Watch the .nxt conference live online

The .nxt conference on new top-level domains kicks off in San Francisco later today, but fear not if you were unable to make it in person – much of the content will be streamed live online.
Roughly half of the three-day meeting’s sessions will be made available live, and it appears that the whole lot will be available on demand for the next three months.
If the conference is as informative as the first one, which took place in February, the $95 fee .nxt is charging to access the streams seems like a pretty good deal.
It’s no substitute for being there in person – much of the value in these things lies in the networking opportunities – but if new gTLDs are likely to effect your business you’d be crazy not to check it out.
More details here.

ICM reveals tough .xxx cybersquatting rules

ICM Registry has finally taken the wraps off its rapid domain name takedown service, which promises to make life difficult for cybersquatters in the .xxx top-level domain.
The Rapid Evaluation Service, as it is known, is basically a souped-up version of the familiar UDRP that tilts the overall balance in favor of legit trademark holders.
It’s designed for companies or individuals who don’t want to be associated with .xxx domain names, and has the remedies to match.
Using RES, brand owners will be able to get a domain temporarily suspended in less than a week, and later have it switched off for good.
That’s right, if a name is lost under RES it goes into registry-reserved status. The complainant does not get control of the domain, and they don’t have to pay recurring renewal fees.
But it will not be cheap. The National Arbitration Forum is the only organization authorized to handle RES work, and it’s charging $1,300 per domain, with no discounts for multiple-domain cases.
RES does not replace UDRP, but it is based on it.
Like UDRP, its three pillars are the domain’s confusing similarity with the complainant’s trademark, the rights and legitimate interests of the registrant, and the question of bad faith registration.
While much of the RES has been copied straight from the UDRP, there are key differences.
ICM has codified some of the good case law that has emerged from the last decade of UDRP and eschewed some of the bad, arguably making RES less open to interpretation.
Notably, unless you’re filing to protect a personal name — celebrities, porn stars or just the average Jo(e) — RES is for nationally registered, in-use trademarks only. Other marks don’t seem to count.
Typos are explicitly included in the definition of confusing similarity (no microsfot.xxx), as are brand+keyword domains (microsoftporn.xxx).
Phonetic similarity also makes an appearance, which seems like it could open a great big can of worms.
The bad faith component of RES is very similar to UDRP, but with the addition of a typosquatting ban and the removal of the requirement to show the registration was made for “commercial gain”.
As far as registrants are concerned, there are some additional protections you won’t find in UDRP, notably this text, which seems to specifically make many generic terms immune:

(iii) the domain name in the .XXX TLD has a primary meaning apart from its secondary meaning as a trademark or service mark associated with the complainant, and is being used in connection with its primary meaning in association with which the complainant has not acquired distinctiveness in the adult-entertainment industry.

Technically, and very hypothetically, I interpret this to mean that if you registered apple.xxx (which you won’t) and used it to publish videos of men recreating that scene from American Pie, you probably couldn’t lose the domain to an RES complaint.
I expect this is largely of concern to companies that have registered trademarks that correspond to dictionary words. They may have to use UDRP as usual.
RES has previously been billed as a 48-hour solution, but in reality cases could take anywhere between three and five days before a Preliminary Decision is handed down.
After a complaint is filed, there’s a one-business-day turnaround for an administrative check, then another two business days for the panelist to decide what to do.
If a respondent has lost three or more RES cases in a year, the panelist will be entitled to presumptively consider them an “abusive registrant” for a preliminary decision.
Preliminary decisions can stop a domain resolving immediately, if the panelist thinks the complainant is likely to win and that there’s no “substantial likelihood of harm” to the registrant.
Registrants then have 10 days to respond before a final decision is made. If they default, maybe because they’re on vacation, they have up to three months to appeal.
In short, we’re looking at the bastard son of UDRP here.
I suspect the trademark lobby is going to quietly love it. If that’s the case, it might help the domain industry look a bit more respectable.
If you’re more likely to be a respondent than a complainant, you’d be well-advised to familiarize yourself with RES (and ICM’s other policies) before investing in gray-area .xxx domains.
The huge glaring problem with the policy as far as I’m concerned is that neither ICM or NAF is going to publish any of its decisions in full, only aggregated statistics.
This is ostensibly to protect the identities of the complainants, but it’s also going to cover up (probably inevitable) sloppy decision-making, which won’t be good for confidence in the .xxx TLD.
But if somebody cybersquats your mom, you’ll probably be glad of it.

How not to upgrade to a .com – ask ICANN

The domain name world can be confusing, and there’s no shortage of timewasters ready to bother ICANN with their relatively minor problems and disputes.
The latest is violin maker Zeta Music Systems, which went to the extraordinary lengths of initiating an ICANN Reconsideration Request to get its hands on a domain name it does not own.
Zeta currently hosts its web site at zetamusic.net. The equivalent .com – which Zeta wants – is owned by a now-defunct company that went by the same name.
Even though the company is apparently bust and the Whois is no longer accurate, it had a long-term registration that is not due to expire until November 2012.
In his Reconsideration Request (pdf), filed in June, Zeta president Michael Gende wrote:

ICANN would be doing no harm to the former Zeta by reassigning the domain to us now. However, ICANN’s inaction with regard to this issue is doing harm to our company as potential customers naturally go to the zetamusic.com domain, and find nothing.

Individually handling second-level domain disputes is obviously none of ICANN’s business, and that’s exactly what Gende has been told (pdf) by its Board Governance Committee.
Reconsideration Requests are a rarely used, rarely successful review mechanism whereby ICANN’s decisions can be challenged if new information comes to light.
Gende’s is the first of 2011 and one of only four filed in the last five years.

Who should be ICANN’s next CEO?

With Rod Beckstrom now less than a year away from leaving the CEO job at ICANN, following his resignation this week, the rumor mill is already spitting out ideas about who should replace him.
While his contract is not set to expire until July 1, 2012, that does not necessarily mean Beckstrom’s replacement will not be named and in situ before then.
His predecessor, Paul Twomey, also gave about 10 months notice when he resigned in March 2009, and Beckstrom had taken over by July.
Twomey played out the remainder of his contract in an advisory capacity, to smooth the transition. He eventually left in January 2010.
So it’s quite possible ICANN’s executive search team will start its hunt sooner rather than later. But where should they look and what type of candidate should they choose?
It’s proved to be a well-compensated but often thankless job.
Candidates must be equally capable of sharing applause with world leaders one day and then sitting in a stuffy meeting room patiently taking shit from community members the next.
They need to be able to act not just as a figurehead but as a diplomat, negotiator and man manager, somebody confident handling large budgets and larger egos.
Candidates with cat-herding experience and a target tattooed on their foreheads will be a shoo-in.
It’s been pointed out ICANN’s four CEO appointees to date have alternated between, for want of better words, “insider” and “outsider” candidates. (The chair has a similar rule.)
Beckstrom came directly from the US government, whereas Twomey had been steeped in ICANN culture for four years as head of the Governmental Advisory Committee when he took over in 2003.
There’s no point speculating about “outsiders” at this point – ICANN could hire basically anyone – but people are already talking about known faces that might put themselves forward.
An insider may be a good call this time around, given the major challenges – new gTLDs and the renewal of the IANA contract, to name two – ICANN faces over the coming year.
As ICANN alum Maria Farrell, one of the people responsible for publicizing criticism of Beckstrom’s management style, noted yesterday, “we need someone who can hit the ground running.”

Put it another way, globally, there are probably about 500 key people involved in running the DNS and numbering systems. If the CEO doesn’t know these people already, and know where the bodies are buried – i.e. is not already one of the 500 – then she or he will be a liability for at least the first year.

That’s a pretty strong endorsement of an “insider” candidate – somebody who already knows their way around ICANN’s complex personality-driven machinery.
While there’s nothing stopping ICANN promoting somebody from within its own ranks, no names jump out as obvious candidates.
Most senior staffers are either Beckstrom-era appointees with less than two years under their belt, or hold specialist roles that would not necessarily make them CEO fodder.
An “insider”, in this case, is more likely to mean somebody from the broader ICANN community.
Two names that have popped up more than once during conversations since Beckstrom’s announcement are Chris Disspain (head of auDA in Australia) and Lesley Cowley (head of Nominet in the UK).
Both, it is whispered, were on the shortlist in 2009. Disspain now sits on the ICANN board of directors and Cowley is the newly installed chair of the ccNSO (replacing Disspain).
Both know ICANN pretty much inside-out and have many years experience managing the policy bodies for their own respective country-code top-level domains.
They are also native English speakers. That’s obviously a slight advantage – English is ICANN’s lingua franca – but not necessarily a deal-breaker.
Some say ICANN could look elsewhere in the world for its new leader. Nigel Roberts, CEO of ccTLD manager Island Networks, wrote yesterday:

ICANN should at least seriously consider this time to appoint a CEO from a non-Anglo-Saxon background to show the rest of the world it really is serious about its purported commitment to diversity.

While blind affirmative action would obviously be a terrible idea, I would have little difficulty imagining the likes of Accenture veteran Cherine Chalaby or career diplomat Bertrand De La Chapelle – ICANN directors native to non-Anglo nations – being put forward as candidates.
Both men have shown a dedication (ambition?) within ICANN, with British-Egyptian Chalaby unsuccessfully standing for chairman this year and BDLC quitting his job in the French government in order to take on his uncompensated role on ICANN’s board.
I hear good things about Chalaby, and his experience in the business world is extensive, though with just a year’s ICANN time served some may say he’s a little green. And if BDLC gets the job, we may have to extend ICANN meetings by a few days to cope with his verbosity.
While a CEO could be hired from essentially anywhere in the world, a willingness to live and work in Marina Del Rey, California may also prove an advantage.
Even though Beckstrom is based just a few hundred miles away in Silicon Valley, I don’t doubt that his distance from ICANN headquarters has contributed to the perception that he’s out of touch with his troops, surrounded by an inner circle of trusted advisers.
That said, I believe that Twomey managed to get away with spending a lot of his time in his native Australia while he was CEO, to little complaint.
Experience in the business world will also be an advantage.
ICANN has a $70 million budget for this fiscal year, and it could well find itself handling double or triple that amount when the new gTLD program kicks off next year.
Would a candidate with experience with similar budgets make a better choice? If so, how many likely applicants would actually would fit that criterion?
There are not a great many “insiders” with CEO experience at organizations of a comparable size, and companies that large do not usually send their CEOs to ICANN meetings anyway.
A senior executive from a domain name company, perhaps a VP looking to get their teeth into their first C-level position, may be a more likely applicant.
But a hire from industry could also present a perception of conflict of interest problem, coming at a time when ICANN is coming under pressure to review its ethics policies.
If Peter Dengate Thrush’s move to Minds + Machines from ICANN’s chair raised eyebrows, imagine how it could appear if ICANN’s CEO was hired directly from a registry or registrar.
As fun as it would be, I think we can probably rule out Bob Parsons for the time being.

Beckstrom quits ICANN

The CEO and president of ICANN has quit.
Rod Beckstrom tweeted within the last hour:

I have decided to wrap up my service at ICANN July 2012. Press release soon.

Many in the ICANN community kinda knew this was coming.
Over the coming hours, expect to read a lot of people question whether the words “I have decided” are strictly accurate.
UPDATE: I’ve covered the story in more depth for The Register.

Breaking: Ad industry piles on ICANN

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents over 500 companies including Facebook, Google, eBay and Microsoft, has told ICANN to put a stop to its new top-level domains program.
The cry calls just a couple of weeks after the Association of National Advertisers said it would lobby Congress and may take ICANN to court over the controversial program.
Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the IAB, said in a press release:

ICANN’s potentially momentous change seems to have been made in a top-down star chamber. There appears to have been no economic impact research, no full and open stakeholder discussions, and little concern for the delicate balance of the Internet ecosystem.
This could be disastrous for the media brand owners we represent and the brand owners with which they work. We hope that ICANN will reconsider both this ill-considered decision and the process by which it was reached.

The IAB’s membership is a Who’s Who of leading online media companies, purportedly responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the US.
It counts AOL, Digg, Amazon, the BBC, Bebo, CNN, Ziff Davis, LinkedIn, Time Warner, Slate, Thomson-Reuters, IDG, the Huffington Post and many other well-known names as members.
Demand Media, too.
If the ANA represents advertisers themselves, the IAB represents the places they spend their advertising money.
It looks like a large portion of corporate America is not happy about new gTLDs. ICANN may have found itself a new, extremely well-funded enemy.

Hannibal Lecter wants his domain back

The actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, best known for playing serial killer Hannibal Lecter, seems to have filed a UDRP complaint over the domain name siranthonyhopkins.com.
Hopkins, via the trust that controls his name and likeness, won anthonyhopkins.com (currently parked) in a similar case last year.
He was knighted in 1993, and siranthonyhopkins.com was registered in 2003, so it’s not clear why the UDRP complaint took so long to file.
He’s the third celebrity in the last decade to win his “Sir” domain at UDRP, after Sir Paul McCartney and Manchester United coach Sir Alex Ferguson.
The case got me wondering – if you’re a British celebrity and you want to protect your personal brand, when do you start to think about defensively registering your “Sir” or “Dame” domain?
What kind of ego would you need to have to preemptively registered such a domain, before you’ve even received your letter from the Queen?
I wonder if any such registrations exist.
And is there a need for them?
Popular octogenarian TV personality Sir Bruce Forsyth was knighted in June this year, and yet sirbruceforsyth.com has been registered (to somebody else) since 2008.

ANA’s response to the Beckstrom letter in full

The Association of National Advertisers has issued statements in response to ICANN president Rod Beckstrom’s admonishment of its attempt to hold up the new top-level domains program.
ANA appeared out of nowhere last week, vaguely threatening to sue ICANN unless it suspended the program, which it believes will cost brand owners billions of dollars.
But yesterday Beckstrom replied, saying the program was developed through a “multi-stakeholder” policy-making process over several years in which ANA had ample opportunity to participate.
He also pointed out that ANA appears to have made faulty assumptions about how the program is supposed to work, particularly with regards “.brand” gTLDs.
This the official response to Beckstrom’s letter from Bob Liodice, ANA’s president and CEO:

We are not surprised by ICANN’s response although disappointed that ICANN chose to defend its process and deny any doubt as to consensus. Rather, ICANN needs to respond to the real concern from the brand owner community.
There is no question that this Program will increase brand owners’ costs by billions of dollars. We should not be debating if 40 or 45 comment periods were held; instead, ICANN should be justifying its economic analysis regarding the Program against the staggering costs to brands.
ANA welcomes further discussions and an opportunity for further economic study to quantify the need for more TLDs and what it will mean for industry and other stakeholders, such as the public interest community who will face the same brand dilution concerns.

ANA general counsel Doug Wood, from the law firm Reed Smith, stated:

Now is not the time for either side to ‘dig in its heels’ much less defend the process, especially in a depressed economy. ANA has raised real concerns regarding economic losses, brand dilution and resultant privacy/cyber-security harms.
In light of our shared goals of a safe and stable global Internet, ICANN should return to the negotiating table and work with all concerned parties, including the ANA and its members, to resolve brand owners’ legitimate concerns in a manner consistent with ICANN’s consensus obligations.

These are of course concerns that have been debated to death for several years in the ICANN community, lately without ANA’s participation.
The organization submitted a couple of comments more than two years ago and then seemed to disappear from the process.
One could argue that’s very odd behavior for an apparently well-funded outfit now loudly claiming that it’s “horrified” by new gTLDs.

Beckstrom strikes back at ANA threat

ICANN president Rod Beckstrom has come out swinging against the latest attack on its new top-levels domains program, promising to “vigorously defend” it.
In his response to a harshly critical missive from the Association of National Advertisers, Beckstrom calls ANA’s claims “either incorrect or problematic in several respects”.
I think “firmly worded” would be an appropriate way to characterize his letter (pdf).
In it, he notes that the new gTLD program has been on the cards since 1998, and has been developed over several years using input from the entire ICANN community, including ANA itself.
He further states that some of the complaints outlined by ANA president Bob Liodice show a lack of research.
As I noted in my interview with Liodice yesterday, ANA seems to think cybersquatting at the top-level will be enabled unless companies defensively apply for their “.brand” gTLDs.
Beckstrom said that these statements “demonstrate a lack of understanding of Program details”.

The letter suggests that companies have no choice but to apply for their own gTLDs. Operating a gTLD means assuming a number of significant responsibilities; this is clearly not for everyone. Indeed, it is hoped that those without an interest in making a contribution to expanded choice or innovation in the DNS will not apply. One clear directive of the consensus policy advice on which the program is built is that TLDs should not infringe the existing legal rights of others. The objection process and other safeguards eliminate the need for “defensive” gTLD applications, because where an infringement of legal rights can be established using these processes, an application will not be approved.

The response goes on to outline some of the mandatory second-level trademark protection mechanisms that have been included in the program’s Applicant Guidebook.
ICANN is arguably on shakier ground here – making use of these mechanisms is still going to cost brand owners time and money, which is the basis of ANA’s objections.
The question now is whether Beckstrom’s responses will be enough to get ANA to call off the dogs.
He has offered to talk to ANA to “to discuss how the ANA might participate more actively in the policy development activities and other ICANN processes going forward”.
That’s specifically not an offer to get into negotiations with ANA about the contents of the Guidebook or to delay the launch of the program.
That was never going to happen, particularly not in response to a thirteenth-hour complaint from an organization that hasn’t commented on the program for the last two years.
Liodice said yesterday that unless ICANN agrees to suspend the program, ANA plans to lobby the US Congress, its Department of Commerce, and may sue.
Reaction from the domain name industry to Beckstrom’s letter has so far been predictably positive.

Snoring interrupts ICANN meeting (MP3)

An ICANN meeting was interrupted yesterday by loud snoring.
I suppose it was only a matter of time.
The incident happened during a teleconference of the Supporting Organization-Advisory Committee New gTLD Applicant Support Working Group chaired by Rafik Dammak and Carlton Samuels.
Dammak is the one who sounds baffled by the sudden interruption, Samuels is the one with the incredible laugh.
Apologies to the participants, but this two-minute MP3 snippet is too gigglesome not to post.