ICANN insists it is working on linkification

Having been accused of ignoring the lack of universal support for new gTLDs in favor of virtue-signalling its support for multilingual domain names, ICANN has now insisted it is working on the problem.

ICANN chair Tripti Sinha said in a letter (pdf) published today that ICANN staff have been “actively engaging” with the software developer community on a “multitude of efforts” aimed at getting Universal Acceptance for all domain names.

She was responding to an October 2023 letter from .tube CEO Rami Schwartz, whose solo research last year uncovered the fact that many major app developers — including WhatsApp maker Meta — were relying on hard-coded TLD lists up to eight years old to validate domains.

This meant domains in the hundreds of TLDs that went live after November 2015 were not being detected as domains, and therefore not automatically “linkified” into clickable links, in many near-ubiquitous apps and web sites.

But Sinha insists that ICANN has been putting resources into the problem, including creating a “technical UA team” that is “actively engaging with technical organizations and communities, raising bug reports, as well as contributing open-source code where possible”.

The team has been participating in hackathons and conferences to push the UA message, she said, and has engaging in web sites such as Stack Overflow (where coders ask each other questions about tricky programming problems) to educate developers.

She named Meta and WordPress as software companies ICANN has been reaching out to directly.

“The ICANN org team has been meeting with META and reported UA related issues to them, including linkification. The team has recently also reported the issues shared by you related to more recently delegated TLDs, including .TUBE,” she told Schwartz. “META continues to look into these issues and is making progress towards resolving them.”

She also pointed out that ICANN and the ICANN-funded Universal Acceptance Steering Group held a Universal Acceptance Day last year and will conduct another this year.

UA Day is actually dozens of individual events — over 50 last year — that took place across the world over the space of a couple of months. This year’s event appears to be equally diverse, with events taking place from March to May across many locations mainly in Asia, Africa and South America.

The UASG supplies PowerPoint presentations and videos to each event to use if they wish, but the focus is very much on the substantially trickier problem of UA for internationalized domain names — domains or email addresses that use non-Latin scripts or diacritics not present in ASCII — rather than the lower-hanging fruit of getting developers to update their TLD lists more frequently.

Even though there hasn’t been a new TLD delegation for a couple of years, there were still almost 30 TLDs deleted from the DNS root last year. The number of valid TLDs changes perhaps more frequently than many developers realize.

Walking down the street somewhere, I once saw a barbershop called “Every Six Weekly”. Crap brand, certainly, but the message lodged itself in my borderline autistic nerd brain — that’s how often society expects me to get my hair cut, every six weeks.

Maybe ICANN should try something like that.

.tube registry claims victory in linkification fight

Latin American Telecom, the company that runs the .tube gTLD, has claimed victory in its fight to get popular social media apps to “linkify” more than 400 TLDs that have gone live in the last eight years.

As I reported two weeks ago, CEO Rami Schwartz managed to figure out that any TLD that entered the root after November 2015 wasn’t being recognized by apps such as WhatsApp, the world’s most-popular messaging app.

This meant that any attempt to share a URL in .tube or 467 other TLDs (including major dot-brands and geo-gTLDs) would be frustrated by the fact that WhatsApp would not automatically turn the URL into a clickable link.

The root cause of the problem appeared to be a library used in the Android operating system, which had a hard-coded list of valid TLDs that had not been updated since November 2015.

In a press release today, the registry reported that the library in question was updated on September 11 (hey, that’s the same day I published my article!) with a brand-new list of TLDs.

So it seems the linkification issue will be solved, once the updated software actually makes it to affected devices.

There are not many TLDs in the pipeline for delegation for the next four years — maybe some contested 2012-round stragglers and the odd IDN ccTLD — so this particular issue is unlikely to cause much more upset for a while.

“This story exemplifies how the perseverance of a small company unearthed a Universal Acceptance issue of global significance, rallying the support of industry leaders and setting a precedent for cooperation that can positively impact billions of internet users,” the registry said in its press release.

Is this why WhatsApp hates some TLDs but not others?

Developers of major pieces of internet software, including the world’s most-popular messaging app, may be relying on seriously outdated lists of top-level domains.

That’s the picture that seems to be emerging from one new gTLD operator’s quest to discover why WhatsApp doesn’t recognize its TLD, and many others including major dot-brands, as valid.

And ICANN isn’t interested in helping, despite its declared focus on Universal Acceptance, the CEO of this registry claims.

When most social media apps detect the user has inputted a URL or domain name, they automatically “linkify” it so it can be easily clicked or tapped without the need for copy/paste.

But when Rami Schwartz of new gTLD .tube discovered that .tube URLs sent via WhatsApp, said to have two billion users, were not being linkified, despite the TLD being delegated by ICANN almost eight years ago, he set out to find out why.

Schwartz compiled a spreadsheet (.xlsx) listing which gTLDs are recognized by WhatsApp and which are not and discovered a rough cut-off point in November 2015. TLDs delegated before then are linkified, those delegated after were not.

According to my database, 468 TLDs have been delegated since December 2015, though not all are still in the root. That’s about a third of all TLDs.

This means that, for example, .microsoft domains linkify but .amazon and .apple domains do not; .asia domains linkify but .africa and .arab domains do not; .london works but .abudhabi doesn’t. Even .verisign missed the cut-off.

If WhatsApp users include a “www.” or “http://” then the app will linkify the domain, even if the specified TLD does not exist.

During the course of a discussion on the web site of the Public Suffix List — which maintains an open-source list of all TLDs and the levels at which names may be registered — it was discovered that the problem may be deeper rooted than the WhatsApp app.

It turns out a library in the Android operating system contains a hard-coded list of valid TLDs which hasn’t been updated since November 24, 2015.

Any app relying on Android to validate TLDs may therefore be susceptible to the same problem — any TLD younger than seven years won’t validate. Schwartz tells us he’s experienced the same issues with the Facebook app on Android devices.

The problem is of particular concern to Schwartz because he’s been planning to market .tube as a form of link-shortening service, and without full support among the most popular messaging apps such a service would be much less attractive.

“I can’t launch this now if it’s not going to work in WhatsApp, if it’s not going to work in Facebook,” he said.

While engineers from Facebook/WhatsApp parent Meta now seem to be looking into the problem, Schwartz says his complaints fell on deaf ears for a long time.

He additionally claims that “ICANN doesn’t really care about universal acceptance” and his attempts to get the Org to pay attention to the problem have been brushed off, despite ICANN making Universal Acceptance one of its key priorities.

Schwartz says ICANN is much more interested in UA when it comes to internationalized domain names (those in non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese) and not the technical issues that underpin the functionality of all TLDs.

“I’ve no idea why ICANN makes the decisions it makes, but I think it has to do with inclusion, I think it has to do with diversity, I think it has to do with a lot of things — not technical,” he said. “But this is a technical issue.”

ICANN maintains a set of UA technical resources on its web site and supports the work of the independent Universal Acceptance Steering Group.

Chutzpah alert! “Tube” domainer objects to Google’s .tube gTLD bid

Remember the “mystery gTLD applicant” that had promised to campaign against Google’s closed generic gTLD applications?
It turns out the company behind the campaign is actually Latin American Telecom, one of the three applicants for .tube, and that part of its strategy is a Legal Rights Objection.
According to a copy of the LRO kindly provided to DI this week, LAT claims that if Google gets to run .tube it would harm its Tube brand, for which it has a US trademark.
If you haven’t heard of Latin American Telecom, it, despite the name, appears to be primarily a domainer play. Founded in Mexico and based in Pittsburgh, its main claim to fame seems to be owning Mexico.com.
The company says it has also been building a network of roughly 1,500 video sites, all of which have a generic word or phrase followed by “tube.com” in their domains, since 2008.
It owns, for example, the domains IsraelTube.com, MozartTube.com, LabradorTube.com, AmericanWaterSpanielTube.com, DeepSeaFishingTube.com… you get the idea.
They’re all cookie-cutter microsites that pull their video content from Vimeo. Most or all of them appear to be hosted on the same server.
I’d be surprised if some of LAT’s domains, such as BlockbusterTube.com, PlaymateTube.com, FortyNinersTube.com and NascarTube.com, didn’t have trademark issues of their own.
But LAT was also granted a US trademark for the word TUBE almost a year ago, following a 2008 application, which gives it a basis to bring an LRO against Google.
According to its LRO:

The proposed purposes of and registrant limitations proposed for .TUBE by Google demonstrate that the intended purpose of Google’s .TUBE acquisition is to deprive other potential registry operators of an opportunity to build gTLD platforms for competition and innovation that challenge YouTube’s Internet video dominance. It is clear that Google’s intended use for .TUBE is identical to Objector’s TUBE Domain Channels and directly competes with Objector’s pre-existing trademark rights

There’s quite a lot of chutzpah being deployed here.
Would LAT’s ramschackle collection of –tube domains have any meaning at all were YouTube not so phenomenally successful? Who’s leveraging whose brand here, really?
For LAT to win its objection it has to show, among other things, that its TUBE trademark is famous and that Google being awarded .tube would impair its brand in some way.
But the company’s LRO is vague when it come to answering “Whether and to what extent there is recognition in the relevant sector of the public of the sign corresponding to the gTLD”.
It relies surprisingly heavily on its Twitter accounts — which have fewer followers than, for example, DI — rather than usage of its web sites, to demonstrate the success of the TUBE brand.
I don’t think its objection to Google’s .tube application is a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination.
There is a third .tube gTLD applicant, Donuts, but it has not yet received any LROs, according to WIPO’s web site.