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Artemis signs 30 anchor tenants for .secure gTLD

Kevin Murphy, July 4, 2013, 06:08:40 (UTC), Domain Registries

Artemis, the NCC Group subsidiary applying for .secure, says it has signed up 30 big-name customers for its expensive, high-security new gTLD offering.
CTO Alex Stamos said that the list includes three “too big to fail” banks and three of the four largest social networking companies. They’ve all signed letters of intent to use .secure domains, he said.
He was speaking at a small gathering of customers and potential customers in London yesterday, to which DI was invited on the condition that we not report the name of anyone else in attendance.
Artemis is doing this outreach despite the facts that a) .secure is still in a two-way contention set and b) deep-pocketed online retailer Amazon is the other applicant.
Stamos told DI he’s confident that Artemis will win .secure one way or the other — hopefully Amazon’s single-registrant bid will run afoul of ICANN’s current rethink of “closed generics”.
He expects to launch .secure in the second or third quarter of next year with a few dozen registrants live from pretty much the start.
The London event yesterday, which was also attended by executives from a few household names, was the second of three the company has planned. New York was the first and there’ll soon be one in California.
I’m hearing so many stories about new gTLD applicants that still haven’t figured out their go-to-market strategies recently that it was refreshing to see one that seems to be on the ball.
Artemis’ vision for .secure is also probably the most technologically innovative proposed gTLD that I’m currently aware of.
As the name suggests, security is the order of the day. Registrants would be vetted during the lengthy registration process and the domain names themselves would be manually approved.
Not only will there not be any typosquatting, but there’s even talk of registering common typos on behalf of registrants.
Registrants would also be expected to adhere to levels of security on their web sites (mandatory HTTPS, for example) and email systems (mandatory TLS). Domains would be scanned daily for malware and would have manual penetration testing at least annually.
Emerging security standards would be deployed make sure that browsers would only trust SSL certificates provided by Artemis (or, more likely, its CA partner) when handling connections to .secure sites.
Many of the policies are still being worked out, sometimes in conversation with an emerging “community” of the aforementioned anchor tenants, but there’s one thing that’s pretty clear:
This is not a domain name play.
If you buy a .secure domain name, you’re really buying an NCC managed security service that allows you to use a domain name, as opposed to an easily-copied image, as your “trust mark”.
Success for .secure, if it goes live as planned, won’t be measured in registration volume. I wouldn’t expect it to be much bigger than .museum, the tiniest TLD today, within its first few years.
Prices for .secure have not yet been disclosed, but I’m expecting them to be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. If “a domain” costs $50,000 a year, don’t be surprised.
Artemis’ .secure would however be available to any enterprise that can afford it and can pass its stringent security tests, which makes it more “open” than Amazon’s vaguely worded closed generic bid.
Other ICANN accredited registrars will technically be allowed to sell .secure domains, but the Registry-Registrar Agreement will be written in such a way as to make it economically non-viable for them to do so.
Overall, the company has a bold strategy with some significant challenges.
I wonder how enthusiastic enterprises will be about using .secure if their customers start to assume that their regular domain name (which may even be a dot-brand) is implicitly insecure.
Artemis is also planning to expose some information about how well its registrants are complying with their security obligations to end users, which may make some potential registrants nervous.
Even without this exposure, simply complying appears to be quite a resource-intensive ongoing process and not for the faint-hearted.
However, that’s in keeping with the fact that it’s a managed security service — companies buy these things in order to help secure their systems, not cover up problems.
Stamos also said that its eligibility guidelines are being crafted with its customers in such a way that registrants will only ever be kicked out of .secure if they’re genuinely bad actors.
Artemis’ .secure is a completely new concept for the gTLD industry, and I wouldn’t like to predict whether it will work or not, but the company seems to be going about its pre-sales marketing and outreach in entirely the correct way.

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