Domain names innovation and competition – WS 08 2017

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7 June 2017 | 11:00 - 12:30 | Room Tornimäe II, Swissotel, Tallinn, Estonia | video record
Programme overview 2017

Session teaser

One big hope of the Internet Community is that the expansion of the name space with more top-level domains (new gTLDs) will finally bring, beside choice and diversity, more competition and innovation to the Internet and its users. The revolutionary introduction of more than 1,000 new extensions during the last could been seen as litmus test for these expectations and raises questions:. Is innovation in the domain name space realistic? How does theoretical and real innovation in the DNS could look like and what are the examples so far? What are the results of ICANN’s studies on competitive effects of new gTLDs? …

Keywords

domain names, top-level domains, icann, innovation, competition, dns, domain name systems

Session description

In the session the panelist will discuss and highlight with the audience two important questions (focal points) raised by ICANN’s expansion of the name space with more top-level domains (new gTLDs).

Focal Point Competition - For the question whether the name space revolution was successful in creating more competition for the benefit of consumers we will have an introductory presentation on the very recent study results. Initial indications are that ICANN’s New gTLD Program has led to a dramatic increase in consumer choice, a modest increase in competition and minimal impact on consumer trust. We will also hear about other aspects such as policy updates in top-level domains, such as .eu, and discuss them.

Focal Point Innovation - For the question whether if there is innovation in the DNS and domain names we will discuss with experts how innovation in the DNS could look like and what are the examples. The discussion may include innovative use of the DNS in the .tel gTLD, gTLDs used in Internet of Things (IoT) and industry digitalization, DNS based methodologies to eradicate malware, botnets and phishing, one click solutions by registrars for domain-email-website to ease everything for the consumer, ENUM, DANE and other solutions, privacy features and GDPR solutions.

Format

11:00-11:40 – Introductory presentation on the focal points competition and innovation (various speakers) 11:40-12:30 – Moderated discussion of the focal points

Further reading

People

Focal Point:

  • Dirk Krischenowski, dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG

Subject Matter Expert (SME):

  • Frederick Donck (ISOC)

Key Participants (for workshop) or Panellists (for plenary):

  • Andrea Becalli (ICANN)
  • Lianna Galstyan (Public Relations Manager for ISOC Armenia)
  • Marcel Hofmann (Key Account Manager at SWITCH, .ch)
  • Dirk Krischenowski (CEO at dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG, .berlin)
  • Sebastien Pensis, (International Relations Support Manager at EURID, .eu)
  • Jörg Schweiger (CEO at DENIC e.G., .de)
  • Ardi Jürgens, Zone Media OÜ

Moderator:

  • Maarja Kirtsi (.ee)/Dirk Krischenowski (.berlin) – tbd

Remote Moderator

  • Dusan Stojicevic

Organising Team (Org Team)

  • Narine Khachatryan
  • Lianna Galstyan
  • Jörg Schweiger
  • Heiki Sibul
  • Marcel Hoffmann
  • Katrin Ohlmer
  • Oliver Passek
  • Andrea Beccalli
  • Heiki Sibul

Reporter:

  • Zack Coleman

Video record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUVL-zhbVwk

Messages

  1. New gTLDs have significantly changed the TLD space
  2. There is no ‘silver bullet’ in terms of the best use of a domain name, although they can be a helpful marker of digital identity
  3. New gTLD domain names might present some opportunities for innovation, in the area of security, the development of IDNs, and the use of brand TLDs

Transcript

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.


>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: Welcome to the workshop 8 Tallinn in EuroDIG here. The topic in workshop 8 is domain names innovation and competition. We have people to tell us what is the rocket science, is it. There is some interest in that session, but I'm going to start with a short introduction. We have -- by the way, my name is Dirk Krischenowski. I am the founder of dotBERLIN. And to answer your questions, we have 55,000 domain names under management. Yeah. That's what I'm doing. And I introduce here.

>> I am from the Estonia foundation. So I'll try to be a very good partner and whenever you have questions, please raise your hand. Whatever comment you have, please help us to make this a very good session for you. You make it interesting as well for us and we try to do it for you.

>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: I will introduce your panel of experts after the presentations. Yeah. Then I start with some slides to get you some insides what happened at ICANN in terms of competition. ICANN did a study over the last years and has engaged with some considing companies doing the studies with them with a special focus on how the many new GTODs are contributing to the mission of ICANN and enhancing competition choice, consumer trust and some things like this. And I will show you some slides of that study which are also part of the discussion afterwards.

So what we saw -- I'm sorry. I have the slide only in German version here. Our development of the domain names, especially the TRDs was going on there in the early '80s, dotBERLIN was introduced and then we have later in the '80s.com along with dot DE and other CCTODs which are still here on the run because we have some IDN CCOTODs and then a long time, nothing happened and we had the first round with seven new gTLDs being added. There were over 200 applications at this time and they allowed only seven. I think they are the most prominent. Then we had around two in 2004 where things like (inaudible), jobs and triple X force was introduced. Then again, 10 years nothing new in the TLD space. Then the first new TLDs entered the route and then we saw the last two years sky rocket in new TLDs and additionally, 1,250 new gTLDs were added to the road. That way, I can do a study on the competition issue. You see in the difference here if you compare number of domain names, it looks quite different, but the number of TLDs is really amazing that has been added to the route.

So, I can go on with this topics. The competition was part of the formation of commitment and the revenue was designed to see what really happened with a new TLDs. And that's still ongoing. We'll make more studies and want to have more data on the introduction of new TLDs and what happens with our TLD universe. So the presides of -- I show you some tables from that 140 pages study which is on the WIKI as one of the sources you might want to read. And you see what -- how the new TLDs contributed to the increase of domain names. If you look here, 50% has increase of new TLDs and Legacy TLDs registrations. 50% means that the new TLDs in the last three years contributed to 50% of the increase of all domain name registration at this time. That's a significant number. There are several comparisons here was different outcomes. The gTLDs were growing thanks to dot com and the Chinese people buying a lot of domain names a lot. Why the ccTLDs didn't have that Chinese effect at this time. So there was a significant contribution here in the gross of the TLDs. Then we thought how well they accepted in the market place and the eyes to the mart place or the registrars because they sell their domain names to their end customers. Here you see more than 269 of the 1,500 at this time were added by promoted by 75 big registrars and there was 61% of the new TLDs. I need to explain from 1,250 in the 1,250 that at least 550 brand TLDs which are not available at the registrar level. That's a different number you should have spaces which could be seen here. So the channel really integrated the new TLDs very quickly and this led accordingly to the study to much greater consumer choice. There is still discussion if there's mean by too much choice because from the psychological stand point, too much competition is -- or too were choices and even worse than having less choice for people, but that might be a part of the next part of the study. Then we have here a lot of new registrar operators especially from China. You see here this is from China. This one, I think this one was Japan. So a lot of Chinese registrars entered the market which hadn't been there were significant number. So also wide link of the choice of registrars there and then registry service providers means that's a back end. That's a back end providers for the new TLDs and we saw quite a number of new back end providers there. Some were coming from the gTLD some space, some had been developed from the ccTLDs like SIDN or ethic or what else, TOD box we have here in the TLD space. There was also a significant increase by the factor of 60 in the G space because we had their main players like very sign a few years ago and only a few other ones.

Then table 6. Interestingly, what happened in terms of registrations? We know dot com has 130 million domain registrations and everybody was looking for the killer new TLD which could catch up with dot com. That didn't happen, but we have a lot of TLDs, which are smaller TLD says. 90% are smaller than 50,000 and yeah. And the typical TLDs we see these days are targeted TLDs and geographic top level domain names like dot HOS or dot fishing or dot web which is coming and the geographics there -- 63 geographic domain names there. The biggest one has about 75,000 registrations. If you compare these small niche numbers, some were existing TLDs which are for a long time there. You see, for instance, dot travel. The biggest one has 18,000. That niche, the travel niche and they survived and they operate profitable. They must operate profitable because they are private organizations. And so you can still survive or run profitable with a smaller number. That niche TLD, they are really working, not all, but most of them.

Then interestingly what happened to the prizes? So the average prizes are about -- yeah. They have different numbers. The average wholesale prize and the weighted one and I heard from the ccTLDs, I think the average prize in ccTLD to registrar is about 6 to 7 Euros or something like this. Depending on the CC and target. Yeah. A lot lower. But interestingly, the new TLDs manage to give added value to the space and they had much, much higher prizes and they had been accepted by consumers. You can think of why they have been accepted maybe to the niche because they were targeted or geographic ones. That's another point for the studies that should look for. And then one big concern was that ICANN approved a lot very similar TLDs. You have something like dot property, dot properties, dot watches, dot car or dot cars and gains and gains. Most objections decided that even car and cars are not similar to each other. So they are both in the route and they are all accepted and further studies need to find out what happens with this very similar TLDs, which ones survived or can both stay there in the market. So conclusions here in that study from ICANN have been the new TLD program has left a dramatic increase in consumer choice. It doesn't say if it's good or bad at the end of the day. It has modest increase in competition all together and minimal impact on consumer trust. I didn't put on consumer trust things here because that was not part of the competition thing. So I can still a lot of more data especially in the pricing area, but these are quite some interesting results we see. We have a big study. I can really recommend you to read the study. There are a lot of small bits and pieces which are quite interesting. Okay.

That's my intro. And I would like to ask Elena to give her introduction.

>> ELENA: Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for this report, Dirk. I have to started with the disclaimer. I work for the European Commission. So I am not knowledgeable as much as you are about the domain name industry and the whole thing.

I'm here to talk to you about the dot U. It is the business sec. A program by the European Commission that's various regulations to see if they're up to date or if they need to be changed or repealed maybe. The dot EU as a domain name has two regulations. One was adopted in 2002 and the other in 2004. It was regulated by item in 2005. That's been over 10 years those were adopted and I can say they're quite (inaudible). They create problems to ask to registry, plus the markets have significantly changed as we have seen. The dot EU is kind of a special case domain name in packets I would say. This has to do with the objectives behind setting up the domain name. It was not set up as (?) it was to create a digital identity for European citizens. It was supposed to mean that you work and you leave and you have your business in the EU. This is the signal your digital signal behind it. In this sense, we can say that the dot EU domain name is advantage because you have a bigger market. You can reach out to. On the other hand, it is also a disadvantage because of the regulations and are the TLDs don't have the strict regulations they have to abide by. So they can easily adapt the market or changes or stuff they need to.

So our main situation now what is (?) that I mentioned before. Two processes. You have to evaluate what has happened from the past till today. We have to look at objectives as I mentioned before. Boosting in commerce and (inaudible) identity and see the domain fame has succeeded. If not, you have to address this. The other part of the exercise is to see for the future. As I said, if you found problems with evaluating the past situation, you have to develop things for it.

This is the point where we are now to have public consultation where everyone can answer and I would urge you to look at it if you have some time. It would be really useful for us. We have added consultation activities. After we have concluded this consultation activities, we will propose new options. Just to give you some ideas because we are already thinking some issues, the fact that there is no more this legal separation between the registry, the registrar and the registrant which was never the case for the TLDs. In the regulation, you cannot do it. We're considering if we should lift that or not. This is to be seen. Another serious issue that we're considering is apart from the objectives of e-Commerce were identity. The whole intra governance sphere has dramatically changed and is still changing. Should we think of ways whereby they would be more actively helping in various areas. It is already doing something like for multi areas, EU is based on multi-equalizement. But with the domain name to be available. Other areas that we should push the registry to be more active for the sake of other priorities and set for the areas. That's more or less for me. Thank you for listening. To you, Dirk.

>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: Thank you, Elena. Can we have this again so everybody can follow. Thank you very much. After the small introductions, I would like to introduce the panel. This is from Zone Media or zone EE which is a brig registrar here in Estonia. Welcome to this session. Elena introduced her. I saw Next Generation Internet was one of our titles. That's a unit. And then we have Jorge which is CEO of Denic. Then we have Elena public relations -- Lianna. Then we have Marcel Hoffman at Switch ccTLD from Switzerland. And finally, we have Andrea Becalli. And we have Mr. Tuckman doing the minutes let's say or the summary of the messages. And we have the remote moderator. You bring up things that people have from the outside.

So then we both start with the questions. Maybe I start with the first competition question. I have a few ones.

So my idea was running a new gTLDs and we have in all the countries where you have a geographic top level domain name like in the Netherlands, you have dot Amsterdam and there's a big dot ML, with millions of domain names like Amsterdam and others are quite small. If you look into numbers, you see that only a fraction of the population in your country really has a domain name. There are a lot of people and a lot of companies which have more than 1, 2, 3, 4 more domain names. I am always curious how to widen the basis of domain names in the country. I think c CTLDs could have a big role in broadening the market overall and there would be one question I have for the panel and for the audience. As we are very small around here, I would be happy to have you all engage the microphones on all tables here. So please feel free to give your comment or another question to the panelists. Yeah. So who wants to start with answering the first question on what can ccTLDs do for broadening the registrant basis in their country and acceptance of domain names.

>> All right. Well, actually, I do have a lot of observations and comments to make just to the very slides presented and I probably do have the chance to do that later. Of course, I'm not -- we can dwell on this later. To answer the question -- but first let me state that dot NL is the leading ccTLD with respect to the number of inhabitants with domain name registration. I think it is 1 out of 3 or 1 out of fore. So there is a lot of room there. But in the presence of social media and mobile apps, I think the one thing that we are really concerned with is how do we make sure that domains do not what I would call surface but they just do not become technical means that still needs to be there, but is just not seen for the customers. We've been looking for the killer application for almost 20 years. We haven't seen it, right? So we talking about domain name industry, we came up with something like INUM, telephone number, domain mapping didn't go far, didn't get any traction on the market because it was just been used for voiceover IP. So not a killer application. The one thing is we're looking for killer application. If I would know the killer application, I would not be sitting here. I would be implementing it here. So if we are talking about domain name and innovations, you can probably just be some ideas dropping and what comes to my mind with respect to ideas dropping I think what we need is that first we make sure that domains are being perceived as your digital representation on the net. Your meaning enterprises, your meaning -- yeah and users as well. What we could probably do is just build on the discussions that surface right now where we are talking about self-determination and sovereignty. So why not build --  well, identities. This is at least one thing I feel we can build on to make domains more attractive. Very long speech, very short resume identities.

>> Hello from me. We're from dot CH and dot LI. There are 40,000 people, but 68,000 domain names. So they're doing something good. But still what we have now is we still have a growth of around 3 to 4% which we're quite happy about. Of course, it's quite different from what it was 10 years ago. We just had recently had this discussion in our company meeting and innovation brainstorms. What could we do? Actually, we were inventing new things in this meeting, but what we want is retain as much domain names as we have and keep them. The direction we're heading now, that's not really innovation. It's that we want to have much as secure space as we offer. That's why we are investing in man power and in technology that our domain space is secure. But that's so far for innovation. We currently have I think maybe could be a difference to the new TLD. Close to many domain names are actually in use. And that's something that's actually quite good. They have TNS. They're using this. And it is really in our case and a lot of ccTLDs it is keeping what you have. And we don't have really like Dirk said, we haven't found the killer app where we can prosper more or get more growth.

>> Hi. From AM dot AMMccTLD perspective, I would like to say to the question you said. We never had an objective to have the high registration in our ccTLD. We wanted to give the opportunity for our citizens and our community members to have that domain names, which is like identity as you said. And for this reason, we also launched the ITN ccTLD. This is the identity thing. I would agree it is also important to keep this domain registrations. We had a situation last year when we had a height increase of registrations and it was done by Chinese registrants. So, this is not only in TLD market, but in ccTLD. The Chinese boom was very noticeable, but then we also noticed that they do not keep these domain names. So the objective of ccTLD, at least for us, is give this opportunity not just to hide -- not just to have the highest registration.

So the questions about the market is really very great and if I may have the question about the policies, do you have limitation for registration and domain name only for citizens or entities leading in the EU European union state or allow theirs as well.

>> Thank you. Indeed. You have to be a resident in the EU or organization established in the EU. And this is what links to the identity. Listening to you talking now. One of the consideration as well in view of the vision is whether we should change those visibility criteria. For example, it is based on residency as I said. If you're a European citizen and you move to China to the U.S., you're not allowed to have a EU. Yeah. Even if you still have a European passport because you don't lived in the EU, you don't have it. It is totally based on residents. We're wondering: Is this fair? Should we consider just about the individuals when you consider about the organizations?

>> Can I just have a comment on that? I'm a registrant myself. I want to comment in 2014, we included European economic area countries to the eligibility. So three more countries then. British. Right now they're still with us.

>> From the registrars perspective, do you have something to add to the panelists?

>> Okay. I'm trying to think of something. First, I take my role as provider of local color very seriously. For my service provider perspective, domains for us do not exist in a bubble. They are part of an overload Internet presence which includes resources and includes applications. And what I would like to see is demand for domain names driven by applications because that's where real use of domain names really comes from. For example, if we look at this new ggTLDs, they're a new part. I wouldn't say they create additional value to society as a whole. They're -- they are let's say use for speculated purposes. There is no innovation in speculation. So yeah. What -- where we kind of see growth in the domain names place to be at is applications and people using the domain names for some kind of value creation either for themselves or for society as a whole. If we are looking at the killer app, I think we should be looking at young people because currently young people are trapped in silos inside Instagrams, Facebook, et cetera. These are not identities which are under control. These are identities under the control of a service provider. So, if we could find a way where we could create value for young people from domain name space, I think that's where a potential for serious growth could be.

>> Yeah.

>> I had a question and comment. I'm from the dot LV registry. And we went through the economic index and researched about how we -- how many people and businesses have their own domain names, have their presence and we are one of the most passive in the European union. We have some kind of website. So we have a large almost 40% of businesses are open. So we have a way to grow. But the problem that we saw also when analyzing the data was that as you mentioned the young people they don't think about the digital identity, how to strengthen it. When we want to give the information and educate, young people, the entrepreneurs as well, sometimes know even less than the young people and when we give our registrars also some resources to spread around their blogs, they don't do that. So I'm not even really sure why is that, but we already see the result. 50% of our domain names go away from our local registrars to foreign registrars either to the closest ones. I'm not sure if that's the reason, but we are now researching is it because of the price or the services that they offer there or because of the information or because of the client support that may not be in the line, but may be much better. But that's how we have our own registrars and we need to collaborate even more. Your clients are going away. When we research it and get strict results, we'll be glad to share. Even that is not stimulating for them to collaborate and educate not only their own customer support that sometimes doesn't know much about the digital identity and domain names itself, but know much about the services and educate their own clients and how it's important for them to have the domain name and strengthen it. So maybe it's a question also to registrars: Is it the same situation here or is it just typical for us. Or you as a registrar don't want to be -- you don't want to share such kind of information with your clients. What are we doing wrong? What should we do better?

>> First of all, we are also a registrar for LATVIA. So I was -- we will take this critique home and ponder upon it very seriously.

>> (comment made)

>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: Yeah. I think it's a universal issue, which is not specific to LATVIA. We -- let's say. We have once considered looking into a LATVIA market ourselves. It's a very competitive space for domain registration space. It is quite tough for let's say regionally limited service provider such as ourselves because there's a huge amount of competition coming from a large service providers, who shall remain nameless. So I think -- let's see. If I were a LATVIAN registrar, I would seriously look into what am I not providing these customers? What are we looking for elsewhere? It might be, for example, the same gTLD, new gTLD domain names. Maybe service providers don't adapt to quickly changing environment and the customer has, for example, to go for a better price or a more -- let's say a wide product range to an international service provider. And once we're kind of in the door, you tend to get stuck. It's not that easy to change service providers eventually. Once international service providers are able to create traction among the users of ccTLDs because if, for example, you go out and register I don't know, dot LY or dot ME or dot IO, for example, go Ng or whatever, the price difference in the ccTLDs is not that big than you might stay with international provider.

>> Okay. Then we have Jorg.

>> JORG: I would like to comment on something else. The question is: What can we do about the number of registrations and the appearances of Facebooks and the likes and what are we doing wrongly there? I think we in this industry, we all do know that domains do have some advantages over Facebook like you are the only one in control. You are not underlying any arbitrariness from the service operator. Then we haven't been able to communicate that perfectly or even if we are in a position to communicate that, probably people do not care about it. I think they do not care about it because social media is offering everybody servicing requirement they really need. They want to communicate easily and they can do that just by registering with any social media and they do not have to set up things. Registering a domain name, those are things you have to get the same facilities you have with registering social media. So even if we would bundle or sell software to domains to easily set up communication services and stuff like that, the only thing we would reach is the same level of usefulness that social media already have. So we would just be trying to follow the market and I think this is not the right solution for our problem. So, when I was citing that digital identity can be a solution for us, what I meant by identities is not so much identity in the sense of ideas, but what I really meant is a digital identity so that on the long run, you can really -- for example, sign, make payments and whatever with your domain name. So something like E identity based on domains, right? As opposed to based on personal ID cards got issued by governance, for example, like I already know they do exist in Estonia, but in other European countries around the world, people are not so eager to put it that way. Not so eager to entrust the government with all their data. So, this is where independent service providers could come in where they could provide E identity that is not controlled by the state and that is not controlled by social media either. But that is controlled by them.

>> I want to talk about one thing, the domain thing is considered about vet and findable. At the same time, we are talking about people on social media on the side of having privacy and not being too easily findable. When we are offering as identity something which is inherently designed to be findable and easily visible, then I'm not sure we are offering the right solution for the identity questions. Maybe the ID cards and things like that work better for these things.

>> You had before when you made your first marks few mentioned innovation. When talking about social media or the ID card or whatever this is -- this takes us to innovation. So actually this was one of the headlines of the topic as well and when I started thinking about the competition and the innovation, my first question would be for the panel. What do you in registrar or whatever organizations, what do you see as innovation when talking about domain names? The larger or more important questions would come later like whether DNS has future at all concerning all the apps or the social media you were naming. So this would be my first questions: What do you as panelists see innovation for?

>> Thank you. You can put the slides -- the first slide of the slide deck, the time line? Is it possible?

>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: To have that timeline? Oops.

>> Yeah.

>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: That one.

>> I apologize because I have to leave for another meeting in about 15 minutes. My other colleague will be here down the road. It is amazing to see. There is so much discussion and things working at ICANN is a day-to-day business. You wouldn't expect so much interest from a larger debate. If I can stand up -- thank you. You know, this is very interesting. When you say what is the future of TLDs. TLDs are very old. 1980. I was 1-year-old. You know? I was 1-year-old and look. So the question is: Where are we going? So far they endured probably the most revolutionary changes in the internet. To here, there was no Internet. You know? To here, there was no world wide web. There was a sort of network of networks that did exist, but it was mainly dot (?). Till here, there was no ICANN. There was no ICANN and all the top level domain names were assigned mainly as ccTLDs. They were assigned by one guy in his office in southern California who literally had a block note and would note in this very old school block note. Okay. You are French research university and you would like to join the network. I think you can manage that far. Then suddenly, by 1998, you know how many millions of Internet users we have world wide? Today about 4 billion. 3.6, something like that. And around this time, the role of top level domain names. We speak about the dot com and someone who remembered and who was centrally in the revolution of the Internet. 1998 is when Google was launched. And then if 2004, Facebook came to be. We had the first round of gTLDs. Clearly, if you map it with expansion of the Internet and then you understand why ICANN was invented in the activity place and why we needed to get a process that would be closely involved and have innovation into the way we expand this whole evolution of the Internet. And then we have to wait till the launch of new GgTLDs to realize that not everybody in this world speaks a language with (?). 1 in every 4 users is Chinese. User completely Chinese character keyboard, but he was forced to write on the address bar of his browser or her browser everything but what was inside of the dot. So that's another key important part of innovation. We tend to forget about we look at GTD problem, we look at the competition. We do look very much from still work. I think we are biased from our western words and from the fact we look at the Internet is a very western-California based till now a days invention. But indeed, it's global.

The other thing we can overlook is when we started with top level domain names, nobody thought that the Internet would become that. Nobody thought that the Internet would be one place where we did fishing, cyber attacks and cyber wars. One thing that was clear is probably top level domain name is probably not the most secure system to do that. We introduced this system, which is called DNS sec which puts another level of security. How do you factor in competition? You have to see that, but indeed these are clear points in the innovation part. And one thing I think is very knowledgeable is e especially about ICANN was set up, one person itself can really manage all that. But probably one company can really take this because this company cannot be found comprised by people as smart as I am that can see how the Internet involves. So the trick here is that we get everybody participating and collectively decide how the Internet revolves. We took seven years of discussions of people saying maybe we cannot go along with one round and then a second round. We need to work together and set up some rules and some process to go ahead with that. ICANN is not for profit organization. And all the things were accumulated with the program is not used to increase my salary or pay off a fancy new car for Nigel or, you know, or a private jet for our CEO. But even on what we do with all this money, now for those of you following the new, I am not seeing an amount of money. There are two people that apply for the same domain name and all have the same rise. At the beginning, the community thought this is something that is very unlikely. Another untold thing is that we even the community in the more in the wildest calculation, they expected around 500 new applications. Something like that. It came to be there were 2,000 applications that came in. And so the last resort solution of having options ended up being quite popular. We have now 250 billion U.S. dollars in a bank account, which is separate. And the community discusses how to use that keeping in mind that our goal is still that to figure out what is next. You know? And how do we go into the innovation? How do make sure we survive and there's a future for us. We go for that, but luckily, if you have questions? I have five minutes more.

>> I just want to ask about new TLDs because nobody mentioned it and how do they still have any chance comparing to the new gTLDs and if yes, how do you see it?

>> JORG: The largest top level domain name dot com. There is 20 million something domain names. And then the second one I think is -- is?

>> (question/comment made)

>> JORG: And then you have dot RU and then you have dot CM and then you have dot CN in Chinese scripts. And then finally -- so I think to be appreciating how much the idea will increase, you need to look at it from a completely different perspective. I think we cannot even fancy that. We are in the infancy of the Internet explosion in all regions of the world. And if you look at the next billions of Internet users, you won't be able to. I have no kids. Someone in China can now have two kids. You know? I don't speak Chinese. I think these things also survive the threat of social media and the threats of -- we still look -- Facebook has 2 billions of users, which is a large size of the Internet population world wide. They want to go to the old worlds. Will they reach this? I don't know. But still the Internet is based on this technology and this technology doesn't completely overlap with the Facebook or social that we know because it is our view of the Internet. They have social networking in Russia and they have social networks in China. They have social networks in other parts of the world. So I think to your question, probably in the next few years, we will see that they are spiking it up in numbers.

>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: I just can't speculate about it. It is all about reaching out to the population and literacy and all that kind of stuff. So it is very hard to give a prognosis on that one. I would like to comment on the impression at least I got by some presentations of my fellow panelists that the new GTTLD round means innovation. I personally do not think so just by presenting more of what was already there is that really innovation? I certainly doubt that. Go you take a closer look on the development of the new gTLDs, it makes you think about it. Of course, every new string or a lot of new strings that have the same business model as the Legacy TLDs or CCs and if they only rely on a number of registrations, they do have a problem. So there's no innovation in that. What is there? Has there been some innovation? Done voting to have a completely new concept with them. I would like to see something like dot secure as being a new concept because they're not relying on the number of registrations, but then if you take a look and compare the CCs or gTLDs, Legacy gTLDs in comparison to new gTLDs, then I can hardly believe what we said is true with respect to did we really get more competition? Are they informative and successful? Of course coming from -- or taking a look at my market, we do have a market share of well over 60% in Germany. I'm also the chair of the board of directors of central, the European association. Over there as well, I do see market shares well above 60%. And we have a share of new gTLDs of just below 2%. So is that really competition? Well, at least I do not see it that way. And taking into consideration that 70% of this 2% apart are just being used for speculation. I doubt we have more choice. We have consumer trust. I don't see it.

>> ZACH: Hi, sir. This is Zach. So I think that's -- I want to bring together a couple of things I think we've had and one of them is from Dirk. In the beginning of his presentation is excluding and code of conduct. Actually, I think that Browns who applied and ran the raid don't operate on that same business model. They're doing it in perhaps exactly for those reasons about consumer trust. If you were Bartly's bank, that's a real indication that Bartly's.com with a misspelling or Apple with PayPal, it's working in a different way. And say actually it is bringing those points together. About 550 I think is the number. 550 of those and successful applications were browns. And about a third of those are just by being browns gTLDs. Say that's mine. Thank you.

>> Okay. Talking about the market share of new TLDs. New gTLDs. We are a bit in Germany. When we look at the numbers, we see the penetration of new gTLDs is 0.01%. So are we better? That depends on the point of view. Sure. What -- regarding the gTLDs, I'm sorry, but they are at least a target because having a price list in Chinese is not really a huge amount of renovation. About 50% of this new gTLDs are registered to China and about the same number are apart. So that kind of usefulness. But at least -- let's see. Securities is a boring subject. As we say, it's been tossed around a lot. But there's some really troubling correlation regarding new gTLDs and innovation in crime because, for example, if we look at what are currently ten most abused top level domain names, these are basically all gTLDs. Quite personal, no service providers who have blocked all gTLDs from the mail servers because let's say reach of (?) to good stuff is really low. So, in that sense, I'm kind of worried if registries don't innovate on that side of stuff. Security prompt. Then this whole knew gTLD might not work well for most of this registries. So, surely innovating in the security space should be a priority for new gTLDs.

>> I would like to take that thought on security being innovation and this brings me back to the question I well asked from the panelists. You come from some what different backgrounds and different companies. What is innovation and domain space for you? You already basically mentioned what it could be, but from a registry perspective, maybe from another perspective.

>> I would say finding innovation is very hard, but I would say what we see as the most -- what we like to see top level domain names do is create simple things. We shed value to domain registrants. In many meetings, I've kind of brought up dot EU as a let's say the perfect registry or almost perfect registry. For example, one thing which I personally considered some what innovative at the time was having basically who is privacy included in the domain price for private individuals. We see a lot of people registering dot EU domain names just to get their specifics because their e-mail addresses are not publicly available, et cetera. That's kind of one of the examples of the kind of innovation we'd like to see. Something simple, but which is appreciated by the users. And there's also innovation in the Internet presence market, which is a domain name combined with something else. I would say, but for example, let's encrypt initiative. Something which TLDs should surely look into supporting, advocating, et cetera, because technically it's much more secure to have your own domain name, your own resources under the protection of TLS than having shared resources on the protection of someone else's certificate. So these are not -- these are not uni corns or something else. Coincidentally for privacy and security space. But yeah. Maybe that's something that we would be very let's say interested to look into. I think many registries will be forced to look into privacy because of four-letter acronym nobody dares to mention.

>> Okay. Going on with answering what have we done about security have introduced (?) a couple of years ago. We have based authentication where you can use your own certificates if you do not trust certificates that have been issued by central authority that already have been corrupted. We know that. So there is certainly some innovation on a security front, but then let's be quite Frank about it. Still, we got 1.0% of DNS sec secure domains. So obviously secure is not sexy. It's not working.

>> It responds to what you said or just to D as well. It is roughly as well as 1% if we're lucky for our domain space. And about this privacy thing, this comes down to nothing to certain loss and apply to certain registries. In our case in Switzerland, we accept that. But in other spaces, they do not allow that by law. I agree with you that it will be an issue in the future because people want that and we understand that they want that. We'll see.

>> Yeah, about the NS sec. We are situated in the center of Tallinn. If you look out that window, you will see a large building of a Swedish bank. You can guess where we are using DNS sec or not. What we are kind of looking into or what we are seeing maybe DNS sec was too mystified. Maybe they presented too much of a (?) to huge problems and maybe people tried to go with DNS sec from 0 to 100 miles an hour in a couple of seconds because when Estonia top level domain registries started working and DNS sec what we saw was basically frustration from more sites. We, I believe, maybe are 1 of 2 registrars here in Estonia who support DNS sec. I think 95% have DNS sec enabled domains registered by us. So users were kind of told. DNS sec is a must. But they were also told that DNS sec is really complex. It's cryptography, it's algorithm, stuff like that. They kind of got scared because it seemed too complicated. To be honest, we got frustrated because, you know, when you invest into a technology and you see that you kind of -- you're the only one, it makes you think you have the right business decisions. I think registry also has been quite frustrated because no one has really no other registrars have really implemented DNS sec. What I would like to see in the DNS sec based is things like they are good in a sense, but let's encrypt is great, but it should have competition. It shouldn't be monopoly certificate market. They could provide that kind of competition. And maybe kind of try to talk down the DNS secs compensations a bit. Most shouldn't be presented to end user. They should just have a checkbox and enable the DNS sec. In the best scenario, it should be enabled by the fourth. We shouldn't really kind of maybe make it into a huge issue as it has been done today.

>> Could we name it to the DNS secs and see what happens.

[Laughter]

>> I guess Estonia is not the only country who battles with the DNS sec. A lot of countries do and statistic is very different. Depends on the view point or the starting point ever the country had you solved all these years with the DNS sec.

>> Yeah.

>> I think he was going to go first.

>> I was just going to point out. Interestingly, we only have maybe hundreds of domain names with DNS sec enabled. Someone is looking --

>> 1,000.

>> Okay. So that's, ah, 1%. A bit less than 1% of all domain names. 70% of domain name resolutions are DNS sec capable here in Estonia. So we should kind of try to bring those two together.

[Laughter]

>> So my question comes from a different perspective and more precisely when looking at the graph on the previous slide, I was on the screen. You can see a lot of GLTs being taken into use and launched in the future. So that really makes me worried and scared for the earlier right holders such as trademark owners. Registration is based on a first come, first serve principle. However, especially when making available new gTLDs and order TLDs, it's very good for cyber squatters or other squatters to register different domain names which they are not in fact entitled to. With ICANN, there is sunrise period which helps, but at the same time, it is physically impossible to register all possible domain names and which could comprise the trademark, for example. And also after the registration and infringing registration, you can enforce your rights, but it's very, very expensive considering the amounts of, you know, infringing domain names. So my question is that -- sorry. Is the first come, first serve principle viable in the long run? With more and more gTLDs and TLDs becoming available or made substantial examination considering rights in many EU country its is with trademarks become the norm in the future and if not, what can be the solution concerning that numerous infringements? Thank you.

>> Unless anyone else wants to? Okay. I would -- really, really great comment, I think. It really speaks something to something we find true. I invite to you get involved in the ICANN rights and subsequent procedures based on those reviews. Those are the questions being considered and right now and say particularly in the backed of rights protection, there will be a discussion about a new EDRP and way of getting domain names. I'll keep you in touch with the people. You can really get involved with answering the questions and more appropriately aware. Things will get discussed and new policies will directly come out of there and say thanks very much.

>> ADAM: Adam from ICANN. Andrea mentioned I may have a comment. One thing DNS sec, we believe there are about 750 million who are using DNS sec validating resolvers and that means end users. They haven't done anything. It's the network service providers ISPs and people who run those networks who operate DNS sec. There's 25% of Internet users sitting behind DNS. So if you want to know how to do it and particularly for Estonia, we will be more than happy to arrange training sessions, if we haven't done so already. John crane is here. He's our security officer, our chief security officer. We can start talking about it right now and will be more than happy to put on training here and hold across the region. That's what we're trying to do across all of Europe. Training is free. We'll probably go for a drink too. Thanks.

>> A comment to that. We have already agreed to that. We haven't spread the news, but we just met with (?) today. So it's all set.

>> We got our training already.

[Laughter]

>> Yeah. I have a comment to the trademark infringement things. From our perspective, it was that we see if you have a TLD, which has a reasonable price to the registrars and a reasonable prize to the end users and restrictions, then all these cyber squatters and trademark infringes are not there. So essentially for us is having restrictions in a TLD makes it easier to enforce everything. Also higher price provides security. If you see where the trademark infringements come, it's (?) some TLDs cost. That's essentially and that brings us to the question again. Does the prize play a role in that?A I lot of ccTLDs are quite cheap from a perspective of a high priced geo top level domain name. So would high pricings bring more value to the market and having less domain names that are just part for speculation? That's a general question I have to the audience. And independent.

>> What was the question? Will higher prices bring value?

>> Higher prices and restrictions. Only people from Estonia or the European union or something like this.

>> I think there's -- there's definitely sweet spot at somewhere below maybe $10, but above a few dollars where, you know, things get too expensive to register thousands of domain names for spamming and stuff. So yeah. Pricing does matter, but I don't think it matters a huge amount. For example, we don't see. EU. It has quite competitive prices. We don't see dot EU being abused that much. There's a lot more abuse going on in the do the com space rather than the dot EU space. But they have restrictions. So there might be something in that.

>> I have a comment. In Latvia, we have a 50% discount if the domain name is signed by MS sec. That is a really active signing for the domain names that year when we announced. So our situation a little bit better, but still not as good as it would seem. It was a huge beacon in the very beginning and now we have a domain name signed in that zone, but still now even though they used the discount and they now think well, that's nothing much. We're all thinking about the DNS training. For those who have applied that, they're talking us and asking us and explain what DNS sec is because we investment implemented it -- we haven't implemented it. We have a discount and we want for the clients to come and ask that they need this. Now they're coming to us and saying okay. Now you have to do something else for the DNS sec and talk to end users as well. So I think that price is a good teaser in the very beginning, but afterwards, everyone get used to it. It will not be a good thing at the very end. This is just experience in Latvia.

>> I would like to comment about the speculation. I am from the Estonia Internet foundation. In one 1/2 year ago, we decided to abolish our requirement. What happened what we didn't expect was that our market was really popular in China. And in the first quarter of 2013, our growth was the highest in Europe. It was like around 14% or even more. Anyway, we got like 27,000 new domains. It was huge speculation going on. We had no idea back then if they're going to renew the domains, what will happen because we got a lot of letters from them that you should make for us the discount price or the price was still for them too high. And we decided not to do that because it is our politics today and after one year, the domains that were renewed were 7,000 domains. So we lost around 20,000 domains. Still they kept some of -- investors still kept them. We don't know what they're going to do with that because we have seen they actually don't use those domains. It is still for the speculation. One blogger wrote one year ago when it was huge growth that the dot EE means in China mutual I. They should invest in market in China because it would have a huge market there and it would be very popular. I would say we still see ourselves fast CCLD, not Chi LLD which are popular in China.

>> I wanted to come to price matters as well. If I remember correctly in Latvia for the GA, there was a conversation about I think it was Latvia cert. A guy from there -- they didn't analyze on the domain names used for different purposes and I think that his outcome of research was that the price -- if you want to do something with the domain name, the price doesn't matter. In their scale, they had domains used for negative purposes from $1 to $25 or 25 Euros. I guess there are less, but the price matters. If someone really wants something to use for something, then the price does not matter.

>> You have a question on innovation?

>> I had a lot of questions, but there were a lot of people who said a lot of things. So luckily, I didn't have to use my prepared questions. We need some time for remarks as well.

>> The microphone.

>> I will not speak because there is a silence on remote participation. So I will not speak as remote moderator. I will put my headset on my head. First, TLD was (?). Who was the difference between dotBERLIN and dot (?). Who cares. From the users perspective, four years from the structure of the domain names and every single logic for the users is the same. So there is no change in that. We can speak about evolution or revolution. When you said new gTLDs are not innovation, they are not revolution. They are evolution. When you said that IDN is not innovative or let's say not precisely like that, but they are evolution also. Not revolution. So when you say about DNS sec, let's compare these two safety belt in the cars. Is that innovation? No. Sorry. This is something that needs to be called the evolution because up until '70s, '80s, we were driving the car without safety belt and other technologies. So now we need to drive the belt with safety belt on. So I don't see clearly the answer about what is innovative in domain name. Domain name growth. All of that is evolution. There is the revolution, but what is innovation in here? I don't see clearly. And on the other hand, one little comment about digital identity. Digital identity is not only domain name. When you say youth are using social network, yes they're using social network to build their digital identities, but not name of Facebook page or profile or whatever with the content. So domain name is one part with the story hosting servers, other services and web page is the other part of building this digital identity. So we -- how many times did you hear the registries are educating people about hosting, about hosting packages, technologies, files TP, I can go on and go on. But it's mutual thing between registrars, hosting companies which are mostly hosting companies and registries have the problem to educate people about domain names, but they have problem to educate people about hosting, et cetera. So if you want to make it easy for the user, so you need to work together to educate youngsters that Facebook, tomorrow is done. I don't know, bankruptcy or something like that, their Facebook page is gone. But you need to build something innovative for them that hosting and domain name will be simple enough to use like Facebook page. Thank you.

>> Thank you very much. That was a great statement. Mr. Zachman brings everything together in messages and a small summary of that meeting.

>> Thank you. I realize I am standing between you guys and lunch. In the interest of gravity, I thought I would start off by saying thank you for organising and the panel for contributing for interesting sessions. Thanks very much, guys.

[APPLAUSE]

Great. And say, I think I will try to do this in three points. So the first is we're kind of working on the assumption that the new TLDs have significantly changed. Does anyone contest that? Anyone got any improvements? Okay. And then the second one, there is probably no silver bullet in terms ever the best use of domain name, but we talked about how there could be a helpful marker in the identity and that adds a kind of second statement point. I'm looking around for thoughts on that. We're all interested in lunch clearly. And the third one -- I was trying to keep this one positive. New detail to the domain names would have DNS set and the development of IDNs and around the use of browns TLDs and ideas for the future. Anyone to add? Yeah.

>> Actually, I did want to add one other thing regarding the innovation perspective. From dot EU, we are currently working on an algorithm that would be perceiving while the domain is being registered that info would look at the history and by the self-learning algorithms if they would have abuse (?). So just by checking this, we would potentially prevent the domain names being registered. That, of course, means that we cannot really discard the registration, but we would withhold the name servers within 24 hours and spammers usually let the domain name go by that time. So that is something that dot EU is working currently.

>> Thank you. If anyone has any kind of suggestions to reframing this and any comments, comment to me afterwards and thanks very much for coming and have a great lunch.

>> Yeah. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]


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