Apple, Google and Microsoft still don’t understand new TLDs

Kevin Murphy, January 22, 2013, Domain Tech

The world’s most-popular web browsers are still failing to recognize new top-level domains, many months after they go live on the internet.

The version of the Safari browser that ships with the Mountain Lion iteration of Apple’s OS X appears to have even gone backwards, removing support for at least one TLD.

The most recent versions of Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer also both fail to recognize at least two of the internet’s most recently added TLDs.

According to informal tests on multiple computers this week, Safari 6 on Mountain Lion and the Windows 7 versions of Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome v24 all don’t understand .post and .cw addresses.

Remarkably, it appears that Safari 6 also no longer supports .sx domains, despite the fact that version 5 does.

Typing affected domain names into the address bars of these browsers will result in surfers being taken to a search page (usually Google) instead of their intended destination.

If you want to test your own browser, registry.sx, una.cw and ems.post are all valid, resolving domain names you can try.

The gTLD .post was entered into the DNS root last August and the first second-level domain names went live in October.

The ccTLDs .sx and .cw are for Sint Maarten (Dutch part) and Curacao respectively, two of three countries formed by the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010.

ICANN approved the delegation of .cw in October 2011 and second-level domains there have been live since at least July 2012 (that’s when the registry’s site, una.cw, went live).

SX Registry’s .sx was delegated in December 2011 and sites there have been live since early 2012. It went into general availability in November.

Safari v5 on Windows and OS X recognizes .sx as a TLD, but v6 on Mountain Lion does not.

The problems faced by .post and .cw on Chrome appear to be mostly due to the fact that neither TLD is included on the Public Suffix List, which Google uses to figure out what a TLD looks like.

A few days after we reported last May that .sx didn’t work on Chrome, SX Registry submitted its details to the PSL, which appears to have solved its problems with that browser.

It’s not at all clear to me why .sx is borked on newer versions of Safari but not the older ones.

If the problem sounds trivial, believe me: it’s not.

The blurring of the lines between search and direct navigation is one of the biggest threats to the long-term relevance of domain names, so it’s vital to the industry’s interests that the problem of universal acceptance is sorted out sooner rather than later.

Russian iTunes Store infiltrated by .xxx banners after snafu [NSFW]

Kevin Murphy, December 5, 2012, Domain Registries

Russian iTunes users reportedly got a shock today when they discovered masses of sexually explicit content from the .xxx gTLD in their iTunes Store.

According to local reports, attempts to visit a part of the store dedicated to foreign movies displayed a bunch of banner ads for .xxx web sites instead of the expected content.

Digging a little deeper, it appears that the images were being drawn directly from xxx.xxx, a promotional directory site owned and managed by ICM Registry, the .xxx registry.

Speculation in the Apple blogs is that an iTunes Store developer inadvertently typed “xxx.xxx” somewhere as a placeholder URL, not realizing that .xxx is actually a live TLD.

There’s a lesson here for new gTLD registries somewhere, I’m sure.

Did Apple buy iCloud.com for $4.5m?

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2011, Domain Sales

Apple is rumored to have spent $4.5 million on the domain name icloud.com.

If it’s true, and domain-only sale, the deal, first reported by GigaOm today, would be in the top 15 most-expensive reported domain name transactions of all time, according to my records.

The Whois for icloud.com currently shows Xcerion, a Swedish company, as the registrant, mostly behind Network Solutions’ privacy service.

According to GigaOm, Xcerion recently rebranded its iCloud service as CloudMe, which is a useful indicator that it doesn’t plan on using the domain for much longer.

Apple secures iPad trademark

Kevin Murphy, March 29, 2010, Gossip

Apple has bought the “iPad” trademark, as it relates to handheld computers, from Fujitsu.

The deal removes any doubt, if there ever was any, that anybody registering domain names containing the string had better unload them quickly or get lawyered up.

According to PatentAuthority.com, the US trademark on iPad was transferred to Apple on March 17. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

Fujitsu filed for the trademark several years ago to cover its line of handheld retail devices.

You may recall that a music producer made headlines last week for attempting to sell the domain ipaddownloads.com and others for $1 million on eBay.

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

Kevin Murphy, March 23, 2010, Domain Sales

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)