Cash-for-gold site seizes “sucks” domain

An Arizona cash-for-gold company has successful recovered a “sucks” domain name via UDRP, after it emerged that the anonymous gripe site was actually run by a competitor.
Valley Goldmine filed the UDRP complaint against the domain valleygoldminesucks.com back in August. As I reported, the contested domain contained a mere two blog posts, both dating to May 2009.
Up until about a month ago, the registrant’s identity was protected by Go Daddy’s privacy service.
But Valley Goldmine used a subpoena to identify the actual registrant, and it turned out to be the operator of Gold Stash For Cash, a direct competitor, which does business at goldstash.com.
The site was created after a local TV news report had ranked Valley Goldmine higher than GSFC in an “investigation” into cash-for-gold companies. The blog posts, ironically, attacked the report’s objectivity.
Despite precedent largely protecting “sucks” domains on free speech grounds, this was enough for WIPO panelist Maxim Waldbaum to find against the registrant on all three requirements of the UDRP.
Interestingly, Waldbaum used the fact that the domain satisfied the “bad faith” part of the UDRP to justify the “confusingly similar” criterion.

The associated website has high placement on search engine results for the Mark and is operated by the principal of a direct competitor of Complainant. Respondent’s use of the Disputed Domain Name in this context is precisely within the list of bad faith criteria under paragraph 4(b) of the Policy, which, in this Panel’s view, clearly indicates Respondent’s intent to create confusing similarity in the minds of Internet users.

The fact that GSFC stood to benefit financially from anonymously bad-mouthing its competitor clearly over-rode any free speech concerns, which does not seem unreasonable.
The panelist concluded:

Although cloaked in the mantle of a gripe site, Respondent’s website is quite clearly a platform for Respondent to cast aspersions on the reliability of a report that portrayed his company in a negative light and his competitor in a positive light, and to otherwise sling mud.

Amusingly, while GSFC appears to own goldstashforcashsucks.com, a third party owns goldstashsucks.com.

IPv4 depletion “imminent”

The pool of IPv4 address space available to regional internet registries will likely expire in “early 2011”, according to the Number Resource Organization.
ICANN/IANA said today that it has allocated two more /8 blocks of IPv4, approximately 33.5 million addresses, to APNIC, the Asia-Pacific RIR.
This means there are only 12 /8 blocks left, about 5% of the total allowable addresses under IPv4.
Under IANA’s rules, the final five /8s will all be allocated at the same time, one to each of the five RIRs. So there are only seven left to be handed out under the normal process.
The NRO followed up ICANN’s blog post with a press release stressing the importance of adopting IPv6. From the release (my emphasis):

“This is a major milestone in the life of the Internet, and means that allocation of the last blocks of IPv4 to the RIRs is imminent,” states Axel Pawlik, Chairman of the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five RIRs. “It is critical that all Internet stakeholders take definitive action now to ensure the timely adoption of IPv6.”
…
According to current depletion rates, the last five IPv4 address blocks will be allocated to the RIRs in early 2011. The pressure to adopt IPv6 is mounting. Many worry that without adequate preparation and action, there will be a chaotic scramble for IPv6, which could increase Internet costs and threaten the stability and security of the global network.

There’s a danger that things could start getting messy over the next couple of years, as the RIRs themselves start running out of IPv4 and network managers worldwide start discovering their IPv6 capabilities are not up to scratch.

“Beware of Hookers”, ICANN attendees told

ICANN has published a security guide for delegates planning to attend its meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, this December, which makes quite entertaining reading.
A highlight of the report (pdf), prepared by outside consultants Control Risks, warns attendees to steer clear of bar prostitutes who plan to take advantage of them.

All travelers should avoid bars which have public touts (or “spruikers”) standing outside encouraging them to enter. Many of these bars attract high levels of local prostitutes, some who intend to rob tourists by drugging them in the bar or in their hotel rooms.

Sage advice.
The report also recommends staying off the streets after 11pm, using official taxis, keeping your wallets clean of identifying information, and not resisting muggers/abductors.

Fight for your life, but not your possessions.

I’m cherry-picking the scary stuff here, obviously. In general, the report says Cartagena is fairly safe. Last year, there were only two kidnappings in the city.

Cartagena enjoys a mostly deserved reputation as one of the safe destinations for foreign travelers in Colombia. Certainly, violent crime rarely affects foreign visitors to the city.

ICANN has said that it will commission such reports when there is a concern that security at its chosen meeting locations may not be up to scratch.
I believe the new meetings security plan was introduced in response to the vague terrorism threats that clouded the Nairobi meeting earlier this year, keeping many flighty Americans at home.

Trademark holders think new TLD policies inadequate

Less than one in ten trademark holders believes ICANN’s policies go far enough to protect their rights under new top-level domains, according to a recent survey.
World Trademark Review is reporting that 71.6% of its survey respondents believe that the current Draft Applicant Guidebook goes not far enough to “prevent trademark infringement”.
Only 9.5% said they believe the DAG does contain adequate provisions.
The full survey will be published later this month, but today a few more results can be found over at the WTR blog.
The survey was conducted prior to ICANN’s recent Trondheim resolutions, which contained a few amendments to strengthen policies such as Uniform Rapid Suspension.

US and Russia face off over ICANN veto power

The ruling body of the International Telecommunications Union this week kicked off a major policy-making meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, and has already seen the US and Russia taking opposing stances over the future control of ICANN.
A group of former Soviet nations, chaired by the Russian Federation’s Minister of Communications, seems to have proposed that the ITU should give itself veto power over ICANN decisions.
A proposal filed by the Regional Commonwealth in the field of Communications (RCC) calls for the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee to be scrapped and replaced by an ITU group.

Consideration should be given to the expediency of having the functions of GAC carried out by a specially-constituted group within ITU with the authority to veto decisions adopted by the ICANN Board of Directors. If it is so decided, the ITU Secretary-General should be instructed to consult ICANN on the matter.

The proposal was first noted by Gregory Francis at CircleID.
It says that the GAC is currently the only avenue open to governments to “defend their interests” but that it has “no decision-making authority and can do no more than express its wishes”.
It also notes that fewer than 50% of nations are members of the GAC, and that only 20% or fewer actually participate in GAC meetings.
The proposal was apparently submitted to the ongoing ITU Plenipotentiary Conference but, in contrast to ICANN’s policy of transparency, many ITU documents are only accessible to its members.
A reader was kind enough to send me text extracted from the document. I’ve been unable to verify its authenticity, but I’ve no particular reason to believe it’s bogus.
The RCC was set up in 1991 to increase cooperation between telecommunications and postal operators in the post-Soviet era. Its board is comprised of communications ministers from a dozen nations.
Its position on ICANN appears to be also held by the Russian government. Igor Shchegolev, its communications minister, is chair of the RCC board.
At the Plenipotentiary on Tuesday, Shechegolev said (via Google Translate):

We believe that the ITU is capable of such tasks to international public policy, Internet governance, its development and finally, protection of interests of countries in ICANN.

the ITU should be a place where the development of the Internet is fostered. The Internet has progressed and evolved in a remarkably successful way under the existing multi-stakeholder arrangements. Changes, especially changes involving inter-governmental controls, are likely to impair the dynamism of the Internet—something we all have an interest in avoiding.

ICANN itself has no formal presence at the Plenipotentiary, after ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Toure turned down a request by ICANN president Rod Beckstrom for observer status.
The conference carries on until October 22. It’s likely that we haven’t heard the last of the anti-ICANN rhetoric.

FDA to get domain name takedown role?

The US Food and Drug Administration may in future take a stronger role in having domain names associated with rogue internet pharmacies shut down.
Following the meeting between domain name registrars and registries and the Obama administration at the White House last week, I reached out to a few attendees to find out what was discussed.
I didn’t have much luck, to be honest. Some said the meeting was quite dull. But Christine Jones, Go Daddy’s general counsel, was good enough to answer a few questions via email.
The meeting was scheduled to discuss voluntary measures domain firms can take to shut down web sites selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals. I asked whether any specific solutions were discussed.
Jones replied: “Not specifically. There could be an FDA-led solution at some point, which Go Daddy supports.”
The FDA has taken action against illegal online pharmacies in the past, but it does not currently appear to do so on a day-to-day basis.
In November 2009, the agency sent warning letters to the operators of 136 web sites that appeared to be selling medicines illegally. The letters were also sent to the registrars of record for the sites’ domains, most of which were taken down.
The FDA said at the time that the intention was to alert the registrars that the registrants in question may have been in violation of their terms of service and eligible for termination.
In general, the FDA says that overseas pharmacies selling prescription drugs into the US, whether counterfeit or not, is illegal. What this would mean for any “FDA-led solution” is a matter for speculation.
It’s well-known that sick people in the US tend to pay more for their prescription drugs than in other nations, due in part to years of protectionist policies designed to keep the pharma business healthy.
While there are plenty of crooks selling potentially dangerous bogus pills online, some say there are also many legitimate Canadian pharmacies online that supply authentic products more cheaply to US-based prescription holders.
Currently, many US registrars use services such as LegitScript to identify potentially infringing sites. Demand Media’s registrar, eNom, is the most recent convert.
LegitScript, which also only approves US pharmacies, is subject to a certain degree of controversy.
Last week it threatened to sue a web site that made a number of allegations about its financing and the motivations of founder John Horton.
Horton founded LegitScript in 2007, shortly after leaving his Bush administration role as associate deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
LegitScript’s main competitor, PharmacyChecker.com, recently asked the US Congress to investigate Horton for alleged ethics violations, claiming he set up LegitScript while still in government.
In April 2007, the ONDCP issued a report which harshly criticized PharmacyChecker for approving Canadian pharmacies that sell drugs to US citizens over the internet, which it said was illegal.
The domain name legitscript.com was initially registered on March 20, 2007. The earliest Whois record I can find, from July that year, shows Horton was the registrant.
Horton’s LinkedIn profile says he left the administration in May 2007.
It seems likely that even if LegitScript did not exist until Horton was out of government, he was preparing its foundations months earlier, at the same time as his office was trashing his future competitor.
Finally, to return to last week’s White House meeting, I asked Go Daddy’s Jones whether the focus was on healthcare or IP protection, and she had this to say:

The focus of this particular meeting was definitely not IP protection. Although IPEC [Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator] organized the meeting, there were administration officials and law enforcement attending from many areas of the government. The focus was on finding ways to deal with the rogue pharmacy issue, to get non-compliant registrars to join the fight, and to beef up AUPs to cover registrars in these cases.

She also said that the topic of COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, was not raised.
As I’ve previously reported, ICANN did not attend the White House meeting.

Arab League asks ICANN for recognition

The League of Arab States has called on ICANN to formally recognize the Arab region.
UPDATED: Read this correction.

Delhi Commonwealth Games wins UDRP

With five days to go before the Commonwealth Games kicks off in Delhi, the organizers may be under fire for expecting athletes to live like squatters, but they have managed to beat off one cybersquatter.
(Do you see what I did there?)
The Organising Committee of the games has been handed delhi-commonwealth-games.com in a UDRP proceeding against an anonymous registrant handled by WIPO
It looks like a fairly straightforward case. The web site, which has content, appears on the first page of Google for [delhi commonwealth games]. The WIPO panelist said its use of commercial links showed bad faith.
The official domain of the games is the rather less SEO-friendly cwgdelhi2010.org.
Interestingly, the Committee became aware of the domain in April 2009 and its first move was to ask the registrar, Directi, to block it, which it refused. It was well over a year later when the UDRP claim was filed.
Delhi was awarded the Commonwealth Games in 2003. The domain was registered in 2006.
The city has recently come under fire for its apparent lack of preparation, offering arriving athletes accommodation well below par from a health and safety perspective.

ICANN will not attend White House drugs meeting

ICANN has declined an invitation from the Obama administration to attend a meeting tomorrow to discuss ways to crack down on counterfeit drugs web sites.
The meeting, first reported by Brian Krebs, was called with an August 13 invitation to “registries, registrars and ICANN” to meet at the White House to talk about “voluntary protocols to address the illegal sale of counterfeit non-controlled prescription medications on-line.”
The meeting is reportedly part of the administration’s Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft, which was announced in June.
It also follows a series of reports from security firms that called into question domain name registrars’ willingness to block domains that are used to sell fake pharma.
ICANN tells me that, following talks with White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, it was agreed that it would “not be appropriate” for ICANN to attend.
The decision was based on the fact that ICANN’s job is to make policy covering internet names and addresses, and not to regulate the content of web sites.
ICANN’s vice president of government affairs for the Americas, Jamie Hedlund, said the meeting was “outside the scope of our role as the technical coordinator of the Internet’s unique identifiers.”
I suspect it also would not have looked great on the global stage if ICANN appeared to be taking its policy cues directly from the US government rather than through its Governmental Advisory Committee.
Demand Media-owned registrar eNom, which has took the brunt of the recent criticism of registrars, recently signed up to a service that will help it more easily identify and terminate domains used to sell counterfeit medicines.

New TLD guidebook could be finalized in Cartagena

I’ve got the official line from ICANN — it’s possible that the final Applicant Guidebook for new top-level domain applications could be approved as early as December.
I reported late last night that, following its weekend board retreat, the final version of ICANN’s new TLD rulebook would be published before its public meeting in Cartagena, Colombia.
This morning, based on some reader comments and a closer reading of the board’s latest resolutions, I concluded that there was a pretty good chance I was wrong, so I asked ICANN for clarification.
I essentially asked whether we were looking at another six months of pondering Draft Applicant Guidebook version 5, or whether the next iteration would be the final one.
This is the official ICANN spokesperson line:

The next guidebook to be posted for public comment will be called the “next version” of the applicant guidebook – depending on public comment, the Board will decide whether to approve it as final (with changes) or request another iteration.
…
As stated above, the Board could consider approving the next version of the Guidebook as early as the Cartagena meeting or set a timeline for approval sometime thereafter.

So, there’s the answer: it depends.
Frankly, given the number and gravity of the unresolved issues on the table, I think Cartagena may be optimistic. But it’s not impossible.
(Cheers to @mneylon and @dot_scot for the constructive criticism.)