African Union can’t register .africa domain

File this one under “ironic”. Also file it under “Maarten Botterman might be the worst pen-pal in history.”

It turns out that the African Union has been unable to register its domain of choice in the .africa gTLD — for which AU support was a crucial and divisive deal-breaker — because of rules insisted upon by governments.

The AU Commission’s vice chair, Kwesi Quartey, has asked ICANN to release the string “au” from the list that all contracted registries have to agree to reserve because they match the names or acronyms of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).

The AU is an IGO, so its string is protected from being registered by anyone, including itself.

Quartey wrote, in a letter (pdf) to ICANN chair Botterman:

Unfortunately inclusion of the AU label within the IGO List had the unintended consequence of preventing any third party, including the African Union, from registering the acronym as a domain name (au.africa), yet there is an urgent need to change the African Union digital identifier on the internet from au.int to the .africa domain name.

“Urgent need”, you say? That’s ICANN’s specialty!

Botterman immediately sprang into action and sent his urgent reply (pdf), waiting just 21 short months from Quartey’s July 2020 urgent request to urgently pass the buck to the Governmental Advisory Committee.

Only the GAC can ask for a protected acronym to be removed from the list, he wrote. ICANN Org and board have their hands tied.

Also, removing “au” from the list will release it in all gTLDs, potentially allowing it to be registered by third parties in hundreds of other zones, so watch out for that, Botterman noted.

An additional wrinkle not noted in the letter, which may help or hinder the AU, is that Australia also has rights to the same string under an entirely different new gTLD program reserved list, because it matches the Aussie ccTLD.

You’ll recall that .africa was a contested gTLD in which AU support was the deciding factor.

The AU had originally offered to support a bid from DotConnectAfrica, but after the new gTLD program got underway it withdrew that support and conducted a registry tender that was won by ZA Central Registry, which now runs .africa.

DCA has been pursuing ICANN about this in arbitration and the courts ever since.

ICANN blocks 1.5 million domains, including some three-letter names

A million and a half domain names, including many potential valuable three and four-letter strings, have been been given special protection across all gTLDs under a new ICANN policy.
The long-discussed, highly controversial reservation of the names and acronyms of various intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations has become official ICANN Consensus Policy and will be binding on all gTLD registries and registrars from August this year.
The policy gives special protection to (by my count) 1,282 strings in each of the (again, by my count) 1,243 existing gTLDs, as well as future gTLDs. That comes to over 1.5 million domains.
The strings match the names, and sometimes the acronyms and abbreviations, of recognized Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) as well as the International Olympic Committee, Red Cross, Red Crescent and related movements.
These are all organizations whose names are protected by international law but not necessarily by trademarks.
Protected strings run from obscurities such as “europeanbankforreconstructionanddevelopment” and “internationalunionfortheprotectionofnewvarietiesofplants” to “can”, “eco” and “fao”.
All gTLDs, including legacy TLDs such as .com, are affected by the policy.
The full list of protected strings can be found here.
Any of the Red Cross, IOC and IGO strings already registered will remain registered, and registries are obliged to honor renewal and transfer requests. Nobody’s losing their domains, in other words. But if any are deleted, they must be clawed back and reserved by the registry.
The protected organizations must be given the ability to register their reserved matching names should they wish to, the policy states.
Registries will be able to sell the acronyms of protected INGOs, but will have to offer an “INGO Claims Service”, which mirrors the existing Trademark Claims service, in gTLDs that go live in future.
The policy was developed by ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization and approved by the ICANN board of directors all the way back in April 2014 and has been in implementation talks ever since.
It’s the 14th Consensus Policy to be added to ICANN’s statute book since the organization was formed 20 year ago.
Registries and registrars have until August 1 to make sure they’re compliant. Consensus Policies are basically incorporated into their contracts by reference.
Work on IGO/INGO protections is actually still ongoing. There’s a GNSO Policy Development Process on “curative” rights for IGOs and INGOs (think: UDRP) that is fairly close to finishing its work but is currently mired in a mind-numbing process debate.
UPDATE: This post was updated January 17, 2018 to correct the number of reserved strings and to clarify how INGO names are treated by the policy.

Government anger over two-letter domains

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has clashed with its board of directors over the lack of protections for two-letter domain names that match country codes.
The board has now formally been urged to reconsider its policy to allow registries to sell these names, after angry comments and threats from some GAC members.
Governments from Brazil, Iran, China and the European Union are among at least 10 angered that the names are either not adequately protected or only available for exorbitant prices,
The debate got very heated at ICANN 58 here in Copenhagen on Wednesday morning, during a public session between the GAC and the board, with Iran’s outspoken GAC rep, Kavous Arasteh, almost yelling at Chris Disspain, the board’s point man on the topic.
Arasteh even threatened to take his concerns, if not addressed, to the International Telecommunications Union when it convenes for a plenipotentiary next year.
“Your position is not acceptable. Rejected categorically,” he said.
“The multistakeholder process was not easily accepted by many countries. Still people have difficulty with that,” he said. “We have a plenipotentiary coming in 2018, and we will raise the issue if the matter is not resolved… It is not always commercial, government also has some powers, and we exercise our powers.”
Invoking the ITU is a way to turn a relatively trivial disagreement into an existential threat to ICANN, a typical negotiating tactic of governments that don’t get what they want from ICANN.
The relatively trivial disagreement in this case is ICANN’s decision to allow gTLD registries to release all previously reserved two-letter strings.
In November, ICANN approved a policy that released all two-letter strings on the proviso that registrants have to assert that they will not pass themselves off as affiliated with the countries concerned.
Registries also were given a duty to investigate — but not necessarily act upon — governmental complaints about confusion.
ICANN thinks that this policy is perfectly compliant with the GAC’s latest official advice, supplied following the Helsinki meeting last June, which asked ICANN to:

urge the relevant Registry or the Registrar to engage with the relevant GAC members when a risk is identified in order to come to an agreement on how to manage it or to have a third-party assessment of the situation if the name is already registered.

Disspain patiently pointed out during Wednesday’s session that governments have no legal rights to their ccTLD strings at the second level, and that most of the complaining governments don’t even protect two-letter strings in their own ccTLDs.
But some GAC reps disagreed.
China stated (via the official interpreter): “We believe the board doesn’t have the right or the mandate to decide whether GAC members have the right over two-character domain names.”
While no government spoke in favor of the ICANN policy on Wednesday, the complaining governments do appear to be in a minority of the GAC.
Despite this, they seem to have been effective in swaying fellow committee members to issue some stern new advice. The Copenhagen communique, published last night (pdf), reads:

a. The GAC advises the ICANN Board to:
I. Take into account the serious concerns expressed by some GAC Members as contained in previous GAC Advice
II. Engage with concerned governments by the next ICANN meeting to resolve those concerns.
III. Immediately explore measures to find a satisfactory solution of the matter to meet the concerns of these countries before being further aggravated.
IV. Provide clarification of the decision-making process and of the rationale for the November 2016 resolution, particularly in regard to consideration of the GAC advice, timing and level of support for this resolution.

ICANN is being compelled to retroactively revisit a policy that was issued in compliance with previous GAC advice, it seems.
The next ICANN meeting is being held in Johannesburg in June, so the clock is ticking.
Two-letter domains are valuable properties even in new gTLDs. With each expected to sell for thousands, two-letter names are likely to be a multimillion dollar windfall for even moderately sized portfolio registries.

Buy a $10k .club, get a free T-shirt

.CLUB Domains will today release 9,200 previously reserved .club names into the channel at premium prices.
The registry is also offering free T-shirts to the first 500 people to purchase a premium name for $59.99 and more, personalized with said name.
While the names will become available at 1500 UTC today, the full list is not expected to be published until midnight UTC at landrush.club
CMO Jeff Sass gave the following list of examples of names to be released: watches.club, vino.club, ocean.club, elite.club, driving.club, comicbook.club, Chinese.club and gambling.club.
A thousand of the names are three-character strings.
The first-year prices are suggest at between $100 and $10,000 at the retail level, Sass said.
All premium names renew at standard-name pricing, he said.
The T-shirt offer requires the user to tweet using promotional hashtags and expires December 31.

After shaky start, .blog launches today

The new gTLD .blog goes into general availability today, after some mild controversy about the way the registry allocated reserved domain names.
Knock Knock Whois There, the registry affiliated with WordPress maker Automattic, last week apologized to some would-be customers for declining to honor some landrush pre-registrations.
Some registrants had complained that domains that were accepted for pre-registration were subsequently added to KKWT’s list of registry-reserved names, making them unavailable for registration.
KKWT said in a blog post Thursday that the confusion was due to it not having finalized its reserved list until just before its landrush period kicked off, November 2.
Registrars, including those accepting pre-registrations, were not given the final lists until the last minute.
Landrush applications cost around $250 but were refundable.
KKWT also revealed the make-up of its founders program domains, the 100-strong list of names it was allowed to allocate pre-sunrise.
The founders program currently seems to be a bit of a friends-and-family affair.
Of the 25 live founder sites currently listed, about 20 appear to be owned by the registry, its employees and close affiliates.
The registry said in its blog post that 25 super-generic domains had been given to WordPress.com. It seems the blog host will offer third-level names in these domains for free to its customers.
.blog had 1,743 domains in its zone file yesterday.
General availability starts about 30 minutes from the time this post was posted, at 1500 UTC. Prices are around the $30 mark.

ICM claws back 68 .porn names it accidentally released

ICM Registry has recovered nine .porn and .adult domain names from their registrants after they were accidentally released into the market.
Domains such as ads.porn, hosting.adult and buy.porn were among those snapped up by registrants, despite the fact that they were supposed to be registry-reserved.
ICM CEO Stuart Lawley told DI that a list of 68 .porn/.adult names (34 strings in each of the two gTLDs) have been brought back into the registry’s portfolio.
Only nine had been registered in the less than 24 hours the names were in the available pool, he said.
Lawley said it was his own personal fault for not sending the reserved list to back-end provider Afilias.
The affected registrants have been offered a domain from ICM’s premium list up to the value of $2,500 for each of the names ICM took back, he said.
Only one registrant has so far declined the offer, Lawley said.
Konstantinos Zournas of OnlineDomain, who broke the news about ads.porn yesterday, identifies this former registrant as “James” and reported that he is taking legal advice.
This is not the first time that a registry has accidentally released reserved names into the pool, where they were subsequently snapped up by domainers.
In January, .CLUB Domains accidentally sold credit.club, a name it had planned to keep on its premium reserved list for $200,000, for $10.99.
In that case, .CLUB honored the purchase after the buyer agreed to develop the site, scoring many brownie points in the domain investor community.
Both .CLUB and ICM have terms in their agreements allowing domains accidentally released to be recovered.
In ICM’s case, the names it accidentally released were not premiums, but rather domains that the registry plans to use as part of its own business — not to be sold at any price.
It used buy.xxx as a cornerstone of its .xxx marketing, for example, and it plans to use buy.porn and buy.adult for the exact same purpose.

AIDS.sucks at $1.5 million and other .sucks premium weirdness

The new .sucks gTLD has some interesting pricing for its reserved premium names. Notably aids.sucks, which currently carries a $1.5 million first-year fee at one registrar.
As far as I can tell, 101domain is the only registrar that is currently publishing its prices for .sucks premium names.
I had a bit of a play around with its web site, to see if I could discover which strings the registry has flagged as premium and which appear to be blocked by the registry.
aids.sucks was the most expensive domain I found, by some margin, at $1.5 million.
The presumably puts it within the pocketbook of, say, a pharmaceuticals company, but probably not a support group.
101domain confirmed that the published price was not an error and is based on the registry’s pricing, but said it was considering lowering it.
That price, and all the other prices cited in this article, are retail prices that would include the registrar’s mark-up.
The next-highest price I could find was $450,000 for sex.sucks.
The string “sex” is usually highly priced on registries’ reserved lists. It’s a slightly different story for .sucks, however, because registry policy states that all pornography is banned. The registrant would have to find a different use.
porn.sucks does not appear to carry a premium fee.
I could not find any other physical diseases carrying premium fees, and it seems that cancer.sucks is not available to register.
However, anxiety.sucks is $4,500, depression.sucks is $12,000, and suicide.sucks is available for $16,500.
It’s worth noting at this point that .sucks is not alone in putting premium prices on domains such as these — suicide.club and aids.club both carry $5,500 fees, for example.
Sports domains baseball.sucks, football.sucks, soccer.sucks, basketball.sucks and hockey.sucks all carry $75,000 fees.
On the vices: poker.sucks is also $75,000, gambling.sucks is $42,000, beer.sucks is $27,000 and alcohol.sucks is $4,500. Other strings, such as casino.sucks, do not appear to be premiums.
This patchy premium coverage goes for entertainment too. While television.sucks ($88,500) and music.sucks ($15,000) are premiums, internet.sucks and radio.sucks are not.
In relationships, gay.sucks is listed at $27,000 (lesbian.sucks does not appear to be premium) and dating.sucks is $15,000.
I tried a few common racial slurs and found them to be unavailable. Vox Pop has a policy against cyber-bullying, which may account for that.
racism.sucks costs $52,500, however.
Religious terms blocked?
Some religious terms are considered premium, while others are not available to register.
.sucks is currently in its sunrise period, so unavailable names have presumably been blocked by the registry for some reason.
I found that christianity.sucks carries a premium price tag of $75,000, while church.sucks is $30,000 and christian.sucks is $34,500.
catholic.sucks is not available, nor are jesus.sucks, christ.sucks and moses.sucks.
But catholicism.sucks, protestant.sucks, methodist.sucks baptist.sucks, can be bought for the regular reg fee.
hindu.sucks, hinduism.sucks, buddhist.sucks and buddhism.sucks are all for sale at the usual price.
judaism.sucks and jews.sucks are available at the regular reg fee, but jew.sucks is not available.
islam.sucks, muslim.sucks and muslims.sucks are not currently available. Nor is muhammed.sucks. But mohammed.sucks and muhammad.sucks are available.
I wonder what we can fairly infer from these apparent discrepancies.
Registry defensives?
As you might expect, the name of the registry is reserved — that happens in pretty much ever gTLD.
It remains to be seen whether Vox Pop will eat its own dog food and allow third-party criticism on its site.
It turns out johnberard.sucks (Vox Populi CEO) is not available. Neither are the names of Rob Hall, CEO of Vox Pop parent Momentous, and Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling, who is involved in the TLD is some currently undisclosed capacity.
rob.sucks, john.sucks and frank.sucks are all not available to register.
As controls, I checked out other common male first names and the full names of other major registry/registrar CEOs and found them all available.
It will be interesting to see if any of these names are ever developed into criticism web sites by their owners.