Uniregistry wins .gift and AOL yanks .patch bid

Three more new gTLD applications were withdrawn today, only one of which was related to this week’s previously reported batch of private auctions.
First, Famous Four Media has pulled out of the .gift race with Uniregistry, presumably after some kind of deal. They were the only two applicants, meaning Uniregistry wins the contention set.
Potentially complicating matters, there are also two applicants for .gifts — if the plural/singular debate is reopened, which seems possible after today’s events, it might not be over yet.
Second, AOL withdrew its application for .patch, which was to be a single-registrant space for its Patch-branded network of local web sites.
This seems to be connected to cost-cutting at AOL.
Last week, the company fired Patch’s creative director in front of 1,000 colleagues and announced it was cutting the number of sites in the network.
Today, it started laying off almost half of Patch’s 1,100 employees, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Third, Top Level Domain Holdings withdrew from the .guide contention set, leaving Donuts the winner — a formality following this week’s Innovative Auctions auction, which it lost.

ICM opens can of worms with .xxx domain seizures

ICM Registry has suspended several dozen .xxx domain names registered by cybersquatters.
It’s believed to be unprecedented for a mainstream registry to unilaterally shut down domains purely on the grounds of alleged cybersquatting, as I reported for The Register earlier today.
ICM took down 70 to 80 domains including washingtonpost.xxx, cnbc.xxx and verizonwireless.xxx because it decided that the domains infringed trademarks and were therefore abusive.
Many belonged to the squatter Domain Name Wire first fingered as the registrant of huffingtonpost.xxx, named in Whois as Justin Crews.
Crews had told MSNBC that he planned to sell the domains at profit.
There was no UDRP arbitration, no court order, just a breach of the .xxx registry-registrant agreement, which gives ICM the right to suspend squatted domains at will.
This is the relevant part of the agreement, which all .xxx registrants must agree to:

You acknowledge and agree that the Registry reserves the right to disqualify you or your agents from making or maintaining any Registrations or Reservations in the .XXX TLD if you are found to have repeatedly engaged in abusive registrations, in its sole discretion.

I blogged back in May about why it might not be necessary to spend a fortune on defensive registrations in .xxx, given the existence of this policy and others.
Nevertheless, while it may take a while for the implications to become clear, I think the suspensions represent a very significant development.
Coming so soon after the end of ICM’s sunrise period, which saw many organizations spend thousands on useless non-resolving defensive registrations, I wouldn’t be surprised if many companies feel like they may have wasted their money.
If you’ve just spent $200 defending your brand, I imagine it would be quite annoying to see the likes of verizonwireless.xxx or businessweek.xxx get the same protection for free.
I would also not be surprised if, from now on, trademark attorneys trying to defend their rights in .xxx first contacted ICM, rather than WIPO or the National Arbitration Forum.
Why spend thousands on a UDRP complaint when you can just send a legal nastygram to ICM?
ICM president Stuart Lawley told DI today that this wave of suspensions was done independently, not in response to any legal demands.
Still, the precedent has been set: ICM will suspend domains for free, under certain circumstances.
What those circumstances are is less clear.
Lawley said that ICM will not get involved in complaints about individual domains – but it will shut down cybersquatters with multiple infringements.
But what constitutes cybersquatting? UDRP has a definition, but I’m not sure ICM does. It may be quite subjective.
It’s also not clear what ICM will do with the suspended domains, not all of which necessarily infringe trademarks. Some may be bona fide, but the ICM policy is to take down the registrant’s entire portfolio.
So will those non-infringing domains be released back into the pool? And if so, how will ICM determine which are squats and which are not?
And what about the ones that are squats? Will they be released?
AOL may be content for huffingtonpost.xxx to remain suspended forever. As long as it’s suspended, the company does not have to worry about defensive registration fees.
But consider gayroom.xxx, which was also suspended.
The owner of gayroom.com owns a trademark on the word “gayroom”. Gayroom.com is a porn site, but one that has chosen not to buy its equivalent .xxx domain.
What if it changes its mind? If gayroom.com wants gayroom.xxx in future, is there a way to take it out of suspension, or is the company stuck without its .xxx forever, just because a cybersquatter got there first?
ICM’s policies do not seem to answer this question and the company has not yet revealed its plans for the suspended domains.
As a post-script, I should note that Huffington Post owner AOL is currently listed as the registrant of huffingtonpost.xxx in the Whois record.
It’s not yet clear why this is the case, but Lawley stated unequivocally today that the apparent transfer is completely unrelated to ICM’s own crackdown.
Go Daddy, the registrar of record for the domain, declined to comment, citing its customer privacy policy.
Did the cybersquatter transfer the domain to AOL before the suspension? Did he sell it to AOL? Or did he just update the Whois with phoney data? Either seems possible at this point.

Lego files a UDRP complaint every three days

Lego, maker of the popular building block toys, is rapidly becoming one of the most UDRP-happy big-brand trademark holders.
The company recently filed its 150th claim, and has so far recovered well over 250 domains that included its trademark.
With over 100 UDRPs filed so far in 2010, that works out to an average of roughly one complaint every three days, and a total spend easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Its success rate to date is 100%, with no complaints denied.
Its successfully recovered domains include oddities such as legogiraffepenis.com, which appears to be based on this amusing misunderstanding.
If Lego keeps up its current rate of enforcement, it will likely pass Microsoft in the next few months in terms of total cases filed. It’s already filed more than Yahoo and Google.
But it still has a long way to go to catch up with AOL, possibly the most prolific UDRP complainant, which has close to 500 complaints under its belt.

AOL loses ICANN accreditation

AOL, one of the first five companies to become an ICANN-accredited registrar, appears to have let its accreditation expire.
The former internet giant is no longer listed on ICANN’s Internic registrar page, and DotAndCo.net’s data shows it lost its .com, .net and .org accreditations on April 27.
It’s hardly surprising. AOL’s profits are falling and it has been reorganizing itself ever since Time Warner returned it to life as an independent company last year.
It’s noteworthy because AOL was one of the first five registrars to challenge Network Solutions’ monopoly, when ICANN introduced competition to the domain name market in 1999.
In April 1999, the company participated in ICANN’s limited registrar “test-bed” experiment, alongside CORE, France Telecom, Melbourne IT and Register.com.
But domain names were never a big deal at the company.
AOL peaked at about 150,000 domains a few years ago and tailed off to a little more than a dozen at the end of 2009. Apparently, the company has decided to let its accreditation simply expire.