First two proper registrars join Web3 Domain Alliance

Two significant ICANN-accredited registrars have signed up to a body that commits them to, among other things, endorse the position that blockchain-based alt-root TLDs have trademark rights to their strings.

United-Domains and MarkMonitor are among about 50 companies now listed as new members of the Web3 Domain Alliance, the association created late last year by well-financed alt-root registry Unstoppable Domains.

The other companies listed appear to be players in the crypto/blockchain/Web3/NFT space, rather than the traditional domain name industry.

The moves by the two registrars are significant because the Alliance’s platform stands to be a significant thorn in ICANN’s side when it finally opens up the next new gTLD application round, which could happen in the next couple years.

According to the Alliance’s web site, members have to commit not only to promote the market acceptance and interoperability of blockchain alt-root domains, but also:

To advocate for the policy position that NFT domain registry owner-operators create trademark rights in their web3 TLDs through first commercial use with market penetration.

This could be a big problem in the next new gTLD round, as current ICANN policy proposals, developed before the likes of Unstoppable became such a big deal, do not specifically account for claims by alt-root providers.

Trademark owners will be able to challenge gTLD applications if the applied-for string matches their mark, but historically it’s not really been possible for companies to obtain trademarks on TLDs.

Along with the membership announcement, Unstoppable has said that it will not enforce its patents against any Alliance member that implements its standards, provided the member agrees not to enforce its own patents.

United-Domains is part of United-Internet, the same company that runs IONOS, 1&1, Sedo and InternetX.

MarkMonitor, since November, has been part of Newfold Digital, the parent of Network Solutions, Web.com, Register.com, BigRock, SnapNames, and others.

MarkMonitor to join Newfold in $300 million deal

Corporate domain registrar MarkMonitor is to be sold to Newfold Digital for $302.5 million cash, the companies announced today.

The company’s current owner, Clarivate, bought NarkMonitor for an undisclosed sum in 2017 and sold off its brand protection unit two years later.

So Newfold’s getting the registrar business and domain management services to add to its stable, which already includes Network Solutions, Register.com, Web.com, and Domain.com.

MarkMonitor has about a million gTLD domains under management and an unknown number of ccTLD domains.

The company has about 2,000 clients around the world, the companies said in a press release.

MarkMonitor expects about $80 million of revenue and $35 million of EBITDA this year.

Floodgates, open! Trademark Clearinghouse now supports .com

The Trademark Clearinghouse has added .com to the roster of TLDs supported by its infringement notification service.

The Deloitte-managed service recently announced the change to its Ongoing Notification Service, which came into effect late last month.

The update means TMCH subscribers will receive alerts whenever a .com domain is registered that contains their trademark, helping them to decide whether to pursue enforcement actions such as UDRP.

Unlike the ICANN-mandated 90-day Trademark Claims period that accompanies the launch of each new gTLD, the registrant herself does not receive an alert of possible infringement at point of registration.

The service, which is not regulated by ICANN, is still free to companies that have their marks registered in the TMCH, which charges an extra dollar for every variation of a mark the holder wishes to monitor.

Such services have been commercially available from the likes of MarkMonitor for 20 years or more. The TMCH has been offering it for new gTLDs since they started launching at the end of 2013.

With the .com-shaped gaping hole now plugged, two things could happen.

First, clients may find a steep increase in the number of alerts they receive — .com is still the biggest-selling and in volume terms the most-abused TLD.

Second, commercial providers of similar services now find themselves competing against a free rival with an ICANN-enabled captive audience.

The upgrade comes at the tail end of the current wave of the new gTLD program. With the .gay launch out of the way and other desirable open TLDs tied up in litigation, there won’t be much call for TMCH’s core services for the next few years.

It also comes just a couple months after the .com zone file started being published on ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service, but I expect that’s just a coincidence.

Mucho weirdness as Google “forgets” to renew major domain

Google has lost control of a key domain name, breaking millions of URLs used by its customers.

It emerged today that the domain blogspot.in expired in May and was deleted around June 24.

It was promptly re-registered via a non-ICANN registrar based in India called Domainming and put up for sale on Sedo for $5,999.

Blogspot is the brand used by people using Google’s Blogger platform. While the .com is the primary domain, the company localizes URLs to the ccTLD of the visitor’s home country in most cases.

There are currently over four million blogspot.in URLs listed in Google’s index.

Most of the reports I’ve read today chalk the loss of the domain down to corporate forgetfulness, but it appears to be weirder than that.

Google uses MarkMonitor to manage its portfolio, so if it is a case of the registrar forgetting to renew a client’s domain, it would be hugely embarrassing for whoever looks after Google over there.

However, historical Whois records archived by DomainTools suggests something odder is going on. It looks like MarkMonitor would have been prevented from renewing the domain by the .in registry.

These records show that from June 1, 2018, blogspot.in has had a serverRenewProhibited status applied, basically meaning the registry won’t allow the registrar to renew the domain.

ICANN describes the code like this:

This status code indicates your domain’s Registry Operator will not allow your registrar to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion.

Often, this status indicates an issue with your domain that needs to be addressed promptly. You should contact your registrar to request more information and resolve the issue. If your domain does not have any issues, and you simply want to renew it, you must first contact your registrar and request that they work with the Registry Operator to remove this status code. This process can take longer than it does for clientRenewProhibited because your registrar has to forward your request to your domain’s registry and wait for them to lift the restriction.

The domain was placed into clientDeleteProhibited, clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, serverDeleteProhibited, serverTransferProhibited, and serverUpdateProhibited statuses at the same time.

Basically, it was fully locked down at both registrar and registry levels.

All of those status codes apart from serverRenewProhibited were removed in the first week of May this year, after almost two years.

The registry for .in is government-affiliated NIXI, but the back-end provider is Neustar.

At the time the domain was locked down, Afilias ran the back end, and there was a somewhat fractious battle going on between the two companies for the .in contract.

Judging by the changing status codes, it appears that two years ago somebody — Google, MarkMonitor, NIXI or Afilias — put the domain into a state in which it could not be renewed, transferred or deleted.

For some reason, the domain stayed like that until just a couple of weeks before it expired, when the prohibitions on deletion and transfer were removed.

I’ve been unable to find any information about legal trouble Google had in India two years ago that would have led to this unusual state of affairs.

It doesn’t seem to be a simple case of forgetfulness, however.

Hammock swings from Rightside to MarkMonitor

Statton Hammock has joined brand protection registrar MarkMonitor as its new vice president of global policy and industry development.
He was most recently VP of business and legal affairs at Rightside, the portfolio gTLD registry that got acquired by Donuts in July. He spent four years there.
The new gig sounds like a broad brief. In a press release, MarkMonitor said Hammock will oversee “the development and execution of MarkMonitor’s global policy, thought leadership, business development and awareness strategy”.
MarkMonitor nowadays is a business of Clarivate Analytics under president Chris Veator, who started at the company in July.

Former MarkMonitor execs join new brand protection registrar

Two former MarkMonitor executives have teamed up with a Fairwinds co-founder to launch a new “next generation” brand protection registrar.
The new company is Brandsight. It was set up by CEO Phil Lodico, who left brand consultancy Fairwinds about a year ago, and was accredited by ICANN earlier this month.
The first two hires are Matt Serlin, who until a couple months ago was VP of client services at MarkMonitor, and Elisa Cooper, who joins after being VP of marketing at the intellectual property management company Lecorpio.
Cooper, who also worked for MarkMonitor in the same position until a couple of years ago, will be Brandsight’s head of marketing and policy. Serlin will head up operations and client services.
The two told me yesterday that Brandsight will attempt to differentiate itself from its alma maters through a combination of better technology, expertise and use of data.
Both have many years experience in the domain industry and ICANN and, one imagines, thick contacts books of potential clients.
The Brandsight site, which went live today, will feature improved workflow via a streamlined user interface, they said.
The company also hopes “better leverage big data to help companies make better decisions and streamline processes around domain management”, Cooper said.
“Legacy registrars haven’t been focused on building new technology, some for almost 10 years,” she said.
It looks like it’s going to be a boutique operation at first — I believe Lodico, Serlin and Cooper are the only three employees right now — but Cooper said the plan is to staff up over the remainder of the year in areas such as sales.
The idea is to be a company that is purely focused on corporate domain services as its core competency, as opposed to what they called the “legacy” larger registrars that have domains as just one service among many, Cooper and Serlin said.
Brandsight is based in New York state and funded by private investors.

MarkMonitor tells .feedback to take a hike after “breach” claim

MarkMonitor is to voluntarily terminate its registrar relationship with Top Level Spectrum after the .feedback registry hit it with a breach of contract notice.
Troy Fuhriman, director of domain management at the registrar, told DI today that the company has just sent TLS a letter stating that it no longer wishes to sell .feedback names.
TLS earlier this month accused MarkMonitor of breaking the terms of its Registry-Registrar Agreements by leaking details of that agreement to media outlets including yours truly.
While TLS CEO Jay Westerdal told DI that an apology from MarkMonitor would be enough to make the termination threat go away, MarkMonitor has clearly decided against that route.
“We’re going to terminate all accreditation agreements for .feedback,” he said. “In part it’s a response to ICANN’s finding that Top Level Spectrum violated its Pubic Interest Commitments, and what we believe is a retaliatory breach notification from them.”
MarkMonitor and a small posse of high-profile clients including Facebook recently won a Public Interest Commitment Dispute Resolution Policy complaint against .feedback, related to the transparency of its launch policies and pricing.
It was in that complaint that MarkMonitor released details contained in the RRA that TLS deemed to be confidential.
Terminating the agreement means that MarkMonitor will no longer be able to sell .feedback names as a registrar and will have to transfer its existing registrations to a different registrar.
Not many clients are affected. MarkMonitor had only 45 .feedback domains under management at the last count (which was still enough to make it the fourth-largest independent .feedback registrar).
Most of these domains will be moved to 101domain, which with fewer than 200 domains is still the leading .feedback registrar.
UPDATE: Westerdal says that MarkMonitor was in fact terminated on Monday. Neither party claims that MarkMonitor made any effort to comply with the breach notice by apologizing.

.feedback threatens to shut off MarkMonitor

Top Level Spectrum, the controversial .feedback gTLD registry, has threatened to de-accredit MarkMonitor unless it apologizes for “breaching” its registrar contract.
The move is evidently retaliation for the MarkMonitor-coordinated complaint about .feedback’s launch policies, which last month led to TLS being found in breach of its own ICANN contract.
De-accreditation would mean MarkMonitor would not be able to sell .feedback domains any more, and its .feedback names would be transferred to another registrar.
In a letter to MarkMonitor (pdf) yesterday, TLS informs the registrar that it breached its Registry-Registrar Agreement by releasing said RRA to “the press” as part of the exhibits to its Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Policy complaint.

The problem we take issue with is that your exhibit should have redacted the “Confidential RRA Agreement” prior to being handed over to ” the press ” and it should have been marked in an appropriate way so ICANN would not publicly disclose it. As we can tell no precautions were taken and as a party to the action we find that you violated the confidentiality of the agreement.

I understand “the press” in this case includes DI and others. We published the document last October. We were not asked to keep anything confidential.
The RRA section of the document is marked as “private and confidential” and contains terms forbidding the disclosure of such information, but the name of the registrar is redacted.
TLS believes the undisclosed registrar is actually Facebook, a MarkMonitor client and one of the several parties to the PICDRP complaint against .feedback.
While Facebook may not have actually signed the RRA, MarkMonitor certainly did and therefore should not have released the document, TLS says.
The letter concludes that the “breach… seems incurable” and says: “Please let us know what actions you will take to cure this breach with us or we will have no other option but to de-accredited your Registrars.”
Despite this, TLS CEO Jay Westerdal tells us that an apology will be enough to cure the alleged breach.
The threat is reminiscent of a move pulled by Vox Populi, the .sucks registry, last year. Vox deaccredited MarkMonitor rival Com Laude in June for allegedly leaking a confidential document to DI (I was never able to locate or identify the allegedly leaked document, and had not published any document marked as confidential).
TLS was found in breach of the Public Interest Commitments in its ICANN contract last month by a PICDRP panel. It was the first registry to suffer such a loss.
The PICDRP panel found that .feedback’s launch had not been conducted in a transparent way, but it stopped short of addressing MarkMonitor’s complaints about “fraudulent” behavior.

.feedback gTLD in breach of contract after big brand “fraud” claims

ICANN has slapped .feedback operator Top Level Spectrum with a contract breach notice after a huge complaint about alleged fraud filed by a gang of big brands.
The company becomes the third new gTLD to be hit by a breach notice, and the first to receive one as a result of losing a Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Process case.
While TLS dodged the “fraud” charges on a technicality, the breach is arguably the most serious found by ICANN in a new gTLD registry to date.
The three-person PICDRP panel found TLS was in violation of the following commitment from its registry agreement:

Registry Operator will operate the TLD in a transparent manner consistent with general principles of openness and non-discrimination by establishing, publishing and adhering to clear registration policies.

But TLS dodged the more serious charges of “fraudulent” behavior, which it denied, largely on the technicality that its PICs only require it to bar its registrants from such behavior.
There’s nothing in the PICs preventing the registry from behaving fraudulently, so the PICDRP panel declined to rule on those allegations, saying only that they “may be actionable in another forum”.
The complainants, which filed their 1,800-page complaint in October, were MarkMonitor and a bunch of its clients, including Adobe, American Apparel, Best Buy, Facebook, Levi and Verizon.
They’d claimed among other things that 70% of .feedback domains were trademarked names actually registered by the registry, and that TLS had stuffed each site with reviews either paid for or scraped from services such as Yelp!.
They claimed that Free.Feedback, a free domains service hosted by an affiliated entity, had been set up to auto-populate Whois records with the names of brand owners (or whoever owned the matching .com domain) even when the registrant was not the brand owner.
This resulted in brand owners receiving “phishing” emails related to domains they’d never registered, the complainants stated.
TLS denied all all the allegations of fraud, but the PICDRP panel wound up not ruling on many of them anyway, stating:

the Panel finds that Respondent’s Registry Operator Agreement contains no covenant by the Respondent to not engage in fraudulent and deceptive practices.

The only violations it found related to the transparency of .feedback’s launch policies.
The panel found that TLS had not given 90 days notice of policy changes and had not made its unusual pricing model (which included an extra fee for domains that did not resolve to live sites) transparent.
The registry had a number of unusual launch programs, which I outlined in December 2015 but which were apparently not adequately communicated to registrars and registrants.
The panel also found that Free.Feedback had failed to verify the email addresses of registrants and had failed to make it easy for trademark owners to cancel domains registered in their names without their consent.
Finally, it also found that TLS had registered a bunch of trademark-match domain names to itself during the .feedback sunrise period:

self-allocating or reserving domains that correspond to the trademark owners’ marks during the Sunrise period constitutes a failure by the Respondent to adhere to Clause 6 of its Registration and Launch policies, versions 1 and 2. According to the policies, Sunrise period is exclusively reserved for trademark owners

TLS, in its defense, denied that it had self-allocated these names and told the panel it had “accidentally” released them into the zone file temporarily.
As a result of the PIC breaches found by the panel, ICANN Compliance has issued a breach notice (pdf) against the company.
To cure the breach, and avoid having its Registry Agreement taken away, TLD has to, by April 15:

Provide ICANN with corrective and preventative action(s), including implementation dates and milestones, to ensure that Top Level Spectrum will operate the TLD feedback in a transparent manner consistent with general principles of openness and nondiscrimination by establishing, publishing and adhering to clear registration policies;

That seems to me like it’s probably vague enough to go either way, but I’d be surprised if TLS doesn’t manage to comply.

Big brands condemn “fraudulent” .feedback gTLD in ICANN complaint

Top Level Spectrum has been accused today of running the gTLD .feedback in a “fraudulent and deceptive” manner.
Over a dozen famous brands, corralled by corporate registrar MarkMonitor, today formally complained to ICANN that .feedback is a “complete sham”.
They reckon that the majority of .feedback domains belong to entities connected to the registry, violate trademarks, and have been stuffed with bogus and plagiarized reviews.
TLS denies any involvement.
MarkMonitor clients Adobe, American Apparel, Best Buy, Facebook, Levi and Verizon are among those that today filed a Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Policy complaint with ICANN.
PICDRP is the mechanism third parties can use to complain about new gTLD registries they believe are in breach of the Public Interest Commitments found in their registry contracts.
The 50-page complaint (pdf), which comes with hundreds of pages of supporting documentation spread over 36 exhibits, purports to show TLS engaging in an “escalating pattern of discriminatory, fraudulent and deceptive registry misconduct”.
While the allegations of wrongdoing are fairly broad, the most interesting appears to be the claim that TLS quietly registered thousands of .feedback names matching trademarks to itself and then filled them with reviews either ripped off from Yelp! or supplied by overseas freelancers working for pennies.
TLS denies that it did any of this.
The .feedback registry is closely tied to the affiliated entity Feedback SAAS, which offers a hosted social platform for product/company reviews. Pricing for .feedback domains is dependent on whether registrants use this service or not.
The complaint states:

the overwhelming majority of domain names registered and activated within the .FEEDBACK TLD — over seventy percent (70%) — are currently owned and operated by Respondent [TLS], and parties working in concert with Respondent
…
Respondent has solicited and paid numerous third parties, including professional freelance writers who offer to post a set number of words for a fee, to write fabricated reviews regarding Complainants’ products and services.
…
These ostensibly independent reviews from ordinary consumers are intended to give the appearance of legitimate commentary within .FEEDBACK sites, when, in fact, the reviews are a complete sham.

An investigation carried out by MarkMonitor (pdf) showed that of the 2,787 .feedback domains registered up to July 31, 73% were registered to just five registrants.
The top registrant, Liberty Domains LLC of Las Vegas, owned 47% of these domains.
MarkMonitor believes this company (which it said does not show up in Nevada company records) and fourth-biggest registrant Core Domains LLC (based at the same Vegas mail forwarding service) are merely fronts for TLS, though it has no smoking gun proving this connection.
TLS CEO Jay Westerdal denies the company is affiliated with Liberty.
The MarkMonitor investigation counted 27,573 reviews on these sites, but 22% of them purported have been written prior to the date the domain was registered, in some cases by years.
The company reckons hundreds of reviews can be traced to five freelance writers who responded to February job ads looking for people who could write and post 10 150-word reviews per hour.
Other reviews appear to have been copied wholesale from Yelp! (this can be easily verified by visiting almost any .feedback site and searching for exact-match content on Google).
Westerdal told DI last week that registrants can use an API to import reviews.
The brands’ complaint goes on to criticize TLS for its Free.feedback offering, a very odd, bare-bones web site which seems to offer free .feedback domains.
When you type a domain or email address into the form on Free.feedback, it offers to give you the equivalent .feedback domain for free, automatically populating a second form with the Whois record of the original domain.
According to the complaint, after somebody registers a free .feedback domain, Feedback SAAS starts contacting the person listed in the Whois about their “free trial registration” regardless of whether they were actually the person who signed up the the domain. The complaint states:

Complainants and multiple other trademark owners who received such email notifications from Feedback SAAS and TLS registrars never visited the FREE.FEEDBACK website, and they never requested a free trial registration in the .FEEDBACK TLD

I’ve been unable to fully replicate this experience in attempts to test Free.feedback.
The complaint alleges multiple breaches of the PICs in the .feedback ICANN Registry Agreement.
The brands want ICANN Compliance to conduct a thorough investigation of .feedback, for all Free.feedback domains with phony Whois to be terminated, and for affected trademark owners to get refunds. They also want their legal costs paid by TLS.
ICANN does not typically publish the outcome of PICDRP complaints. Indeed, this is only the second one I’m aware of. It’s difficult to judge what MarkMonitor’s posse’s chances of success are.