Libyan registry hacked by anti-Gaddafi crackers

The official registry web site for the Libyan top-level domain has been defaced by anti-Gadaffi crackers.
Nic.ly currently looks like this (click to enlarge):

The attack appears to be limited to the web server – as bit.ly domains are still resolving I assume the culprits have not managed to take control of the registry’s more important systems.
Libya famously cut itself off from the internet in March, shortly after the ongoing rebel uprising – which today arrived on the streets of Tripoli – kicked off.
The .ly domain also went completely dark in 2004 after a communication breakdown between the registry manager and IANA.
(via Sophos)

On its birthday, .co has a 66% renewal rate

Two thirds of .co domain names due to expire in July were renewed, according to the registry.
In its monthly newsletter, .CO Internet said that its renewal rate was 66%.
A company spokesperson confirmed that this figure is for the entire month, which includes the July 20 one-year anniversary of the repurposed ccTLD going into general availability.
What this essentially means is that about one in three .co domain names registered for a year during the initial landrush a year ago were allowed to expire last month.
According to HosterStats, which categorizes over half a million .co domains according to how they’re being used, about 73,000 .co domains – roughly 13% of the total – are now classified as expired.
.CO Internet says it has over one million registered domains.
If the company was publicly traded, investors and analysts would be looking to the renewal rate as an indication of the financial health of the company.
VeriSign typically reports a .com/.net renewal percentage in the low-to-mid 70s. If .co has a similar ratio, that’s not necessarily positive.

FSC steps up anti-.xxx campaign

The Free Speech Coalition is trying to rally its supporters into a legal nastygram campaign against ICM Registry ahead of the launch of .xxx next month.
The California-based porn trade group wants webmasters to inform ICM that if it sells their trademarks as .xxx domains, they may sue.
It’s released a template letter (pdf) for members to use. It reads, in part:

ICM is now on notice that the registration of any domain name using the .XXX extension that is identical or confusingly similar to one of the trademarks or domains listed on Exhibit A will violate (COMPANY NAME)’s intellectual property rights and constitute an unfair business practice. ICM must take steps to prevent such activity before it can occur. Failure to take affirmative steps to prevent this conduct will establish ICM’s substantial liability.

The FSC believes that because .xxx is squarely aimed at porn webmasters, it smells like a shakedown a lot more than a more generic-sounding string would.
Its tactics are interesting – encouraging others to issue legal threats instead of doing it itself.
As I’ve previously noted, top-level domain registries based in the US have a pretty good legal defense against cybersquatting suits under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
Whether those defenses extend to claims of trademark infringement is a different matter. As far as I know, a sponsored gTLD manager has never been sued on these grounds.
The .xxx gTLD is of course one of the most cybersquatting-unfriendly namespaces ever, in terms of the number and strength of its trademark protection mechanisms.

IFFOR names .xxx porn council members

The five porn industry members of the body which will set the rules for .xxx domains have been named by the International Foundation For Online Responsibility.
IFFOR is the policy shop set up by ICM Registry to oversee the new top-level domain. It will be funded to the tune of $10 a year from every .xxx domain registration.
The newly announced members of its Policy Council are:
Jerry Barnett, managing director of Strictly Broadband, a UK-based video-on-demand provider.
Florian Sitta, head of the legal department of the large German porn retailer Beate Uhse.
Trieu Hoang, based in Asia, counsel for AbbyWinters.com.
Chad Bellville, a US-based lawyer who advertises UDRP services.
Andy Kayton, general counsel for WebPower, which runs iFriends (a pornographic webcam service) and ClickCash, a large affiliate network.
Both Americans are members of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, according to IFFOR.
It will be interesting to see what the adult industry makes of this. Usually when a porn company throws in with ICM Registry and .xxx there’s a bit of a backlash on webmaster forums.
That said, I doubt these names will come as much of a surprise. Some if not all of the companies these people represent have already engaged in the .xxx Founders Program.
IFFOR’s non-porn Policy Council members were named in June.

Some IDNs fly, while some fail

Russia may have witnessed a domain name boom this year with the launch of .РФ last November, but other internationalized domain names are proving far from popular.
Jordan’s الاردن. country-code top-level domain has taken only about 150 registrations since its launch last October, according to a report in the Jordan Times.
The poor showing has been attributed to both a lack of awareness and a lack of demand. The article quotes Mahmoud Al Kurdi, sales and marketing manager at regional presence provider Virtuport:

If a person does not even know how to type the address of a certain website in English letters, he or she can type in Arabic letters on Google and search for the website. I see no point in typing address in Arabic letters. It is not convenient.

The sentiments are echoed in the article by other local experts, while the registry, the National Information Technology Centre, said it is planning a marketing campaign to drum up interest.
There could be other reasons for slack adoption – Jordan’s IDNs costs $140 for the first two years and $35 per year thereafter. There are also strict rules governing who can register.
Meanwhile in Russia, .РФ had taken 855,751 registrations by June 30, according to the registry’s first-half 2011 report, following its scandal-tinged launch eight months earlier.
Russia is of course substantially larger than Jordan – which has a population smaller than that of London – with ten times as many internet users as Jordan has citizens.

ICM makes $4m from .xxx Founders

ICM Registry made just shy of $4 million from its Founders Program, which allocated premium .xxx domain names to porn webmasters.
As Elliot’s Blog reported, uber-domainer Frank Schilling’s Name Administration has picked up 33 .xxx domains for a seven-figure sum.
Schilling got his hands on the likes of amateur.xxx, asian.xxx, hardcore.xxx, hot.xxx, porno.xxx and many other “super premiums” domains.
He said in a statement provided by ICM:

I believe that .XXX, unlike many other new TLDs, offers SLD registrants the opportunity for long term type-in traffic. Many people navigate in a way that suggests they believe .XXX existed all along. Few strings other than .XXX share this attribute.

ICM president Stuart Lawley said that .xxx was a popular type-in TLD long before it even existed on the internet. Apparently the non-existent .web is also pretty good for traffic.
While on the face of it selling these super-premiums to a domainer may look like ICM shirking its duties to its sponsored community, Schilling like all .xxx Founders has committed to develop web sites at all of his .xxx names – the domains are not for flipping.
ICM says it has allocated some 1,500 domains to 35 registrants under the Founders Program.
Beate-Uhse, Germany’s biggest adult retailer, has picked up kostenlos.xxx (“free”) among others.
Channel 1 Releasing, a Californian gay porn publisher, has grabbed several domains related to its niche, such as muscle.xxx and jock.xxx.
I understand one UK company has also decided to rebrand its entire stable around the .xxx extension.
While many domains sold for six figures, not all Founders paid big bucks – many got their names for the standard registration fee in exchange for their development commitments.

Is 80% of .xxx going to be defensive?

Is the new adults-only top-level domain going to turn out to be just as big of a trademark shakedown as some had feared?
EasySpace, a British domain name registrar, claims that 80% of its .xxx pre-orders are from organizations outside the porn industry.
“Out of the hundreds of businesses that have rushed to pre-register with Easyspace ahead of the opening of the Sunrise phase for .XXX domains on 7 September 2011, only 20% of them are from the adult industry,” the company said in a press release.
EasySpace is just one rather small registrar, of course, and its marketing of .xxx is very much in the “Protect your brand” camp, so its numbers may not necessarily hold up industry-wide.
The company is charging $189.99 ($310) for non-porn defensive registrations, an almost 100% markup on the registry fee.
Still, 80% is a big number, and likely to be used by critics not only of .xxx but of new TLDs in general.

The first .xxx porn site has gone live

Casting.xxx tonight has become officially the first live porn site to use a .xxx domain name.
It’s very not safe for work, of course, but if you head over there right now you can watch a handful of streaming videos, according to sources.
Casting.xxx is the first site to use a domain granted under ICM Registry’s Founders Program, which let the registry sell off or basically give away premium names to publishers.
ICM says it’s allocating about 1,500 domains to about 35 Founders, which is quite a lot more domains than I was expecting.
The .xxx top-level domain has been active in the domain name system for a few months now, but to date the only resolving domains have been those belonging to registry manager ICM.
Casting.xxx is registered to a Really Useful Ltd, which appears to have been set up purely to build sites on .xxx domains, of which casting.xxx is the first of several.
The .xxx sunrise period begins next month, with landrush in November and general availability slated for December.

Breaking: CentralNic regains control of gb.com

CentralNic has taken back control of gb.com, which was seized without warning by the company’s founder at the weekend.
The domain gb.com now resolves to CentralNic’s site, and the company has posted the following message:

The CentralNic service for domains ending in .gb.com has been fully restored. We apologize for any inconvenience – the interruption was effected without any warning by a third party, and was therefore out of our control.

The pseudo-TLD service, which serves primarily UK small businesses that couldn’t get the .co.uk they wanted, went down on Saturday, leaving registrants confused and angry.
I’ve reached out to CentralNic for comment and will update when I have more information.

PIR sets its sights on .ngo

The .org registry hopes to add .ngo – for Non-Governmental Organization – to its stable of top-level domains, when ICANN opens its new gTLD program next year.
It may well face competition for the domain, however.
It’s quite difficult to narrowly define what an NGO is, but the Public Internet Registry plans to adopt a fairly broad definition that will give it potentially “millions” of new registrants.
“We’re looking at global, regional, and local NGOs, we’re engaging with all of them,” said PIR chief Brian Cute. “This acronym is something that these organizations strongly identify with.”
Cute said PIR has letters of support from some NGOs already, but is not prepared to disclose the identities of its supporters just yet.
Many NGOs are based in emerging markets – according to Wikipedia, India has as many as 3.3 million of them. PIR hopes to encourage domain growth in developing nations, Cute said.
With that in mind, we’re probably not looking at super-premium pricing, though PIR is not talking specific details of its plan yet.
It will be a self-designated “community” application, meaning it will qualify for a Community Priority Evaluation in the event that ICANN receives more than one bid for .ngo.
When a CPE kicks in, applications are scored against a number of criteria and have to get 14 out 16 points in order to win a contested gTLD without going to auction.
Those 14 points are not easy to win, however. Even .ngo, with its commonly understood meaning, may be a hard call.
As it happens, there is already potentially one other .ngo bidder.
The British charity Article 25 has been pondering a .ngo application since 2008, according to its web site at dotngo.net.
That initiative seems to have roughly similar goals to PIR — global, restricted, non-profit — and VeriSign seems to have been engaged as a possible registry services provider.
PIR plans to stick to its existing back-end infrastructure provider, Afilias.
As a community application, it will be a “closed domain”, Cute said. Unlike .org, there will be eligibility criteria to pass before you’re allowed to register a domain name.
PIR also plans to apply for internationalized domain name transliterations of .org, in Chinese, Hindi, Cyrillic and Arabic, Cute said.
Here‘s the site for the application.