ICANN takes over country’s ccTLD after Hall of Famer’s death

ICANN has assumed temporary ownership of .lb, the ccTLD for Lebanon, after the death of the man who founded the registry and managed it for 30 years.

IANA, in an unprecedented move, has made itself the “caretaker” sponsor and admin contact for .lb, according to the official record, which changed on Thursday.

The Org replaces the American University in Beirut, which as the name suggests is an American-owned university in Beirut, as sponsor and Lebanese Domain Registry as the admin.

It appears that AUB has not been involved with running .lb for a few years, having terminated its relationship with LBDR in 2020, and has told IANA that it is no longer the ccTLD’s sponsor.

AUB’s disassociation with LBDR, which appears to have been quite acrimonious, forced the registry to move onto CoCCA’s managed registry platform, where it still sits today.

Nabil Bukhalid, LBDR’s founder and a member of ISOC’s Internet Hall of Fame, had been trying to secure a permanent home for .lb for years, according to a history of the domain on the registry’s web site.

But he died unexpectedly of a heart attack while on vacation in January this year, leaving Lebanon’s domain in a bit of a limbo.

Kim Davies, head of IANA, revealed in a letter posted today (pdf) that .lb has been managed by Bukhalid’s “associates” for the last six months.

He said ICANN has approved a new “caretaker” role for IANA, and that the designation “will signal that there is an extraordinary and temporary operational situation”.

“IANA will continue to work with Bukhalid’s known associates to ensure the ongoing operation of the domain, until such time as a qualified successor is identified through a normal ccTLD transfer request process, at which time the caretaker designation will be removed,” he wrote.

.lb is believed to have fewer than 5,000 domains under management.

Bukhalid’s struggle to secure a successor played out against the backdrop of a Lebanese government that has far more important things to worry about. The country has been in a deep financial crisis since 2019, a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a revolution, and one of the largest accidental non-nuclear explosions in human history.

The economic crisis was such that Bukhalid was forced to incorporate LBDR in Delaware a couple years back.

“We are establishing this designation out of an operational necessity. There appear to be no specific policies that govern a situation where the existing designated ccTLD manager no longer performs its role but there is no obvious successor,” Davies wrote.

He suggested that the ccNSO may want to consider creating a policy for this kind of scenario.

Similar situations could occur in future, I reckon, if increasingly grey and wrinkly Postel-era “Just Some Guy” ccTLD sponsors don’t make arrangements for their heirs.

Davies said in his letter that the “caretaker” designation has been used once before, for Libya’s .ly in 2004. But it’s the first time IANA has been a caretaker, and the Libya experiment went spectacularly badly.

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