ARI expands its DNS business

ARI Registry Services officially announced its aggressive targeting of the DNS services market at an event in Toronto last week.
The company says it is the named DNS provider in over 450 new gTLD applications, giving it a substantial foot in the door should they be approved by ICANN.
That’s almost three times as many applications as ARI is involved with as registry provider.
“To our competitors, we are coming for you,” a tired and emotional ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis said during the launch event at a club in Toronto last Tuesday, which DI attended.
“Bring it on,” equally tired and emotional executives from larger competitors were heard to mutter in the audience.
ARI seems to be targeting just TLD operators to begin with, while competitors such as Verisign, Neustar and Afilias also offer managed DNS to enterprises.
ARI already runs the DNS for Australia’s .au.

ICANN unleashes the transparency firehose with MyICANN portal

Worried that it can be hard to find useful information on its web sites, ICANN has opened up a new portal, MyICANN.
Part firehose, part sprinkler, MyICANN.org aggregates all of ICANN’s news feeds, many of them apparently new, and enables users to filter them by the topics or languages they’re interested in.
The portal was announced by CEO Fadi Chehade during his inaugural address at the opening of ICANN 45 here in Toronto this morning.
At first, the site is designed to make all the information ICANN publishes on daily basis more accessible, but Chehade said that it will evolve into a “full process management system”, enabling two-way participation.
I’ve been playing with a MyICANN demo all weekend, and it’s already thrown up a few sources of information that even I was not aware of.
It’s quite slick; basically a fancy RSS reader, but I think it could use a few additions.
The volume of information is high enough that the ability to mark items as “read” would be handy. Also, while items are dated I think a more granular timestamp would be useful.

Donuts signs up to Architelos anti-abuse service

Architelos has a secured its first major customer win for the NameSentry anti-abuse service that it launched back in August.
Donuts, the highest-volume portfolio gTLD applicant, has signed up for the service, according to the companies.
For Donuts, which is probably the applicant that makes opponents of new gTLDs the most nervous, it’s another chance to show that it’s serious about operating clean zones.
For Architelos, it’s a pretty significant endorsement of its new technology.
The NameSentry service aggregates abuse data from multiple third-party malware, spam and phising lists and presents it in a way that makes it easier for registries shut down bad behavior.

Downtime emerges as key barrier to Trademark Clearinghouse changes

The risk of embarrassing technical glitches is now the major stumbling block in discussions about the best way to deploy the forthcoming Trademark Clearinghouse for new gTLDs.
ICANN is worried about the “reputational implications” of the TMCH going offline if, as proposed by domain name registries, it is in the “critical path” of the live registration process.
The concerns emerged in a letter earlier this week, and were discussed during an ICANN conference call yesterday.
The TMCH is expected to be a big database of trademarks, used to support the Trademark Claims and Sunrise periods that new gTLD registries will have to offer.
The policy behind both rights protection mechanisms is settled (essentially), but the actual technical implementation is still open to question.
While ICANN and its two contractors — IBM and Deloitte — have been quietly working on their favored model for some months, the registries that will support most new gTLDs have their own model.
Neustar, ARI Registry Services, Verisign and Demand Media have proposed a TMCH design that they say would be less costly to registries (and therefore brand owners) as well as having certain security benefits.
The problem with the registry’s plan is that it calls for real-time interactions between registrars, registries and the TMCH during the Trademark Claims phase of new gTLD launches.
This would require the Clearinghouse to operate with 100% up-time, which makes ICANN very nervous. It said in its letter this week:

Though requirements for resiliency to guard against such failures will be in place, the risk and impact of a failure incident in a centralized live query system are significant and have an impact on the reputation and, therefore, the effectiveness of the rights protection mechanisms supported by the Trademark Clearinghouse. Such an event could have reputational implications for the Clearinghouse and the New gTLD Program.

If the Clearinghouse went down, the argument goes, it would prevent domain names being registered in new gTLDs.
This would look very bad for ICANN, which has already experienced a few embarrassing technical problems with the program. How its policies and processes perform with live gTLDs will be scrutinized intensely.
But the registries say they’ve mitigated the problem as much as they can in their centralized model.
“It only puts the Trademark Clearinghouse in the critical path for registration for a limited number of registrations,” Neustar vice president Jeff Neuman said on yesterday’s call.
“In our model if a domain name does not match a trademark in the Clearinghouse then the Clearinghouse never sees it, it doesn’t matter if the Clearinghouse is up or down,” he said.
The negative impact of downtime in this scenario is that registrars would not be able to show would-be registrants Trademark Claims notices. But it would not necessarily enable cybersquatting.
Neuman further argued that the TMCH should be covered by the same kinds of service level agreements and data escrow requirements as contracted gTLD registries, minimizing the risk of downtime.
The second major hurdle to the implementation talks is the relative lack to date of input from brand owners.
The intellectual property community has previously expressed reservations about any TMCH model that would enable data mining by bad actors or opportunistic registrars and registries.
Yes, it’s a data privacy issue. Brand owners are worried that the contents of the Clearinghouse could be used by competitors to find holes in their trademark protection strategies, or by scammers.
While yesterday’s call had more input from the trademark community, the real work will come next Wednesday during a session at ICANN 45 in Toronto.

Dyn grabs $38 million in funding

Managed DNS service provider Dyn has secured a $38 million investment from venture capital firm North Bridge.
The minority investment is Dyn’s first. It’s been bootstrapped since its founding 11 years ago, according to founder and CEO Jeremy Hitchcock.
As part of the deal, noted tech investor Jason Calacanis has joined Dyn’s board, along with Hitchcock, company co-founder Tom Daly and two North Bridge partners, Ric Fulop and Russ Pyle.
“I am not building an exit strategy. I am creating an economic engine,” Hitchcock said in an open letter to customers.
“Plus, we had experienced 70 percent growth year over year. We were doing a pretty good job of growing by ourselves but we want to be a step ahead,” he said.

Melbourne IT holding new gTLD trademarks summit

Melbourne IT will hold a half-day conference on trademark protection in new gTLDs next month in Washington DC.
Google, Microsoft, Donuts, and the Association of National Advertisers are among those expected to take part in the discussion.
The meeting follows on from Melbourne IT’s recent anti-cybersquatting proposal, which calls for stronger protections for brands that are frequent targets of trademark infringement.
The panel includes many familiar faces from ICANN meetings. Applicant interests are represented, albeit by a minority of the panelists.
It will be moderated by Melbourne IT chief strategy officer (and ICANN vice-chair) Bruce Tonkin. Here’s the full line-up:

Andrew Abrams, Trademark Counsel, Google
James L. Bikoff, Partner, Silverberg, Goldman & Bikoff
Steve DelBianco, Executive Director, NetChoice and Vice Chair Policy Coordination, ICANN GNSO Commercial Business Users Constituency
Dan Jaffe, Group EVP Government Relations, Association of National Advertisers
Jon Nevett, Co-Founder, Donuts
Russell Pangborn, Associate General Counsel – Trademarks, Microsoft
Craig Schwartz, General Manager – Registry Programs, BITS/The Financial Services Roundtable
Brian J. Winterfeldt, Partner, Steptoe & Johnston and ICANN GNSO Counselor (Intellectual Property Constituency)

The event starts at 1.30pm local time at the Capital Hilton in DC on September 18. An RSVP is needed. There’s no official word on remote participation yet.

Refunds uncertain as .nxt says sorry for cancelation

It’s not yet clear whether people who paid for tickets for the .nxt conference will get full refunds.
In an apologetic email sent to attendees last night, organizer Kieren McCarthy said that .nxt is “trying to recoup” money already paid to the conference venue. The email states in part:

For a number of reasons – the most significant being the fact that the ICANN process is still in flux – we were not able to get the number of attendees or sponsors needed.
Having communicated with a large number of people that the conference was directly aimed at, the conclusion would appear to be: right idea, wrong time. The conference was designed as a meeting place for a new industry to meet and interact. It is now clear that that effort was premature.
Unfortunately that does not resolve the fact that you are currently out of pocket, whether through a conference ticket, hotel room or flight to London.
.Nxt is currently trying to recoup money we have paid to the hotel venue so we are in a position to reimburse at least some of those costs. We will keep in touch with any developments.

Fewer than 100 people were registered for the $950-a-ticket three-day event, .nxt said. The first two conferences, held in San Francisco last year, attracted closer to double that number.
The company plans to offer some of its planned sessions online instead, according to the email and a statement on the conference web site.
McCarthy is currently calling would-be attendees to explain the situation. Many have been understanding, according to the email.
Some attendees have told us they want full refunds for their tickets and hotel rooms, when the hotel was booked via .nxt. Recouping money spent on airfare is a different matter, of course.
The conference, which also left some attendees out of pocket when it was postponed in June, is unlikely to return.

Confirmed: .nxt conference canceled

The .nxt conference on new gTLDs has indeed been canceled, according to organizer Kieren McCarthy.
The show was expected to run next week, August 29-31, in London, following two successful events in San Francisco last year.
It was originally expected to run in June, but was postponed in May due to ICANN-related program delays.
I had planned to hold off posting the news until I had the full details, but I’ve received several emails this morning from people wondering what was going on so I thought I’d share what I know.
McCarthy is currently phoning attendees individually to explain the situation, so if you’re already a paid-up delegate I expect you’ll be getting a call soon. An announcement is expected later today.
ARI Registry Services tweeted this morning that .nxt is not offering refunds, but I cannot confirm that at this time.
More when we get it…

Bulgarian domain show returns for second year

Domain Forum, the Bulgarian conference on new gTLDs that ran in Sofia late last year, is to return.
While the agenda has yet to be confirmed, the dates have. The event will run November 15 and November 16 at the Grand Sofia Hotel.
The scope of the show seems to be a little broader than just new gTLDs this time around, with sessions on domain name technology such as DNSSEC and intellectual property also planned.
I’d hazard a guess that Bulgaria’s ongoing quest for its own Cyrillic IDN ccTLD will also take a prominent role in discussions.

Architelos launches new gTLD anti-abuse tool

Architelos, having consulted on about 50 new gTLD applications, has refocused on its longer-term software-based game plan with the recent launch of a new anti-abuse tool for registries.
NameSentry is a software-as-a-service offering, currently being trialed by an undisclosed number of potential customers, designed to make it easier to track abusive domains.
Architelos gave us a demo of the web site yesterday.
The service integrates real-time data feeds from up to nine third-party blocklists – such as SURBL and SpamHaus – into one interface, enabling users to see how many domains in their TLD are flagged as abusive.
Users can then drill down to see why each domain has been flagged – whether it’s spamming, phishing, hosting malware, etc – and, with built-in Whois, which registrar is responsible for it.
There’s also the ability to generate custom abuse reports on the fly and to automate the sending of takedown notices to registrars.
CEO Alexa Raad and CTO Michael Young said the service can help streamline the abuse management workflow at TLD registries.
Currently, Architelos is targeting mainly ccTLDs – there’s more of them – but before too long it expects start signing new gTLD registries as they start coming online.
With many new gTLD applicants promising cleaner-than-clean zones, and with governments leaning on their ccTLDs in some countries, there could be some demand for services such as this.
NameSentry is priced on a subscription basis, based on the size of the TLD zone.