DNS abuse as it relies on
> reporting rather than detection. If it is not detected, then it might
> not as well exist to ICANN and the registry but the end-user is going to
> suffer anyway. It can also be poisoned by incorrect data. One of the
> most famous incidents was where the .ZIP was designated the most toxic
> of the new gTLDs by some security consultancy. The .ZIP gTLD wasn't even
> active. (That was a wonderful example of the weakness of ICANN's
> evaluation process in allowing a commonly used file extension to become
> a gTLD. Ironically .com was a file extension dating back to the 1970s.)
>
> One of the metrics in the web usage reports that I run is a compromised
> sites estimate per TLD. That is partially based on a continually updated
> "toxic links" table of URLs that are known to be used in link injections
> and links that should not appear in certain sets of websites. Basically
> these are links for discounted gTLDs that appear in gTLDs/ccTLDs where
> there's no real connection and they appear identically across a set of
> sites. Some of the historical survey data here goes back over ten years
> or so. It is not unusual to see compromised websites remain compromised
> for years.
>
> Unfortunately the definition of DNS abuse is too narrow to encapsulate
> such issues because it is purely focused on DNS, reported phishing,
> malware, botnet and e-mail spam. Web-side abuse is far worse in some
> respects as it kills gTLDs. The .LOAN gTLD's business model looked good
> initially but it collapsed (around 2015 or so) and the then registry
> manager, Famous Four Media, turned to discounting as a means to inflate
> the zone. The problem was that it ended up with approximately a million
> or so adult and gambling affiliate websites and only a few hundred
> on-topic websites. Most of those affiliate sites washed out of the zone
> when the new registry management made the decision to increase the
> wholesale renewal/registration fee in August 2018. Pricing, ironically,
> is the most effective tool in fighting some forms of DNS abuse.
>
> Most of these link injection compromises are easily detected and could
> be detected in a TLD-wide scan by Verisign. The reality is that the
> number of websites that would need to be scanned is far smaller than the
> total number of .COM registrations. It would be relatively easy for
> Verisign, should it decide to go down this path, to implement a system
> where it could notify registrars of such issues. The problem arises
> where these registrars then have to notify resellers/hosters who would
> then have to notify their customers. There's also the possibility that
> the customer has outsourced the development of the site that was
> compromised so there are many links in the kill chain to securing a
> compromised site.
>
> The .COM, by virtue of being the largest TLD, will see more compromised
> sites than other TLDs. But the pricing issue reduces the volume of
> webspam because the discounted gTLDs are more economically viable.
>
> The Public Interest Commitments (Section a) requires the
> registrar-registrant agreement to have terms forbidding phrarming,
> malware distribution, botnet operations and, most interestingly
> copyright infringement and counterfeiting. The problem with the last two
> issues is that Section b (where the registry will run surveys of the TLD
> to measure security threats) makes no reference to them as being part of
> the security threat model. With copyright infringement, apart from the
> obvious streaming of movies and Pay TV programming, it can be a very
> difficult task to identify the original copyright owner. Some of the
> Chinese software used to produce such sites is quite sophisticated in
> how it scrapes websites, blogs and search engine results. It can be an
> absolute nightmare, at times, writing the code to distinguish between a
> legitimate website and one of these generated websites.
>
> With streaming services, there are two basic types. The first,
> obviously, are the services that stream content in real time. They are
> high bandwidth operations. The second are the services that just
> redistribute the keys from a legitimately subscribed smartcard so that a
> set of decoders connected by the Internet can all just a single
> smartcard to access programming. That kind of service is more difficult
> for a registry to identify as it is relatively sparse data and those
> networks tend to be relatively small in size. Trying to detect these
> services is a waste of the registry's time and resources. Websites
> offering streaming services will be picked up in Verisign's monthly scan.
>
> There's a break between Section a and Section b of the PICs in that
> there's no requirement for the registry to take any action. It is only
> required to record any action that it does take. The registrar is the
> one in the firing line as section a specifically mentions the registrar
> having terms in its contract with the registrant.
>
> Regards...jmcc
> --
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