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ICANN says “no impact” from TMCH downtime

Kevin Murphy, May 22, 2015, Domain Registrars

The 10-hour outage in the Trademark Clearinghouse’s key database had no impact on domain registrations, ICANN says.
We reported earlier this week that the TMCH’s Trademark Database had been offline for much of last Friday, for reasons unknown.
We’d heard concerns from some users that the downtime may have allowed registrants to register domain names matching trademarks without triggering Trademark Claims notices.
But that worry may have been unfounded. ICANN told DI:

The issue occurred when two nodes spontaneously restarted. The cause of this restart is still under investigation. Although both nodes came back up, several services such as the network interface, TSA Service IP and the SSH daemon did not. All TMDB Services except the CNIS service were unavailable during the outage. From a domain registration point of view there should have been no impact.

CNIS is the Claim Notice Information Service, which provides registrars with Trademark Claims notice data.

Concern over mystery TMCH outage

Kevin Murphy, May 20, 2015, Domain Tech

The Trademark Clearinghouse is investigating the causes and impact of an outage that is believed to have hit its primary database for 10 hours last Friday.
Some in the intellectual property community are concerned that the downtime may have allowed people to register domain names without receiving Trademark Claims notices.
The downtime was confirmed as unscheduled by the TMCH on a mailing list, but requests for more information sent its way today were deflected to ICANN.
An ICANN spokesperson said that the outage is being analyzed right now, which will take a couple of days.
The problem affected the IBM-administered Trademark Database, which registrars query to determine whether they need to serve up a Claims notice when a customer tries to register a domain that matches a trademark.
I gather that registries are supposed to reject registration attempts if they cannot get a definitive answer from the TMDB, but some are concerned that that may not have been the case during the downtime.
Over 145,000 Claims notices have been sent to trademark owners since the TMCH came online over a year ago.
(UPDATE: This story was edited May 21 to clarify that it is the TMCH conducting the investigation, rather than ICANN.)

New gTLD launches: registrar coverage at less than 40% of the market

Kevin Murphy, January 7, 2014, Domain Registrars

Registrars representing less than 40% of the gTLD market are ready to offer new gTLDs during their launch phases, according to the latest stats from ICANN.
ICANN released yesterday a list (pdf) of the just 21 registrars that have signed the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement and have been certified by IBM to use the Trademark Clearinghouse database.
Signing the 2013 RAA is a requirement for registrars that want to sell new gTLDs. Almost 150 registrars are currently on the new contract.
But being certified for the TMCH is also a requirement to sell names during the first 90 days of each new gTLD’s general availability, when the Trademark Claims service is running.
Together, the 21 registrars that have done both accounted for 59 million registered gTLD domain names (using August’s official numbers), which translated to 39.5% of the gTLD market.
It’s a high percentage due to the presence of Go Daddy, with its 48.2 million gTLD names. The only other top-10 registrar on the list is 1&1.
Twelve of the 21 registrars on the list had fewer than 40,000 names under management. A couple have fewer than 100.
Only one new gTLD, dotShabaka Registry’s شبكة., is currently in its Trademark Claims period.
The second batch, comprising Donuts’ first seven launches, isn’t due to hit until January 27, giving just a few weeks for the certified list to swell.
There’ll be 33 new gTLD in Claims by the end of February.
The rate at which new registrars are being certified by IBM is not especially encouraging either. Only four have been added in the last month.
Some registrars may of course choose to work via other registrars, as a reseller, rather than getting certified and doing the TMCH integration work themselves.