Architelos: shadiest new gTLD is only 10% shady

Disputing the recent Blue Coat report into “shady” new gTLDs, domain security firm Architelos says that the shadiest namespace is just under 10% shady.
That’s a far cry from Blue Coat’s claim earlier this week that nine new gTLDs are 95% to 100% abusive.
Architelos shared with DI a few data points from its NameSentry service today.
NameSentry uses a metric the company calls NQI, for Namespace Quality Index, to rank TLDs by their abuse levels. NQI is basically a normalized count of abusive domains per million registered names.
According to Architelos CEO Alexa Raad, the new gTLD with the highest NQI at the end of June was .work.
Today’s NameSentry data shows that .work has a tad under 6,900 abusive domains — almost all domains found in spam, garnished with just one suspected malware site — which works out to just under 10% of the total number of domains in its zone file.
That number is pretty high — one in 10 is not a figure you want haunting your registry — but it’s a far cry from the 98.2% that Blue Coat published earlier this week.
Looking at the numbers for .science, which has over 324,000 names in its zone and 15,671 dodgy domains in NameSentry, you get a shadiness factor of 4.8%. Again, that’s a light year away from the 99.35% number published by Blue Coat.
Raad also shared data showing that hundreds of .work and .science domains are delisted from abuse feeds every day, suggesting that the registries are engaged in long games of whack-a-mole with spammers.
Blue Coat based its numbers on a sampling of 75 million attempted domain visits by its customers — whether or not they were valid domains.
Architelos, on the other hand, takes raw data feeds from numerous sources (such as SpamHaus and SURBL) and validates that the domains do actually appear in the TLD’s zone. There’s no requirement for the domain to have been visited by a customer.
In my view, that makes the NameSentry numbers a more realistic measurement of how dirty some of these new gTLDs are.

Two .cpa applicants lose CPE

Two applicants that applied for the gTLD .cpa as a “Community” have lost their Community Priority Evaluations.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants scored 11 points out of 16, CPA Australia scored 12.
While relatively high scores for CPE, they both failed to pass the 14-point winning threshold.
The string, which stands for “certified public accountant”, is contested by a total of six applicants, which will now have to fight it out at auction.
Both applicants failed to score any of the four available points on the “nexus” criteria, which require the applicant-defined community to closely match the community described by the string.
In both cases, the CPE panel noted that the applicant wanted to restrict .cpa to members of their organizations, which only represents a subset of CPAs in the world.
The decisions can be found here.
Only two CPEs now remain unresolved — the reevaluation of DotGay’s .gay, and DotMusic’s .music. The status of .med and .kids is currently unknown.

.cam given the nod as Rightside wins confusion appeal

Rightside’s application for .cam will be un-rejected after the company beat Verisign in an appeal against a 2013 String Confusion Objection decision.
That’s right, .cam is officially no longer too confusingly similar to .com.
In a just-published August 26 decision (pdf) a three-person International Centre for Dispute Resolution panel overruled the original SCO panelist’s decision.
The new panel wrote:

Based on the average, reasonable Internet’s user’s experience, and the importance of search engines, in the [Final Review Panel]’s view, confusion, if any, between .COM and .CAM is highly likely to be fleeting. While a fleeting association may create some “possibility of confusion” or evoke an “association in the sense that the string brings another string to mind,” both such reactions are insufficient under the ICANN SCO standard to support a finding that confusion is probable.

It’s not quite as clear-cut a ruling as the .shop versus .通販 ruling last week, relying on the appeals panel essentially just disagreeing with some of the finer points of the original panel’s interpretation of the evidence.
Relating to one piece of evidence, the appeals panel found that the original panelist “improperly shifted the burden of proof” to Rightside to show that .cam was intended for camera-related uses.
Rightside was one of two applicants given the opportunity to appeal its SCO decision by ICANN last year, largely because two other .cam applicants managed to pass their Verisign objections with flying colors, creating obvious inconsistency.
Taryn Naidu, Rightside’s CEO, said in a statement:

We always felt strongly that the first panel’s decision was seriously flawed. How can .CAM in one application be different from the .CAM in another application when evaluated on the basis of string similarity? The fact is, it can’t.

It’s always struck me as unfair that Verisign did not get the chance to appeal the two SCOs it lost, given that the panelist in both cases was the same guy using the same thought processes.
The question now is: is the appeals panel correct?
I suppose we’ll find out after .cam goes on sale and unscrupulous domainers attempt to sell .cam names for inflated prices, hoping their would-be buyers don’t notice the difference.
The other two .cam applicants are AC Webconnecting and Famous Four Media. All three will now go to auction.

Another new gTLD goes to a closed generic applicant

Dish DBS has won the contention set for the .data gTLD, even though its proposed business model has been banned by ICANN.
Competing applicants Donuts and Minds + Machines have both withdrawn their competing applications.
It’s the second string this week to go to a “closed generic” applicant, that wants to keep all the domains in the TLD to itself even though it’s not a dot-brand.
Earlier this week, the company behind the Food Network TV show won .food.
Most companies that applied for closed generics changed their minds after the Governmental Advisory Committee issued advice against the model, but Dish was one of the ones that stuck to its original plans.
In June, ICANN ruled that .data, .food and a few others could either withdraw their bids, drop their exclusivity plans, or have their applications frozen until the next new gTLD round.
As withdrawal now seems to be off the cards, it seem that .data will not see the light of day for some time to come.

Third ICM windfall due as .sex hits sunrise

If we’ve learned one thing about new gTLD sunrise periods, it’s that adult-oriented TLDs sell quite well.
ICM Registry started its third such period yesterday, as .sex went into its “TMCH Sunrise” phase.
Until October 1, any company with a trademark in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to buy a matching .sex domain on a first-come, first-served basis.
From October 5 to October 30, anyone with a .xxx domain name or current .xxx “Sunrise B” block will be able to buy the matching .sex during the Domain Matching phase.
Anyone who buys a .xxx before October 1 will be able to participate in this second sunrise.
ICM reported in May that .porn received 3,995 sunrise registrations while .adult sold 3,902 — both via a combination of TMCH Sunrise sales and blocks.
At ICM’s prices, that’s enough to comfortably cover its ICANN application fees.
Every other new gTLD with the exception of .sucks has sold fewer than 1,000 sunrise names.
General availability for .sex starts November 4.

Laughable security report labels Google Registry “shady”

A report by security company Blue Coat Systems today denounced new gTLDs as “shady” and recommended organizations think about blocking the “shadiest” ones entirely.
The study classified “tens of millions” of domains requested by users of its censorware service according to whether they had content that posed a security risk.
It found that nine new gTLDs and one ccTLD scored over 95% — that is, 95% of the domains in those TLDs requested by its customers were potentially unsafe.
But its numbers, I believe, are bollocks.
My main reason for this belief? Blue Coat has ranked .zip as “100% shady”.
This means that, according to the company, every single .zip domain its customers have visited is either spam, malware, a scam, a botnet, suspicious, phishing or potentially unwanted software.
The problem is that the entire .zip zone file currently consists of precisely one (1) domain.
That domain is nic.zip, and it belongs to Google Registry. This is a pre-launch TLD.
As far as I can tell, Google Registry is not involved in distributing malware, spam, phishing, etc.
Nevertheless, Blue Coat said network administrators should “consider blocking traffic” to .zip and other “shady” TLDs.
The top 10 list of the worst TLDs includes .country, .kim, .cricket, .science, .work, .party, .gq (Equatorial Guinea) and .link.
That’s a mixture of Afilias, Minds + Machines, Famous Four and Uniregistry. The common factor is the low cost of registration.
The full Blue Coat report, which can be downloaded here, does not give any of the real underlying numbers for its assertions.
For example, it ranks .review, one of Famous Four Media’s portfolio, as “100% shady” but does not reveal how many domains that relates to.
If its customers have only visited 10 .review domains, and all of those were dodgy, that would equate to a 100% score, even though .review has over 45,000 domains in its zone.
At the other end of the table, .london’s score of 1.85% could have been positively affected by Blue Coat customers visiting a broader selection of .london domains.
The company claims that the report is based on “tens of millions” of domains, but I’d hazard a guess that most of those are in .com and other more established TLDs.
That’s not to say that there’s no truth in Blue Coat’s broader assertion that a lot of new gTLDs are full of garbage — do a Google search for .review sites and see if you can find anything worth looking at — but I don’t think its numbers are worth the pixels they’re written with.

Radix targets a million .online names in 2-3 years

Having just finished the most-successful new gTLD launch day to date, Radix Registry reckons it can get .online to seven figures in two to three years.
“We’re at 37,170 names as of an hour ago,” Radix CEO Bhavin Turakhia told DI at about 1000 UTC this morning.
That represents less than a full day of general availability. The company said last night that 28,000 names were registered in the first 30 minutes.
UPDATE: At the 24-hour mark, Radix tweeted this:

What an exciting Day 1 it has been for .online! Total DUMs 24 hours into the GA is 39,449 #newgTLDs #domaining

— Radix (@RadixRegistry) August 27, 2015

That beats .club’s 25,000-ish, which was Radix’s publicly stated goal, but it also tops .berlin’s 31,000 first-day names.
The CEOs of both these rival registries had publicly predicted their positions would be toppled and actively encouraged Radix to claim the crown.
Turakhia said that the majority of names registered came from pre-orders, largely at 1&1.
“Fourteen thousand names came from 1&1, 6,000 from Go Daddy, 2,700 from United Domains, 1,900 from Name.com and 1,400 from Tucows,” he said, partially breaking down the 37,170 figure by registrar.
He said the goal is to have a .online zone measured in the millions of names.
“I estimate that we should be able to get to a million names in a period of two to three years,” he said. “That’s on a conservative basis.”
Depending on how you count domains, .xyz may have already been the first to hit one million. Its zone never got as high as a million names, but it may have briefly crossed a million in terms of domains under management earlier this year.
At auction, .online sold for what is believed to be an eight-figure sum, originally to a joint venture of Radix, Tucows and Namecheap.
Radix bought out its partners earlier this year.
That was an increase in risk exposure Radix business head Sandeep Ramchandani said made him nervous. He said launch day’s numbers show .online’s potential.
Turahkhia said that there are 680,000 names in the .com zone that end in “online” today, and a million that have “online” somewhere in the second level, showing that the string is desirable to registrants.
Radix said last night that its Early Access Period — during which names are sold for a higher price — ended with 1,130 sales.
Turahkhia said that of these, about 1,000 were registered in the last three days, during which time the price was $100. Regular .online pricing is around the same as .com ($14.99 at 1&1 and Go Daddy), but some registrars are selling for as much at $50.

Free speech banned from .bible

The Bible may be a piece of literature that belongs to the world, but in .bible it’s going to be a propaganda tool for Christians.
The just-published Acceptable Use Policy (pdf) bans any content that the American Bible Society, acting as registry, deems unsuitable. Specifically prohibited:

Pointing to any content that may, as determined in ABS’s sole discretion, disparage or blaspheme God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Christianity (to include any sects or denominations), the Bible, or any other such tenet, symbol, representative or principles of the Christian faith.
Pointing to any content that, as determined in ABS’s sole discretion, espouses or promotes a religious, secular or other worldview that is antithetical to New Testament principles, including but not limited to the promotion of a non-Christian religion or set of religious beliefs.

This would seem to ban, for example, a web site that used the Bible’s text to question whether human sacrifice and scapegoating are really moral precepts by which people should live their lives.
ABS is a non-denominational organization, so presumably you are allowed to set up sites that say Eucharistic wine is really magic human blood, and also that it isn’t.
The registry is the publisher of the “Good News” modern-English translation of the Bible, which ends with billions of people being cast into a lake of fire to burn for eternity.

Did XYZ.com pay NetSol $3m to bloat .xyz?

Evidence of a possibly dodgy deal between XYZ.com and Network Solutions has emerged.
Court documents filed last week by Verisign suggest that the .xyz registry may have purchased $3 million in advertising in exchange for $3 million of .xyz domain names.
Verisign, which is suing .xyz and CEO Daniel Negari over its allegedly “false” advertising, submitted to the court a list of hundreds of exhibits (pdf) that it proposes to use at trial.
Among them are these two:

• Email from Negari to Andrew Gorrin re EPP Feed and billing directly for $3,000,000 in domains
• Credit Memo to Andrew from Negari “We have elected to pay for our $3MM Q2 advertising insertion order, which was dated May 20th with a credit…….” (5/31/14)

Gorrin is Web.com’s senior VP of marketing and Negari is Daniel Negari, XYZ.com’s CEO.
The documents these headings refer to are not public information, and are not likely to be any time soon, but they appear to refer to on the one hand XYZ billing NetSol for $3 million in domain names and on the other NetSol billing XYZ for $3 million in advertising.
Only one of the two document headings is dated, so we don’t know how closely they coincided.
Other headings, among the 446 documents Verisign wants to use at trial, suggest that they happened at pretty much the same time:

• Email from Andrew Gorrin to Ashley Henning (web.com) re Bulk Purchase of .xyz domains (5/29/14)
• Email from Andrew Gorrin to Negari re XYZ.Com Advertising IO and Marketing Agreement attaching signed agreements (5/20/14)
• Email string Ashley Henning to Christine Nagey, Andrew Gorrin, Edward Angstadt re Bulk Purchase of .XYZ Domains (5/30/14)

The emails Verisign cites were dated May 2014, shortly before .xyz went into general availability June 2.
What we seem to be looking at here — and I’m getting into speculative territory here — are references to two more or less simultaneous transactions, both valued at exactly $3 million, between the two parties.
Both companies have consistently refused to address the nature of their deal, citing NDAs.
As you recall, the vast majority of .xyz’s early registrations were provided by NetSol, which pushed hundreds of thousands of free .xyz domains into its customers’ accounts without their explicit consent.
The number of freebies is believed to be about 350,000, based on comments Negari recently made to The Telegraph, in which he stated that .xyz, which had about 850,000 domains in its zone at the time, would have 500,000 registrations if the freebies were excluded.
With a registry fee roughly equivalent to .com’s (.xyz’s is believed to be a little lower), 350,000 names would work out to roughly $3 million.
Negari has stated previously that every .xyz registration was revenue-generating, even the freebies.
Is it possible that NetSol paid XYZ’s registry fees using money XYZ paid it for advertising? Is it possible no money changed hands at all?
I’m not saying either company has done anything illegal, and it’s completely possible I’m completely misunderstanding the situation, but it does rather put me in mind of the old “round-trip” deals that tech firms used to dishonestly prop up their tumbling revenue at the turn of the century.
Back in 2000, the dot-com bubble was on the verge of popping, taking the US economy with it, and companies facing the decline of their businesses came up with “creative” ways to show investors that they were still growing.
AOL Time Warner, for example, “effectively funded its own online advertising revenue by giving the counterparties the means to pay for advertising that they would not otherwise have purchased”.
Regulators exercised their legal options in these cases only where there appeared to be dishonest accounting, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that XYZ or Web.com unit NetSol have failed to adhere to anything but the highest accounting standards.
Again, I’m not saying we’re looking at a “round-trip” deal here, and there’s not a great deal of evidence to go on, but it sure smells familiar.
Certainly, questions have been raised that Verisign did not raise in its initial complaint.
Anyway.
On a personal note, I’d like to disclose that among the documents Verisign demanded from XYZ are dozens of pages of previously confidential emails exchanged between myself and Negari.
I’ve read them, and they’re mostly heated arguments about a) his refusal to give details about the NetSol deal and b) my purported lack of journalistic integrity whenever I published a post about .xyz with an even slightly negative angle.
XYZ had no choice but to supply these emails. I can’t blame it for complying with its legal requirements.
I wasn’t the only affected blogger. Mike Berkens, Konstantinos Zournas, Rick Schwartz and Morgan Linton also had their private correspondence compromised by Verisign.
I don’t know how they feel about this violation, but in my view this shows Verisign’s contempt for the media and its disregard for the sanctity of off-the-record conversations between reporters and their sources.
And that’s what I have to say about that.

Ashley Madison .sucks domain mysteriously vanishes

The domain ashleymadison.sucks, which hosted a tool to search a database of millions of stolen Ashley Madison users’ data, has been deleted.
According to Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling, the domain was deleted by its registrant within the five-day grace period permitted under ICANN rules.
The site looked like this shortly after it launched at the weekend.

Ashley Madison, which uses .com, is the “dating” site specifically designed for people who want to have extra-marital affairs.
Hackers recently released a 9GB file containing, reportedly, as many as 32 million users’ email addresses. The breach has led to much online shaming of public figures and has reportedly led to suicides.
The ashleymadison.sucks site hosted a forum and a search engine that allowed partial email address searches. Even in the short time it was up, it attracted a fair amount of forum posts, as well as the attention of Vox Populi itself, which tweeted:

Of all the new sites emerging on the dotSucks platform, none seems more timely or driven by passion than http://t.co/2sx4zk6s7V

— DotSucks (@DotSUCKSDomain) August 22, 2015

Interestingly, I’m not sure if the site would have fallen foul of any Vox Pop policies.
There’s a provision against hacking, but the site was merely showing the proceeds of hacking rather than doing any hacking. In addition, the registry’s prohibition on cyberbullying only extends to children.
The domain, at time of writing, is back in the available pool. Uniregistry wants $2,078.96 for it, which may explain why it was deleted while a refund was still available.