VeriSign boss leaves domain industry

Former VeriSign chief executive Mark McLaughlin, who resigned last week, is leaving the domain name industry entirely, signing up as the new CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a firewall vendor.
The privately held company is being tipped for an imminent IPO, which could mean a big stock payday for McLaughlin if executed successfully.
The Wall Street Journal quotes McLaughlin today as saying “the upside is on the equity side”.
Coming ahead of the launch ICANN’s top-level domains program, you could have been forgiven for thinking that McLaughlin may have been headhunted by a new gTLD player.
That would have been a heck of an endorsement of the commercial opportunity of new gTLDs, for the head of .com and .net to throw in with the newcomers.
But clearly McLaughlin has realized there’s more money in firewalls.
Smart man.
At VeriSign, founder Jim Bedzos has taken over as CEO while a permanent replacement for the 10-year VeriSign veteran is sought.

VeriSign CEO quits. But where’s he going?

VeriSign’s CEO and president Mark McLaughlin has quit the company for a CEO position at an undisclosed private company.
The news of his departure, after two years at VeriSign’s helm, came during the company’s second quarter earnings call yesterday.
McLaughlin’s been at VeriSign for over a decade. In his time as CEO, he oversaw a massive restructuring at the company.
VeriSign is now dramatically smaller – 1,000 people compared to 5,000 when he took over – following the sale of assets such as the security business, which Symantec bought.
His resignation is effective on Monday, but he’s told the company he’ll stick around until late August. Founder and chairman Jim Bedzos will become interim CEO while a replacement is found.
But where’s McLaughlin going?
The timing, less that six months before ICANN’s new top-level domains program kicks off, is certainly curious. It would be an unbelievable coup for a new gTLD firm to hire the former boss of .com.
A lot of people are switching companies at the moment, positioning themselves the best to exploit the new gTLD opportunity. (Anybody need a writer? I’m told my prices are very reasonable).
But he could be going anywhere, of course.
On VeriSign’s earnings call yesterday, McLaughlin said he wanted to join a private company and take it public, which made me think he may be leaving the domain business entirely.
McLaughlin is an advisor to Altos Ventures, a venture capital firm with a bunch of startups to its name.
There are not a great many companies in the domain industry – that we know about, at least – that immediately jump out as near-term IPO candidates.
McLaughlin plans to announce his new employer next week.

ICANN demands the right to terminate .jobs

ICANN has asked the International Chamber of Commerce to rule that it has the right to terminate Employ Media’s .jobs contract.
It’s filed its response to Employ Media’s demand for arbitration over the disputed Universe.jobs service, which saw the registry vastly expand the .jobs space.
Employ Media “transcended the very intent behind creation of the TLD” with Universe.jobs, which allocated tens of thousands of .jobs domains to the DirectEmployers Association, ICANN said.
The organization wants the ICC to rule that it “may, but is not required to, terminate the Registry Agreement with Employ Media”, as it has already threatened.
Employ Media took ICANN to arbitration in May, after ICANN notified it that it was in breach of its registry agreement and they were not able to settle their differences in private talks.
The registry wants a declaration that it is not in breach.
But according to ICANN, Employ Media is still and has always been restricted to selling domains just to human resources professionals to promote jobs “within their own organizations”.
That’s despite ICANN’s approval of a contract amendment last year that allowed the registry to sell non-companyname .jobs domains.
This liberalization, ICANN says, did not allow the company to launch Universe.jobs, which monetizes at least 40,000 geographical and vocational .jobs through a massive third-party jobs board.
ICANN is now trying to frame the arbitration proceeding around a single question – was its breach notice “appropriate” or not?
The whole debacle is based around two interpretations of the .jobs Charter, which spells out who can register .jobs domains. This is what it says:

The following persons may request registration of a second-level domain within the .JOBS TLD:
– members of SHRM [the Society For Human Resources Management]; or
– persons engaged in human resource management practices that meet any of the following criteria: (i) possess salaried-level human resource management experience; (ii) are certified by the Human Resource Certification Institute; (iii) are supportive of the SHRM Code of Ethical and Professional Standards in Human Resource Management, as amended from time to time, a copy of which is attached hereto.

Employ Media’s interpretation is fairly literal and liberal – any signed-up SHRM member can register a .jobs domain and somebody at DirectEmployers is a member and therefore eligible.
Becoming a SHRM member is pretty straightforward and cheap. It’s not much of a barrier to entry.
ICANN argues that this interpretation is bogus:

Employ Media has espoused policies that allow a .JOBS domain name (or thousands of them) to be used for virtually any purpose as long as a human resource manager is propped up to “request” the domain. In doing so, Employ Media has failed to enforce meaningful restrictions on .JOBS registrations, as required by the Registry Agreement.

It further argues that Employ Media should have allocated premium .jobs domains through an “open, fair and transparent” process, rather than the “self-serving… backroom deal” with DirectEmployers.
Evidence now filed by ICANN shows that the two organizations have been arguing about this since at least November 2009, when Employ Media launched a Universe.jobs “beta”.
ICANN also now says that it has no problem with Universe.jobs, provided that Employ Media and SHRM amend their Charter policies to make the service retroactively compliant.
The more this dispute progresses and the more convoluted and expensive it becomes, the more it leaves me scratching my head.
You can download the latest arbitration documents from ICANN.

Bit-squatting – the latest risk to domain name owners

Forget phishing, forget cybersquatting, forget typosquatting, high-value domain name owners may have a whole new threat to worry about – “bit-squatting”.
This appears to be the conclusion of fascinating new research to be presented by Artem Dinaburg at the Black Hat and DEF CON hacker conferences in Las Vegas next week.
Defective internet hardware, it turns out, may be enabling a whole new category of typosquatting that could prove worrying for companies already prone to domain name abuse.
According to a summary of Dinaburg’s research, RAM chips can sometimes malfunction due to heat or radiation, resulting in “flipped bits”, where a 1 turns into a 0 or vice-versa.
Because the DNS uses ASCII encoding, a query containing a single flipped bit could actually send the user to a completely different domain name to the one they intended to visit.
To test the theory, Dinaburg appears to have registered the typo domain name mic2osoft.com. While it’s not visually confusing or a likely typo, in binary it is only one bit different to microsoft.com.
The ASCII binary code for the digit 2 is 00110010, which is only one bit different to the lower-case letter r, 01110010.
The binary for the string “microsoft” is:

011011010110100101100011011100100110111101110011011011110110011001110100

and the binary encoding for “mic2osoft” is (with the single changed bit highlighted):

011011010110100101100011001100100110111101110011011011110110011001110100

Therefore, if that one bit were to be accidentally flipped by a dodgy chip, the user could find themselves sending data to the bit-squatter’s domain rather than Microsoft’s official home.
I would assume that this is statistically only a concern for very high-traffic domains, and only if the bit-flipping malfunction is quite widespread.
But Dinaburg, who works for the defense contractor Raytheon, seems to think that it’s serious enough to pay attention to. He wrote:

To verify the seriousness of the issue, I bit-squatted several popular domains, and logged all HTTP and DNS traffic. The results were shocking and surprising, ranging from misdirected DNS queries to requests for Windows updates.
…
I hope to convince the audience that bit-squatting and other attacks enabled by bit-flip errors are practical, serious, and should be addressed by software and hardware vendors.

His conference presentations will also discuss possible hardware and software solutions.
For large companies particularly at risk of typosquatting, the research may also present a good reason to conduct a review of their trademark enforcement strategies.
I’m not going to be in Vegas this year, but I’m looking forward to reading more about Dinaburg’s findings.
The annual Black Hat and DEF CON conferences are frequently the venues where some of the most beautifully creative DNS hacks are first revealed, usually by Dan Kaminsky.
Kaminsky is not discussing DNS this year, judging by the agendas.
The conferences were founded by Jeff Moss, aka The Dark Tangent, who joined ICANN as its chief security officer earlier this year.

Final gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected this week

It’s been over a month since ICANN approved its new top-level domains program, but we still don’t have a final-final version of the Applicant Guidebook.
The resolution approving the program ICANN passed in Singapore called for a number of amendments to be made to the 352-page tome.
The current draft was published May 30, and so far ICANN has not said when the next version – likely to be the version used in the first round of applications – will be released.
I inquired, and now word has come from on high that ICANN’s new gTLD team hopes to have the English version of the new Guidebook published by the end of July – this coming weekend.
The Singapore resolution called for changes to the government Early Warning and Advice processes, added protection for Olympic and Red Cross trademarks, and a modification of the Uniform Rapid Suspension cybersquatting policy.
One has to wonder if the changes outlined in the resolution are the only changes that we’ll see – a month seems like a long time to make just a few fairly minor edits.
The resolution said the board “authorizes staff to make further updates and changes to the Applicant Guidebook as necessary and appropriate”.
The first round of new gTLD applications is set to open January 12.

Could .om become the next typo TLD?

Will Oman’s .om domain follow in the footsteps of .co? Or .cm? Or neither?
The country-code top-level domain is set to be transferred to a new manager following an ICANN vote this coming Thursday.
The redelegation is one item on a unusually light agenda for the board’s July 28 telephone meeting. It’s on the consent agenda, so it will likely be rubber-stamped without discussion.
The domain is currently assigned to Oman Telecommunications Company, but the new owner is expected to be the national Telecommunications Regulatory Authority or an affiliated entity.
The Omani TRA was given authority over the nation’s domain names by Royal Decree in 2002.
It has already successfully had the Arabic-script ccTLD .عمان approved by ICANN for use as an internationalized domain name, but the IDN has not yet been delegated.
AusRegistry International this March won a $1.3 million contract with the TRA to provide software and services for the .om and .عمان registries.
At the time, the TRA said it planned to market both Latin and Arabic extensions to increase the number of domain registrations.
The .om ccTLD is of course a .com typo, like .co and .cm, but squatting is not currently possible due to its strict registration policies.
Only Omani entities may register .om domains today, and only third-level domains (such as example.com.om and example.net.om) may be registered. Domains may not be resold.
I have no particular reason to believe this situation will change under new stewardship, but it will certainly be worth keeping an eye on the TLD for possible policy changes.
When Cameroon’s .cm opened up, it implemented a widely vilified blanket wildcard in an attempt to profit from .com typos.
Colombia’s .co of course took the responsible route, disowning wildcards and embracing strong anti-squatting measures, even if its mere existence was still a headache for some trademark owners.

ICANN fights government gTLD power grab

ICANN has opposed a US move to grant governments veto power over controversial new top-level domain applications.
Cutting to the very heart of Obama administration internet governance policy, ICANN has told the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that its recent proposals would “undermine the very principle of the multi-stakeholder model”.
The stern words came in ICANN’s response to the NTIA’s publication of revisions to the IANA contract, the contract that allows ICANN to retain its powers over the domain name system root.
The NTIA’s Further Notice Of Inquiry contained proposed amendments to the contract, including this:

For delegation requests for new generic TLDS (gTLDs), the Contractor [ICANN] shall include documentation to demonstrate how the proposed string has received consensus support from relevant stakeholders and is supported by the global public interest.

This was widely interpreted as a US attempt to avoid a repeat of the .xxx scandal, when ICANN approved the porn gTLD despite the unease voiced by its Governmental Advisory Committee.
As I noted in June, it sounds a lot like code for “if the GAC objects, you must reject”, which runs the risk of granting veto powers to the GAC’s already opaque consensus-making process.
In his response to the FNOI (pdf), ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom says that the NTIA’s proposal would “replace” the “intensive multi-stakeholder deliberation” that created the newly approved Applicant Guidebook.
He also pointed out the logical inconsistency of asking IANA to remain policy-neutral in one part of the proposed contract, and asking it to make serious policy decisions in another:

The IANA functions contract should not be used to rewrite the policy and implementation process adopted through the bottom-up decision-making process. Not only would this undermine the very principle of the multi-stakeholder model, it would be inconsistent with the objective of more clearly distinguishing policy development from operational implementation by the IANA functions operator.

NTIA head Larry Strickling has been pounding the “multistakeholderism” drum loudly of late, most recently in a speech in Washington and in an interview with Kieren McCarthy of .nxt.
In the .nxt interview, Strickling was quite clear that he believes ICANN should give extra authority to governments when it comes to approving controversial strings.
The NTIA concern – shared by other government entities including the European Commission – is that controversial strings could lead to national blocking and potentially internet fragmentation.
While Strickling declined to comment on the specific provisions of the IANA contract, he did tell .nxt:

If the GAC as a consensus view can’t support a string then my view is that the ICANN Board should not approve the string as to do so in effect legitimizes or sanctions that governments should be blocking at the root zone level. And I think that is bad for the Internet.
Where you’re dealing with sensitive strings, where you’ve engaged the sovereignty of nations, I think it is appropriate to tip the hat a little bit more to governments and listen to what they say. On technical issues it wouldn’t be appropriate but on this particular one, you’ve got to listen a little bit more to governments.

He also indicated that the US would not necessarily stand up for its principles if confronted by substantial objections to a string from other governments:

So we would be influenced – I can’t say it would be dispositive – if a large number of countries have a problem with a particular string, even if it was one that might not be objectionable to the United States government.
And that is out of interest of protecting the Internet’s root from widespread blocking at the top-level by lots of governments.

Does this mean that the US could agree to a consensus GAC objection to a .gay gTLD? A .porn? A .freespeech? It certainly sounds like it.

Olympics make more new gTLD demands

The International Olympic Committee, fresh from its big win at ICANN Singapore, is pushing for more special protections in the new top-level domains program.
ICANN only approved the new gTLD program last month with the proviso that Olympic and Red Cross strings – .redcross and .olympic for example – would be banned as gTLDs in the first round.
The decision was a pretty obvious piece of political bone-throwing to the Governmental Advisory Committee, which had backed the IOC’s cause.
Now the IOC wants to ensure ICANN will ban .olympic and .olympiad in eight additional languages, including four non-Latin scripts, as well as “confusingly similar” strings such as .olympics.
I expect ICANN will probably grant this concession, even though the idea that somebody other than the IOC could successfully apply for .olympics under existing rules has always been ludicrous.
The IOC has probably already spent just as much money lobbying for these changes as it would have cost to file a slam-dunk legal rights objection, as already allowed by the Guidebook.
And that would only have been necessary, of course, in the vanishingly improbable scenario where somebody was stupid enough to pay $185,000 to apply for .olympics in the first place.
But the IOC now also wants all of its brands banned at the second level in all new gTLDs. This seems like a bigger ask, given that ICANN resolved to protect the Olympic marks “for the top level only”.
In a July 1 letter to ICANN (pdf), published today, an IOC lawyer includes suggested text for the Applicant Guidebook, to be included in the default registry agreement, stating:

In recognition of legislative and treaty protection for the Olympic designations, the labels “OLYMPIC” and “OLYMPIAD” shall be initially reserved at the second level. The reservation of an Olympic designation label string shall be released to the extent Registry Operator reaches agreement with the International Olympic Committee.

This would give the Olympic brand as much protection as country names at the second level.
The problem with this, of course, is that it sets the precedent for a specially protected marks list, which ICANN has resisted and which the GAC specifically has not asked for.
It’s a problem ICANN has arguably brought on itself, of course, given that it already specially protects “icann”, “iana” and a number of other strings on spurious technical stability grounds.

CNN asks: Will .xxx domains cost $185,000?

If you’ve ever doubted what a rarefied world we work in, check out this new CNN interview with ICM Registry, which confusingly conflates .xxx with ICANN’s new top-level domains program.
Anchor Pauline Chiou uses the approval of new gTLD program as a segue into a brief interview with ICM president Stuart Lawley about the forthcoming .xxx sunrise period.
“If they want to apply for this one-time block do they have to pay this $185,000?” she asks
She goes on to press Lawley into launching a defense of ICANN’s program that I doubt he was expecting.

You’ll notice that Chiou also refers to ICANN as the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names” and flatteringly describes it as “the group that oversees the development of the internet”.
For a casual viewer, it would be fairly easy to come away from this interview assuming Lawley works for ICANN, and that .xxx domains could cost $185,000.

Why we won’t see dotless domain names

Will http://google ever work?
Will any of the hundreds of .brand gTLDs expected to be approved by ICANN in its first round of new top-level domains resolve without dots?
Will users be able to simply type in the name of the brand they’re looking for into their browser’s address bar and have it resolve to the company’s official site?
Probably not, according to the experts.
ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook answers this question, but you need to know where to look, and to know a little about DNS records, to figure it out what it actually says.
Section 2.2.3.3 of the Guidebook (page 75 of the May 30 PDF) provides a list of the permissible contents of a new gTLD zone.
Specifically not allowed are A and AAAA records, which browsers need in order to find web sites using IPv4 and IPv6 respectively.
“To facilitate a dotless domain, you would need to place an A or a AAAA record in the zone, and these are not on the list of permitted record types,” said Kim Davies, root zone manager at IANA. “The net result is a default prohibition on dotless domains.”
Applicants may be able to obtain A/AAAA records if they specifically ask for them, but this is very likely to trigger an Extended Evaluation and a Registry Services Review, according to Davies and the Guidebook.
There’s an additional $50,000 fee for a Registry Services Review, with no guarantee of success. It will also add potentially months to the application’s processing time.
(Incidentally, ICANN has also banned DNS “wildcards”. You cannot have an infinite SiteFinder-style catch-all at the second level, you need to allocate domain names individually.)
Applicants that successfully obtain A/AAAA records, enabling dotless domains, would face a far greater problem than ICANN’s rules – endpoint software probably won’t support them.
“As it stands, most common software does not support the concept,” Davies said. “There is a common assumption that fully qualified domain names will have at least one dot in them.”
You can type IP addresses, host names, domain names or search terms into browser address bars, and dots are one of the ways the software figures out you’re looking for a domain.
You can test this today. There are already a handful of top-level domains, probably fewer than 20 and all ccTLDs, that have implemented an A record at the TLD level.
On some platforms, you may be able to get URLs such as http://io and http://ac to work.
They don’t revolve on any Windows 7 browser I’ve tested (Firefox/IE/Chrome), but I’d be interested in hearing your experiences, if you’d be so good as to leave a comment below.
Given the lack of software support, it may be a poor use of time and resources to fight ICANN for a dotless gTLD that most internet users won’t even be able to resolve.
According to a recent CircleID article by Paul Vixie, chairman of the Internet Systems Consortium, many browsers treat domains without dots as local resources.
Only if the browser’s “DNS search list” cannot find a local resource matching the dotless TLD will it then go out to the internet to look for it.
In some organizations, a local resource may have been configured which matches a new gTLD. There may be a local server called “mail” for example, which could clash with a .mail gTLD.
A recent article in The Register quoted security people fretting about what would happen if a malicious hacker somehow persuaded ICANN to approve a string such as .localhost or .lan.
These worries appear to be largely reliant on an erroneous belief that getting your hands on a gTLD is going to be as simple as registering a domain name.
In reality, there’s going to be months of technical evaluation – conducted in a fish-bowl, subject to public comment, applicant background checks and, in the case of a request for A records, the aforementioned Registry Services Review – before a gTLD is approved.
If everything works according to plan, security problems will be highlighted by this process and any gTLDs that would break the internet will be caught and rejected.
So it seems very unlikely that we’re going to see domains without dots hitting the web any time soon.
Domain names are designed to help people find you. Dotless domains today will not do that, even if ICANN does approve them.