Corsica seeks new gTLD registry operator

The local government of the French island of Corsica is looking for contractors to apply for and manage a .corsica top-level domain.
The Executive Council of the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse issued an RFP in late September. The deadline for responses is October 17, a week from now.
The desired string appears to be the Anglicized .corsica, rather than the French .corse.
Corsica, situated in the Mediterranean, is one of France’s 22 official regions. According to Wikipedia, it has slightly more political power than its mainland counterparts.
Under ICANN’s new gTLD application rules, geographical strings need the approval of the relevant local government before they can be accepted.
I expect any .corsica application would need a letter of support or non-objection from the French national government as well as the Corsican executive, before it is approved.
(via Jean Guillon)

Comment Tagged: Corsica, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, rfp

ICANN hunts for anti-cybersquatting database provider

ICANN is in the process of looking for an operator for the Trademark Clearinghouse that will play a crucial brand protection role in new top-level domains.
An RFI published last week says that ICANN is looking for an exclusive contractor, but that it may consider splitting the deal between two companies — one to provide trademark validation services and the other to manage the database.
The TMCH is basically a big database of validated trademarks that registrars/registries will have to integrate with. It will be an integral part of any new gTLD launch.
Registries are obliged by ICANN rules to hold a sunrise period and a Trademark Claims service when they go live, both of which leverage the clearinghouse’s services.
Rather than having to submit proof of trademark rights to each gTLD operator, brand owners will only have to be validated by the TMCH in order to be pre-validated by all gTLDs.
I estimate that the contract is worth a few million dollars a year, minimum.
If the ongoing .xxx sunrise period is any guide, we might be looking at a database of some 30,000 to 40,000 trademark registrations in the first year of the TMCH.
One potential TMCH provider currently charges $100 for the initial first-year validation and a recurring $70 for re-validation in subsequent years.
ICANN has not ruled out the successful TMCH provider selling add-on services too.
But the organization also seems to be at pains to ensure that the clearinghouse is not seen as another gouge on the trademark industry.
The RFI contains questions such as: “How can it be assured that you will not maximize your registrations at the expense of security, quality, and technical and operational excellence?”
The two providers that immediately spring to mind as RFI respondents are IProta and the Clearinghouse for Intellectual Property (CHIP).
Belgium-based CHIP arguably has the most institutional experience. It’s handled sunrise periods for Somalia’s .so, the .asia IDN sunrise, a few pseudo-gTLD initiatives from the likes of CentralNIC (de.com, us.org, etc), and is signed up to do the same for .sx.
Its chief architect, Bart Lieben of the law firm Crowell & Moring, is also well-known in the industry for his work on several sunrise period policies.
IProta is a newer company, founded in London this year by Jonathan Robinson, an industry veteran best known for co-founding corporate domain registrar Group NBT.
The company is currently managing the .xxx sunrise period, which is believed to be the highest-volume launch since .eu in late 2005.
“IPRota is very well positioned on the basis of our recent and past experience so I think we almost certainly will go ahead and respond,” Robinson confirmed to DI.
Domain name registries and registrars could conceivably also apply, based on their experience handling high-volume transactional databases and their familiarity with the EPP protocol.
ICANN sees the potential for conflicts of interest — its RFI anticipates that any already-contracted party applying to run the TMCH will have to impose a Chinese wall to reduce that risk.
The RFI is open for responses until November 25. ICANN intends to name its selected provider February 14, a month after it starts accepting new gTLD applications.
This is another reason, in my view, why submitting an application in January may not be the smartest move in the world.

1 Comment Tagged: chip, ICANN, iprota, new gTLDs, new TLDs, tmch, trademark clearinghouse

IFFOR hires McCarthy to handle .xxx outreach

Kieren McCarthy, CEO of the .nxt new top-level domains conference, has reportedly joined the International Foundation For Online Responsibility to manage policy communications.
IFFOR is the sponsoring organization for ICM Registry’s new gTLD, responsible for setting the policies that will govern .xxx domain names.
ICM’s opponents in the Free Speech Coalition fear IFFOR, claiming it will be both toothless in the light of ICM’s “veto power” over policies (which ICM disputes) and dangerous to .xxx domain holders.
As well as outreach, McCarthy will be tasked with “developing the tools through which Internet community members and IFFOR Policy Council members can reach consensus positions”, according to Xbiz.
He has the right background. He’s the former general manager for public participation at ICANN, and lately one of its fiercest critics. More recently, he’s also done some consulting work for ICM.
Hopefully one of his first actions at IFFOR will be to add DI to the press release mailing list, so I don’t have to source Xbiz the next time the organization has news to report.

2 Comments Tagged: .nxt, free speech coalition, icm registry, iffor, international foundation for online responsibility, xxx

Pirates set up domain seizure workaround

Movie and music pirates are setting up alternative DNS services to help users work around the government seizure of domain names.
A new service, BlockAid.me, launched an open beta at the end of September. It’s currently being promoted prominently on at least one major movie/music/games-sharing site.
The site encourages internet users to reconfigure their computers to use BlockAid’s DNS servers. That way, if a domain name used by a piracy web site is seized by law enforcement, BlockAid will be able to direct surfers to the original owner’s IP address more or less transparently.
This is exactly what the experts predicted would happen.
Ever since the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency started seizing domain names associated with pirated content and US politicians have been discussing legislation to streamline the process, workarounds have been expected.
In May, DNS experts including Paul Vixie, Dan Kaminsky and now-ICANN chair Steve Crocker said that the Protect-IP Act in the US would persuade many users to switch to offshore DNS servers.
They warned that this would lead to a rise in cybercrime against consumers, as disreputable or insecure DNS providers send surfers to spoofs of banks and other sensitive sites.
While there’s no reason to believe the BlockAid project has this kind of nefarious activity in mind, if the idea catches on it’s probably inevitable that a similar service operated by crooks will emerge eventually.
Amusingly, BlockAid’s web site says that it may financially support itself in future by showing ad-laden web pages instead of returning NXDOMAIN errors, a much-criticized money-making tactic many ISPs already use.
Note also that the .me registry is managed by Afilias, a heavily US-based company, which likely makes BlockAid.me just as vulnerable to seizure as any .com address.

10 Comments Tagged: blockaid.me, piracy, protect ip, proxies

Domain Registry of America still slamming, still scamming

Domain name slamming is alive and well in the ICANN-accredited registrar community.
I’ve just received a letter in the mail offering me the chance to transfer and renew domainincite.com for the knock-down price of £25 ($38) a year.
It’s Domain Registry of America again, still slamming almost a decade after it was first sued for the completely unethical practice of conning people into transferring their domain names.
The letter looks like a renewal notice. Besides ostensibly coming from “Domain Renewal Group”, it also contains the prominent text “Domain Name Renewal Service”.
Domain Renewal Group and Domain Registry of America are one and the same – fronts for the ICANN-accredited registrar Brandon Gray Internet Services Inc, dba NameJuice.com.
The letter, as you can see from the scan, is a little less bogus than the ones DROA started sending out back in 2001. The text states now much more clearly that “this is not a bill”.
But domain slamming has always relied upon people not reading the letter properly and/or not understanding the intricacies of domain transfers, and this is no different.
DROA’s business depends upon its letters finding their way into the hands of gullible individual registrants or accounting departments that will blindly pay official-looking notices.
At the prices the company charges – pretty much the most expensive in the industry – very few people will have transferred their domains because they thought they were getting a good deal.
There have been numerous complaints and lawsuits against DROA over the last decade.
In November 2009, the UK Advertising Standards Agency found DROA in breach of truthfulness and honesty guidelines for a substantially similar mailshot and ruled:

The mailing must not appear again in its current form.

And last year, the .ca registry CIRA terminated Domain Registry of Canada, another Brandon Gray front, for slamming .ca registrants using the same methods.
So isn’t it about time ICANN shut these muppets down too?
Unfortunately, ICANN can only use contracts to enforce compliance, and I’m not sure there are any sticks in the 2001 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that it can use to beat them.
DROA has plainly breached Go Daddy’s Whois access policy by slamming me (the letter was sent to my Whois billing address, not my actual residence), but I don’t think there’s much Go Daddy can do about that short of suing.
As far as I can tell, Brandon Gray, which has about 130,000 domains under management, got its ICANN accreditation in about 2003. It was previously an eNom reseller.
So its accreditation is probably going to be up for renewal within the next couple of years.
Fortunately, ICANN has just this week introduced stricter new accreditation application rules that are specifically designed to weed out the scumbags.
Any company or individual with a track record of dishonesty is no longer welcome at ICANN.
So if there’s nothing that can be done before then, at the very least when Brandon Gray’s accreditation expires ICANN should not renew it.
What’s more, other registrars should lean on ICANN to make sure Brandon Gray is shown the door. It’s been bringing their industry into disrepute for the best part of a decade and it’s time for it to stop.

19 Comments Tagged: brandon gray internet services, domain registry of america, domain registry of canada, domain renewals group, go daddy, ICANN, slamming

ICANN to hire conflict of interest experts

ICANN is to bring in ethics experts to advise it on its conflicts of interest policy, addressing the ongoing controversy over its former chairman’s move to the domain industry.
The organization plans to “engage an external firm with expertise in advising on ethical issues”, according to the minutes of a September 15 meeting of its Board Governance Committee.
The consultants will be tasked with helping to “develop an ICANN Ethics Regime or set of Guidelines for the Board, the staff and the community.”
ICANN has been faced recently with calls to impose post-employment restrictions on board members and staff, in order to prevent a “revolving door” between it and the industry it essentially regulates.
This follows former chairman Peter Dengate Thrush’s move to new gTLD applicant Minds + Machines just a few weeks after voting to approve the new gTLD program.
Senator Ron Wyden and the Association of National Advertisers are among those making the call, and the US Department of Commerce, which oversees ICANN, appears to have heard it.
But as I reported earlier in the week, it may actually be illegal for ICANN, as a California corporation, to contractually ban employees from joining domain name companies after they quit.
However, the BGC has other ideas about how to strengthen ethics without imposing these potentially problematic employment restrictions.
It’s now talking about a ethics policy with “disclosure and abstention requirements” for directors “surrounding future interests or potential future interests”.
While the policy has yet to be written, one can imagine a scenario in which an ICANN director would be prevented from voting on a policy that would be likely to enrich them in a future job.
Cherine Chalaby, Bill Graham and Ray Plzak are the BGC members who will be leading the board discussions, which are expected to continue in Dakar later this month.
The ethics issue was first raised publicly by ICANN president Rod Beckstrom during his opening address at the Singapore meeting in June — before the new gTLD vote and before Dengate Thrush’s departure.

1 Comment Tagged: ana, conflict of interest, dakar, ethics, ICANN, m+m, Minds + Machines

Two new TLDs to be approved next week

ICANN is set to approve two new country-code top-level domains next week – .cw and .sx – for the year-old nations of Curacao and Sint Maarten.
The two countries were created when the Netherlands Antilles split last October.
The ICANN board of directors plans to rubber-stamp the delegations of both ccTLDs next Tuesday, according to the consent agenda for its meeting.
It also plans to vote on the “transition” arrangements for the Netherlands Antilles’ .an, which is now a ccTLD without a country.
The .an space won’t be the first TLD to be deprecated. Yugoslavia’s .yu disappeared in March last year, for example, a few years after Serbia and Montenegro acquired their own ccTLDs.
The recipient of .sx is expected to be SX Registry, a joint venture of Luxembourg registry startup OpenRegistry and Canadian registrar MediaFusion.
OpenRegistry CEO Jean-Christophe Vignes said that if ICANN votes for the delegation the company will start talks with potential registrar partners at the ICANN Dakar meeting later this month.
MediaFusion and Vignes’ alma mater EuroDNS have already been approved to act as .sx registrars.
The company plans to use CHIP, the ClearingHouse for Intellectual Property, for its sunrise period.
Anyone with a .an registration predating December 2010 will be able to request the equivalent .sx name under a grandfathering program the company plans to launch.
It will be the first TLD that OpenRegistry has provided the back-end infrastructure for.

5 Comments Tagged: .an, .cw, .sx, cctlds, chip, iana, ICANN, mediafusion, openregistry, sx registry

BITS may apply for six financial gTLDs

BITS, the technology policy wing of the Financial Services Roundtable, may apply to ICANN for as many as six financially-focused new top-level domains.
The organization is pondering bids for .bank, .banking, .insure, .insurance, .invest and .investment, according to Craig Schwartz, who’s heading the project as general manager for registry programs.
(UPDATE: To clarify, these are the six strings BITS is considering. It does not expect to apply for all six. Three is a more likely number.)
Schwartz, until recently ICANN’s chief gTLD registry liaison, told DI that the application(s) will be filed by a yet-to-be-formed LLC, which will have the FSR and the American Bankers Association as its founding members.
It will be a community-designated bid, which means the company may be able to avoid an ICANN auction in the event that its chosen gTLD strings are contested by other applicants.
“We’ve looked at the scoring, and while it may not come into play at all we do believe we can meet the requisite score [for a successful Community Priority Evaluation],” Schwartz said. “But we’re certainly mindful of what’s happening in the space, there’s always the possibility of contention.”
There’s no relationship between BITS and CORE, the Council of European Registrars, which is apparently looking into applying for its own set of financially-oriented gTLDs, Schwartz said.
It’s not a big-money commercial play, but the new venture would be structured as a for-profit entity, he said.
“It’s relatively analogous to what’s happened in the .coop space, where after 10 years they have only about 7,000 registrations,” Schwartz said.
It sounds like pricing might be in the $100+ range. Smaller financial institutions lacking the resources to apply for their own .brand gTLDs would be a likely target customer base.
Interestingly, .bank may begin life as a business-to-business play, used primarily for secure inter-bank transactions, before it becomes a consumer-facing proposition, Schwartz said.
He added that it would likely partner with a small number of ICANN-accredited registrars – those that are able to meet its security requirements – to get the domains into the hands of banks.
VeriSign has already signed up to provide the secure back-end registry services for the bid.

3 Comments Tagged: .bank, .insure, .invest, aba, american bankers association, bits, financial services roundtable, fsr, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, phishing

AusRegistry drops the “Aus”, sets up in US

AusRegistry International has rebranded itself as ARI Registry Services and will now offer new gTLD clients the option to host their domains in either Australia or the US.
The company has built itself a registry back-end in an undisclosed location on US soil to support the move.
Dropping the “Aus” appears to be specifically designed to address the perception that locating a gTLD in Australia is somehow technologically or politically risky, which ARI says isn’t the case.
ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis explained the decision in a press release:

We are the first to admit that the ‘Aus’ reference in our previous name incorrectly positioned us as a smaller, geographically focused organisation, which did create some issues with our plans for global expansion. Despite the fact we have an office and staff in the United States and clients situated in four of the seven continents around the world, there remained some belief that our services were somewhat isolated in Australia.

Potential gTLD applicants are concerned about issues such as “overzealous governments, privacy and ownership laws, political environments and financial benefits including currency fluctuations” that can vary according to the jurisdiction a registry is hosted in, ARI said.
A choice between the US and Australia may seem like a choice between one “overzealous government” and another, but it may at least put some insular American companies’ minds at rest.
While the move makes perfect business sense for ARI, I can’t help but feel that ICANN’s goal of increasing geographic diversity in the registry industry seems a little diminished this morning.
The rebranding does not affect the company’s parent, AusRegistry Group, which provides the back-end for Australia’s .au ccTLD.
ARI’s new domain is ariservices.com.

1 Comment Tagged: ari registry services, ausregistry, ausregistry international, ICANN, new gltds, new TLDs

Full UDRP reform unlikely until 2017

The often-criticized Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy is unlikely to see fundamental changes for at least five years, following an ICANN review published yesterday.
ICANN has recommended, after talking to the community, that full UDRP reform should be put on the back-burner until at least a year and a half after the first new gTLDs go live.
Since that isn’t likely to happen until early 2013, ICANN is unlikely to address the subject until mid-2014. The chances of a revamped UDRP going live before 2017 are therefore slim.
The new Final Issue Report (pdf), prepared by ICANN staff and sent to the GNSO Council yesterday, says:

Staff recommends that a [Policy Development Process] on the UDRP not be initiated at this time. Staff recommends that a PDP be delayed until after the New gTLD Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) has been in operation for at least eighteen months. Doing so would allow the policy process to be informed by data regarding the effectiveness of the URS, which was modelled on the UDRP, to address the problem of cybersquatting.

The report was informed by a number of stakeholder webinars and questionnaires sent to UDRP providers earlier this year, as well as a round of public comments.
It notes that UDRP has remained the same since October 1999, but that it still has proved flexible enough to react to changes in the domain industry and cybersquatting tactics.
The report states:

After carefully evaluating the issues and concerns expressed by the ICANN community regarding the UDRP, Staff has concluded that many relate to process issues associated with the implementation of the UDRP, rather than the language of the policy itself.

In the absence of root-and-branch reform, ICANN has suggested the formation of an “expert panel” to investigate whether smaller changes could be made to the periphery of the UDRP.
It could, for example, look at amendments to the Supplemental Rules that UDRP providers use to handle complaints and responses. ICANN wrote:

To the extent that these expert recommendations result in modifications to certain of the UDRP Rules or suggested changes for provider Supplemental Rules to align with the UDRP Rules, these may be adopted by the ICANN Board without the necessity of undertaking a complete PDP.

Consultations have shown that there’s little appetite for massive reform from either side of the debate; it’s probably not too cynical to say that the status quo will be maintained largely by paranoia.
Trademark holders would ideally prefer a cheaper, faster system that is more accommodating to their own interests, whereas domain investors would like to see an end to forum-shopping and panelists who give too much deference to big business.
But both sides are terrified that the actual process of reforming UDRP would be captured by their opponents, ultimately tilting the balance of power against their own interests.
The trademark lobby is convinced that ICANN policy-development is the plaything of the domain name industry, and vice versa.
What we’re left with is a system where cybersquatting still pays and in which reverse domain hijacking can sometimes be a cheap way to get your hands on a domain you want.
And it looks like it could stay that way for some time to come.
The Final Issue Report now needs to be considered by the GNSO Council, presumably at its public meeting in Dakar, Senegal later this month.
I think the Council will almost certainly accept the report’s recommendations against a PDP with little argument – everybody has far too much other stuff to be worrying about at the moment.
It’s less clear to me whether the idea of an “expert panel” will find favor, however. That may be one of Dakar’s more interesting open questions.

3 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, gnso, ICANN, udrp