YouPorn owner acquires fellow .xxx plaintiff

Manwin, the porn company currently suing ICANN and ICM Registry over the .xxx launch, has acquired co-plaintiff Digital Playground.
“To me this deal is no different than the acquisition of Pixar by Disney,” Digital Playground CEO Ali Joone said, according to Xbiz.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While Digital Playground was named as a plaintiff on the .xxx lawsuit, Manwin was clearly the lead. Manwin has also launched a solo Independent Review Process arbitration case against ICANN.
The company is one of the biggest porn producers on the internet, owning YouPorn as well as managing Playboy’s web presence under license.
Manwin claims that ICM’s launch amounted to “extortion”, and that it gave away its lack of respect for the porn industry by selling premium names to domainers including Frank Schilling and Mike Berkens.
ICM’s response to the lawsuit is due later this week.

The first .xxx phishing site?

Those readers following @domainincite on Twitter may have noticed I spent a lot of time on Friday Googling for .xxx web sites, to get an idea how the new namespace is being used.
All in the name of research, of course.
As well as the expected video, dating and forum sites, I found one or two inexplicably safe-for-work oddities.
I also found what I believe may be the first .xxx site set up for phishing.
The domain name signin.xxx, registered to an individual in Ohio, looks extremely suspicious, especially when you consider the subdomains the registrant has created.
Here’s a screenshot of the URL www.hotmail.com.signin.xxx:

I have no evidence that the site has been used in a phishing attack, or that the registrant intends to use it in one. However, it seems pretty clear that he’s noticed the potential for abuse.
The page’s footer offers to sell the domain for a seven-figure sum.

CADNA calls for mandatory .xxx-style sunrises

The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse has asked ICANN to make one-time trademark blocks, much like those offered by .xxx operator ICM Registry, mandatory in most new top-level domains.
In a letter to ICANN bosses (pdf) sent last week, CADNA president Josh Bourne wrote:

ICANN should consider including a requirement in the Applicant Guidebook that all new gTLD registries that choose to sell second-level domains to registrants adopt a low-cost, one-time block for trademark owners to protect their marks in perpetuity.
…
ICANN should require registries to give brand owners the option to buy low-cost blocks on their trademarks before any registration period (Sunrise or Landrush) opens. This can be offered at a lower cost than sunrise registrations have been priced at in the past – this precedent has been set with the blocks offered in .XXX, where the blocks are made in perpetuity for a single, nonrecurring fee.

The recommendation is one of several. CADNA also reckons ICANN needs to name the date for its second round of new gTLD applications, and that “.brand” applicants should get discounts for multiple gTLD applications.
The letter comes as opposition to the new gTLD program in the US becomes deafening and ICANN’s board of directors have reportedly scheduled an impromptu meeting next week to determine whether the January 12 launch is still a good idea.
CADNA is no longer opposed to the program itself. Fairwinds Partners, the company that runs the lobbyist, recently restyled itself as a new gTLD consultancy.
But there’s a virtually zero chance the letter will come to anything, unless ICANN were to decide to open up the Applicant Guidebook for public comments again.
I also doubt the call for a mandatory ICM-style “block” service would be well-received by anyone other than ICANN’s intellectual property constituency.
The problem with such systems is that trademarks do not grant exclusive rights to strings, despite what some organizations would like to think.
It’s quite possible for ABC the taxi company to live alongside ABC television in the trademark world. Is it a good idea to allow the TV station to perpetually block abc.taxi from registration?
Some would say yes. The Better Business Bureau and Meetup.com, to name two examples, both recently went before Congress to bemoan the fact that they could not block bbb.xxx and meetup.xxx – both of which have meaning in the adult entertainment context and were reserved as premium names – using ICM’s Sunrise B.
With that all said, there’s nothing stopping new gTLD applicants from voluntarily offering .xxx-style blocking services, or indeed any form of novel IP rights protection mechanisms.
Some applicants may have even looked at the recent .xxx sunrise with envious eyes – with something like 80,000 defensive registrations at about $160 a pop, ICM made over $12 million in revenue and profit well into seven figures.

ICM opens can of worms with .xxx domain seizures

ICM Registry has suspended several dozen .xxx domain names registered by cybersquatters.
It’s believed to be unprecedented for a mainstream registry to unilaterally shut down domains purely on the grounds of alleged cybersquatting, as I reported for The Register earlier today.
ICM took down 70 to 80 domains including washingtonpost.xxx, cnbc.xxx and verizonwireless.xxx because it decided that the domains infringed trademarks and were therefore abusive.
Many belonged to the squatter Domain Name Wire first fingered as the registrant of huffingtonpost.xxx, named in Whois as Justin Crews.
Crews had told MSNBC that he planned to sell the domains at profit.
There was no UDRP arbitration, no court order, just a breach of the .xxx registry-registrant agreement, which gives ICM the right to suspend squatted domains at will.
This is the relevant part of the agreement, which all .xxx registrants must agree to:

You acknowledge and agree that the Registry reserves the right to disqualify you or your agents from making or maintaining any Registrations or Reservations in the .XXX TLD if you are found to have repeatedly engaged in abusive registrations, in its sole discretion.

I blogged back in May about why it might not be necessary to spend a fortune on defensive registrations in .xxx, given the existence of this policy and others.
Nevertheless, while it may take a while for the implications to become clear, I think the suspensions represent a very significant development.
Coming so soon after the end of ICM’s sunrise period, which saw many organizations spend thousands on useless non-resolving defensive registrations, I wouldn’t be surprised if many companies feel like they may have wasted their money.
If you’ve just spent $200 defending your brand, I imagine it would be quite annoying to see the likes of verizonwireless.xxx or businessweek.xxx get the same protection for free.
I would also not be surprised if, from now on, trademark attorneys trying to defend their rights in .xxx first contacted ICM, rather than WIPO or the National Arbitration Forum.
Why spend thousands on a UDRP complaint when you can just send a legal nastygram to ICM?
ICM president Stuart Lawley told DI today that this wave of suspensions was done independently, not in response to any legal demands.
Still, the precedent has been set: ICM will suspend domains for free, under certain circumstances.
What those circumstances are is less clear.
Lawley said that ICM will not get involved in complaints about individual domains – but it will shut down cybersquatters with multiple infringements.
But what constitutes cybersquatting? UDRP has a definition, but I’m not sure ICM does. It may be quite subjective.
It’s also not clear what ICM will do with the suspended domains, not all of which necessarily infringe trademarks. Some may be bona fide, but the ICM policy is to take down the registrant’s entire portfolio.
So will those non-infringing domains be released back into the pool? And if so, how will ICM determine which are squats and which are not?
And what about the ones that are squats? Will they be released?
AOL may be content for huffingtonpost.xxx to remain suspended forever. As long as it’s suspended, the company does not have to worry about defensive registration fees.
But consider gayroom.xxx, which was also suspended.
The owner of gayroom.com owns a trademark on the word “gayroom”. Gayroom.com is a porn site, but one that has chosen not to buy its equivalent .xxx domain.
What if it changes its mind? If gayroom.com wants gayroom.xxx in future, is there a way to take it out of suspension, or is the company stuck without its .xxx forever, just because a cybersquatter got there first?
ICM’s policies do not seem to answer this question and the company has not yet revealed its plans for the suspended domains.
As a post-script, I should note that Huffington Post owner AOL is currently listed as the registrant of huffingtonpost.xxx in the Whois record.
It’s not yet clear why this is the case, but Lawley stated unequivocally today that the apparent transfer is completely unrelated to ICM’s own crackdown.
Go Daddy, the registrar of record for the domain, declined to comment, citing its customer privacy policy.
Did the cybersquatter transfer the domain to AOL before the suspension? Did he sell it to AOL? Or did he just update the Whois with phoney data? Either seems possible at this point.

Notes from the Senate new gTLDs hearing

The US Senate’s Commerce Committee held a hearing into ICANN’s new generic top-level domain program today, following pressure from the Association of National Advertisers.
It must have been a busy day on Capitol Hill. Not only was the hearing delayed by 45 minutes, but when it did begin only four or five Senators showed up to speak.
Committee chair Sen. Jay Rockefeller put his head through the door just long enough to deliver a prepared statement, leaving Sen. Amy Klobuchar to lead the rest of the hearing.
It was a relatively subdued and hurried affair that heard for the most part some extremely well-worn arguments about the potential benefits and risks of new gTLDs.
Nevertheless, the hearing did generate a few headline moments. These are my first impressions.
Rockefeller in pro-gTLD shocker
Given that the hearing was called at the behest of ICANN’s critics, it was slightly surprising that the Committee’s chairman gave a generally pro-expansion statement.
Sen. Rockefeller said he was generally in favor of new gTLDs, believing them to be pro-competition and pro-innovation, but suggested that the roll-out should be slower and more cautious.
“I think we’ll have to get used to .hotel, I think we’ll have to get used to .auto,” he said.
“If ICANN is determined to move forward, it should do so slowly and cautiously,” he said. “The potential for fraud, consumer confusion, and cybersquatting is massive and argues for a phased in implementation. Scaling back the initial round of new top level domains introduced in 2013 may be a prudent approach.”
ICANN expects about 1,000 applications
Senior vice president Kurt Pritz gave the latest ICANN guesstimate about how many new gTLD applications it expects to receive in the first round.
That number is 500 to 1,000, maybe a little more but “not thousands”, he said, noting that the estimate was completely based on hearsay.
New ICANN conflict of interest rules
ICANN’s board of directors evidently voted to restrict their post-ICANN employment opportunities at the board meeting earlier today, if Pritz’s testimony is an accurate guide.
He said that directors will not be able to work for any new gTLD operator that they have voted to approve for 12 months after they leave ICANN.
Cheaper application fees for worthy applicants
Again scooping the publication of today’s ICANN board meeting resolutions, Pritz revealed that application fees are going to be reduced from $185,000 to $47,000 for needy applicants.
This suggests heavily that ICANN figured out a way to accommodate the recommendations of the Joint Applicant Support working group, which proposed a number of measures aimed at reducing the financial burden for applicants in developing nations.
There was no word from Pritz about which organizations or nations will be eligible for the reduction, however.
The ANA compares senators to Disney characters
At one point, the ANA’s Dan Jaffe wheeled out a slide bearing a picture of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, to illustrate the problem of inaccurate Whois information.
He was addressing Sen. Maria Cantwell and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, both of whom asked questions about fraud and both of whom use Whois privacy services on their official campaign web sites.
I found this immensely amusing.
Dyson speaks for the little guy (if he has a trademark)
Former ICANN chair Esther Dyson said in her opening testimony that she was the only person at the hearing there to represent public opinion, rather than that of big business.
She then went on to complain, with a straight face, about all the trademark enforcement headaches big business will have to deal with in a world of hundreds of new gTLDs.
She’s particularly miffed, as a director of a company called Meetup, that ICM Registry has reserved meetup.xxx as a premium domain name.
Meetup will probably sue whoever buys the name for trademark infringement, she indicated.
Way to stick it to The Man, Esther!
Wither IDNs?
Non-Latin-script gTLDs were not discussed in any depth during the hearing, meriting only one or two mentions.
That’s unusual, given that IDN gTLDs are the one benefit of the ICANN program that not even intellectual property interests have dared to argue against.
Next steps
The ANA and the YMCA want somebody to put a stop to the new gTLD program, or to at least delay it.
Dyson suggested that for the US to unilaterally intervene might be a bad idea, politically.
When asked whether the Department of Commerce would be able to stay ICANN’s hand, Commerce representative Fiona Alexander ducked the question.
With a handful of exceptions, nobody on the Senate committee seemed to care enough about the subject to show up and ask questions.
I think this probably counts as a win for the pro-expansion camp.
There is however another hearing, this time before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, next week. If recent history is any guide, we’re likely to be in for more of the same.

Was .xxx’s launch disappointing?

The weekend box office numbers are in, and .xxx didn’t put as many bums on seats as might have been expected.
ICM Registry sold 55,367 new .xxx domain names in its first 24 hours of general availability, giving it a total of almost 159,351 registrations, according to the company.
That’s pretty good going for a TLD which, despite the spin in ICM’s recent TV commercials, is intended for a limited customer base, and which is selling for $80 to $100 a year.
Given its $60 registry fee, ICM will have taken over $3.3 million in revenue yesterday, over $550,000 of which will be given to its sponsoring organization, IFFOR.
However, the 159,351 total includes non-resolving domains, ICM has confirmed.
Due to the unique trademark protection mechanisms put in place for non-porn companies, it’s possible to pay for a .xxx domain that will only ever resolve to a standard registry placeholder.
ICM has previously said that it took almost 80,000 sunrise applications, and that the landrush phase put its total “comfortably over 100,000”.
It did not, however, break out the mix of Sunrise A (resolving) and Sunrise B (non-resolving) domains.
That’s an important distinction, both for ICM’s ongoing revenue and for gauging demand for .xxx among registrants.
Each Sunrise B domain gave ICM a $161 windfall but, unlike every other TLD launched to date, has the sale had no recurring revenue component.
I think it’s possible that 50,000 to 60,000 sunrise domains were non-resolvers, which would give .xxx a total of roughly 100,000 active domains under management after one day of GA.
(My assumptions are that all 80,000 sunrise applications were unique and approved, and that roughly two thirds were for Sunrise B non-resolving domains).
Assuming all the active domains are renewed, it’s a $6 million a year business (or $5 million, if you exclude the mandatory IFFOR donation) for ICM already.
The .xxx zone is already bigger than .travel, .pro, .jobs, .aero, .coop, .museum and .cat. It will likely be bigger than .name, .tel and .asia by the end of the month.
So why suggest that it’s a disappointing result?
Pre-reservations
First, for a few years ICM was accepting no-cost .xxx “pre-reservations” through its web site, while its gTLD application was in ICANN limbo.
It racked up over 900,000 such reservations for roughly 650,000 unique .xxx domain names before shutting the offer down in July this year.
One might expect that most people interested enough in .xxx to pre-register a domain months or years in advance might also be interested in grabbing that domain during landrush, sunrise or at the moment of GA. That apparently didn’t happen.
.CO
Let’s also compare .xxx to the launch of .co by .CO Internet last year.
While .CO did not have anything like the long-term media exposure as .xxx, it did of course have the advantage of offering a completely generic string priced at a third of .xxx.
Within its first 24 hours of general availability, .CO said that it had 233,000 domains under management, about 39,000 of which were landrush or sunrise registrations.
Even at the cheaper registry fee (about $20 a year) .CO still made more money in day one than ICM (although ICM wins hands-down in terms of premium domain sales).
.CO, incidentally, also only had 10 accredited registrars at launch (not counting resellers) compared to ICM’s over 70.
Go Daddy
Go Daddy is responsible for roughly half of all new .com registrations, with similar numbers in other TLDs including .co, but it does not appear to be promoting .xxx very heavily.
For the last few days, its homepage has contained only one small below-the-fold reference to .xxx domains. Its TLD drop-down menu has .xxx in tenth place, between .biz and .ca.
Conversely, ICM has been promoting Go Daddy (and DomainMonster) more heavily in its own marketing – notably on gavin.xxx, the site “owned” by its TV commercial character.
Expectations
So is .xxx on track to meet expectations at this early stage?
ICM CEO Stuart Lawley has previously predicted 300,000 to 500,000 registrations in the first few months, and that’s still an achievable goal given its day-one performance.
.CO Internet, for example, more than doubled its 233,000 first-day take within two months of going into general availability.
The new Russian ccTLD .рф registered 200,000 domains in its first six hours when it launched in November 2010, and hit 800,000 by April this year.
While .xxx clearly hasn’t yet smashed estimates in the same way as its sunrise did, I think early indications are that it’s looking pretty healthy.

Blah blah ICM blah .xxx blah blah…

Today blah blah ICM Registry blah blah .xxx blah live blah.
Blah blah 10 years blah blah porn blah blah generally available blah. Blah delay blah 5pm blah Lawley blah.
ICANN blah blah Governmental Advisory Committee blah blah blah San Francisco blah blah blah.
Blah blah Free Speech Coalition blah blah controversy blah Manwin blah blah blah lawsuit blah antitrust blah blah blah leg to stand on.
Blah speculators blah domainers blah cybersquatters blah. Blah blah shirt off your back blah.
Blah blah contract blah blah policies blah blah UDRP blah toothless blah blah blah WIPO blah blah blah donkey porn.
Blah reporting blah damned blah story blah 10 years blah blah bored blah blah blah blah finally over.
Blah blah blah.

.xxx to tackle piracy, child abuse and censorship

The International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the policy oversight group for .xxx domains, says it wants to help fight piracy, child abuse material and internet censorship.
Those are the three priorities to emerge from IFFOR’s inaugural two-day meeting last month, according to the organization. It has set up three working groups to look at the issues.
On filtering, a pretty hot topic given the various pieces of copyright-related legislation currently under consideration in the US and elsewhere, IFFOR said:

The filtering working group will review the state of global filtering laws, regulations and plans with a view to educating legislators and others about the advantages and effectiveness of user-defined filtering as opposed to mandated filtering or blocking at the ISP or router-level.

While there’s yet to be a proven case of an entire nation blocking .xxx domains, some countries have said they are considering it and I’ve heard several anecdotal cases of companies blocking the TLD.
IFFOR also said wants to find a way to help combat piracy “that can work across the entire dot-xxx registry” and is looking at both technical and legal measures.
The child abuse imagery working group, headed by veteran cyber-cop Sharon Girling, plans to work with existing third-party organizations on reporting and policy-making.
All three goals are self-evidently noble. Whether IFFOR will be able to make a noticeable impact on any will of course depend on what policies its working groups come up with.
IFFOR’s Policy Council comprises nine members: five from the porn industry, a free speech advocate, a child protection advocate, a security expert and an ICM Registry representative.

YouPorn imposes embargo on .xxx sites

Manwin, the company behind YouPorn, has stepped up its fight against ICM Registry by saying it will not do business with any .xxx web site.
Reported in the adult press this weekend, the ban seems to extend to webmasters hoping to promote their sites on Manwin’s “tube” sites, including YouPorn.
It also won’t allow its content to be used on .xxx sites, according to Xbiz.
Manwin is of course already suing ICM and ICANN under US monopoly laws, and has demanded an ICANN independent review, claiming the .xxx launch amounted to “extortion”.
The domain YouPorn.xxx is currently on ICM’s Registry Reserved list, meaning it was not acquired during sunrise and will not become available when .xxx opens its doors on Tuesday.
YouPorn is one of the web’s top 100 sites, according to Alexa.

ICM sells $700,000 of .xxx domains to Clips4Sale

ICM Registry has just announced the sale of $700,000 worth of .xxx domain names to Clips4Sale, which operates a network of clip-oriented porn sites.
The cash deal comprises 30 domains including one $300,000 name and two others at over $80,000 each, according to the company.
The domains themselves have not been disclosed.
The $300,000 sale would be the 16th most-expensive domain of the year, according to DNJournal’s chart. Gay.xxx sold last month for $500,000.
ICM is taking .xxx into general availability next Tuesday.