ICANN plans return to Cancun in 2021

ICANN has named the locations of two of its 2021 public meetings.

Notably, it will return to Cancun, Mexico, in the March for ICANN 70, just one year after hosting ICANN 67 there.

In both years, the dates appear to coincide with some US universities’ “Spring Break” academic holiday, which sees many college students descend on Cancun to take advantage to excess of Mexico’s more liberal drinking laws.

In June 2021, ICANN will head to the Hague in the Netherlands, perhaps also known for its more liberal attitude to inebriants, for its mid-year policy meeting.

It’s already named Seattle, home to several domain companies, as its choice for the final meeting of 2021.

Under ICANN’s system of dividing up the world into regions for the purpose of meetings rotation, Mexico counts as Latin America rather than North America.

Comment Tagged: cancun, hague, ICANN, icann 67, icann 70, icann 71

These five TLDs contain 80% of all child abuse images

Online child abuse watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation has released its 2018 annual report, and it fingers the five TLDs that host four in five cases of child sexual abuse images and videos.

The TLDs in question are Verisign’s .com and .net, Neustar’s repurposed Colombian ccTLD .co, Russia’s .ru and Tonga’s .to.

IWF found the illegal content in 3,899 unique domains, up 3% from 2017’s 3,791 domains, in 151 different TLDs.

Despite the apparent concentration of illegal web pages in just five TLDs, it appears that this is largely due to the prevalence of image-hosting and file-sharing “cyberlocker” sites in these TLDs.

These are sites abused by the purveyors of this content, rather than being specifically dedicated to abuse.

It would be tricky for a registry to take action against such sites, as they have substantial non-abusive uses. It would be like taking down twitter.com whenever somebody tweets something illegal.

In terms of domains being registered specifically for the purpose of distributing child abuse material, the new gTLDs created since 2012 come off looking much worse.

IWF said that last year it found this material on 1,638 domains across 62 new gTLDs. That’s 42% of the total number of domains used to host such content, compared to new gTLDs’ single-figures overall market share.

The number of URLs (as opposed to domains) taken down in new gTLD web sites was up 17% to 5,847.

IWF has a service that alerts registries when child abuse material is found in their TLDs.

Its 2018 report can be found here (pdf).

2 Comments Tagged: child abuse material, iwf, new gTLDs

PIR says it has no plans to raise .org prices

Public Interest Registry claims it has no plans to raise its wholesale fee for .org domains, in the face of outrage from domainers and non-profits.

Under a proposed renegotiated contract with ICANN, price caps that have limited PIR to a 10% price increase every year would be removed.

But in a statement last week, the company said:

Rest assured, we will not raise prices unreasonably. In fact, we currently have no specific plans for any price increases for .ORG. We simply are moving to the standard registry agreement with all of its applicable provisions that already is in place for more than 1,200 other top-level domain extensions.

This does not necessarily translate to a commitment to not raise prices, of course. PIR may have “no specific plans” today, but it may tomorrow.

Over 3,300 people and organizations filed comments with ICANN about the proposed removal of the price caps, almost all of them negative.

Comments came initially from domain investors, but they were soon joined by many non-profit .org registrants and others.

Most claimed that it was unfair to allow unlimited price increases in legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs such as .org, which can be seen more as a public trust.

PIR went on to point out in its letter that it has not raised its prices — believed to be still under $10 a year — for the last three years.

But it might be worth noting that senior management has changed in that period. Brian Cute left the CEO job a year ago and, after an interim caretaker manager, was replaced by Donuts alumnus Jon Nevett in December.

.org’s registration numbers have been dipping. Over the last three years, it’s dropped from a peak of 11.3 million to 10.6 million at the end of 2018.

But it’s also renegotiated its back-end contract with Afilias over that period, meaning it’s now paying millions less on technical running costs than it once was.

PIR also reiterates that, like many of its customers, it is also a non-profit that is not motivated by investors and share prices.

More than half of its profits go to fund the Internet Society, itself a non-profit organization.

“We are different. We are mission based and not every decision is a financial one; we are not just driven by the bottom line,” its statement says.

PIR says that registrants are also protected by the measure in all ICANN gTLD contracts that allows registrants to lock in prices for up to 10 years in the event of a price increase, and by the fact that .org operates in a competitive market.

Reasonable people can and do disagree on whether these are effective protections in a case like .org.

4 Comments Tagged: .org, ica, ICANN, pir, price caps, prices, public interest registry

.CLUB to let brands block “trillions” of domains for $2,000

.CLUB Domains has launched a service for trademark owners that will enable them to block an essentially infinite number of potential cybersquats for a $2,000 payment every three years.

But the restrictions in place to avoid false positives mean that some of the world’s most recognizable brands would not be eligible to use it.

The service is called Trademark Sentry. In February, .CLUB asked ICANN for approval to launch it under the name Unlimited Name Blocking Service.

It’s cast by the registry roughly as a kind of clone of Donuts’ five-year-old Domain Protected Marks List, which enables brands to block their marks across Donuts’ entire portfolio of 242 gTLDs for far less than they would pay defensively registering 242 domains individually.

But while Donuts has a massive stable of TLDs, .CLUB is a one-horse town, so what’s going on?

Based on promotional materials .CLUB sent me, it appears that Trademark Sentry is primarily a way to reduce not defensive registration costs but rather UDRP costs.

Instead of blocking a single trademarked string across a broad portfolio of TLDs — for example google.ninja, google.bike, google.guru, google.charity… — the .CLUB service allows brands to block any domain that contains that string in a single TLD.

For example, Google could pay .CLUB $2,000, and for the next three years it would be impossible for anyone to register any .club domain that contained the substring “google”.

Any potential cybersquatter who went to a registrar and tried to register domains such as “mygooglesearch.club” or “googlefootball.club” or “bestgoogle.club” or “xreegtegooglefwrreed.club” would be told by the registrar that the domain was unavailable.

It would be blocked at the registry level, because it contained the blocked string “google”.

Customers will be able to add typos to the blocklist for a 50% discount.

To the best of my knowledge, this is not a service currently offered by any other gTLD registry.

It’s precisely the kind of thing that the IP lobby at ICANN was crying out for — albeit without the obligation to pay for it — prior to the 2012 application round.

.CLUB reckons it’s a money-saver for brand owners who find themselves filing lots of UDRP complaints.

UDRP complaints cost at least $1,500, just for the filing fees with outfits such as WIPO. They can cost many hundreds more in lawyers fees.

Basically, if you expect your brand will be hit by at least one UDRP in .club in the next three years, $2,000 might look like a decent investment.

.club domains have been subject to 279 UDRP complaints over the last five years, according to UDRPSearch.com.

But .CLUB has put in place a number of restrictions that are likely to seriously restrict its potential customer base.

First, the trademark will have to be “fanciful”. The registry says:

To qualify for Unlimited Name Blocking a trademark must be fanciful as defined by the USPTO and meet the .CLUB Registry’s additional requirements and subject to the .CLUB Registry’s discretion. Marks that are not fanciful but when combined with another word become sufficiently unique may be allowed.

“Apple” would not be permitted, but “AppleComputer” might be.

.CLUB told me that any trademark that, if blocked, would prevent non-infringing uses of the string would also not qualify for the service.

If you look at a UDRP-happy brand like Lego, which has already filed several complaints about alleged cybersquats in .club, it would certainly not qualify. Too many words end in “le” and begin with “go” for .CLUB to block every domain containing “lego”.

Similarly, Facebook would likely not qualify because one can imagine non-infringing uses such as facetofacebookmakers.club. Twitter is a dictionary word, as is Coke. Pepsi is a substring of dyspepsia. Amazon is primarily a geographic term. McDonald’s is derived from a common surname, as are Cartier and Heinz.

For at least half of the famous brands that pop into my head, I can think of a reason they will probably not be allowed to use this service.

.CLUB also won’t allow trademarks shorter than five characters.

Still, for those brands that do qualify, and do have an aggressive UDRP-based enforcement policy, the service seems to be priced at a point where an ROI case can be made.

Like Donuts’ DPML domains, anything blocked under Trademark Sentry is not going to show up in zone files, so we’re not going to have any objective data with which to monitor its success.

Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, cybersquatting, donuts, dpml, ICANN, trademark sentry, trademarks, udrp, unlimited name blocking service

Another five Amazon TLDs move to Nominet

Another five gTLDs owned by Amazon have made the back-end switch from Neustar to Nominet.

According to changes to IANA records this week, Nominet is now the registry services provider for .bot, .zappos, .imdb, .prime, and .aws.

This brings the number of Amazon TLDs to migrate from Neustar to Nominet recently to 40.

Amazon has 52 gTLDs in its portfolio. It moved 35 of them to Nominet a couple weeks ago.

Neustar told us at the time:

in an effort to diversify their back-end support, Amazon has chosen to move some, but not all, of their TLDs to another provider. Neustar will still manage multiple Amazon TLDs after the transition and we look forward to our continued partnership.

Moving .bot is notable as it is one of only six Amazon TLDs currently accepting registrations. It’s still many months away from general availability, but it has about 1,500 names in its zone. The other four movers are currently pre-launch.

It may or may not be significant that no non-Latin-script TLDs belonging to Amazon have made the transition.

According to IANA records, Neustar is still managing 12 Amazon strings, only three of which — .song, .coupon and .zero — are not internationalized domain names.

If those three TLDs were to also make the jump to Nominet over the coming weeks, I would not be in the least bit surprised.

Nominet does not currently handle IDN TLDs for any client.

Comment Tagged: .bot, amazon, neustar, new gTLDs, transition