Blacknight dumps .ie from free domain program, replaces it with .co

Blacknight Solutions has dropped its local ccTLD, .ie, from the free domain name program it offers in partnership with Google to Irish small businesses.
It’s being replaced with .co, the repurposed Colombian ccTLD, which has been getting an indecent amount of traction in regional projects targeting small business recently.
“Unfortunately, while we may be the market leader for .IE, we feel that the restrictions on the domain impose too many restraints to benefit program participants,” Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon said.
Supporting the highly restrictive ccTLD was imposing too many costs and headaches, Neylon said. The company will continue to sell the domains, just not through the program.
Blacknight, Google and the Irish postal service have been offering companies a free year domain registration and hosting under the banner of Getting Business Online for over a year.
In May, Blacknight reported that in the first year only about 21% of companies participating in the program chose .ie.
The .co domain is of course unrestricted.
It’s another regional win for .CO Internet, which markets .co as the TLD of choice for startups.
Just last week .CO Internet announced that Startup Britain, a private-sector entrepreneurial campaign backed by the UK government, had switched from a .org to a .co.

Industry objection forming to Google and Amazon’s keyword gTLD land grab

Members of the domain name industry, led by Michele Neylon of Blacknight, plan to complain to ICANN about dozens of single-registrant new gTLD applications filed by Google and Amazon.
The signatories of a new letter are bothered by plans by these companies and others to hold dictionary word gTLDs for their own exclusive use, not allowing regular internet users to register domains.
While the letter does not call out applicants by name, it specifically mentions .blog, .music and .cloud as examples of potentially objectionable single-registrant gTLDs.
Google has applied for .blog and .cloud for its own use, among many others. Amazon has done the same for .cloud and .music and dozens of others. All three are heavily contested.
The letter is so far signed by 13 people, many of whom work for registrars. It states in part:

generic words used in a generic way belong to all people. It is inherently in the public interest to allow access to generic new gTLDs to the whole of the Internet Community, e.g., .BLOG, .MUSIC, .CLOUD. Allowing everyone to register and use second level domain names of these powerful, generic TLDs is exactly what we envisioned the New gTLD Program would do. In contrast, to allow individual Registry Operators to segregate and close-off common words for which they do not possess intellectual property rights in effect allows them to circumvent nation-states’ entrenched legal processes for obtaining legitimate and recognized trademark protections.

The ICANN Applicant Guidebook gives certain special privileges to single-registrant gTLDs.
In its discretion, ICANN can release such registries from the Code of Conduct, which obliges them to treat all accredited registrars on a non-discriminatory basis.
The condition for this exception is that “all domain name registrations in the TLD are registered to, and maintained by, Registry Operator for its own exclusive use”.
The measure was designed to capture dot-brand gTLDs such as .google and .amazon, where only the registry itself controls the second-level domain names.
But Google seems to want to benefit from the exception to the Code of Conduct while still offering second-level domains for use by its customers, at least in some applications.
In its .blog application, for example, it states:

Charleston Road Registry [the applying Google subsidiary] intends to apply for an exemption to ICANN’s Registry Operator Code of Conduct and operate the proposed gTLD with Google as the sole registrar and registrant. The proposed gTLD will specifically align with Blogger, an existing Google product, and will provide users with improved capabilities that meet their diverse needs.
The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated second-level domain space for the management of a userʹs Blogger account.

However, the same application also states:

The mission of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated domain space in which users can publish blogs. All registered domains in the .blog gTLD will automatically be delegated to Google DNS servers, which will in turn provide authoritative DNS responses pointing to the Google Blogger service. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to simplify the Blogger user experience. Users will be able to publish content on a unique .blog domain (e.g., myname.blog) which will serve as a short and memorable URL for a particular Blogger account.

“Google want .blog to be only for Blogspot users, which is insane,” Neylon told DI. “No one company should have control of a generic name space like that.”
“The new TLD project spent thousands of hours working on protecting IP rights, and then you get big companies blatantly abusing the system,” he said.
It’s not at all clear whether Google’s plan for .blog is a permitted use case. Does Google’s plan for .blog and other gTLDs mean third parties will be “controlling” and/or “using” .blog domains?
Or is its plan more akin to a dot-brand offering its customers vanity URLs, such as kevin.barclays or john.citi?
I err to the former interpretation.
When a new gTLD applicant asked ICANN for clarity on this matter last December, ICANN’s response was:

“Exclusive use” has its common meaning. The domain name must be exclusively used by the Registry Operator, and no unaffiliated (using the definition of “Affiliate” in the Registry Agreement) third-party may have control over the registration or use of the domain name.

Neylon said he plans to send the letter to ICANN management, board and new gTLD program Independent Objector next week. There’s no target number of signatures.

Blacknight now .co accredited

Irish registrar Blacknight Solutions has been approved as a .co registrar, according to the company.
It’s one of the ongoing second wave of .co registrars following the initial 10 used by .CO Internet at launch.
Judging by .CO’s web site, Blacknight will be the 18th registrar to get approval to sell directly (13th if you don’t count the jointly owned registrars on the list), as well as the smallest.
Previously, the company was like so many others a reseller of My.co, the Colombian channel-oriented registrar.

Even when the domains are free, Irish small businesses prefer .com to .ie

Irish small businesses overwhelmingly chose .com domains over .ie and .eu during the first year of a Blacknight Solutions web presence freebie initiative.
Blacknight said today signed up 10,000 Irish small business customers through Getting Business Online, a partnership with Google and the local postal service, which it launched a year ago.
The scheme, which Google has been promoting with local partners in various territories around the world, gives companies a free domain and basic web hosting for a year.
According to Blacknight managing director Michele Neylon, 61% of sign-ups chose a .com domain, while 21% chose Ireland’s .ie, 13% chose .eu and 4% chose .biz.
“The way .ie is run, you have to go through an extensive validation process, and it’s also restricted what domains you can register,” Neylon, a regular critic of .ie policy, said.
As the initiative is just a year old, it’s not yet clear how many of these 10,000 companies plan to stick around on paid services.

Hackers stole data from Verisign, Blacknight

Hackers broke into Verisign’s corporate network and made out with sensitive data, it emerged today.
The attacks happened in 2010 and the company does not believe its all-important domain name infrastructure – which supports .com and several other top-level domains – was compromised.
Reuters broke the news today, but the attack was actually revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last October. The filing said:

In 2010, the Company faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers. We have investigated and do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System (“DNS”) network. Information stored on the compromised corporate systems was exfiltrated.

The filing, which was required under recent SEC disclosure rules, goes on to say that the attacks were “not sufficiently reported to the Company’s management” until September 2011.
It adds that Verisign does not know whether the “exfilitrated” – ie, stolen – data was used by the attackers. The filing does not say what was taken.
Back in 2010, Verisign was still a security company. It did not sell off its SSL business to Symantec until August that year. The filing does not say whether SSL data was breached.
As one of the logical single points of failure on the internet, Verisign is of course the subject of regular attacks, mainly of the performance-degrading distributed denial of service variety.
The bigger worry, as Reuters rather breathlessly notes, is that if hackers could compromise the integrity of the DNS root or .com/.net zones, it could lead to mayhem.
In unrelated news, the domain name registrar Blacknight today revealed that it got hacked on Tuesday.
The attackers may have got away with contact information – including email addresses and telephone numbers – for up to 40,000 customers, the company said.
Financial information such as credit card numbers was not compromised, Blacknight said.
The company has contacted Irish data protection regulators and will also inform the police. Customers are advised to change their passwords.
If you’re a Blacknight customer you’ll also want to be on the lookout for “spear-phishing” attacks in the near future. When the bad guys know your name, it can lead to a more convincing phish.

Blacknight warns about new gTLD “false promises”

Domain name registrar Blacknight Solutions has warned domain buyers not to be “duped” by registrars offering preregistration in new top-level domains that have not yet been approved.
“Every time an end user gets duped it hurts our industry and companies like us have to clean up the mess,” managing director Michele Neylon said.
In a press release, Blacknight said:

After receiving several queries from customers, Blacknight discovered that registrants interested in acquiring domains in rumoured new gTLDs had become confused by these offers, as they are not familiar with how the new TLD implementation might work. This sort of speculative offer is the equivalent of taking a down payment on a concept car that has not been approved for production. It is a false promise.

While the company was diplomatic enough to avoid naming names, I strongly suspect the release refers primarily to United Domains, which has been offering preregistration for the last few months.
UD currently offers such services for dozens of non-existent TLDs, such as (without leaving the B’s) .bank .bayern .bcn .berlin .bike and .board.
Given that none of the 50-odd potential gTLD applicants listed have revealed what their registration policies will be, it seems possible that many wannabe registrants will be left disappointed.
Don’t expect to be able to get a .bank domain via preregistration.
UD’s preregistering process looks a lot like a regular shopping cart, albeit with $0 pricing and no requirement to submit credit card details.
There is a FAQ that, if you read it, explains that there can be no guarantee you’ll get the names you ask for.
These services, and others like it, are basically ways to build up mailing lists of interested buyers, in order to contact them when domains actually start becoming available.
The registrar has already been burned by a couple of gTLD applicants.
LACNIC sent UD a nastygram in April, for example, when it discovered the registrar was offering preregistration in .lac.
Bizarrely, UD was at one stage accepting preregistration in .brand gTLDs in which literally no third party will qualify to buy a domain, such as .unicef.
ICANN has not to my recollection publicly stated a position on preregistration since 2000, when it said that “the practice of pre-registration should not be encouraged”.

Is Ireland’s .ie to change hands?

The Irish country-code domain, .ie, may be up for redelegation, according to Ireland’s largest domain name registrar.
Michele Neylon, managing director of Blacknight Solutions, has written to ICANN (pdf) to demand answers, after his inquiries about the potential changes were rebuffed.
The .ie ccTLD is currently delegated to University College Dublin, but since 2000 its operation has been contracted to IE Domain Registry, a spin-off company. Since 2007, it’s essentially been controlled by the Irish government.
According to Neylon, IEDR is “aggressively” pursuing a redelegation. If successful, this would put its own name in the IANA database, rather than the University’s. He wrote:

The management and development of the IE namespace should be with an entity that has made a strong commitment to holding the .ie domain in trust for the public good, and a strong commitment to a policy process that is driven by the Internet community and by the explicit consideration of the public good. This is not the case with IEDR, a private company that has practically no transparency and has zero representation of the internet community in its board or ongoing development.

It has been longstanding ICANN/IANA policy not to publicly discuss redelegation requests, which it apparently chose to exercise when Neylon inquired about the IEDR situation.
Neylon believes that any redelegation should be subject to public consultation in Ireland, which would be difficult if the talks all happen behind closed doors.
Blacknight is the registrar of record for 20% of .ie names. It’s also the only Irish registrar with an ICANN accreditation.