My highlights from .nxt

The jetlag has finally worn off, and I’ve had a few days to cogitate, so I thought I’d share some of my personal highlights of the .nxt conference last week.
In no particular order, these are the things that put a smile on my face:
Kieren McCarthy’s opening speech. The analogy he drew between the introduction of new top-level domains and the building of San Francisco’s bridges was either divinely inspired or Satanically tortured. Either way, it worked. Nice bit of writing.
Meeting a genuine outsider. It’s rare I get to meet anybody at this type of meeting who’s not already familiar with ICANN and the domain market, but I did at .nxt. Dude gave me a fake name and said he’d showed up primarily to see if his competitors were there, ahead of a possible TLD bid. When I asked him what information would make his life easier, he said “help with the acronyms”. Figures.
The “Reality Check” session. I took six pages of notes, so I must have found it informative.
Juan Diego Calle’s keynote. He may not be the world’s greatest public speaker, but Calle’s speech, which talked the crowd through .co’s pretty smart marketing strategy, was good content.
John Berryhill’s panels. Everybody bangs on about how funny this guy is, but the .nxt panels he moderated really gave him a platform to exercise his wit. He’s good value, but I feel certain that if I ever let him represent me in court we’d both find ourselves banged up on contempt charges.
San Francisco. I lived there for eight years, and last week was my first time back there since 2007. Great to visit the old haunts. Beautiful weather, too, for this time of year.
Free candy. Great big bowls of the stuff were laid out after the closing session. Nice touch.
Me. Virtually everybody I met for the first time was already a DI reader, which was hugely gratifying. The notable exception was a certain ICANN staffer, who’d never heard of the site. That’s fair enough, I suppose – it’s not like I cover ICANN much.
Overall, I had a great few days at .nxt, and I look forward to the next one.

Gratuitous Go Daddy girl butt photo

Apologies to lady readers for the blatant sexism.
And apologies to discerning readers of both genders for shamelessly buying into Go Daddy’s propaganda machine.
But it is a very, very nice photograph.

Any guesses who the new Go Daddy girl will be?
She’s almost certainly Latina. Probably Colombian, given the .CO Internet tie-in Go Daddy’s planning for the Super Bowl.
Shakira’s probably too expensive.
Mike Berkens reckons Sofia Vergara is a likely candidate, but I’ve no idea who she is because I’m British.
I’ve managed to rule out Heather Mills McCartney and Queen Latifah.

The Top Ten Hottest Posts of 2010

Tumbleweeds are blowing through the domain name industry this week, which makes it an excellent time to take a look back at 2010, in the form of a list of this blog’s most widely read posts.
In descending order, here are the top ten DomainIncite stories of 2010:
ICANN had no role in seizing torrent domains
When ICANN stood accused by the blogosphere of helping the US government shut down dozens of .com domains in November, it took the organization a full week to officially deny it. In the meantime, it kicked off a Twitter campaign encouraging people to visit this post, making it the year’s most-read by some margin.
dotFree’s “free” domain names explained
Everyone wants something for nothing, so when I provided the first interview with the chief executive of the recently launched dotFree Group in August, it gathered a lot of attention. It turned out .free domains may not be as “free” as some had hoped.
WordPress.com becomes a domain name registrar
When I spotted that WordPress.com owner Automattic had received an ICANN registrar accreditation, company CEO Matt Mullenweg was good enough to link back to this post when he subsequently announced the move to his readers in October.
First reactions to ICANN’s VI bombshell
It was the biggest shake-up in the domain name industry in a decade – ICANN announced in November that it would start letting registrars and registries own each other. The full repercussions have yet to be felt, but this post summarized some of the early reactions.

ICANN will not attend White House drugs meeting
When and how governments and law enforcement should be able to block domain names is an ongoing hot topic for the industry. This September post broke the news that ICANN would not participate in US talks about blocking “fake pharmaceuticals” web sites.
Porn group starts anti-XXX campaign
The ongoing .xxx drama continues to be one of the key domain name industry stories that plays just as well with a mainstream readership. In addition, including the keywords “xxx”, “group” and “porn” in the same headline has proven disturbingly useful for acquiring search engine traffic.
Gaming scandal hits Russian domain launch
Internationalized domain names finally arrived on the internet in 2010, and the launch of Russia’s .РФ (.rf) IDN ccTLD was easily the biggest success story. It has racked up almost 700,000 registrations in the last two months, but was hit by allegations of registrar gaming, which I reported on here.
ICANN told to ban .bank or get sued
The road to the approval of ICANN’s new gTLD program was widely anticipated to have wrapped up by the end of the year. It didn’t, but that didn’t stop some eleventh-hour special pleading by organizations such as the Financial Services Roundtable.
Whistleblower alleged shenanigans at DirectNIC
DirectNIC has had its fair share of legal troubles in 2010. First it was sued for cybersquatting by Verizon (which it denied) and then, as I reported in this December post, a former employee alleged a complex scheme to make money through fraudulent domain arbitrage (which it denied, then settled).
Survey reveals demand for .brand TLDs
A World Trademark Review survey revealed mixed reactions from trademark lawyers and corporate marketing departments to new TLDs, but it did reveal that most companies would use their “.brand” TLD, if they had one, as their primary online address.
Let’s hope 2011 brings such a diverse range of interesting topics to write about. I’m certain it will.

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The ICANN Brussels schwag bag – full details

I’ve just landed at ICANN 38, in the really rather lovely setting of the Mont des Arts in Brussels.
Either I’m lost, or it’s a bit quiet at the moment, so I thought I’d get the most important news out of the way first – what’s in the schwag bag?
A heck of a lot more than the last ICANN meeting I attended, in Mar Del Plata, Argentina three five years ago.
Consider this a disclosure statement – I am now forever beholden to all of these companies, in no particular order:

• T-shirt (Hanes) from ICANN.
• T-shirt (Fruit of the Loom) from RegistryPro.
• Empty Belgian chocolate bag from Iron Mountain (visit the booth for the choccie, presumably).
• Fan with party invite printed on it from GMO (dotShop).
• Pen from .CO Internet.
• Keyring (foam) from dns.be.
• Pen from Nic.ru.
• Belgian chocolate box (full) from Centr.
• Keyring (metal) from PIR (slogan: “PracticeSafeDNS.org”)
• Badge/button (small) from .quebec.
• Badge/button (huge) from ICM Registry (slogan: “Yes to .XXX”)
• Bumper sticker from .quebec.
• Notebook from PIR (.org “Celebrating 25 years”)
• Playing cards (one-way backs) from Ausregistry.
• “Multi-purpose retractable lock” from SIDN.
• USB Flash drive (4GB) from Afnic.
• Notebook from .eu.
• A good-sized tree’s worth of flyers, booklets and sales pitches from the meeting’s sponsors – very strong contingent of new TLD players and consultancies.
• The bag itself is sponsored by Afilias.

I heard a rumor that ICM was giving away .xxx vuvuzelas, but if they were they appear to have already run out.

VeriSign announces bizarre ‘.com 25’ award winners

As part of its 25th anniversary of .com celebrations, VeriSign has today announced the 25 winners of its “.com 25” award.
The award was given to “the 25 people and/or companies whose inspiring contributions were fundamental in shaping the Internet and, thereby, our worlds”, VeriSign said.
The winners all seem to deserve the recognition, even if one of them, craigslist, is technically a .org.
But looking at the 75 nominees the judging panel had to choose from, I’m scratching my head on at least half a dozen of them.
What is Zappos? What does Pandora do? Why is Muhammad Yunus on the list? What on earth is TheKnot.com?
And where are Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris, who between them basically created the domain name system in the first place?
It’s a little disappointing that the only European with a gong appears to be web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. It’s even more disappointing that I can’t think of any other deserving Europeans.
The full list of winners can be found here.

Bigotgate woman gets cybersquatted

Gillian Duffy, an unknown Rochdale pensioner five hours ago, has become the latest victim of celebrity cybersquatting.
Duffy is the voter Gordon Brown described as “bigoted” after she buttonholed him during an election walkabout this morning.
Brown thought he was having a private conversation as his car sped away, unaware that his radio mic was still on. Oops.
As a result, he’s been forced to apologize publicly at least four times in the last four hours, by my count.
The news in the UK has talked about nothing else this afternoon, so it’s hardly surprising that the domain name gillianduffy.co.uk has just been registered.
It’s currently parked with 1&1.
I’ll be fascinated to see what the registrant plans to do with the domain once Mrs Duffy’s 15 minutes are up.

Apple secures iPad trademark

Apple has bought the “iPad” trademark, as it relates to handheld computers, from Fujitsu.
The deal removes any doubt, if there ever was any, that anybody registering domain names containing the string had better unload them quickly or get lawyered up.
According to PatentAuthority.com, the US trademark on iPad was transferred to Apple on March 17. Details of the deal were not disclosed.
Fujitsu filed for the trademark several years ago to cover its line of handheld retail devices.
You may recall that a music producer made headlines last week for attempting to sell the domain ipaddownloads.com and others for $1 million on eBay.

FourSquare.com expires, reporter seeks padding

Visitors to one of the web’s hottest geo apps had a bit of a surprise today when instead of FourSquare.com’s normal site they found a Go Daddy parking page.
It’s the usual problem — the company forgot to renew its registration.
That’s pretty much all there is to say about the story, unless you’re London daily newspaper Metro, which decided to pad the piece with a big chunk of lorem ispum:

It’s free for a reason.

Burberry files UDRP on Engrish squatter

Burberry, the once-respectable fashion house more commonly associated nowadays with British chavs, has filed a UDRP complaint against a webmaster with an hilarious grasp of English.
Two claims were made against burberryscarfshop.com and burberryscarfstore.com. One site appears to be aimed at Brits, the other Americans, although you’d never know it from the language.
The American site claims: “To provide the superior scarves and service is our common logos and incessant pursue.”
From the British site:

Burberryscarfshop.com of the opinion that no people should go without beautiful scarf.
It is very important and exciting for every people to choose the perfect scarf in the preparation of his happy day!

I wonder which way this decision is going to go…