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CASE FILE
Case File governance intelligence tracks institutions, policy processes, standards activity, registry operations, accountability disputes, and implementation signals that affect internet infrastructure. BTW.
Institutional BreakdownLegal and Policy ConflictElection and Control Risk
Institution legitimacy and continuity risk mapping.
Primary-source based timeline and risk analysis.
Used for continuity and policy exposure planning.
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Latest from CASE FILE
755 articles
CASE FILE
When Wine-Origin Claims Reached the Root: .WINE, .VIN and the Contract Path to Identity Digital
The argument over .WINE and .VIN did not ask ICANN to decide who could lawfully use names such as Champagne, Rioja or Bordeaux. It asked whether a global naming contract could carry protections for wine-origin claims before international and national law had produced a single…
CASE FILE
Who Could Stop Site Finder? VeriSign’s Wildcard and the Birth of Registry-Service Preclearance
When VeriSign changed the answers returned by the authoritative .COM and .NET servers in September 2003, the registry operator controlled the technical switch. ICANN did not itself edit the zones: it could demand rollback, invoke the contracts and threaten enforcement. Technical…
CASE FILE
Who Could Authorise .AMAZON? From GAC Objection to Enforceable Safeguards and Root Delegation
The dispute over .AMAZON was not resolved by a single veto, judgement or bargain. It advanced only when distinct powers aligned: governments advised, an accountability panel identified defective decision-making, the ICANN Board changed programme status, negotiators converted…
CASE FILE
When a Registry Policy Became Browser Code: The .APP Contract, Delegation and HSTS Preload Chain
.APP did not become an HTTPS-enforced namespace through one decision by one institution. Its path ran through a governmental warning, an amended application, evaluation, a twelve-party auction, an ICANN contract, a root-zone change, a registry-to-registrar notice rule and…
CASE FILE
After the Failed CPE: How DotMusic Reached the .MUSIC Root
A failed community-priority score did not end DotMusic Limited’s application, and a later delegation did not erase that failure. The route from 10 points in 2016 to a live top-level domain in 2021 ran through separate institutions, separate legal instruments and separate…
CASE FILE
The Domain ICANN Did Not Order: .PHARMACY’s 2018 Contract Cure
A Public Interest Commitment Dispute Resolution Procedure standing panel found that the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy had not transparently applied its published eligibility rules to one rejected applicant. ICANN then issued a breach notice and later recorded the…
CASE FILE
Why Booking.com’s .HOTELS Contended with .HOTEIS but Not .HOTEL
Two decision processes within ICANN’s new-gTLD programme could compare similar-looking top-level-domain strings and produce opposite-looking outcomes because they were not answering the same procedural question. Booking.com’s route to .HOTELS shows how a visual screen…
CASE FILE
When Territorial Coexistence Met a Single Root: Merck KGaA, .MERCK and the Limits of ICANN Review
For decades, private agreements divided use of the Merck name by territory. ICANN’s root could not. The .MERCK record shows how contractual history could enter objections and accountability proceedings without giving any one forum power to partition a globally unique label, award…
CASE FILE
Verified, Bundled, Released: How .NGO/.ONG Turned NGO Eligibility into Registry Enforcement
Behind .NGO and .ONG’s verification promise was a contractual machine: a name could be created before documentary review finished; linked commands once moved matching labels across two top-level domains; and different failures could lead to lock, hold, termination, deletion or…
CASE FILE
Registry.Africa and the Remedy Gap: Why DCA’s IRP Victory Did Not Reverse the .AFRICA Delegation Chain
DotConnectAfrica secured a consequential finding that ICANN had mishandled its `.AFRICA` application, but the ruling neither transferred the string nor erased the rival operator’s contract. The result becomes intelligible only when the dispute is followed across the separate…
CASE FILE
Emergency Custody, Not Ownership: The .WED Failure and ICANN’s EBERO Chain
The .WED case is not chiefly a story about a failed registry. It is a test of how contractual emergency powers, escrowed records, root-zone changes and a temporary operator can preserve a top-level domain without deciding who may hold its permanent registry role next. The record…
CASE FILE
Who Could Stop the .ORG Sale? PIR, ICANN and the Legal Objects Behind the Ethos Capital Rejection
The proposed transfer of Public Interest Registry to an Ethos Capital affiliate drew petitions, government scrutiny and accountability challenges, but none operated as a freestanding veto. The deal failed because authority was divided among a private purchase agreement, corporate…
CASE FILE
Who Could Restore the Caps? Namecheap and the .ORG/.INFO Accountability Chain
The removal of historical wholesale price caps from the .ORG and .INFO registry agreements produced thousands of objections, a successful accountability challenge and a court-confirmed award, yet none of those events rewrote the contracts. The case shows why public participation…
CASE FILE
The Contract Clause That Stopped the .ORG Sale
ICANN did not stop the proposed Ethos Capital acquisition through a registrant vote, a court injunction or a change to the domain-name system. It used a prior-consent clause in Public Interest Registry’s registry agreements—an ex ante gate that public opposition could influence…
CASE FILE
The .ECO Community That Became a Registry Right
Big Room’s 14-point Community Priority Evaluation did not establish ownership of environmentalism or place .ECO in the DNS root. It gave one community-based application priority inside a four-way contention set. Narrow review left that score intact; a later registry agreement and…
CASE FILE
A .AFRICA Process Victory Without the String
DotConnectAfrica’s 2015 Independent Review Process victory established that ICANN’s Board had handled its .AFRICA application inconsistently with ICANN’s Articles and Bylaws. The Board then preserved the undelegated string and returned the application to evaluation. Neither the…
CASE FILE
When Estonia Split an Identity Card in Two
Estonia’s 2017 eID crisis was not simply a chip failure or an emergency patch. It exposed a boundary: a component could retain formal evaluation credentials while new cryptographic evidence made keys produced through one library unsafe for continued operational reliance. Estonia…
CASE FILE
How Consensus Advice Held .AMAZON for Five Years
In the .AMAZON dispute, governments did not own the root-zone switch and an independent review panel did not acquire it. The decisive power moved through presumptions, reasons, application status, contract terms and finally delegation—showing how consensus can stop a namespace…
CASE FILE
Why Google Could Not Keep .SEARCH Closed
Google’s registry subsidiary applied to reserve a generic namespace for its own corporate group at a time when ICANN’s published rulebook did not expressly forbid that model. The application exposed a policy omission, and the decisive response came not from public comment…
CASE FILE
How a 14-Point Score Eliminated Six .HOTEL Applicants
A single Community Priority Evaluation report did not award a registry or place `.HOTEL` in the DNS root. It did something narrower and, for six competitors, immediately decisive: it supplied the score that activated ICANN’s pre-adopted rule for ending their applications’ route…
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