Neustar hires Becky Burr as privacy chief

Neustar has recruited one of the ICANN community’s best-known lawyers as its new chief privacy officer.
Becky Burr is set to join the company June 1, reporting to general counsel Scott Blake Harris, according to a Neustar press release.
Burr is well-known in the domain name industry.
While at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration during the Clinton administration, she was one of the people most heavily involved in ICANN’s creation.
In private practice as a partner at the law firm Wilmer Hale since 2000, she’s been involved in many of the industry’s most fractious legal disputes.
Over just the last couple of years she’s represented the .Jobs Charter Compliance Coalition in its fight against Employ Media, ICM Registry in its quest to get .xxx approved, and most recently Big Room in its attempts to fend off a .eco trademark infringement lawsuit.
She’s also sat on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and its country-code Names Supporting Organization.

Battle over .jobs to drag on into 2013

Employ Media’s fight to avoid losing its contract to run .jobs won’t be resolved this year, according to the latest batch of arbitration documents published by ICANN.
February 2013, two years after the the battle was joined, is now the absolute earliest the company could find out whether ICANN has the right to shut down .jobs due to an alleged contract breach.
As you may recall from deep in the mists of time (actually, February last year) ICANN threatened to terminate Employ Media’s contract due to the controversial .Jobs Universe project.
The registry gave thousands of .jobs domains, mostly geographic or vocational strings, to its partner, the DirectEmployers Association, which started competing against jobs listings sites.
A coalition of jobs sites including Monster.com complained about this on the basis that .jobs was originally designed for companies to list their own jobs, not to aggregate third-party listings.
The coalition believed that the .Jobs Universe project was essentially a fait accompli, despite Employ Media’s promise that all the names now allocated to DirectEmployers would be subject to an open RFP process.
ICANN eventually agreed with the coalition, issued a breach notice, and now it finds itself in arbitration under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce.
Employ Media demanded arbitration in May last year, but it has inexplicably taken until now for it, ICANN and the ICC to publish a draft timetable for the process.
A face-to-face hearing has now been scheduled for January 28 to February 8, 2013. Between now and December, it’s paper filings – claims and counterclaims – all the way.
Arbitration clauses were added as standard to ICANN’s registry agreements in order to create a cheaper, faster option than fighting out disagreements in the courts.
However, with both sides lawyered up and a process now likely to last at least two years, it’s easy to wonder just how much more efficient it will be.
It won’t be an easy decision for the ICC panel.
While I still believe Employ Media was a bit sneaky about how it won ICANN approval for the .Jobs Universe project – and it certainly disenfranchised other jobs sites – there’s no denying that .jobs is now a much healthier gTLD for registrants as a result of DirectEmployers’ involvement.
An ICANN win might actually be a bad thing.

Another contention battle confirmed as Starting Dot reveals five gTLD bids

Portfolio gTLD applicant Starting Dot is to apply to ICANN for five new generic top-level domains, catering mostly to vertical industries and professions.
The France-based company wants .archi, .bio, .design, .immo and .ski.
The first thing to note is that we now have another confirmed contention set – Starting Dot’s .immo application is not the same .immo announced by Nic.at a few weeks ago.
The word “immo” is apparently an abbreviation for “real estate” commonly used in Germany, France and Italy. The gTLD would be reserved for members of that sector.
The .archi gTLD would be reserved for certified architects. It’s backed by the International Architectural Union, a Paris-based umbrella trade group which represents over a million architects.
The .bio proposal, pitched at the food and agricultural industries, anticipates a semi-regulated namespace, while .design would be open to anyone with an interest in that topic.
For .ski, Starting Dot has partnered with Adrenaline TLD, which originally planned to file for five extreme sports gTLDs, on a joint-venture app.
As I blogged earlier today, Adrenaline founder Rob Rozicki now works for the new gTLD marketing firm DomainDiction, which seems to have signed Starting Dot as one of its first clients.

Three South African city gTLDs announced

UniForum, which runs South Africa’s .za country code, reportedly is applying to ICANN for three local city top-level domains.
The company, which also goes by the name of ZA Central Registry, is going for .capetown, .durban and .joburg (for Johannesburg), according to a report in MyBroadband.co.za.
That’s in addition to its controversial African Union-backed .africa bid.
ZACR is one of several ccTLD registries to get into the new gTLD game. In Europe, Nominet (.uk), Afnic (.fr and others), SIDN (.nl) and Nic.at have already announced applications.

TLDH signs another city gTLD – .budapest

Top Level Domain Holdings has been backed by the city of Budapest as the official applicant for the .budapest generic top-level domain.
If the application is approved, TLDH subsidiary Minds + Machines will run the back-end registry and the city will receive a share of the revenue.
TLDH has previously announced deals with local governments for .london, .bayern (Bavaria), .miami and .nrw (North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state).
The company does not list its two announced Indian city gTLD bids – .mumbai (for which city approval may have been withdrawn) and .bangaluru (which appears to be a typo) — on its web site, but a spokesperson indicated that they’re both still active applications.
TLDH also seems to be confirming on its web site that it is in fact applying for .horse, an application I’d long suspected was nothing more than a red herring. Guess I was wrong.
Budapest is of course Hungary’s capital city. Wikipedia says it has about 1.74 million inhabitants, making it Europe’s seventh-largest city.

Nominet involved in seven gTLD applications

Nominet, the .uk registry, is providing registry services for seven new generic top-level domain applications, according to CEO Lesley Cowley.
Cowley told Nominet’s Annual General Meeting today that five of the applications are for dot-brands, a Nominet spokesperson said.
The identities of the clients are currently protected by non-disclosure agreements.
The other two bids are for .wales and .cymru, which Nominet is applying for with the approval of the Welsh government.
The other big European ccTLD operator to already announce its applications, Austria’s Nic.at, said recently that it has submitted 11 applications, six of which were geographic.

.secure applicant claims NCC stole her idea

Domain Security Company CEO Mary Iqbal claims that NCC Group took many of her ideas for a high-security .secure top-level domain following unproductive investment talks.
Iqbal is also hinting at “potential future litigation” over the issue.
The surprising claims, made in emails to DI today, follow the announcement last week that a new NCC subsidiary, Artemis Internet, will also apply to ICANN for .secure.
“NCC Group has taken many of the security measures outlined in the Domain Security Company LLC security plan and incorporated them into the NCC Group’s proposed security measures,” Iqbal said.
Artemis chief technology officer Alex Stamos, a veteran security industry technologist, has dismissed the allegations as “completely ridiculous”.
“The only reason I know she is applying is because we did some Google searches when we were putting together our announcement,” he said.
Iqbal claims she was first contacted by NCC in January this year to talk about signing up for data escrow services – one of the technical services all new gTLD applicants need.
However, she says these talks escalated into discussions about a possible NCC investment in Domain Security Company, during which she shared the company’s security and business plans.
She said in an email:

These disclosures were made based on assurances from the NCC Group that the NCC Group was not then involved with any other applications for a secure Top Level Domain. Specific assurances were also given that the NCC Group was not involved with any other potential application for a .SECURE Top Level Domain.

But Stamos said that he’s been working on .secure at NCC since late last year, and he has no knowledge of any talks about investing in Iqbal’s company.
“All I know is that she talked to one of our salespeople about escrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen a business plan or security plan.”
Emails from an NCC executive sent to Iqbal in January and forwarded to DI by Iqbal today appear to be completely consistent with a sales call.
Iqbal said she has emails demonstrating that the talks went further, but she declined to provide them “since I may have to use it in any potential future litigation”.
Stamos pointed out that if NCC was in the habit with competing with its escrow clients, it would have applied for considerably more gTLDs than just .secure.
Artemis is proposing a significant technology development as part of its .secure bid, he said: the Domain Policy Framework, which he outlines on his personal blog here.
He added that Artemis is happy to compete with other .secure applicants – he evidently expects more to emerge – but on the merits of the application rather than “spurious claims”.
Domain Security Company “already has a very troubling history of using the legal process to overcome problems that should be based on merit”, he said.
That’s a reference to the company’s almost-successful attempt to secure US trademarks on .secure and .bank, in spite of the US trademark office’s rules against granting trademarks on TLDs.
Expect more stories like this to emerge about other gTLDs after ICANN’s Big Reveal of the applicant list next month.
Whether her claims have any merit or not, Iqbal’s not the first to claim that another applicant stole her idea, and she certainly won’t be the last.

How NCC plans to revolutionize domain name security with .secure gTLD

The proposed .secure generic top-level domain is now officially contested, after NCC Group, best known in the domain industry for its data escrow services, announced a bid.
Newly formed NCC subsidiary Artemis Internet Inc, based in San Francisco, is the official applicant.
According to Artemis chief technology officer Alex Stamos, who co-founded security testing firm iSEC Partners and sold it to NCC for $22.8 million two years ago, this is a hard security play.
The .secure gTLD would be all about enforcing strict security policies on registrants, he said.
“Right now there are a lot of interesting security technologies out there, but they’re generally not very effective because they’re optional,” he said.
As well as premium pricing and a manual registrant verification process expected to take about two weeks – complete with mailing address confirmation and two-factor authentication tokens – Artemis plans to force registrants to adhere to certain baseline security policies.
For example, all .secure web sites would have to be completely HTTPS, Stamos said. The only permissible use of a standard port 80 URL would be to redirect to the encrypted site.
The same would go for mail servers – they’d all have to use TLS to encrypt email as standard.
“When you go to bank.secure you’ll know that the software and servers at the other end are going to make the most secure decisions possible,” Stamos said.
Artemis would scan its registrants’ sites for compliance with these baseline rules, looking out for things such as botched SSL implementations.
But Artmeis wants to take it a step further. It is also proposing a new protocol, Domain Policy Framework, which would let registrants publish their security policies in the DNS.
Stamos said the company has set up a Domain Policy Working Group to develop the spec, which it plans to submit to the IETF for standardization before the end of the year.
The other members of the working group, which promise to include some “influential” names in financial services, software and social media, will be announced in July.
DPF would work alongside the existing DNSSEC and DANE protocols to enable registrants to specify, for example, which Certificate Authorities browsers should trust when accessing their .secure domain, preventing certain types of attacks, Stamos said.
Obviously, this system is not going to work without support from browser software, but Stamos said he’s hopeful that the big vendors will embrace the DPF spec.
“The most innovative and forward-leaning browsers will support it first,” he said.
Domains in .secure would still be accessible by non-compliant browsers, he said.
ARI Registry Services has been hired to manage the back-end registry, but Artemis is also building a secondary registry system for storing the DPF records, which it plans to offer to other TLD registries.
NCC plans to invest up to £6 million ($9.7 million) in Artmeis over the next 15 months, according to a press release.
Another firm, Domain Security Company, also plans to apply for .secure.

ICANN not done with TAS bug analysis

Despite sending out hundreds of notifications to new gTLD applicants today, it looks rather like ICANN’s analysis of the TLD Application System bug is not yet complete.
(MAY 10 UPDATE — in a statement today, ICANN provided significantly more information about the notification process, rendering much of the speculation originally in this post moot. Read it here.)

Demand Media mum on $18m new gTLDs investment

Demand Media has invested $18 million in new generic top-level domains, but it won’t disclose whether it has spent all of the money on application fees.
The company, which owns number two domain name registrar eNom, held its first-quarter earnings conference call this evening, during which it revealed the investment.
A roughly $18 million investment could mean as many as 100 new gTLD applications, but Demand executives refused to elaborate on its plans.
CFO Charles Hilliard said that new gTLDs are seen as a “significant strategic growth opportunity” and that Demand would provide more details upon the closure of ICANN’s application window.
As Mike Berkens has already suggested tonight on TheDomains, a massive investment in application fees seems to be the most plausible use for the money.
The fact that the whole of the investment appears to have been made in April would support this view.
But CEO Richard Rosenblatt also confirmed during the call that the company has now also entered into the registry services provider business, providing the back-end for other applicants.
It does not appear to have been particularly successful attracting clients. Rosenblatt said that Demand has created a back-end platform and “signed our first two strategic customers”.
Just two clients would put Demand at the low end of the registry service provider rankings in this first new gTLD round.
I’m aware of at least one applicant that changed its mind about partnering with the company for its application.
ICANN’s background checks on new gTLD applicants include probes into, among other things, adverse cybersquatting decisions under the UDRP.
Demand Media, as a massive domain registrant, gets hit by UDRP complaints fairly regularly, and some have said it’s lost enough to be disqualified from running a registry under ICANN’s rules.
As far as I’m aware, it’s currently an open question whether hiding UDRP losses and applications behind subsidiaries will be enough to evade these background checks.
But if Demand is prepared to pump $18 million into applications, it must have a pretty good inkling that it won’t tumble at the first hurdle.