Recent Posts
- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
- .ai up to 425,000 domains
- A million “free” .music domains up for grabs
- D3 to get $5 million in crypto to apply for .ape gTLD
- Alibaba hit with ICANN breach notice
- New Vegas conference “Davos for Web3 interoperability”
- ICANN content policing power grab may be dead
- Cable company unplugs its dot-brand after acquisition
- Germany crosses 10,000 dot-brand domains milestone
- Founders out as Com Laude gets equity injection
- PIR’s Diaz to leave domain industry
- Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment
- ICANN opens $217 million Grant Program
- Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)
- .ai registry fights deadbeats with tweaked auction rules
- Amazon and Google among .internal TLD ban backers
- .ai registry advises buyers not to use GoDaddy
- .post liberalizes with new sunrise period
- Team Internet spends $41 million on content farm
- Epik backtracks on Kiwi Farms claim after legal threat
- .austin names launch on blockchain
- Freenom shuts down 12.6 million domains — report
- GoDaddy’s next .xxx contract may not be a done deal
- GlobalBlock blocking 2.5 million domains
- Microsoft moving its cloud apps from .com to .microsoft
- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
- ICANN scores win in single-letter .com lawsuit
- Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD
- Up to 70 jobs on the line at Nominet as .uk regs dwindle
- Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay
- Private auctions could be banned in new gTLD next round
- ICANN meeting venue “insensitive and hurtful”
- GoDaddy to start selling graphic.design domains
- GAC spinning up new gTLD curveball at ICANN 79?
- GoDaddy’s GlobalBlock supports blockchain names
- Police .uk domain takedowns dive in 2023
- GoDaddy wants to cut the bullshit from .xxx
- Dueling domain blocking services to launch at ICANN 79
- Freename tries to bridge DNS and blockchain
- Olive retires from ICANN
- Whois policy published without life-saving disclosure rule
- UK gov takes its lead from ICANN on DNS abuse
- Tucows reports 2023 results
- Twitter “completely unresponsive” on clickable domains
- ICANN spends $5 million more than planned in first fiscal half
- .art takes a million domains off its premium list
- KeyTrap ‘the most devastating vulnerability ever found in DNSSEC’
- Freenom settles $500 million Meta lawsuit and will exit domain business
- New gTLD lottery to return in 2026
- First GlobalBlock prices revealed — they ain’t cheap
- Domain universe grows on new gTLDs despite .com shrinkage
- D3 signs up crypto gTLD client number five
- GoDaddy reports strong domains growth
- How to qualify for a $40,000 gTLD
- Registry service provider evaluation handbook published
- WebUnited inks deal to “mirror” country’s TLD in the blockchain
- GoDaddy project unveils brand-blocking calculator
- Report: Monster “misappropriated” millions from Epik
- .com is shrinking but Verisign raises prices again anyway
- D3 announces fourth crypto new gTLD client
- Donald Trump loses second UDRP case
- UK cybersquatting complaints hit record low
- No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse
- ICANN insists it is working on linkification
- Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps
- GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration
- Epik reveals who is running the company
- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
- Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services
- Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime
- Team Internet says revenue beat estimates
- Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction
- .ai helps UDRP cases rise in 2023, WIPO says
- Freenom’s domains land at Gandi after termination
- .ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite
- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
- Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
- ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable
- You can’t use money to buy .box domains
- After 14 years, ICANN practices what it preaches on IDNs
- Weak demand for private Whois data, ICANN data shows
- .ing doing way better than .meme
- DNS Women barred from ICANN funding?
- Dev releases free open-source TLD registry platform
- INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital
- Anguilla fears the .ai junk drop
- Five more gTLDs get launch dates
- $10 million of ICANN cash up for grabs
- Almost 50,000 .ai domains sold in a quarter
- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
- Life insurance company kills dot-brand
- ICANN finds new home for Lebanon’s TLD after founder’s death
- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
- Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant
- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
- Amazon planning new push into registrar market?
- Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules
- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
- Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars
- GoDaddy service to let you block domains in over 650 TLDs
- Did I find a murder weapon in a zone file?
- ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman
- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
- Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system
- Nominet to take over .gov.uk
- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
- ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live
- .au regs slide on 2LD anniversary
- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
- Two more dot-brands bite the dust
- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
- Did somebody spend a million bucks on a Google domain hack?
Will the Trademark Clearinghouse kill off premium domains?
Rules proposed for the new Trademark Clearinghouse threaten to cut off some of new gTLD registries major sources of early revenue, according to registry providers.
Premium domain sales and founders programs are among the now industry-standard practices that would be essentially banned under the current draft of the TMCH rules, they say.
The potential problems emerged in a draft TMCH Requirements document circulated to registries 10 days ago and vigorously discussed during a session at the ICANN meeting in Beijing last week.
The document lists all of the things that new gTLD registries must and must not, and may and may not, do during the mandatory Sunrise and Trademark Claims rights protection launch periods.
One of the bits that has left registries confused is this:
2.2.4 Registry Operator MUST NOT allow a domain name to be reserved or registered to a registrant who is not a Sunrise-Eligible Rights Holder prior to the conclusion of the Sunrise Period.
What this means is that trademark owners get first dibs on pretty much every possible string in every gTLD.
“Trademark owners trump everything,” Neustar business affairs veep Jeff Neuman said during the Beijing meeting. “Trademark owners trump every possible use of every possible name.”
It would mean, for example, that if a new gTLD wanted to allocate some names to high-profile anchor tenants during a “founders program”, it would not be able to do so until after the Sunrise was over.
Let’s say the successful applicant for .shop wants to reserve the names of hundreds of shop types (book.shop, food.shop, etc) as premium names, to allocate during its founders program or auction later.
Because the .shop Sunrise would have to happen first, the companies that the own rights to, for example, “wallpaper” or “butcher” (both real US trademarks) would have first rights to wallpaper.shop and butcher.shop, even if they only planned to defensively park the domains.
Because there’s likely to be some degree of gaming (there’s a proof-of-use requirement, but the passing threshold is pretty low), registries’ premium lists could be decimated during Sunrise periods.
If ICANN keeps its TMCH Requirements as they are currently written, new gTLD registries stand to lose a lot of early revenue, not to mention control over launch marketing initiatives.
However, if ICANN were to remove this rule, it might give unscrupulous registries the ability to circumvent the mandatory Sunrise period entirely by placing millions of strings on their premium lists.
“Registries should have discretion to schedule their start-up phases according to their business plans so long as rights protection processes are honored, so that’s the balancing we’ve tried to do,” ICANN operations & policy research director Karen Lenz said during Beijing.
“It’s trying to allow registries to create requirements that suit their purposes, without being able to hollow out the rights protection intention,” she said.
The requirements document is still just a draft, and discussions are ongoing, she added.
“It’s certainly not our intention to restrict business models,” Lenz said.
Registries will get some flexibility to restrict Sunrise to certain registrants. For example, they’ll be able to disqualify those without an affiliation to the industry to which the gTLD is targeted.
What they won’t be able to do is create arbitrary rules unrelated to the purpose of the TLD, or apply one set of rules during Sunrise and another during the first 90 days of general availability.
The standard Registry Agreement that ICANN expects all new gTLDs to sign up to does enable registries to reserve or block as many names as they want, but only if those names are not registered or used.
It seemed to be designed to do things like blocing ‘sensitive’ strings, rather like when ICM Registry reserved thousands of names of celebrities and cultural terms in .xxx.
The Requirements document, on the other hand, seems to allow these names being released at a later date. If they were released, the document states, they’d have to be subject to Trademark Claims notices, but not Sunrise rules.
While that may be a workaround to the premium domains problem, it doesn’t appear to help registries that want to get founders programs done before general availability.
It seems that there are still many outstanding issues surrounding the Trademark Clearinghouse — many more than discussed in this post — that will need to be settled before new gTLDs are going to feel comfortable launching.
It shall be amusing to see how many of the Benelux TMs from the .eu sunrise, among others attempting to game the system, make it into the TMCH, e.g. see:
http://eu.adr.eu/adr/decisions/decision.php?dispute_id=4014
http://eu.adr.eu/adr/decisions/decision.php?dispute_id=3147
http://www.adreu.eurid.eu/adr/decisions/decision.php?dispute_id=2438
(all those marks were for “plectrums”, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plectrum )
Even a quick look at the proposed 2013 RAA shows ICANN still hasn’t fixed loopholes / ambiguities from the current RAA.
With new gTLDs innovative people will run rings around ICANN. It’s likely history will look back on .eu fiasco as a gentle stroll in the park in comparison to what ICANN is going to do with new gTLDs.
What?
.eu a fiasco?
It depends where you sit down: Registrant or Registry.
Domainers are bad for registries, not only for registrants. Although they look like revenue in the short term, they lessen the strength of the TLD and make it look bad in the long term.
@ Rubens Given the “pre-registrations” sites do you honestly believe that the Domain Industry is not looking at “Domainers” and “Defensive” registrations in (non brand & non IDN gTLDs as a significant, if not the dominant source of revenue?
If not do you honestly expect existing businesses to move to a “better name” in new gTLDs…. or run multiple websites in any number?
There were thousands of names secured using word&word trademarks to get exact matches as the & can’t be represented in domain names. Names like usa.eu where the American Embassy had its application rejected in favour of a “us&a” trademark.
Innovation? Was it what Eurid wanted? Was it in the public interest? Does it matter? Was it a good thing or did it do long term damage?
It was so pervasive that even Wikipedia has notes on it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu#landrush
Interestingly Bob Parson criticized the use of shell companies…
Has ICANN taken measures to prevent the use of shell companies in the new gTLD process or does it think such a strategy would provide the “innovation” it says it seeks?
People will also have no incentive to pay a high price for a domain, if they know that 2 minutes later it will be subjected to “Trademark Claims notices”. Yes its not an immediate UDRP but it sure is a headache and risk that a potential buyer or potential user who gets the name from the registry would think twice about.
The Claims service is an added benefit to the registrant as it warns of what potential UDRP/URS filings might come before registering the domain.
The information to trademark holders is just as easy to do with zone files and such services are already in-place today in the gTLD space.
With Claims service covering only the first 90 days of general availability, TM holders will keep using zone files as a more ubiquitous approach.
What stops the Registry to set the price for the TMCH Sunrise to 1 million dollars a domain?
NOTE: to participate in Sunrise “proof of use” is required so just having the trademark is not enough (that say, the threshold of proof is not that high).
Founders program are already being sold…
If people are already buying those names they are taking a huge risk.
1. If that name is TM then they are in trouble if the TM owner gets a first shot at the name. Still unclear at Icann.
2. Even if the TM owner doesn’t get a first shot, he will be alerted immediately after with the TMCH allert system. So either way, a buyer should think twice as this devalues those names, since he would need to allocate resources to possibly protect the name he just got.
Charles?
ha?
Mother? Is that you?
“Charly”?
Can’t registries reserve a list of names, and release them (through auction etc.) post-sunrise under section 2.4.4.
The only RPM requirement would then be to subject the domains to the Claims Services, which, the way I understand it, is simply a notification scheme.
?
Sorry, I’ve just re-read 2.2.4, I see the ambiguity now ..
People have short memories of what happened not only during .eu and George mentioned above but also for .info
http://www.zdnet.com/info-chief-quits-in-protest-over-sunrise-period-3002094819/
Trademark is subject to trademark squatting just as domains are subject to cybersquatting except for TM their is no downside, and no $100K per statutory damage
@gpmgroup I know a lot of new gTLD applicants that are counting on domainers to get a quick ROI. What I disagree is that being a sound business decision; if real enterpreneurs can’t get the domain they want in your TLD because a domainer bought it, they will look elsewhere, so both the registrant and the domainer will be unhappy.
Defensive registrations, on the other hand, is not something that has too big a negative image impact on the TLD. It looks bad for the DNS industry as a whole, for sure.
Many domainers are dropping their names right now, there must be a reason for this.