Single/plural gTLD combos to be BANNED

Singular and plural versions of the same string will be banned at the top level under proposed rule changes for the next round of new gTLDs.

The final set of recommendations of ICANN’s New gTLDs Subsequent Procedures working group (SubPro), which were published after four years of development last week, state:

the Working Group recommends prohibiting plurals and singulars of the same word within the same language/script in order to reduce the risk of consumer confusion. For example, the TLDs .EXAMPLE and .EXAMPLES may not both be delegated because they are considered confusingly similar.

The 2012 round had no hard and fast rule about plurals. There were String Similarity Review and String Confusion Objection procedures, but they produced unpredictable results.

At least 15 single/plural string pairs currently exist in the root, including .fan(s), .accountant(s), .loan(s), .review(s) and .deal(s). Sometimes they’re both part of the same registry’s portfolio, other times they’re owned by competitors.

But others, including .pet and .pets and .sport and .sports, were ruled by independent panels too “confusingly similar” to be allowed to coexist.

The proposed new rule would remove much of the subjectivity from these kinds of decisions, replacing the current system of objections with a flat no-coexistence rule.

If a gTLD that was the plural of an existing gTLD were applied for, the application would be rejected. If the singular and plural variants of the same word were applied for in the same round, the applications would likely end up at auction.

But there would be some wriggle room, with the ban only applying if both applied-for strings truly are singular/plural variations of each other in the same language. The working group wrote:

.SPRING and .SPRINGS could both be allowed if one refers to the season and the other refers to elastic objects, because they are not singular and plural versions of the same word. However, if both are intended to be used in connection with the elastic object, then they will be placed into the same contention set. Similarly, if an existing TLD .SPRING is used in connection with the season and a new application for .SPRINGS is intended to be used in connection with elastic objects, the new application will not be automatically disqualified.

In such situations, both registries would have to agree to binding Public Interest Commitments to only use the gTLDs for their stated, non-conflicting purposes. Registrants would also have to commit to only use .spring to represent the season and .springs for the elastic objects, also.

The ban will substantially eliminate the problem I’ve previously referred to as “tailgating”, where a registry applies for the plural variant of a competitor’s successful, well-marketed gTLD, prices domains slightly lower, then sits back to effortlessly reap the benefits of their rival’s popularity.

One could easily imagine applicants for strings such as .clubs or .sites in the next round, with applicants content to lazily ride the coat-tails of the million-selling singular namespaces.

The rule change will also remove the need for existing registries to defensively apply for the single/plural variants of their current portfolio, and for existing registrants to be compelled to defensively registry domains in yet another TLD.

On the flipside, it means that some potentially useful strings would be forever banned from the DNS.

While it might make sense for a film producer to register a .movie domain to market a single movie, it would not make sense for a review site or movies-related blog, where a .movies domain would be more appropriate. But now that’s never going to be possible.

SubPro’s work is still subject to final approval by SubPro, the GNSO Council and ICANN board of directors before it becomes policy.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, plural, singular, string similarity, subpro

ICANN might pay for your lockdown broadband

ICANN is to seriously consider requests that community volunteers should have their broadband costs subsidized out of the ICANN budget.

On Thursday, its board of directors will meet to discuss what it’s calling the “ICANN Pandemic Internet Access Reimbursement Program Pilot”.

No additional information is currently available, but the name of the proposed pilot is pretty descriptive.

The agenda item follows calls from some community members for ICANN to help out with the costs of broadband (and potentially hotel rooms) for those who have incurred out-of-pocket expenses to participate in ICANN’s remote Zoom meetings.

ICANN typically covers the travel and accommodation for certain key policy-making volunteers attending its thrice-yearly public meetings and occasional intersessional face-to-face gatherings.

With coronavirus confining most of these people to their home offices for the last several months, and with all official ICANN meetings going virtual, ICANN could save as much as $8 million this calendar year

Paying the broadband costs of a handful of community members would likely amount to a mere drop in that ocean.

However, while the details of the proposed pilot program are not yet known, one could imagine how galling it would be to many if ICANN opened its piggy-bank to North American lawyers on six-figure salaries, rather than only to volunteers from the broadband-poor developing world.

As a reminder, ICANN’s budget primarily comes from the “tax” registrants pay whenever they register a gTLD domain name.

Still, we shouldn’t prejudge these things. Perhaps the policy will be sensible.

ICANN introduced a similar pilot reimbursement program for community members with childcare needs last year, largely without controversy. Due to the absence of face-to-face meetings this year, this cash-for-kids scheme will run until ICANN 71 in June next year.

Comment Tagged: broadband, coronavirus, ICANN, reimbursement

The end of the beginning? ICANN releases policies for next round of new gTLDs

Over eight years after ICANN last accepted applications for new gTLDs and more than four years after hundreds of policy wonks first sat around the table to discuss how the program could be improved, the working group has published its draft final, novel-length set of policy recommendations.

Assuming the recommendations are approved, in broad terms the next round will be roughly similar to the 2012 round.

But almost every phase of the application process, from the initial communications program to objections and appeals, is going to get tweaked to a greater or lesser extent.

The recommendations came from the GNSO’s New gTLD Subsequent Procedures working group, known as SubPro. It had over 200 volunteer members and observers and worked for thousands of hours since January 2016 to come up with its Final Draft Report.

Some of the proposed changes mean the cost of an application will likely go down, while others will keep the cost artificially high.

Some changes will streamline the application process, others may complicate it.

Many of the “changes” to policy are in fact mere codifications of practices ICANN brought in unilaterally under the controversial banner of “implementation” in the 2012 round.

Essentially, the GNSO will be giving the nod retroactively to things like Public Interest Commitments, lottery-based queuing, and name collisions mitigation, which had no basis in the original new gTLDs policy.

But other contentious aspects of the last round are still up in the air — SubPro failed to find consensus on highly controversial items such as closed generics.

The report will not tell you when the next round will open or how much it will cost applicants, but the scope of the work ahead should make it possible to make some broad assumptions.

What it will tell you is that the application process will be structurally much the same as it was eight years ago, with a short application window, queued processing, objections, and contention resolution.

SubPro thankfully rejected the idea replacing round-based applications with a first-come, first-served model (which I thought would have been a gaming disaster).

The main beneficiaries of the policy changes appear to be registry service providers and dot-brand applicants, both of which are going to get substantially lowered barriers to entry and likely lower costs.

There are far too many recommendations for me to summarize them eloquently in one blog post, so I’m going to break up my analysis over several articles to be published over the next week or so.

In the meantime, ICANN has opened up the final draft report for public comment. You have until September 30.

The report notes that previously rejected comments will not be considered, so if your line is “New gTLDs suck! .com is King!” you’re likely to find your input falling on deaf ears.

After the comment period ends, and SubPro considers the comments, the report will be submitted to the GNSO Council for approval. Subsequently, it will need to be approved by the ICANN board of directors.

It’s not impossible that this could all happen this year, but there’s a hell of a lot of implementation work to be done before ICANN starts accepting applications once more. We could be looking at 2023 before the next window opens and 2024 before the next batch of new gTLDs start to launch.

UPDATE: This post was updated August 27, 2020 to clarify procedural and timing issues.

2 Comments Tagged: gnso, ICANN, new gTLDs, subpro

It’s a CONSPIRACY! Canadian registrant “sues” pretty much everybody

Canadian domain registrant and noted industry troll Graham Schreiber has sued, or at least claims to have sued, just about every notable figure in the ICANN community.

A document purporting to be a lawsuit is being circulated today among some of the dozens of named defendants, which include several people who’ve not been involved with ICANN for many years.

It names 27 volunteers from ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency, 21 current and former senior executives of registries and registrars, several members of the US and UK governments, an FBI agent, an unnamed “White House Conspirator”, as well as lawyers for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ICANN, Google and the UK Intellectual Property Office.

It’s my job to tell you in simple terms what the alleged lawsuit alleges, but I’m afraid I’m at an utter loss with this one. It reads like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist that would make the average Qanon believer appear the model of reason and clarity.

Schreiber variously refers to his defendants as “Kingpins” involved in a “Cartel” or “Conspiracy”, the factual details of which he never quite gets to.

Here’s a representative sample paragraph, unedited:

If and when, the “Defensive Registrations” obliged by ICANN’s R[r]egistry & R[r]egistrar “Stakeholders” = “Kingpins” and specifically CentralNic [ weren’t purchased ] assailants would strike; and Infringe, Dilute, Blur and Pass-Off as our online business, individually with identical and confusingly similar domain name, faking to be appointed or an authorized agent of the primary Registrant, in a country’s entrepreneurs Intellectual Property may or may not have been protectable at Common Law Trademark, under Madrid Protocol Rules, as it / they fulfilled the obligations of local National laws, to become a Registered Trademark, as I secured in the USA with USPTO, after the CIPO did their work.

At one point, he admits to trolling the defendants on social media since 2012, and points to their failure to sue him as evidence of a conspiracy:

I’ve made statements via those Social Media resources which would, if they were untrue, subject me to a singular lawsuit or multiple lawsuits from the Defendants listed, for: Defamation, Slander and Libel.

As yet, these well taunted Defendants have all conspired together, in collective silence, anticipating that their grandeur and my insignificance would, maintain safe passage, for them to continue.

As the vast majority of the Defendants are well schooled, powerful U.S. Attorneys, it’s my expectation that the Court oblige them to address the charges here stated, or collectively for their defence, they must File a lawsuit with this Court, charging me for what could be [ but aren’t ] remarks constituting Defamation, Slander & Libel against them, which again, I’ve posted on some of the Defendants own clients, Social Media Platforms

Schreiber was once a regular fixture in DI’s comments section too. Thankfully, we’ve not heard from him in years.

The root cause of the “lawsuit” appears to be an old beef Schreiber has with CentralNic.

He says he owns what he calls a “common law trademark” on the term “Landcruise” and he once used the matching .com domain to operate a motor-home rental business.

At some point in 2011, he became aware that a British registrant had registered landcruise.co.uk and landcruise.uk.com.

At the time, CentralNic was primarily in the business of selling domains at the third level in pseudo-gTLDs such as uk.com, gb.com and us.com.

Schreiber tried and failed (twice) to get the .uk domain transferred under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, and then he took his beef to the courts.

In 2012, he sued CentralNic, ICANN, Verisign, eNom, and Network Solutions in a complaint that barely made much more sense than the “lawsuit” being circulated today.

That case was thrown out of court in 2013.

I expect the same fate to befall the current lawsuit, if indeed it has even been filed in a court.

Schreiber wants $5 million from every defendant.

If you want to check whether you’re one of them, read the PDF “complaint” here.

Comment Tagged: .uk.com, centralnic, cybersquatting, graham schreiber, ICANN, landcruise, lawsuit, nominet

“Arms dealer” registrar probed by ICANN

ICANN’s top security thinkers are looking into hotly denied claims that an Israeli registrar collaborated with malware distributors.

Luckily for the registrar, GalComm, so far they’ve come up empty-handed and ICANN has told the company it does not consider it “malicious”.

ICANN told GalComm this week that its Security, Stability and Resiliency team is looking into a report published by security consultancy Awake Security in June entitled “The Internet’s New Arms Dealers: Malicious Domain Registrars”.

The report connected GalComm to over 100 malicious browser extensions, used to steal data, that have been installed 33 million times. GalComm was apparently the attackers’ registrar of choice.

While Awake did not report the registrar to ICANN, GalComm took it upon itself to write to ICANN to deny the allegations, saying that it merely acted as a neutral registrar and had no involvement in hosting or distributing the malware.

It also demanded that Awake retract its report and apologize or face legal consequences. The report is still available.

Now, ICANN has written back (pdf) to assure the registrar that its investigations to date has been “unable to corroborate the findings Awake Security presented and it does appear that Awake Security had an inaccurate picture of the total domains under management by GalComm”.

It added that the investigation is ongoing, however:

Based on the information we have been able to obtain to date, we have no reason to believe it appropriate for GalComm to be considered a “malicious domain registrar” as asserted by Awake Security. However, as noted in Awake Security’s report, the malicious actors behind the domains in question may be utilizing detection evasion techniques. As such, our investigations continue, and we appreciate GalComm’s cooperation and support of those investigations.

ICANN has previously told news outlets that it receives very few complaints about GalComm, none related to malware.

Comment Tagged: awake security, galcomm, ICANN, malware, security, ssr

No lockdown bump for .eu as domain base shrinks in Q2

The European Union ccTLD .eu did not see an overall benefit from the pandemic lockdowns that affected many of its member states in the second quarter.

Registry operator EURid this week said that its total domains under management for .eu was 3,606,143 at the end of June, down by 16,907 from 3,623,050 at the end of March.

The company blamed Brexit for the decline, as Brits will no longer be eligible for .eu domains after the political transition period expires at the end of the year and many are therefore being allowed to expire.

This has been EURid’s story for many quarters, with the exception of a discount-related Portuguese aberration in Q1.

The number of regs from the UK dropped by 16.6% year-over-year and 5.1% quarter-over-quarter, to wind up at 135,355.

But .eu did not see the lockdown bump experienced by many other registries and registrars during the quarter either.

New regs in Q2 were at 163,277, compared to 190,011 in Q1 and 164,906 in Q2 2019. It sold fewer domains, even as its peers reported significant increases in sales.

I expect this is fairly easily explained.

Anecdotally, much of the pandemic-related boost the industry has experienced has been due to bricks-and-mortar microbusinesses such as mom-n-pop retailers, bars and restaurants selling online for the first time and needing domain names to make the switch.

These types of registrants, serving a small local area, don’t need a TLD reflecting their membership of a vast trading union, and are probably better served by their national ccTLD or a descriptive generic, so .eu got overlooked.

When it comes to the lockdown bump, it appears .eu was the exception to the rule.

Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, coronavirus, eurid, lockdown

After a year’s delay, .gay reveals launch dates

Top Level Design has revealed the launch plan for its .gay gTLD, after almost a year of delays.

General availability was originally planned for October last year, but it was pushed out twice, first due to marketing reasons and then because of coronavirus.

The new plan is for GA to begin at 1500 UTC on September 16. Unlike last year’s planned launch, there does not appear to be any special symbolism to the date.

There’s also going to be an early access period first, from September 8 through 15. This is the period where reg prices start high and reduce every day until they settle at regular GA pricing.

As I’ve previously reported, the registry has reserved five tiers of premium names, from $12,500 down to $100, all of which will renew at premium prices to deter domainers.

The base registry fee is $25, but expect to pay more at the checkout.

Most of the large registrars are on board, with half a dozen set to offer pre-regs, but I don’t see any of the big Chinese registrars on the registry’s list.

Comment Tagged: .gay, eap, ga, launch, new gTLDs, top level design

ICANN names Egypt-based head of Istanbul office

ICANN has appointed veteran staffer Baher Esmat as the new head of its regional office in Istanbul, Turkey.

His new job title will be managing director for Middle East and Africa, having previously headed ICANN’s partnership programs for the region. He’s basically become ICANN’s point man in the region.

He’s replacing Nick Tomasso, who’s sticking around at ICANN in his main role as VP of meetings but appears to be leaving Istanbul.

Esmat currently lives in Egypt, which isn’t even in the same time zone, and there does not appear to be a short-term plan to move him to Istanbul

The ICANN board noted in its resolution promoting Esmat:

There will be a fiscal impact on ICANN in FY21 only to the extent of travel and related costs for Mr. Esmat as he will continue to reside in Egypt for the time being, but ICANN will save on the costs associated with Mr. Tomasso’s having resided in Istanbul during his tenure as the representative of the liaison office in Turkey, Istanbul.

It’s not clear whether the decision to stay in Egypt is coronavirus-related, but I imagine working from home in Egypt isn’t much different from working from home in Turkey.

Esmat has been at ICANN for 14 years. Tomasso ran the Istanbul office from 2017. The handover is effective at the end of the month.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, istanbul

Countries ask Amazon for thousands more domain blocks

The eight South American nations of the Amazon region are demanding Amazon block more domain names in the recently delegated .amazon gTLD.

Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization secretary general Alexandra Moreira has written to Amazon VP of public policy Brian Huseman to complain that Amazon’s current set of “cultural” safeguards do not go far enough.

The August 14 letter, which was forwarded to DI, seems to mark a new phase of bilateral talks, after ICANN washed its hands of its reluctant role of third-party facilitator last month.

Currently, .amazon is governed by a set of Public Interest Commitments in its registry contract designed to protect the “Culture and Heritage specific to the Amazonia region”.

ACTO, as well as disagreeing with the use of the term “Amazonia”, has a narrow interpretation of the PICs that Moreira says is “insufficient to ensure respect for the historic and cultural heritage of the Amazon region”.

Under ACTO’s reading, Amazon is only obliged to block a handful of domains from use, namely the words “OTCA”, “culture”, “heritage”, “forest”, “river”, “rainforest”, the names of indigenous peoples and national symbols.

Moreira writes:

That would leave out a vast number of terms that can still cause confusion or mislead the public about matters specific to the Amazon region, such as the names of cities, villages, mountains, rivers, animals, plants, food and other expressions of the Amazon biome, biodiversity, folklore and culture.

ACTO wants the list of protected domains to be expanded to include these additional categories, and for Amazon and ACTO to sign a binding agreement to that effect.

Given that the Amazon forest is home to literally tens of thousands of distinct species and Brazil alone has over 5,500 municipalities, this could translate to a hell of a long list.

I should probably note that the .amazon PICs also offer ACTO the chance to block 1,500 strings of its own choosing, so ACTO’s narrow interpretation may not tell the whole story.

Comment Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs

Dot-brand fizzles out after acquisition

Another dot-brand gTLD has decided to terminate its ICANN contract, but this time it’s because the brand itself has been discontinued.

.ceb was applied for by the Corporate Executive Board Company, a consulting company, in 2012.

But the company was acquired by Gartner in 2017, and the CEB brand was discontinued the following year.

For some reason it’s taken Gartner a couple of years to remember it has a gTLD it doesn’t need, and it’s told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate it.

The .ceb dot-brand was never used.

It’s the 81st dot-brand to self-terminate, the 12th this year.

Comment Tagged: .ceb, corporate executive board, dot-brands, gartner, ICANN, new gTLDs, termination