DomainTools opens massive email record database

DomainTools has opened up a huge database that matches domain names to the mail servers they use.
A search on ReverseMX.com for a domain name returns the mail servers that domain uses. In reverse, you can search for a mail server or IP address and find out which domains use it.
For example, a query for one of Google’s mail servers will spit back a short list of some of the domains that use Google for their email, along with an aggregate domain count.
DomainTools said in a press release:

ReverseMX can be used by a wide audience – basically anyone interested in researching the footprint of small or large email providers. For example, users can analyze which mail servers’ domains are using certain email providers, or how Microsoft’s hosted email is doing against Gmail or Yahoo.

The data currently covers the 130 million domains registered under .com, .edu, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us – the largest TLDs for which zone files are freely available.
DomainTools has already uncovered a few interesting factoids, such as that 30 million domain names use Go Daddy for their email, making it easily the largest provider.
The service also interrogates domains’ SPF records to work out which IP addresses are authorized to send email for any given domain.
I can imagine ReverseMX being useful for researchers in the security industry (and their spammer adversaries?).
But unlike DomainTools’ other services, it does not immediately appear to be something that many people in the domain name industry will find themselves using on a daily basis.

Comment Tagged: DomainTools, reversemx

Now you can outsource your whole gTLD

It’s already common practice for domain name registries to outsource their technical operations to a back-end provider such as VeriSign or Afilias, but a new company hopes that new gTLD registries will want to go one step further.
Sedari, which appears to have soft-launched at the .nxt conference today, wants successful new gTLD applicants to outsource their back-office functions too.
The company, headed by former ICANN policy advisor Liz Williams, “helps string owners outsource the risk and responsibility of running a registry in compliance with ICANN’s contracts”, according to its site.
I understand this means functions such as billing, support, compliance, and liaising with the back-end registry and the front-end registrars.
I guess it’s going to be possible for a successful gTLD applicant to sign a registry contract with ICANN and then do very little to actually manage its day-to-day operation.
A registry that outsources its technical infrastructure to the likes of Neustar and its back office to Sedari will presumably be free to focus on nothing but marketing.
Sedari is staffed by a number of familiar faces.
Its CFO is Kevin Wilson, who had the same role at ICANN until January, and former ICANN director Dennis Jennings is on the board.
Its CTO is Wayne MacLaurin, who was previously CTO of Momentous. Jothan Frakes, formerly with Minds + Machines, is senior VP of channel management.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, sedari

Direct marketers join anti-gTLD bandwagon

The UK Direct Marketing Association has added its voice to the collection of advertising trade groups that oppose ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
DMA executive director Chris Combemale said in a statement:

Creating a tranche of new internet domain names will be extremely costly to businesses. As well as the associated costs of registering new domain names and spending money to attract customers to multiple domains, businesses face the legal and financial headache of having to contend with cybersquatters grabbing specific domains.
Customised domain names won’t offer brands any enhanced marketing possibilities because consumers can easily search for specific information with the current domain name system.
Companies are already hard pressed to find cost savings in these tough trading times; adding a further financial burden that won’t reap any commercial benefits cannot be justified.

The organization said it plans to formally ask ICANN to withdraw or revise the program.
The Association of National Advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the American Association of Advertising Agencies have already made similar calls.
The DMA UK has over 800 members, according to its web site.

3 Comments Tagged: direct marketing association, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs

Most new gTLDs will fail

We’re going to see hundreds of new gTLDs over the coming years, but we’re also going to see potentially hundreds of failures.
That’s the view being espoused by some of the biggest cheerleaders of ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program, including its former chairman, at the .nxt conference this week.
During the opening session on Wednesday, a panel of experts was asked to imagine what the domain name industry might look like in 2017, five years after the first new gTLDs go live.
“My assumption is that many TLDs will have completely failed to live up to their promoters’ hype,” said Minds + Machines executive chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, whose last action as ICANN chair was pushing through approval of the program. “But on the other hand many of them, and I hope a majority of them, will be thriving.”
Anyone expecting to build a business on defensive registrations better think again, panelists said.
“Many ill-conceived generic-term TLDs will have failed by that point, especially those generic term TLDs that are taking comfort in the .xxx Sunrise Part B revenue model,” said Paul McGrady of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
“There’s definitely going to be burnout in the brand-owner community, so don’t expect the brand owners to show up to to fuel that,” he said.
Others, such as Tucows CEO Elliot Noss, went further.
“I think there’ll be more failures than successes and I’m not fussed by that,” said Noss. “For the users in the namespace, it’s not like they’re left high and dry.”
He compared failing gTLDs to the old Angelfire and Geocities homepage services that were quite popular in the late 1990s, but which fizzled when the cost of domains and hosting came down.
But while the disappearance of an entire gTLD would take all of its customers with it, a la Geocities, that’s unlikely to happen, panelists acknowledged.
ICANN’s program requires applicants to post a bond covering three years of operations, and it will also select a registry provider to act as an emergency manager if a gTLD manager fails.
When gTLD businesses fail, and they will, they’re designed to fail gracefully.
In addition, taking on an extra gTLD after its previous owner goes out of business would be little burden to an established registry provider — once the transition work was done, a new string would be a extra renewal revenue stream with possibly little additional overhead.

2 Comments Tagged: .nxt, ICANN, new gTLDs

M+M surprised by .mumbai snub

One of Minds + Machines’ key top-level domain applications has been thrown into confusion after government support for its .mumbai bid was apparently revoked.
In a letter that surfaced on the ICANN web site this week, Y.S. Mahangade, deputy director of IT at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, wrote (pdf):

Honorable Deputy Mayor of MCGM inadvertently issued a letter to one organization which has been revoked later by Honorable Deputy Major of MCGM. It may please be noted that the official position of the City of Mumbai is communicated by Municipal Commissioner.

Under ICANN’s rules, all applications for geographical gTLDs must be backed officially by the local government, otherwise they get rejected.
According to Wikipedia, the Mayor of Mumbai (and presumably the deputy) has a “largely ceremonial” function, “as the real powers are vested in the Municipal Commissioner”.
Wikipedia does not say what kind of power the deputy director of IT wields. I’m guessing it’s not much.
M+M CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a statement:

This is the first we have heard about this and we are looking into the matter with our client, India TL Domain Pvt Ltd, to whom the original letter of appointment was issued by the Deputy Mayor of Mumbai. Once we understand what the situation is viz-a-viz India TL Domain Pvt Ltd and the City of Mumbai, we will provide an update.

You can view the letter of support from the deputy mayor here.
M+M announced its deal with the .mumbai applicant, India TL Domain, in June. As I noted at the time, not much is known about the company.
But according to official records, the company’s managing director is Ashok Hiremath, who’s also chairman of Mumbai-based fungicide manufacturer Astec Lifesciences.
His brother Suresh, now apparently a British citizen living in London, appears to be the only one of the company’s three directors to have engaged, albeit lightly, in ICANN policy development.
The third director is also Astec’s corporate secretary. The company shares its address with Astec.
In June, M+M’s parent company, Top Level Domain Holdings, issued two million new shares to an unnamed consultant as a result of the .mumbai deal, raising £160,000 ($260,000).
This is not the first time a geographic gTLD applicant that apparently raised support from the necessary governmental entity has had its plans thrown into doubt.
The same happened to DotConnectAfrica, a potential .africa bidder, in May, after the African Union apparently did an about-face.
Mumbai is India’s largest city, with over 20 million citizens. It’s also the richest (although the poverty there is enough to make you weep) making .mumbai a potentially lucrative gTLD.

Comment Tagged: .mumbai, astec lifesciences, city tlds, ICANN, m+m, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs, new TLDs, tldh

MelbourneIT talks to 270 .brand applicants

The Australian domain registrar MelbourneIT said it has talked to 270 companies and signed contracts with 17 that want to apply for “.brand” top-level domains.
The news came in the company’s “disappointing” first-half financial results announcement yesterday.
According to its official report (pdf), MelbourneIT has received 230 expressions of interest and has inked deals with 14, but managing director Theo Hnarkis reportedly told analysts the higher numbers.
The company is charging clients between AUD 45,000 ($47,000) and AUD 75,000 ($79,000) to handle the ICANN application process.
MelbourneIT’s preferred partner for back-end registry services is VeriSign, so the clients it signs are likely to become recurring revenue streams for VeriSign if their applications are successful.

Comment Tagged: .brand, ICANN, melbourneit, new gTLDs, new TLDs, verisign

Watch the .nxt conference live online

The .nxt conference on new top-level domains kicks off in San Francisco later today, but fear not if you were unable to make it in person – much of the content will be streamed live online.
Roughly half of the three-day meeting’s sessions will be made available live, and it appears that the whole lot will be available on demand for the next three months.
If the conference is as informative as the first one, which took place in February, the $95 fee .nxt is charging to access the streams seems like a pretty good deal.
It’s no substitute for being there in person – much of the value in these things lies in the networking opportunities – but if new gTLDs are likely to effect your business you’d be crazy not to check it out.
More details here.

Comment Tagged: .nxt, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs

Want Beyonce.xxx? JustinBieber.xxx? Forget it

ICM Registry has banned a whole bunch of celebrity names from the new .xxx top-level domain, in order to scupper cybersquatters and opportunistic porn webmasters.
Want to register Beyonce.xxx, AngelinaJolie.xxx, OlsenTwins.xxx, Madonna.xxx, BritneySpears.xxx, KimKardashian.xxx, HalleBerry.xxx or WinonaRyder.xxx?
How about JustinBieber.xxx, BradPitt.xxx, CharlieSheen.xxx, SimonCowell.xxx, GeorgeMichael.xxx, EltonJohn.xxx, VerneTroyer.xxx, DonaldTrump.xxx or OsamaBinLaden.xxx?
Forget it. According to Whois records, you’re out of luck on all counts. They’ve all been reserved by the registry.
These are all among what I’m guessing is at least hundreds – maybe more – of celebrity names that ICM has blocked from ever being registered.
The company won’t say how many celebrities have been afforded this privilege, or how it came up with the list, but it has said in the past that a total of about 15,000 domains have been registry-reserved.
That also includes the names of the world’s capital cities, culturally sensitive strings put forward by a handful of governments, and the “premium” names that ICM plans to auction.
I’m wondering what the cut-off point is for celebrities. How famous do you have to be to get your .xxx blocked by default by the registry? B-List minimum? D-List? What database is ICM using?
American Pie actor Tara Reid just entered Celebrity Big Brother here in the UK, which pretty much means her career is over, and she’s managed to make it to ICM’s reserved list.
While ICM has always said it would help protect personal names from abuse, it’s never been entirely clear about how it would go about it.
Its registry agreement with ICANN has for some time said that “unauthorized registration of personal names” would be forbidden, but there were no real details to speak of.
As I reported last week, its souped-up cybersquatting policy, Rapid Evaluation Service, has a special provision for personal names.
But presumptively blocking a subset of the world’s famous people from .xxx is bound to raise questions in the wider context of the ICANN new gTLD program, however.
As far as I can tell, no corporate trademarks have been given the same rights in .xxx as, say, David Cameron or Barack Obama.
If ICM can protect Piers Morgan’s “brand”, why can it not also protect CNN? Or Microsoft or Coke or Google? None of these brands are registry-reserved, according to Whois.
The trademark lobby will raise this question, no doubt. ICM has its own celebrity Globally Protected Marks List for .xxx, which only applies to individuals, they could argue.
There are some differences, of course.
Celebrities sometimes find they have a harder time winning cybersquatting complaints using UDRP if they have not registered their names as trademarks, which can be quite hard to come by, for example.
(UPDATE: And, of course, they may not qualify for ICM’s sunrise period if they don’t have trademarks, as EnCirca’s Tom Barrett points out in the comments below).
In addition, celebrity skin is a popular search topic on the web, which may give cybersquatters a greater impetus to register their names as domains, despite the high price of .xxx.
Also, if a registry were to reserve the brand names of, say, the Fortune 1000, it would wind up blocking many dictionary or otherwise multi-purpose strings, which is obviously not usually the case with personal names.

5 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, gpml, ICANN, icm registry, new gTLDs, new TLDs, trademarks, xxx

Libyan registry hacked by anti-Gaddafi crackers

The official registry web site for the Libyan top-level domain has been defaced by anti-Gadaffi crackers.
Nic.ly currently looks like this (click to enlarge):

The attack appears to be limited to the web server – as bit.ly domains are still resolving I assume the culprits have not managed to take control of the registry’s more important systems.
Libya famously cut itself off from the internet in March, shortly after the ongoing rebel uprising – which today arrived on the streets of Tripoli – kicked off.
The .ly domain also went completely dark in 2004 after a communication breakdown between the registry manager and IANA.
(via Sophos)

1 Comment Tagged: libya, ly, nic.ly, security

ICM reveals tough .xxx cybersquatting rules

ICM Registry has finally taken the wraps off its rapid domain name takedown service, which promises to make life difficult for cybersquatters in the .xxx top-level domain.
The Rapid Evaluation Service, as it is known, is basically a souped-up version of the familiar UDRP that tilts the overall balance in favor of legit trademark holders.
It’s designed for companies or individuals who don’t want to be associated with .xxx domain names, and has the remedies to match.
Using RES, brand owners will be able to get a domain temporarily suspended in less than a week, and later have it switched off for good.
That’s right, if a name is lost under RES it goes into registry-reserved status. The complainant does not get control of the domain, and they don’t have to pay recurring renewal fees.
But it will not be cheap. The National Arbitration Forum is the only organization authorized to handle RES work, and it’s charging $1,300 per domain, with no discounts for multiple-domain cases.
RES does not replace UDRP, but it is based on it.
Like UDRP, its three pillars are the domain’s confusing similarity with the complainant’s trademark, the rights and legitimate interests of the registrant, and the question of bad faith registration.
While much of the RES has been copied straight from the UDRP, there are key differences.
ICM has codified some of the good case law that has emerged from the last decade of UDRP and eschewed some of the bad, arguably making RES less open to interpretation.
Notably, unless you’re filing to protect a personal name — celebrities, porn stars or just the average Jo(e) — RES is for nationally registered, in-use trademarks only. Other marks don’t seem to count.
Typos are explicitly included in the definition of confusing similarity (no microsfot.xxx), as are brand+keyword domains (microsoftporn.xxx).
Phonetic similarity also makes an appearance, which seems like it could open a great big can of worms.
The bad faith component of RES is very similar to UDRP, but with the addition of a typosquatting ban and the removal of the requirement to show the registration was made for “commercial gain”.
As far as registrants are concerned, there are some additional protections you won’t find in UDRP, notably this text, which seems to specifically make many generic terms immune:

(iii) the domain name in the .XXX TLD has a primary meaning apart from its secondary meaning as a trademark or service mark associated with the complainant, and is being used in connection with its primary meaning in association with which the complainant has not acquired distinctiveness in the adult-entertainment industry.

Technically, and very hypothetically, I interpret this to mean that if you registered apple.xxx (which you won’t) and used it to publish videos of men recreating that scene from American Pie, you probably couldn’t lose the domain to an RES complaint.
I expect this is largely of concern to companies that have registered trademarks that correspond to dictionary words. They may have to use UDRP as usual.
RES has previously been billed as a 48-hour solution, but in reality cases could take anywhere between three and five days before a Preliminary Decision is handed down.
After a complaint is filed, there’s a one-business-day turnaround for an administrative check, then another two business days for the panelist to decide what to do.
If a respondent has lost three or more RES cases in a year, the panelist will be entitled to presumptively consider them an “abusive registrant” for a preliminary decision.
Preliminary decisions can stop a domain resolving immediately, if the panelist thinks the complainant is likely to win and that there’s no “substantial likelihood of harm” to the registrant.
Registrants then have 10 days to respond before a final decision is made. If they default, maybe because they’re on vacation, they have up to three months to appeal.
In short, we’re looking at the bastard son of UDRP here.
I suspect the trademark lobby is going to quietly love it. If that’s the case, it might help the domain industry look a bit more respectable.
If you’re more likely to be a respondent than a complainant, you’d be well-advised to familiarize yourself with RES (and ICM’s other policies) before investing in gray-area .xxx domains.
The huge glaring problem with the policy as far as I’m concerned is that neither ICM or NAF is going to publish any of its decisions in full, only aggregated statistics.
This is ostensibly to protect the identities of the complainants, but it’s also going to cover up (probably inevitable) sloppy decision-making, which won’t be good for confidence in the .xxx TLD.
But if somebody cybersquats your mom, you’ll probably be glad of it.

Comment Tagged: icm registry, rapid evaluation service, res, udpr, xxx