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…

Comment Tagged: burberry, udrp

Pornographers still hate .xxx

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for the porn industry, has condemned the proposed .xxx top-level domain as “untenable” and “detrimental”.
In a letter to ICANN, FSC executive director Diane Duke challenged ICANN’s board to “settle the issue once and for all by going to the actual community to test the application’s true level of support”.
The FSC is concerned that the introduction of .xxx, as proposed and pursued by ICM Registry for the last 10 years, will inevitably lead to government regulation of the online porn industry.
Duke wrote: “a proposal for a ‘Sponsored’ top-level domain by a company that is not of the industry, with the added intent to ‘regulate’ an industry it knows nothing about, is simply untenable”.
The FSC has an even bigger problem with IFFOR, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, the group set up by ICM to act as its sponsoring organisation
IFFOR – a bit of a hack to get around the fact that ICM was essentially applying for a gTLD during a “sponsored” TLD round – was loosely modelled on ICANN’s own bottoms-up structure, with four supporting organisations creating policy for .xxx domains.
Judging by this flowchart, which is open to interpretation, the adult industry would control less than half the votes.
“Our resolute position is that no self-respecting industry would ever agree to have a minority voice on a board tasked with setting critical policies for its members,” Duke wrote.
While ICANN ultimately rejected .xxx due to the lack of community support, ICM did manage to get some support from other areas of the adult community back in 2005.
ICANN was found at fault when it rejected .xxx. The question now is whether ICANN decides to stand by its first decision, to approve .xxx, or its second, to reject it.
Bottom line: It can’t win either way.

1 Comment Tagged: diane duke, free speech coalition, fsc, ICANN, icm registry

Go Daddy follows Google out of China

Go Daddy is to stop accepting new .cn registrations, after CNNIC demanded that it start collecting photographs and signed registration documents from Chinese customers.
General counsel Christine Jones told the Congressional Executive Committee on China that Go Daddy has also seen an increase in DDoS attacks, specifically against human rights sites that it hosts.
“Domain name registrars, including Go Daddy, were then instructed to obtain photo identification, business identification, and physical signed registration forms from all existing .CN domain name registrants who are Chinese nationals, and to provide copies of those documents to CNNIC,” she said.
Any domain without such documentation would have been blocked by China, she said.
“For these reasons, we have decided to discontinue offering new .CN domain names at this time. We continue to manage the .CN domain names of our existing customers,” she said.
Go Daddy has about 1,200 Chinese customers and 27,000 .cn domains on its books. The company is not going to block Chinese customers. What China will do about them remains to be seen.
The move comes at a tense time for US-China internet relations, with Google grabbing headlines all week due to its ongoing censorship row with the country.
Jones denied the move has anything to do with Google. “We made the decision that we didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government,” she said.
I’ve uploaded a PDF of her written testimony here.

Comment Tagged: china, christine jones, go daddy, google

Colombians not keen on .co grandfathering

Uptake of .co domains among existing .com.co registrants under the current “grandfathering” process has been quite low, according to .CO Internet chief executive Juan Diego Calle.
The formerly restrictive Colombian ccTLD is opening for global registrations soon, but the domain’s roughly 27,000 third-level registrants have already been given the chance to re-register their brands at the second level.
Calle told me earlier that only about 10% to 20% of .com.co registrants have chosen to do so. Grandfathering opened on March 1 and ends next Tuesday.
“Third-level domains are very well recognised in Colombia as a way to show you have a Colombian presence,” Calle said.
The sunrise period for trademark holders begins on April 1. Companies with trademarks registered in Colombia will be given priority, regardless of where the company is based.
I’ll be writing more about the .co launch tomorrow, to be published in a slightly more respectable venue.

1 Comment Tagged: .co, cctlds, colombia, juan diego calle

Bizarre domain suggestion tool

There are plenty of available domain name suggestion tools out there, but BizNameWiz has to be the strangest I’ve seen.
The press release says it uses a “unique and creative algorithm”.
No kidding. I’ll let these screengrabs speak for themselves. …continue reading

2 Comments Tagged: biznamewiz

OpenDNS serves 1% of the internet

OpenDNS, the free DNS resolution provider, said today it has 18 million users on its books, meaning it now provides DNS for more than 1% of the world’s internet users.
The percentage is based on the estimate that there are 1.67 billion internet users.
“One percent of all of the world’s Internet users is a momentous achievement and our growth rate indicates that number will climb at an even more rapid pace going forward,” said CEO David Ulevitch.
When OpenDNS launched in 2006, I couldn’t really see the need.
But since then, the company has added services such as URL filtering, which have become popular with the 25,000-odd schools on the company’s customer roster.
Far more useful to domain-buying adults such as me and you is the company’s CacheCheck, which enables you to manually update OpenDNS’s cache of any given domain. Over the years, this has often proven to be an invaluable time saver when meddling with my domains’ DNS records.

1 Comment Tagged: cachecheck, david ulevitch, opendns

Three reasons why iPadDownloads.com is not worth $1 million

The mainstream media has been carrying a few stories today about the guy who is trying to eBay iPadDownloads.com, iPadDownload.com and iPadDownloads.net for $1 million apiece.
“This is probably the first very smart thing I have ever done in my life,” the registrant, record producer Nik Tyler, told Fortune magazine.
I don’t know the guy. It’s quite possible that his entire life to date has been a constant stream of dumb moves. Here are three reasons why iPadDownloads.com is another: …continue reading

Comment Tagged: apple, ebay, ipad, ipaddownloads.com, nik tyler

Dot-XXX lights fire under ICANN’s feet

ICM Registry has urged ICANN to stop messing around and finalise the contract that would add .xxx to the domain name system.
“There is no legitimate obstacle to the approval of ICM’s registry agreement,” ICM chair Stuart Lawley said in a letter to ICANN yesterday. “We can see no reason for further delay in the process of approving ICM’s registry agreement”.
At its Nairobi meeting earlier this month, ICANN’s board decided to hand the problem of how to handle .xxx to its staff, saying it “wishes to create a transparent set of process options which can be published for public comment.”
ICM now claims that no such process options are necessary. The .post application, Lawley said, was approved last December, six years after it was made, without the need for any new processes.
There are some differences between .post and .xxx, of course. While the .xxx application has previously been approved, it has also previously been rejected.
It is back on the table following an Independent Review Panel decision that ICANN broke its fairness rules by singling out ICM for special treatment.
Lawley reminds ICANN of as much several times in his latest letter, which can be found here.
ICANN’s staff is expected to deliver its process options next week. There will be a period of public comment, and the board will have to make a call by its June meeting in Brussels.

Comment Tagged: brussels, ICANN, icm, nairobi, stuart lawley, xxx

Verizon seeks another registrar scalp

After killing off small Indian registrar Lead Networks last week, Verizon wasted no time in gunning for a larger target, DirectNIC.
The carrier sued DirectNIC on Friday, claiming the company has been involved in the systematic typosquatting of hundreds of thousands of domains, including at least 288 belonging to Verizon.
There appears to be at least two things going on here.
First, Verizon is claiming that the common registrar practice of parking expired, pre-delete domains, somehow falls foul of US anti-cybersquatting laws if the parked domains are typosquats.
DomainNameWire addresses the possibly discomforting precedents this could set over here.
Second, the Verizon complaint resurrects the theory that DirectNIC’s owners, including CEO Sigmund Solares, are or were themselves typosquatters, using shell …continue reading

1 Comment Tagged: dell, directnic, intercosmos, kenyatech, lead networks, michael gardner, noah lieske, sigmund solares, verizon

Dynadot sorry for .tv snafu

Dynadot has apologised to customers for glitches during last week’s .tv landrush that allowed people to register premium domain names at well below market prices.
On Thursday, VeriSign slashed the first-year prices of “premium” .tv names and set the renewal fees to a standard lower registry rate.
While prices were lower, they were still premium, but some domainers discovered they could register domains previously priced in the tens of thousands of dollars for the standard fee at some registrars, Dynadot included.
Dynadot said this weekend that this was because “we were given an incomplete list of the Premium .TV Domain Names… So, any Premium .TV Domain Names that weren’t on the list were displayed at the normal .TV registration price.”
The company further apologised for giving registrants store credit, rather than a cash refund, after it discovered its mistake and deleted the registrations, which was “probably not the best way to handle the situation”. This policy has been reversed, and registrants can now get a “no questions asked” refund.
Demand during the .tv land-rush was evidently so high that Dynadot’s float at VeriSign was quickly drained.
The company said: “We had a problem with the central registry and ran out of funds. This meant we could not process any COM/NET/TV/CC domain registrations, domain transfers, and domain renewals.”

1 Comment Tagged: .tv, dynadot, verisign