World of Warcraft player ganks UDRP complainant

An aviation safety consulting firm has lost its UDRP case against a gamer who used its company name for his World of Warcraft guild.

Wyvern Consulting went after wyvern.com, which was registered by its current owner back in 2005.

The registrant said he’d originally registered the name for a possible business venture, which fell through, and then decided to use it for his WoW guild instead.

The National Arbitration Forum panelist found that while Wyvern proved the name was confusingly similar to its common law trademark, and that the registrant lacked legitimate interests in the domain, it had failed to prove bad faith.

Complainant does not have a registered trademark, and offers no proof of consumer confusion or loss of business. Respondent’s proof of its current use is minimal, but the burden is upon Complainant on this issue. Respondent’s use of the disputed domain name as a forum and e-mail service for its World of Warcraft guild does not establish that Respondent registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith

The domain in question currently appears to be unused, although archive.org shows a WoW guild page back in 2008.

4 Comments Tagged: naf, national arbitration forum, udrp, world of warcraft, wyvern.com

East Africans to seek regional TLD

The East African Community has reportedly started planning to apply to ICANN for its own top-level domain, .eac.

I must confess, I’d never heard of the EAC before. I’ve discovered it’s an intergovernmental organization comprising five African nations – Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda – that’s been around in its current incarnation for about 10 years.

It’s one of those rare organizations granted a .int domain, currently living at eac.int.

According to AfricaNews.com, internet experts from the five countries have met to discuss applying for .eac. Geoffrey Kayonga, director of the Sanvei Institute of Technology in Kigali, Rwanda, is quoted:

We are trying to see how best we can most probably create a taskforce that is going to ensure that we obtain the regional code called ‘.eac’

There’s already a movement to create a .africa TLD for the whole of the continent, which was recently given the nod by tech ministers within the African Union.

3 Comments Tagged: .eac, east african community, ICANN, new TLDs

Casino.com plotting top-level domain bid?

Is this the first gambling-related new top-level domain applicant?

Casino.com, in this frankly odd press release, seems to be dropping hints that it would be interested in applying for a new TLD when ICANN opens up the bids next year.

Discussing the controversy over the porn-only .xxx domain, the release goes on to say:

In spite of this, online casino sites are considering the idea of a unique domain as well, hoping that it will give them the same impact as governments and schools by using .gov and .edu.

It would of course be a huge shock if there were no gambling TLDs proposed in the first round.

I expect a .poker or .casino TLD could be quickly flipped for millions, given the potential value of their sunrise auctions. Casino.com itself was sold for $5.5 million, back in 2003.

Of course, actually applying to ICANN for .poker could be an expensive gambit. With multiple applicants, it’s one TLD that could easily head to auction.

Comment Tagged: .casino, .poker, casino.com, ICANN, new TLDs

Top-level domain count likely to top 300 this year

Perusing the big stack of marketing literature that I picked up at ICANN Brussels in June, I noticed that few companies agree about how many top-level domains currently exist.

Mildly surprising really, given that the official count isn’t especially difficult to come by. According to IANA’s database, there are 292 delegated TLDs today.

That number breaks down like this:

251 ASCII ccTLDs
9 IDN ccTLDs
4 gTLDs
3 “restricted” gTLDs
1 “infrastructure” TLD
13 “sponsored” gTLDs
11 test IDN TLDs

Interestingly, according to IANA, there are only four vanilla, open gTLDs – .com, .net, .org and .info.

I wonder how many sites NeuStar has shut down because .biz is “restricted” to business users? Or how many .mobi domains have been put on hold for breaking the “sponsored” guidelines.

The list does not yet count the six IDN ccTLDs that ICANN’s board approved August 5. So there are actually 298 approved top-level domains today.

In the IDN ccTLD pipeline as of Brussels were also Qatar, Singapore and Syria, which had met string approval but were not yet delegated, and about 15 others that had not.

There are two (or three) more voting meetings for ICANN’s board this year, and so it seems likely that the delegated TLD count will break through the 300 mark before 2011.

2 Comments Tagged: cctlds, iana, ICANN, idns, new TLDs

New TLD ownership rules punted to ICANN board

The ICANN board will be asked to untangle the policy mess that currently bans domain name registrars from applying for new top-level domains, after a GNSO working group failed to reach consensus.

The Vertical Integration WG was tasked with figuring out whether registrars should be allowed to own new TLD registries and vice versa, but only managed to reach deadlock.

The GNSO Council is now likely to punt the issue to the ICANN’s September 24-25 retreat, asking the board to consider the issues raised by the WG’s non-committal interim report.

It’s a dismaying case of pass-the-parcel that highlights both the trickiness of the VI problem and the limits of ICANN’s bottom-up policy-making process.

ICANN’s Draft Applicant Guidebook currently says that cross ownership between registrars and new TLD registries should be limited to 2% and that all new TLDs need to be offered to all accredited registrars.

This was in response to fears from some quarters that if a registrar also owned a new TLD registry, it would have an unfair advantage over other registrars, ultimately harming registrants.

The DAGv4 text was an overt, deliberately Draconian placeholder – it would ban all registrars and some registries, as well as making “.brand” TLDs unworkable – designed to force the GNSO find a better solution to the perceived problem.

The WG, which is ongoing, has so far failed to do so, and now seems set to pass the hot potato back from whence it came.

What all this means is that the ICANN board (and, let’s face it, staff) will be forced to assemble a workable VI policy for the first round of new TLD applications from the piecemeal suggestions of the WG; to do over two days or less what the WG failed to do over six months.

What the board will decide remains to be seen, but it could wind up governing the first round of new TLD applications, potentially making it a considerably smaller round.

9 Comments Tagged: ICANN, vertical integration