ICANN 71

Dates:	June 14-17, 2021
Location:	The Hague, NL
Venue:	Virtual
Website:	https://71.schedule.icann.org/

ICANN 71 was a Policy Forum that was held from June 14 to June 17, 2021, virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was supposed to have taken place in The Hague, the Netherlands. Although there was a prominent, well-attended plenary concerning ICANN's Multistakeholder Model, the vast majority of sessions were dedicated to either ICANN's response to regulatory developments in Europe or DNS Abuse mitigation.

Meetings

Plenaries

Multistakeholder Model Evolution

The discussion mainly focused on:

• The pros and cons of encouraging or permitting adversarial interactions
  

Ron Andruff proffered, "The consensus model needs to be revised from meeting the highest standard: Full Consensus, to the next level: General Consensus with dissenting opinions. That change would better inform the debates."

• Whether ICANN's role in Internet Governance should be streamlined
  

Jorge Cancio said, "We stay in the weeds now" (as compared with work as recent as 2008) and argued that “ICANN should stay at the principle level, lean, and future proof.”

• The backlog of unimplemented policies, some of which are now out-of-date or conflict with current work
  

Mason Cole worried "How big a danger to the model is unfinished work? The community has expectations regarding completing work...the SSR1 recommendations are nearly a decade old...This is like dragging weight around unnecessarily." Likewise, James Bladel said, "There is too much emphasis on process and not enough on relevance."

• How ICANN can better involve the Global South
  

Claire Craig explained that ICANN must work with governments in developing nations, as they are the key access points. There are few if any capacity-building programs there, and the ICANN communities are too small; it's about striving toward equity, not equality. Jovan Kurbalija agreed, suggesting that the model should 1) embrace the public good aspect of ICANN (it's not just commercial); 2) that the pandemic made governments much stronger as it did tech; 3) ICANN should work with IGF to get more involved with politics because it’s trying to exist too far from the political center; and 4) ICANN needs to educate the general public to gain prominence via boundary spanners.

Impact of Regulatory Developments

The conversation was supposed to be general but time and again the questions drove the dialogue back to the GDPR. In its constellation, speakers addressed:

• The effort to increase Cybersecurity in Europe with the Proposal for a Regulation on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act), the EC proposals (to correct or) enhance the GDPR, Proposal for a Directive on measures for a high common level of cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2), SSAD, and how to go beyond ICANN's Contracted Party House
  

For instance, Volker Greimann asked, "Why is NIS2 focussing on DNS as opposed to hosting, e.g, where the content is? Why are Hosters not subjected to the same requirements?"

• Paul Muchene and Jeff Neuman had a side discussion RDAP. Paul: doesn’t it already do what these proposals seek? Jeff: RDAP is a technical protocol. It is policy agnostic.”
• Alexander Seger representing the European Council, gave an update on the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime on enhanced cooperation and disclosure of electronic evidence Budapest convention on cybercrime (the Budapest Convention), which has 66 member parties and concerns criminal law, not civil

Reputation Block Lists

This plenary was guided by the objective of helping the ICANN community understand RBLs: what they are, how they're made, what they can be used for, obstacles, and advances. Three people (Carel Bitter, Roman Huessy, and Ben Coon) from the RBL field were interviewed by the moderator (LG Forsberg). A cybersecurity expert from ICANN's OCTO (Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob), the vice-chair of M3AAWG (Matt Thomas), the co-chair of ICANN's DNS Abuse working group (Reg Levy), and the co-vice chair of ALAC Joanna Kulesza also spoke.
The panel discussed:

• Whether the lists are maintained through automation or by humans

The datasets are generally automated but humans spot-check URLs that don’t score high enough to be included in the RBL, add/remove them from the lists, and verify false positives.

• The frequency of false positives, and the most common reasons behind them

Most malware is sent through email; using shorteners in emails is phishy behavior. False positives are not very common. The most common reasons are that in emails, readers don't understand what is malicious or they don’t like what they see; so, they report it.

• Why RBL providers do not share information with each other

They use different methodologies, look for different types of abuse, and do not want to publish their findings when there are not mitigation mechanisms

• Why evidence is not included in RBLs

Including evidence is not possible at scale (2-3K emails/second) because it would reveal Honeypots

Critiques and concerns included:

Reg Levy: false positives;

Joanna Kulesza: end users ending up on RBLs and transparency on criteria.

John McCormac: Detection versus reporting may be a limiting factor for RBLs, which in turn may always be behind the curve. "One possible metric that could help some RBLs would be whether a domain name was registered at full fee or at a heavy discount. It might be a bit of a meta-metric. In terms of webspam doms, the patterns in new gTLDs from web usage surveys revealed that 95% of them were gone within a year, locking registries into a kind of discount addiction to survive."

Crystal Ondo: the difference between maliciously registered vs hacked domains needs to be underscored. "A lot of domains that end up on RBLs are victims themselves, not bad actors. Further muddying the waters."

Roman Hussey: RBLs, such as Abuse.CH, do not have a way to determine whether a domain name is a victim of a compromise or registered for malicious purposes for two reasons: Missing Whois (not registrant data, but the sponsoring registrar and registration data) and missing pDNS data (when the domain name was first observed).

Policy

GNSO

• GNSO: EPDP Phase 2A Update
  

Two outstanding issues:

1. legal vs. natural persons
   
2. feasibility of unique contacts/anonymized emails
   

• GNSO Transfer Policy Review PDP WG

Contracted

RrSG

• Last year the RrSG became a formal professional (as opposed to commercial) association, and they held their first General Assembly at ICANN 71. Their legal office is located in Germany (Thomas Rickert Law Firm) so that they can have their own bank account and credit card.
• Liz Behsudi from the I&JN gave a presentation on the think tank's DNS Abuse toolkit. She discussed legal interoperability, the think tank's three foci, domains, content, and data, the importance of different thresholds for responses to DNS Abuse and understanding the typology of notifiers, and why the EU electronic evidence proposal may affect whois data.
• Graeme Bunton presented on developments at the DNS Abuse Institute, which is following the logic that there are two ways to reduce DNS abuse: # prevent it or # react to it. Bunton explained that economic realities indicate that there should be more emphasis on reactive solutions because they don’t have to be integrated into current technology. He also discussed CART, which will include domain look-up, who’s reporting, type of malware/spam, and required information so that registrars can get information about abuse complaints from API and reporters can go to one place. He hopes it will be new, improved DAAR, non-binary, better, fairer, and more concerned with the persistence than the existence of abuse.

ccNSO

The main section of the meeting was dedicated to discussing the principles for IDN ccTLDs determination. There were questions about:

• how to define territory;
• the relations with ISO3166-1 code;
• why a "visual association" between the code and the territory in question is now written as a “meaningful representation of the territory”; and
• the difference between designated languages and official languages (the former is required, not the latter) because many languages are used within given territories but are not officially recognized. “Designated language” comes from the UN glossary and means it has legal status or serves as a language of administration.

ASO

Did not meet at ICANN 71.

Advice

ALAC

The key issues discussed in the ALAC meeting were: the prospects for SSAD; the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com decision, the debate over whether domain names should be trademarked, and fears over the privatization of generic nouns; the potential policy implications of Verisign's US Patent 10,979,384; and questions over why ICANN's GDPR response is talking so long: is it due to technical or policy complications?

SSAC

SAC115

RSSAC

The RSSAC held a working session to develop the "Requirements for Measurements of the Local Perspective on the Root Server System." The main debate was over whether the data (results from the tool) should be made publicly available. If the tool is primarily for root server operators then the team should drop the recursive operator language. Likewise, there were concerns over the RFC language used around “data repository users should publish their results.” RSOs just using it for their own needs may hesitate if they know their results will be published elsewhere. Public availability may be fine for researchers. Wes Hardaker suggested that there could be a button on the results page that says “publish results;” he has had good results with this type of button on a DNSSEC checking tool. Thus, he argued results publication should be opt-in, not opt-out. Conversely, Brad Verd argued that data results should be shared in exchange for using the service and that the notice that users can opt out can be included at the beginning or end of the process. Paul Hoffman reminded the group to emphasize that the tool is for information, not giving best/good evaluations or determinations.

DNSSEC & Security

• Jacques Latour spoke about Internet of Things (IoT) Device Identity Management. IoT devices appear to work very similarly to domains in terms of DNSSEC, and his team wants to make DNSSEC integral to IoT security.
• Daniel Migault spoke about the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Identity Pinning protocol, which is meant to ensure that users have a confidential channel with an authenticated peer. It is a complementary way to authenticate in addition to the DNSSEC protocol. It is being developed to be used for critical infrastructure (and not necessarily regular end users). Whereas DNSSEC is a trust-based quest for information, TLS establishes a session based on existing information. TLS is about the communication users are establishing with an entity, while DNSSEC is about the information users are asking about the entity with which they're establishing a session.
• Steve Crocker discussed two gaps in original DNSSEC protocol specifications:

1. Automation of DS Updates
   The question is how to convey DS from 3rd party DNS providers to Registrars or Registries
2. Multiple DNS providers
   It is difficult to accommodate the transfer of DNS services from one provider to another because the effects may be worse than expected. Multi-signer protocol (RFC 8901) has been completed but there are many moving parts and things left to do