Cybersquatting cases down in .uk

The number of cybersquatting complaints filed against .uk domains fell in 2016, according to data out this week from Nominet.

The .uk registry said that there were 703 complaints filed with its Dispute Resolution Service in the year, down from 728 in 2015.

However, the number of individual domains complained about appears to have increased, from 745 to 785. That’s partly due to registrants owning both .co.uk and .uk versions of the same name.

The number of cases that resulted in domains being transferred was 53%, the same as 2015, Nominet said.

The large majority of cases were filed by UK-based entities against UK-based registrants, the stats show.

Comment Tagged: .uk, cybersquatting, drs, nominet

As .boots self-terminates, ICANN will not redelegate it

The dot-brand .boots may become the first single-dictionary-word gTLD to be taken off the market, as The Boots Company told ICANN it no longer wishes to be a registry.

Boots, the 168-year-old British pharmacy chain, told ICANN in April that it is unilaterally terminating its Registry Agreement for .boots and ICANN opened it up for comment this week.

As with the 22 self-terminating dot-brands before it, .boots was unloved and unused, with just the solitary, ICANN-mandated nic.boots in its zone file.

Boots, as well as being a universally known brand name in the UK and Ireland, is of course a generic dictionary word representing an unrelated class of goods (ie footwear).

It’s the first dying dot-brand to have this kind of dual use, making it potentially modestly attractive as a true generic TLD.

However, because it’s currently a dot-brand with no third-party users, it will not be redelegated to another registry.

Under Specification 13 of the Registry Agreement, which gives dot-brands special rights, ICANN has the ability to redelegate dot-brands, but only if it’s in the public interest to do so. That’s clearly not the case in this instance.

These rules also state that ICANN is not allowed to delegate .boots to any other company for a period of two years after the contract ends.

Given that there’s no chance of ICANN delegating any gTLDs in the next two years, this has no real impact. Perhaps, if the ICANN community settles on a rolling gTLD application process in future, this kind of termination may be of more interest.

1 Comment Tagged: boots, dot-brands, ICANN, termination

GoDaddy launches security service after Sucuri acquisition

GoDaddy has revealed the first fruits of its March acquisition of web security service provider Sucuri.

It’s GoDaddy Website Security, what appears to be a budget version of the services Sucuri already offers on a standalone basis.

For $6.99 per month ($83.88/year), the service monitors your web site for malware and removes it upon request. It also keeps tabs on major blacklists to make sure you’re not being blocked by Google, Norton or McAfee.

This low-end offering gets you a 12-hour response time for the cleanup component. You can up that to 30 minutes by taking out the $299.99 per year plan.

The more expensive plan also includes DDoS protection, a malware firewall and integration with a content delivery network for performance.

There’s also an intermediate, $19.99-per-month ($239.88/year) plan that includes the extra features but keeps the response time at 12 hours.

An SSL certificate is included in the two more-expensive packages.

The pricing and feature set looks to compare reasonably well with Sucuri’s standalone products, which start at $16.66 a month and offer response times as fast as four hours.

As somebody who has suffered from three major security problems on GoDaddy over the last decade or so, and found GoDaddy’s response abysmal on all three occasions (despite my generally positive views of its customer service), the new service is a somewhat tempting proposition.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, godaddy, securi, security, website security

Zero registrars pass ICANN audit

Some of the biggest names in the registrar game were among a bewildering 100% that failed an ICANN first-pass audit in the latest round of random compliance checks.

Of the 55 registrars picked to participate in the audit, a resounding 0 passed the initial audit, according to data released today.

Among them were recognizable names including Tucows, Register.com, 1&1, Google and Xin Net.

ICANN found 86% of the registrars had three or more “deficiencies” in their compliance with the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement.

By far the most problematic area was compliance with sections 3.7.7.1 to 3.7.7.12 of the RAA, which specifies what terms registrars must put in their registration agreements and how they verify the contact details of their customers.

A full three quarters of audited registrars failed on that count, according to ICANN’s report (pdf).

More than half of tested registrars failed to live up to their commitments to respond to reports of abuse, where they’re obliged among other things to have a 24/7 contact number available.

There was one breach notice to a registrar as a result of the audit, but none of the failures were serious enough for ICANN to terminate the deficient registrar’s contract. Two registrars self-terminated during the process.

ICANN’s audit program is ongoing and operates in rounds.

In the current round, registrars were selected from those which either hadn’t had an audit in a couple of years, were found lacking in previous rounds, or had veered dangerously close to formal breach notices.

The round kicked off last September with requests for documents. The initial audit, which all registrars failed, was followed by a remediation phase from January to May.

Over the remediation phase, only one third of the registrars successfully resolved all the issues highlight by the audit. The remainder issued remediation plans and will be followed up on in future rounds.

The 0% pass rate is not unprecedented. It’s the same as the immediately prior audit (pdf), which ran from May to October 2016.

Comment Tagged: audit, compliance, ICANN, raa

Zone file access is crap, security panel confirms

ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service has some serious shortcomings and needs an overhaul, according to the Security and Stability Advisory Committee.

The panel of DNS security experts has confirmed what CZDS subscribers, including your humble correspondent, have known since 2014 — the system had a major design flaw baked in from day one for no readily apparent reason.

CZDS is the centralized repository of gTLD zone files. It’s hosted by ICANN and aggregates zones from all 2012-round, and some older, gTLDs on a daily basis.

Signing up for it is fairly simple. You simply fill out your contact information, agree to the terms of service, select which zones you want and hit “submit”.

The purpose of the service is to allow researchers to receive zone files without having to enter into separate agreements with each of the 1,200+ gTLDs currently online.

The major problem, as subscribers know and SSAC has confirmed, is that the default subscription period is 90 days.

Unless the gTLD registry extends the period at its end and in its own discretion, each subscription ends after three months — cutting off access — and the subscriber must reapply.

Many of the larger registries exercise this option, but many — particularly dot-brands — do not.

The constant need to reapply and re-approve creates a recurring arse-ache for subscribers and, registry staff have told me, the registries themselves.

The approval process itself is highly unpredictable. Some of the major registries process requests within 24 hours — I’ve found Afilias is the fastest — but I’ve been waiting for approval for Valuetainment’s .voting since September 2016.

Some dot-brands even attempt to insert extra terms of service into the deal before approving requests, which defeats the entire purpose of having a centralized service in the first place.

Usually, a polite email to the person handling the requests can produce results. Other times, it’s necessary to report them to ICANN Compliance.

The SSAC has evidently interviewed many people who share my concerns, as well as looking at data from Compliance (where CZDS reliably generates the most complaints, wasting the time of Compliance staff).

This situation makes zone file access unreliable and subject to unnecessary interruptions. The missing data introduces “blind spots” in security coverage and research projects, and the reliability of software – such as security and analytics applications – that relies upon zone files is reduced. Lastly, the introduced inefficiency creates additional work for both registry operators and subscribers.

The SSAC has no idea why the need to reapply every 90 days was introduced, figuring it must have happened during implementation.

But it recommends that access agreements should automatically renew once they expire, eliminating the busywork of reapplying and closing the holes in researchers’ data sets.

As I’m not objective on this issue, I agree with that recommendation wholeheartedly.

I’m less keen on the SSAC’s recommendation that registries should be able to opt out of the auto-renewals on a per-subscriber basis. This will certainly be abused by the precious snowflake dot-brands that have already shown their reluctance to abide by their contractual obligations.

The SSAC report can be read here (pdf).

4 Comments Tagged: czds, ICANN, ssac, zone files