Short .uk domain landrush opens

Nominet opened the landrush phase of its one and two-character .uk domain names within the last hour.
The landrush will see the remaining 2,640 super-short domains that have not already been claimed by trademark holders start to become available.
It costs £10 ($16) to apply, plus the cost of the registration. All contested domains will head to auction, the proceeds of which will be donated to the Nominet Trust.
The available domains are all in the .co.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk and .org.uk spaces. Restrictions may apply – for example .me.uk domains are reserved for individuals.
The landrush will run until June 15. Uncontested domains will be allocated June 23, at which point all unclaimed domains will be released into the available pool. The auctions will kick off July 20.

Those April 1 Headlines in Full

Too many ideas, not enough time.
These are some of the stories I would have written if there were more hours in the day…

Joan Rivers dies after head transplant surgery
UK banishes cybercrime sites to .au
Transparency review calls for ICANN reality show
UDRP panelist returns Taiwan to China
Bob Parsons shoots BigJumbo CEO
“Pigeon shit” blamed for Playboy plague
Hank Alvarez named ICANN compliance chief
Constantine Roussos says DNS needs “more cowbell”
NATO apologizes for Bit.ly bombing
Blacknight unveils leprechaun mascot
RIAA says .so domains “haven for piracy”
DomainTools merges with DomainJerks
BBC to apply for .cotton
ICANN successfully delays heat death of universe
Parsons apologizes, resurrects elephant

‘Hostel’ director slams Go Daddy CEO

Okay, this is getting weird.
Eli Roth, director of Hostel – one of the sickest horror films of recent years – has criticized Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons for his controversial elephant-hunting video.
In a series of Twitter posts last night, Roth condemned Parsons for his video, saying, among other things: “It’s sick fucks like you that make me think Hostel could really happen.”
If you haven’t seen Hostel, it’s basically about an Eastern European gang that lets wealthy Americans torture and murder kidnapped backpackers in exchange for a hefty fee.
It’s just about as grim a movie as you could imagine.
Here’s a screenshot of some of Roth’s tweets.

Compounding the weirdness, Roth was later retweeted by Russell Crowe.

Too many ideas, not enough time.
These are some of the stories I would have covered today, if only there were more hours in the day.
Joan Rivers dies after head transplant surgery
UK government banishes cybercrime sites to .au
Transparency review calls for ICANN reality show
UDRP panelist returns Taiwan to China
Bob Parsons shoots BigJumbo CEO
“Pigeon shit” blamed for Playboy plague
Hank Alvarez named ICANN compliance chief
Constantine Roussos says DNS needs “more cowbell”
NATO apologizes for Bit.ly bombing
Blacknight unveils leprechaun mascot
RIAA says .so domains “haven for piracy”
DomainTools merges with DomainJerks
BBC to apply for .cotton
ICANN successfully delays heat death of universe
Parsons apologizes, resurrects elephant
There’s at least 15 stupidly obscure in-jokes there. Probably more. How many did you “get” without Googling?
15 – Congratulations! You’re me. Or a potential future spouse. Call me!
10-14 – You truly are a domain name industry nerd, the depth and breadth of your knowledge covering both domaining and ICANN politicking. You’ve probably been to ICANN meetings and DomainFest. You should be both immensely proud and profoundly ashamed of yourself.
6-10 – I’m proud to have you as a reader. You’re exactly the type of well-balanced individual I’m hoping to attract to this site. Why not try visiting one of my advertisers and purchasing something?
1-5 – Must try harder! Your insight into the industry is sadly lacking. Perhaps consider subscribing to my RSS and Twitter feeds, which can be found at at the top of the left-hand sidebar, in order to bulk up your knowledge base.
0 — You appear to have visited this blog by mistake. Were you searching for “group porn”? I get a lot of hits for that. Nothing to see here, please move along.

dotMusic and ICANN execs form TLD consultancy

Just what the world needs, another top-level domain consultancy.
Constantine Roussos, best known his campaign for .music, has teamed up with ICANN veteran Tina Dam to launch MyTLD.com, promising to help applicants with their TLD bids.
Dam was senior director of internationalized domain names at ICANN, spearheading the IDN ccTLD Fast Track program, until she quit last December.
Those are good credentials, especially for supporting IDN TLD applicants.
Dam is currently critical of how ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook treats IDN TLDs, saying that the process is too expensive and does not effectively handle transliterations and translations.
Roussos is an entrepreneur, owner of music.us/.biz/.co, who has been pushing his own self-financed .music bid for the last couple of years.
A running joke at the recent .nxt conference was that he was once an “outsider” but has since been firmly institutionalized by the ICANN environment. He’s also critical of aspects of the Guidebook.
MyTLD.com is the latest of a series of companies to form over the last few months to provide consulting to potential TLD applicants.
Recently, domain investors Mike Berkens and Monte Cahn founded Right Of The Dot, which specializes in marketing and premium domain strategy.
And Alexa Raad, former CEO of the .org registry PIR, is currently plugging her new consulting play, Architelos.

WIPO launches global brand database

The World Intellectual Property Organization has opened up a free, searchable web-based database of over 640,000 trademarks.
The slick new Global Brand Database is not related to domain names specifically, but could well prove an invaluable research tool for players in the space, especially for top-level domain applicants.
How useful it becomes will depend on how much the database grows. At the moment, it appears less than comprehensive.
WIPO said the interface currently provides access to three existing databases.
There’s the list of “armorial bearings, flags and other state emblems as well as the names, abbreviations and emblems of intergovernmental organizations” protected under the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property.
There’s the database of “appellations of origin” – geo-brands such as Champagne and Tequila – registered under the so-called Lisbon system.
Finally, and probably most interestingly, there’s international trademarks registered under the Madrid system, which is a way for companies to register their brands in multiple legal jurisdictions.
But don’t expect to find US trademarks, for example, listed in the database yet. WIPO said in its announcement that it plans to add national databases to the system in the future.

Google to crack down on “content farms”?

Bad news for domain developers? Bad news for Demand Media?
Google is to take another look at how its search engine ranks “content farms”, according to a new blog post by principal engineer Matt Cutts.
In a discussion about search quality and web spam, Cutts wrote:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

The post does not get into any details about what hearing feedback “loud and clear” means, but it certainly suggests that Google will rethink how low-quality content sites are ranked.
This could be problematic Demand Media, which generates a lot of its revenue from “content mill” sites such as eHow, which is widely derided but ranks highly for many searches.
Demand Media is on the verge of going public.
It might also not be great news for domain investors who choose to develop their domains with low-quality content, although I suspect that kind of site would be harder to detect than a large mill.

TucsonShooting.com crashes after Tucson shooting

A gun blogger had his web site crash shortly after Saturday’s bloodbath in Tucson, Arizona, because he owns the domain name TucsonShooting.com.
To be clear, the domain has nothing to do with the failed assassination attempt on Rep Giffords. The blogger just likes shooting and he’s based in Tucson. He’s owned the domain since 2002.
In this video, he explains what happened to his site after the massacre, which killed six people.

The domain TucsonShooting.com is the first hit in Google when you search for [tucson shooting], testifying to the power of a good SEO domain. It redirects to GunWebsites.net.
The blogger notes:

Who in their right mind would think there’d be someone so opportunistic to capitalize on a tragedy like this by putting up a domain either ahead of time or so quickly?

Clearly, he hasn’t met many domainers.

What next for new TLDs? Part 1 – Unresolved Issues

Like or loathe the decision, ICANN’s new top-level domains program appears to have been delayed again.
But for how long? And what has to happen now before ICANN starts accepting applications?
In short, what the heck happened in Cartagena last week?
In this four-part post, I will attempt an analysis of the various things I think need to happen before the Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is approved.
In this first post I will look at the issues that ICANN has explicitly tagged as unresolved, with special reference to trademarks.
Unresolved Issues
ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, explaining the board’s resolution on new TLDs on Friday, said:

The intention has been, as much as possible, to indicate those areas where the board feels that the work that has been done is sufficient to move to closure… What we’ve also tried to do is indicate which areas are still clearly open for consideration.

The resolution names only two issues that are explicitly still open for further policy development: geographic strings and “morality and public order” objections. I’ll discuss these in a future post.
Issues considered already reflecting “the negotiated position of the ICANN community” include “trademark protection, mitigating malicious conduct, and root-zone scaling”.
But does this mean that the trademark issue, easily the most contentious of these three “overarching issues” is really sufficiently “closed” that we’ll see no more changes to those parts of the AGB?
I don’t think so. While the Cartagena resolutions say trademark protection has been addressed, it also says “ICANN will take into account public comment including the advice of the GAC.”
It may be too late for the IP community to affect changes directly, beyond the comments they’ve already filed, but the GAC, which has already aligned itself with the trademark lobby, may be able to.
Beyond the text of the resolution, ICANN chair Peter Dengate Thrush said in an interview with ICANN head of media relations Brad White:

We’ve spent a lot of time with the trademark community and come up with three new independent mechanisms for protecting trademark rights on the internet. So the sense of board and the sense of the community is that that’s probably a sufficient effort in developing mechanisms. What we now might look at is how we might enhance, tweak and improve those processes, but we’re not going to convene another process to look at yet another kind of solution for intellectual property rights.

In other words, according to Dengate Thrush, ICANN isn’t planning to create any new IP rights protection mechanisms in the AGB, but these mechanisms, such as Uniform Rapid Suspension and the Trademark Clearinghouse, could be still be modified based on comments received from the trademark lobby over the last week or so.
Most of the outcry from the IP lobby recently has called for the specifics of these two mechanisms to be tilted more in favor of trademark interests; there’s been little call for any new mechanisms.
Trademark rights protections also account for two of the 11 issues that the Governmental Advisory Committee has tagged “outstanding” which “require additional discussion”, by my reading.
More on the GAC bottleneck in part two of this post.

Government ‘cybersquatting’ case rattles India

Cybersquatting mischief is making headlines in India today, after the nation’s main opposition party accused the government of directing a confusingly similar domain name to its own site.
According to various reports, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party served a “legal notice” on the ruling Indian National Congress party over the domain name bjp.com.
The BJP hosts its primary site at bjp.org. According to the party, the .com domain has been redirecting users to the Congress’ own site. Today, it resolves to a page parked at Sedo.
The contested domain is currently registered behind eNom’s privacy protection service. It appears to have changed hands several times over the years, most recently to an Indian.
Unless the BJP has some other evidence connecting its rival to the domain, it looks like this may be a case of cheap political point-scoring.