Registrars still not responding to private Whois requests

Registrars are still largely ignoring requests for private Whois data, according to a brand protection company working for Facebook.

AppDetex wrote to ICANN (pdf) last week to say that only 3% of some 9,000 requests it has made recently have resulted in the delivery of full Whois records.

Almost 60% of these requests were completely ignored, the company claimed, and 0.4% resulted in a request for payment.

You may recall that AppDetex back in July filed 500 Whois requests with registrars on behalf of client Facebook, with which it has a close relationship.

Then, only one registrar complied to AppDetex’s satisfaction.

Company general counsel Ben Milam now tells ICANN that more of its customers (presumably, he means not just Facebook) are using its system for automatically generating Whois requests.

He also says that these requests now contain more information, such as a contact name and number, after criticism from registrars that its demands were far too vague.

AppDetex is also no longer demanding reverse-Whois data — a list of domains owned by the same registrant, something not even possible under the old Whois system — and is limiting each of its requests to a single domain, according to Milam’s letter.

Registrars are still refusing to hand over the information, he wrote, with 11.4% of requests creating responses demanding a legal subpoena or UDRP filing.

The company reckons this behavior is in violation of ICANN’s Whois Temporary Specification.

The Temp Spec says registrars “must provide reasonable access to Personal Data in Registration Data to third parties on the basis of a legitimate interests pursued by the third party”.

The ICANN community has not yet come up with a sustainable solution for third-party access to private Whois. It’s likely to be the hottest topic at ICANN 63 in Barcelona, which kicks off this weekend.

Whois records for gTLD domains are of course, post-GDPR, redacted of all personally identifiable information, which irks big brand owners who feel they need it in order to chase cybersquatters.

8 Comments Tagged: appdetex, cybersquatting, facebook, gdpr, ICANN, temp spec, trademarks, whois

Book review — “Domain Names: Strategies and Legal Aspects”

I’ve only ever read two books about the domain name industry.

The first one was Kieren McCarthy’s excellent Sex.com, the 2007 barely believable non-fictional tech-thriller that seemed to deliberately eschew inside-baseball policy talk in favor of a funny and rather gripping human narrative.

The second, Domain Names – Strategies and Legal Aspects, by Jeanette Soderlund Sause and Malin Edmar, is pretty much the diametrical opposite.

The book, published in its second edition in June, instead seems bent on explaining the complex intersection of domain names and intellectual property rights in as few words as it is able.

Coming in at a brisk 150 pages, it’s basically been engineered to funnel as much information into your brain as possible in as short a space of time as possible.

I blazed through my complimentary review copy during a three-hour train journey a couple months ago.

About half-way through, I realized I had done absolutely no background reading about the authors or publisher, and had no idea who the intended reader was.

The introduction, written for the 2014 first edition by a Swedish civil servant then on the GAC, gives the misleading impression that the book has something to say about multistakeholderism, DNS fragmentation, or new gTLD controversies.

It doesn’t. If the authors have any political opinions, you will not learn them from Domain Names.

What you will get is a competent reference work geared primarily towards IP lawyers and brand management folk who are newbies to the world of domain names.

The authors are both Swedish IP lawyers, though Soderland Sause is currently marketing VP for the .global gTLD registry.

The first half of their book deals with introducing and briefly explaining the high-level technical aspects of the DNS and the basic structure of the market, then discussing the difference between a trademark and a domain name.

An occasionally enlightening middle section of about 30 pages deals with strategies for selecting and obtaining domains, either as fresh registrations or from third parties such as cybersquatters, investors or competitors.

But the second half of the book — which deals with UDRP and related dispute resolution procedures — is evidently where the authors’, and presumably readers’, primary interest lies.

It goes into comparative depth on this topic, and I actually started to learn a few things during this section.

As a newcomer to the work, I cannot definitively say whether the new and updated content — which I infer covers developments in new gTLDs and such over the last four years — is worth the £120 upgrade for owners of the first edition.

It also seems to have gone to the printers before it was fully clear how ICANN was going to deal with GDPR; a third edition will likely be needed in a couple of years after the smoke clears.

I’d be lying if I said I had any fun reading Domain Names, but I don’t think I was supposed to.

I can see myself keeping it near my desk for occasional reference, which I think is what it’s mainly there for.

I can see IP lawyers or ICANN policy wonks also keeping copies by their desks, to be handed out to new employees as a primer on what they need to do to get their hands on the domains they want.

These juniors can then absorb the book over a weekend and keep it by their own desks for future reference, to be eventually passed on to the next n00b.

If that’s what it’s for, I think the authors have done a pretty good job of it.

Domain Names – Strategies and Legal Aspects, 2nd edition, by Jeanette Soderlund Sause and Malin Edmar, is published by Sweet & Maxwell.

Comment Tagged: book review, cybersquatting, Domain Names - Strategies and Legal Aspects, ICANN, udpr

Co-founder Nevett leaves Donuts

Donuts executive vice president of corporate affairs Jon Nevett has left the company, Donuts said yesterday.

He’s the last of the four co-founders of the new gTLD portfolio owner to step aside from their original roles over the last couple of years.

There’s no word on whether he’s got a new gig lined up, but given the recent acquisition of Donuts by Abry Partners, which gave the founders the opportunity to dispose of their shares, Nevett presumably will be in no rush.

Donuts said in a statement that Nevett, who led policy at the company, will continue to act as an advisor.

He follows Dan Schindler and Richard Tindal as co-founders who have since left the company.

Founding CEO Paul Stahura stepped into the executive chair role a couple of years ago to make way for Bruce Jaffe, who led the firm through its merger with Rightside and subsequent sale to Abry.

Jaffe himself will leave next month to allow former ICANN bigwig Akram Atallah into the hot seat. Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade is one of Abry’s lead overseers of Donuts.

Comment Tagged: donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs

The internet is still working after KSK roll

The first-ever change to the security keys at the top of the DNS tree appears to have been a non-event.

While ICANN received reports of some disruptions after last Thursday’s KSK rollover, the impact appears to have fallen short of the millions of users that had been speculated.

ICANN said yesterday:

After evaluation of the available data, there does not appear to be a significant number of Internet end-users who have been persistently and negatively impacted by the changing of the key.

The few issues that have arisen appear to have been quickly mitigated and none suggested a systemic failure that would approach the threshold (as defined by the ICANN community) to initiate a reversal of the roll. In that context, it appears the rollover to the new Key Signing Key, known as KSK 2017, has been a success.

The KSK, also sometimes called the “trust anchor”, is the ultimate cryptographic key in the chain that secures all DNSSEC queries on the internet.

October 11 was the first time it had been changed since the first version came online in 2010.

While changing the key was broadly considered sound security practice, the roll was delayed by a year after it was discovered that potentially millions of endpoints were using DNS resolvers not properly configured to use the 2017 key.

After much research, outreach and gnashing of teeth, it was decided that the risk posed by rolling the KSK now fell within acceptable parameters of collateral damage.

Experts from the likes of Google and Verisign, and one ICANN director, had urged caution and said perhaps the roll should be delayed further while more data was gathered.

But they were in the minority, ICANN went ahead anyway, and it seems their fears have not come to pass.

The KSK is now likely to be rolled regularly — it could be as little as once every five years, or more frequently.

It also gives ICANN the opportunity to eventually update the system to swap out its current RSA keys for keys based on elliptical curve cryptography, which could reduce the traffic load on the DNS as a whole.

1 Comment Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover

Donuts loses to ICANN in $135 million .web auction appeal

Donuts has lost a legal appeal against ICANN in its fight to prevent Verisign running the .web gTLD.

A California court ruled yesterday that a lower court was correct when it ruled almost two years ago that Donuts had signed away its right to sue ICANN, like all gTLD applicants.

The judges ruled that the lower District Court had “properly dismissed” Donuts’ complaint, and that the covenant not to sue in the Applicant Guidebook is not “unconscionable”.

Key in their thinking was the fact that ICANN has an Independent Review Process in place that Donuts could use to continue its fight against the .web outcome.

The lawsuit was filed by Donuts subsidiary Ruby Glen in July 2016, shortly before .web was due to go to an ICANN-managed last-resort auction.

Donuts and many others believed at the time that one applicant, Nu Dot Co, was being secretly bankrolled by a player with much deeper pockets, and it wanted the auction postponed and ICANN to reveal the identity of this backer.

Donuts lost its request for a restraining order.

The auction went ahead, and NDC won with a bid of $135 million, which subsequently was confirmed to have been covertly funded by Verisign.

Donuts then quickly amended its complaint to include claims of negligence, breach of contract and other violations, as it sought $22.5 million from ICANN.

That’s roughly how much it would have received as a losing bidder had the .web contention set been settled privately and NDC still submitted a $135 million bid.

As it stands, ICANN has the $135 million.

That complaint was also rejected, with the District Court disagreeing with earlier precedent in the .africa case and saying that the covenant not to sue is enforceable.

The Appeals Court has now agreed, so unless Donuts has other legal appeals open to it, the .web fight will be settled using ICANN mechanisms.

The ruling does not mean ICANN can go ahead and delegate .web to Verisign.

The .web contention set is currently “on-hold” because Afilias, the second-place bidder in the auction, has since June been in a so-called Cooperative Engagement Process with ICANN.

CEP is a semi-formal negotiation-phase precursor to a full-blown IRP filing, which now seems much more likely to go ahead following the court’s ruling.

The appeals court ruling has not yet been published by ICANN, but it can be viewed here (pdf).

The court heard arguments from Donuts and ICANN lawyers on October 9, the same day that DI revealed that ICANN Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah had been hired by Donuts as its new CEO.

A recording of the 32-minute hearing can be viewed on YouTube here or embedded below.

Comment Tagged: .web, auction, cep, donuts, ICANN, irp, last resort, lawsuit, ndc, new gTLDs, nu dot co, ruby glen, verisign