First example of .sucks cybersquatting?

The .sucks domain has been generally available for a little over a week now, and I’ve found what may be the first example of somebody attempting to sell one to a brand owner.
amherstcollege.sucks is one of only a handful on non-registry-owned .sucks domains to have a web site already indexed by Google.
The site solicits commentary about Amherst College — a liberal arts university in Massachusetts that owns a US trademark on “Amherst” — but does not yet publish any such criticism.
However, the phrases “AMHERSTCOLLEGE.SUCKS DOMAIN NAME + WEBSITE IS FOR SALE” and “IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PURCHASING THIS DOMAIN AND WEBSITE CONTACT US” appear prominently on the bare-bones WordPress blog currently running at the site.
The Whois record shows “THIS DOMAIN IS FOR SALE” as the registrant organization.
Under the UDRP, offering a domain for sale is usually considered enough to meet the “bad faith” part of the three-prong cybersquatting test.
I doubt it’s the only example of a .sucks domain matching a brand currently listed for sale by a third-party registrant, but it is the first one showing up in Google.
It’s still early days; the other .sucks domains with sites and a Google presence are a mix of redirects, mirroring and placeholders.
Microsoft-owned microsoft.sucks is one of them. It redirects to a Bing search results page.
The $250-a-year .sucks gTLD, managed by Vox Populi registry, currently has fewer than 5,700 domains in its zone file. Growth has ground almost to a halt over the last few days.

Donuts: glitch revealed price we would pay for gTLDs

The recently discovered security vulnerability in one of ICANN’s web sites revealed how much Donuts was willing to pay for contested gTLDs at auction.
This worrying claim emerged during a meeting between registries and the ICANN board of directors at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires yesterday.
“We were probably the largest victim of the data breach,” Donuts veep Jon Nevett told the board. “We had our financial data reviewed numerous times, dozens of times. We had our relative net worth of our TLDs reviewed, so it was very damaging information.”
He was referring to the misconfiguration in the new gTLD applicants’ portal, which allowed any user to view confidential application attachments belonging to any applicant.
ICANN discovered the problem in February, two years after the portal launched. The results of a security audit were revealed in late April.
But it was not until late May that it emerged that only one person, dotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski, was suspected by ICANN of having deliberately viewed data belonging to others.
Nevett said communication should have been faster.
“We were in the dark for a number of weeks about who saw the data,” he told the board. “That was troubling, as we were going to auctions in that interim period as well.”
Donuts, which applied for over 300 new gTLDs, is known to have taken a strictly numbers-driven approach to string selection and auction strategy.
If a rival in a contention set had known how much Donuts was prepared to pay for a string, it would have had a significant advantage in an auction.
In response to Nevett’s concerns, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said that ICANN had to do a thorough investigation before it could be sure who saw what when.

XYZ buys .security and .protection from Symantec

XYZ.com has added .security and .protection to its portfolio of new gTLDs under a private deal with security software maker Symantec.
Symantec originally applied for both as closed generics, but changed its plans when ICANN changed its tune about exclusive access gTLDs.
The company won .security in an auction against Donuts and Defender Security late last year; .protection was uncontested. It lost auctions for .cloud and .antivirus.
Symantec’s .symantec and .norton, both dot-brands, are currently in pre-delegation testing.
XYZ already owns .college, .rent and of course .xyz.
In other news, Afilias has acquired .promo, which was in PDT with applicant Play.Promo Oy, in a private auction.
UPDATE: A couple of hours after this post was published, XYZ announced it has also acquired .theatre, which will compete with Donuts’ .theater, from KBE gTLD Holding Inc.

URS fight brewing at ICANN 53

Should the Uniform Rapid Suspension process spread from new gTLDs to incumbent gTLDs, possibly including .com?
That’s been the subject of some strong disagreements during the opening weekend of ICANN 53, which formally kicks off in Buenos Aires today.
During sessions of the Generic Names Supporting Organization and the ICANN board and staff, ICANN was accused of trying to circumvent policy-making processes by forcing URS into the .travel, .pro and .cat registry agreements, which are up for renewal.
ICANN executives denied doing any such thing, saying the three registries volunteered to have URS included in their new contracts, which are modeled on the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement.
“It’s just something we’ve suggested and they’ve taken up,” said Cyrus Namazi, ICANN’s vice president of domain name services.
If a registry wants to increase the number of rights protection mechanisms in its gTLD, why not let them, ICANN execs asked, pointing out that loads of new gTLDs have implemented extra RPMs voluntarily.
ICANN admits that it stands to benefit from operational efficiencies when its registry agreements are more uniform.
Opponents pointed out that there’s a difference between Donuts, say, having its bespoke, voluntary Domain Protected Marks List, and bilaterally putting the URS into an enforceable ICANN contract.
URS is not a formal Consensus Policy, they say, unlike UDRP. Consensus Policies apply to all gTLDs, whereas URS was created by ICANN for new gTLDs alone.
Arguably leading the fight against URS osmosis is Phil Corwin, counsel for Internet Commerce Association, which doesn’t want its clients’ vast portfolios of .com domains subject to URS.
He maintained over the weekend that his beef was with the process through which URS was making its way into proposed legacy gTLD contracts.
It shouldn’t be forced upon legacy gTLDs without a Consensus Policy, he said.
While the GNSO, ICANN staff and board spent about an hour talking about “process” over the weekend, it was left to director Chris Disspain to point out that that was basically a smokescreen for an argument about whether the URS should be used in other gTLDs.
He’s right, but the GNSO is split on this issue in unusual ways.
Corwin enjoys the support of the Business Constituency, of which he is a member, in terms of his process criticisms if not his criticisms of RPMs more generally.
ICA does also have backing from some registrars (which bear the support costs of dealing with customers affected by URS), from the pro-registrant Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, and from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Intellectual Property Constituency thinks that the process is just fine — .travel et al can sign up to URS if they want to.
While the registries have not yet put forward a joint position, the IPC’s view has been more or less echoed by Donuts, which owns the largest portfolio of new gTLDs.
The public comment period for the .travel contract ended yesterday. Comments can be read here. Comment periods on .cat and .pro close July 7.

Want to slam .sucks? You can at dotsucks.sucks

Vox Populi Registry is eating its own dog food and has launched a .sucks gripe site targeting itself.
DotSucks.sucks has gone live, allowing critics to take a pop at the company and its gTLD.
The registry-owned site says: “if we intend to build it, then we need to live here.”
The domain hosts a simple forum. Anyone can sign up using their social media accounts and start posting in moments.
The site says:

WHO SUCKS? US?
Here (right here) is a chance to tell us to our face.
If you are right, we’ll own up to the shortcoming, but if you’re wrong, we get to tell you so!
Criticism can be constructive. Good for the bottom line. It can also be therapeutic. Good for the soul. It ultimately clears the air. Good for making progress.
We are the Vox Populi Registry, a small company with a big mission to create a new and vibrant Internet community. And if we intend to build it, then we need to live here. So tell us what you think. We think you should consider getting a place of your own.

So far, only one idiot has posted a topic. For testing purposes, you understand.
The site does not appear to be moderated.
Earlier this year, Vox Pop CEO John Berard said in an interview he was unsure whether the company would launch a .sucks site for itself.

First .sucks gripe site goes live

Just half a day after the new gTLD became available, the first .sucks sites have started going live.
So far, only one .sucks domain that does not belong to Vox Populi Registry is showing up in Google.
It’s dealman.sucks, and it does not appear to belong to the brand owner.
The domain, which was registered in the first minute of general availability this morning, leads to a “Coming Soon” page that merely says:

CONSUMER FORUM AND ARTICLES
A place for Dealman customers to have a voice and get clarification on issues important to them.
We’ll invite Dealman to contribute and engage with customers too.

Deal Man is a New Zealand web site selling clothes. It does not seem to be a particularly famous brand, but it has attracted criticism.
It has been the subject of recent negative media coverage in the Kiwi press and already has a gripe page on Facebook.

.sucks made millions from sunrise

Vox Populi could have made over $6 million from defensive registrations during its sunrise period.
The company’s first post-sunrise zone file was published today, and according to DI PRO it contains 3,394 domains, the vast majority of which were newly added today.
If all of these names were sunrise registrations, that would add up to an almost $6.8 million windfall for the registry.
However, I don’t think that’s a completely reliable figure. I believe that not all of the names are from sunrise.
The zone file seems to have been generated after .sucks general availability kicked off at a minute after midnight UTC this morning. ICANN publishes zone files around 5am UTC but the time it collects them from registries can vary between TLDs.
Poring over Whois records, I’ve found many examples of domains in the .sucks zone that have creation dates in the early minutes and hours of GA.
Many domains that are not obvious trademarks show creation times in the first 60 seconds of GA, suggesting they were pre-orders and sold for GA prices.
It’s also probable that some sunrise names are not showing up in the zone file yet due to a lack of name servers.
According to a source talking to DI last November, Vox Pop paid “over $3 million” for the right to run .sucks at auction.
It seems to have made its money back — and then some — purely from sunrise fees.
Sunrise names are charged at $1,999 a year by the registry. In GA, most names have a recommended retail price of $250. Strings considered valuable, many of them trademarks, carry a $2,500 “Market Premium” recommended price.

Famous Four following .sucks playbook with premium pricing for brands?

New gTLD registry Famous Four Media has slapped general availability prices of $500 and up on domain names matching famous brands.
The company plans to shortly introduce eight “premium” pricing tiers, ranging from $200 a year to $10,000 a year.
The first to launch, on July 8, will be its “brand protection tier”, which will carry a $498 registry fee.
Famous Four told its registrars that the tier “will provide an additional deterrent to cyber-squatters for well-known brands ensuring that domain names in this tier will not be eligible for price promotions”.
The gTLDs .date, .faith and .review will be first to use the tiered pricing structure.
It’s not entirely clear what brands will be a part of the $498 tier, or how the registry has compiled its list, but registrars have been given the ability to ask for their clients’ trademarks to be included.
I asked Famous Four for clarification a few days ago but have not yet had a response.
While other registries, such as Donuts, used tiered pricing for GA domains, I’m only aware of one other that puts premium prices on brands: .sucks.
Vox Populi has a trademark-heavy list of .sucks domains it calls Market Premium — formerly Sunrise Premium — that carry a $1,999-a-year registry fee.
Unlike Vox Pop, Famous Four does not appear to be planning a subsidy that would make brand-match domains available at much cheaper prices to third parties.
Famous Four’s gTLDs have seen huge growth in the last month or two, largely because it’s been selling domains at a loss.
.science, for example, has over 300,000 registrations — making it the third-largest new gTLD — because Famous Four’s registry fee has been discounted to just $0.25 from May to July.
The same discount applies to .party (over 195,000 names in its zone) and .webcam (over 60,000).
Those three gTLDs account for exactly half of the over 22,000 spam attacks that used new gTLD domains in March and April, according to Architelos’ latest abuse report.
With names available at such cheap prices, it would not be surprising if cybersquatters are abusing these gTLDs as much as the spammers.
Will intellectual property owners believe a $498+ reg fee is a useful deterrent to cybersquatting?
Or will they look upon this move as “predatory”, as they did with .sucks?

Donuts makes private deal with wine-makers

Donuts inked a private side-deal with wine-making regions in order to launch the .wine and .vin new gTLDs
The company signed both Registry Agreements with ICANN late last week, after the wine regions and the European Union stopped complaining.
The EU and regions had filed Cooperative Engagement Process objections with ICANN, saying that Donuts should be forced to protect “geographic indicators” such as Napa Valley and Champagne.
CEPs are often precursors to Independent Review Process complaints, but both were dropped after Donuts came to a private deal.
“The CEP filed by the Wine Regions was withdrawn because we came to a satisfactory private arrangement with the Registry concerned, Donuts,” David Taylor of Hogan Lovells, who represented the wine-making regions, told DI.
Details of the deal have not been disclosed, but Donuts does not appear to have committed to anything that could create compliance problems with ICANN in future.
“It has been a successful negotiation between private parties that avoids policy precedents,” Taylor said. “There are no special changes to these registry agreements (e.g., no new PICs)”
PICs are Public Interest Commitments, enforceable addenda to Registry Agreements that oblige the registry to adhere to extra rules.
So are GIs protected in .wine or not? For now, Taylor won’t say.
“My view is that this is not a victory for either side of the GI debate,” he said. “This is a victory for the wine community (consumers and producers) and ultimately the new gTLD program.”

Barclays probably not breaching contract, says ICANN compliance chief

Barclays doesn’t seem to have violated its new gTLD registry agreements, despite admitting to criminal charges related to currency manipulation, according to ICANN’s top compliance executive.
Allen Grogan, chief contract compliance officer, told DI today that a “literal” reading of the Registry Agreements for .barclays and .barclaycard would not see the bank in breach.
“As far as I know we haven’t received a formal compliance complaint about it. If we received a complaint we would investigate it,” Grogan said.
“At first blush I wouldn’t see a clear-cut violation of the literal language of the agreement,” he said.
Barclays’ suitability to be a new gTLD registry has come under the spotlight in CircleID blog posts recently, first by domainer George Kirikos and then Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin.
All RAs contain a provision that allows ICANN to terminate the contract if any officer or director of the registry is convicted of a financially-related misdemeanor or any felony.
Barclays was one of five banks that recently fessed up to felony currency market fixing charges in the US, paying a combined $2.5 billion fine.
However, as Kirikos, Corwin and now Grogan have pointed out, the RA only talks about crimes committed by officers and directors, not the companies themselves.
Grogran pointed out that to hold a corporation accountable for its crimes long after the fact might be a bit excessive.
Criminal employees and directors can be fired, but a company cannot fire itself.
“Does that means for the next hundred years ICANN or no other corporation should do business with them?” he said.