Nominet to charge brands for no-name Whois access

Nominet has become the second major registry to announce that trademark lawyers will have to pay for Whois after the EU General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect next month.
The company said late last week that it will offer the intellectual property community two tiers of Whois access.
First, they can pay for a searchable Whois with a much more limited output.
Nominet said that “users of the existing Searchable WHOIS who are not law enforcement will continue to have access to the service on a charged-for basis however the registrant name and address will be redacted”.
Second, they can request the full Whois record (including historical data) for a specific domain and get a response within one business day for no charge.
Approved law enforcement agencies will continue to get unfettered access to both services — with “enhanced output” for the searchable Whois — for no charge, Nominet said.
These changes were decided upon following a month-long consultation which accepted comments from interested parties.
Other significant changes incoming include:

• Scrapping UK-presence requirements for second-level registrations.
• Doing away with the current privacy services framework, offloading GDPR liability to registrars providing such services.
• Creating a standard opt-in mechanism for registrants who wish for their personal data to be disclosed in public Whois.

Nominet is the second registry I’m aware of to say it will charge brand owners for Whois access, after CoCCA 10 days ago.
CoCCA has since stated that it will sell IP owners a PDF containing the entire unredacted Whois history of a domain for $3, if they declare that they have a legitimate interest in the domain.
It also said they will be able to buy zone file access to the dozens of TLDs running on the CoCCA platform for $88 per TLD.

Comment Tagged: .brands, .uk, cocca, gdpr, nominet, privacy, trademarks, whois

auDA may sue to delay boardroom bloodbath

auDA is thinking about taking its membership to court in order to delay a vote on the jobs of four of its directors.
The Australian ccTLD registry has also delayed further consideration of its policy to introduce direct, second-level registrations in .au until late 2019.
Both announcements came in the wake of a government review of the organization, which found it “no longer fit-for-purpose”.
auDA last week asked its members to agree to a postponement of the special general meeting, called for by a petition of more than 5% of its members, at which there would be votes on whether to fire the CEO, its chair, and two independent directors.
Under the law, auDA has to hold the SGM by June 7 at the latest, according to a letter (pdf) sent to members on Friday.
But auDA wants to delay the meeting until mid-September, at the earliest, to coincide with its regular Annual General Meeting.
If its members do not consent to the delay — it gave them a deadline of 4pm local time today, meaning responses would have to be drafted over the weekend — auDA said it “intends to apply for a court order… extending the time for calling the requested SGM”.
The delay is needed, auDA said, in order to give the organization the breathing space to start to implement the reforms called for by the government review.
The government wants the makeup of the auDA board substantially overhauled within a year to better reflect the stakeholder community and to ensure directors have the necessary skills and experience.
In response, auDA has told the government (pdf) that it agrees with the need for reform, but that it will not be able to hit its deadlines unlesss the SGM is delayed.
It also said calling the SGM on time would cost it somewhere in the region of AUD 70,000, based on the cost of a similar meeting last year.
auDA announced separately last week that it is delaying any more discussion on second-level registrations — something the reform campaigners largely are opposed to — “until the second half of 2019 at the earliest”.
Josh Rowe, coordinator of the Grumpier.com.au petitioners, said in his response that he found the request for the SGM delay “extremely disappointing”, adding:

auDA is at an important juncture following the Australian Government’s review. However, it is critical that people with the right skills and experience lead auDA through its reform.
Members have lost confidence in the auDA CEO, and the three auDA independent directors. They do not have the right skills and experience to lead auDA through its reform.

He noted that members do not have the resources to fight auDA in court.

1 Comment Tagged: .au, auda, direct, second-level

I just bought a new gTLD registry’s domain for $10

Are .fan and .fans the latest new gTLDs to go out of business? It certainly looks that way.
ICANN has hit the registry with a breach notice for unpaid dues and stripped it of its registrar accreditation.
In addition, its web sites no longer appear functional and I’ve just bought its official IANA-listed domain name for under $10.
Asiamix Digital is the Hong Kong-based company behind both TLDs, doing business as dotFans.
It launched .fans in September 2015, with retail pricing up around the $100 mark, but never actually got around to launching the singular variant, which it acquired (defensively?) from Rightside (now Donuts) earlier that year.
.fans had fewer than 1,400 domains in its zone file yesterday, down from a peak of around 1,500, while .fan had none.
dotFans in-house accredited registrar, Fan Domains, didn’t seem to actually sell any domains and it got terminated by ICANN (pdf) at the end of March for failing to provide basic registrar services.
And now it seems the registry itself has been labeled as a deadbeat by ICANN Compliance, which has filed a breach notice (pdf) alleging non-payment of registry fees.
While breach notices against TLD registries are not uncommon these days, I think this is the first one I’ve seen alleging non-payment and nothing else.
The notice claims that the registry’s legal contact’s email address is non-functional.
In addition, the domains nic.fans, nic.fan and dotfans.com all currently resolve to dead placeholder pages.
Meanwhile, dotfans.net, the company’s official domain name as listed in the IANA database now belongs to me, kinda.
It expired March 12, after which it was promptly placed into a GoDaddy expired domains auction. Where I just bought it for £6.98 ($9.92).

To be clear, I do not currently control the domain. It’s still in post-expiration limbo and GoDaddy support tells me the original owner still has eight days left to reclaim it.
After that point, maybe I’ll start getting the registry’s hate mail from ICANN. Or perhaps not; it seems to have been using the .com equivalent for its formal communications.
Should .fan and .fans get acquired by another registry soon — which certainly seems possible — rest assured I’ll let the domain go for a modest sum.

6 Comments Tagged: .fan, .fans, asiamix digital, breach, compliance, donuts, dotfans, fan domains, godaddy, ICANN, rightside, termination

Child abuse becoming big problem for new gTLDs

There were 3,791 domain names used to host child sexual abuse imagery in 2017, up 57%, according to the latest annual report from the Internet Watch Foundation.
While .com was the by far the worst TLD for such material in terms of URLs, over a quarter of the domains were registered in new gTLDs.
Abuse imagery was found on 78,589 URLs on 3,791 domains in 152 TLDs, the IWF said in its report.
.com accounted for 39,937 of these URLs, a little over half of the total, with .net, .org, .ru and .co also in the top five TLDs. Together they accounted for 85% of all the abuse URLs found. The 2016 top five TLDs included .se, .io and .cc.
New gTLDs accounted for a small portion of the abuse URLs — just over 5,000, up 221% on 2016 — but a disproportionate number of domains.
The number of new gTLD domains used for abuse content was 1,063, spread over 50 new gTLDs. Equivalent numbers were not available in the 2016 report and IWF does not break down which TLDs were most-abused.
According to Verisign’s Q4 Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf), new gTLDs account for just 6.2% of all existing domain names, and yet they account for over 28% of the domains where IWF found child abuse imagery.
IWF said that the increasing number of domains registered to host abuse imagery can be linked to what it calls “disguised websites”.
These are sites “where the child sexual abuse imagery will only be revealed to someone who has followed a pre-set digital pathway — to anyone else, they will be shown legal content.”
Presumably this means that registries and registrars spot-checking domains they have under management could be unaware of their true intended use.

2 Comments Tagged: .com, child abuse material, iwf, new gTLDs

Government gives auDA reform-or-die ultimatum

auDA has just months to either implement sweeping reforms or risk being dissolved and replaced.
That’s the outcome of a review of the Australian ccTLD administrator by the Department of Communications and Arts, published today, that found the organization as it stands today is “no longer fit-for-purpose”.
Among its 29 recommendations, the government is demanding that auDA refresh its board of directors within a year and scrap its “outdated” membership structure.
Minister Mitch Fifield said in a statement:

The central finding of the review is that auDA’s current management framework is no longer fit-for-purpose and reform is necessary if the company is to perform effectively and meet the needs of Australia’s internet community.

He added in a letter to auDA chair Chris Leptos:

In the event that auDA fails to demonstrate progress in achieving the necessary reforms, I will instruct my Department to undertake a public expression of interest process in the future to identify other entities that could administer .au

A failure to reform could even lead to the government itself taking over .au, the report says.
The review did not look at the claims of lavish spending by staff and directors, reported on earlier this week.
Nor does it express any views on the controversial decision to start selling direct second-level .au domains, or to transition the back-end from Neustar to Afilias.
What it does say is that the board of directors needs to be be replaced within a year, using a new membership structure that gets rid of the current “supply” and “demand” classes of member, which differentiate between those who sell domains and those who buy them.
The current system is open to capture or “stacking”, the review says, with it being too easy for individuals to move seamlessly between classes and a lack of clarity on whether domainers should be supply or demand-class members.
Today, the 12-person board comprises the non-voting CEO, three independent directors and four directors elected by each class.
The review states that the board should not get any bigger, but that the majority of directors should be independent, selected by a new six-person Nomination Committee modeled slightly on ICANN’s Nominating Committee.
Directors should be picked on the basis on their experience and skills, limited to two three-year terms, and subject to background screening, the review states.
The government also says that auDA should either replace its current membership classes with either a single membership class open to all or a “functional constituency model” reflecting groups such as consumers, registrars, government, etc.
Fifield said he expects to see “significant” progress on implementing these reforms in the next three to six months.
In a statement, auDA said it welcomed the report and has already begun work on an implementation plan.
Former CEO Chris Disspain, who was fired by the board in 2016, after running the company for 16 years, a move that arguably catalyzed the last two years of chaos at auDA, told DI:

I am pleased that the review has called out a number of important structural issues especially the matter of membership stacking, something that I had raised with the board on a number of occasions towards the end of my tenure and that may have led, at least in part, to my departure.

1 Comment Tagged: .au, auda

Leaked memo alleges lavish travel spending at auDA

A report into .au registry auDA’s historical travel expenses has leaked to the Australian media, the latest apparent salvo in the organization’s increasingly personal civil war.
The Sydney Morning Herald this evening reports on “allegations of lavish spending and misuse of expense accounts by some former directors and employees”.
The primary individual targeted (for want of a better word) by the story is Paul Szyndler, former head of public affairs at auDA and one of the three people behind the Grumpier.com.au campaign to ouster auDA’s current CEO and chair.
It seems the Herald has managed to scoop a leaked copy of an audit compiled by PPB Advisory, which has been looking into spending practices at auDA under its previous management.
The existence of this report has been known for some time, but little about its contents had made it into the public domain beyond a slide deck (pdf) alluding to slack controls on travel expenditure.
The newspaper reports that PPB claims Szyndler racked up several thousand dollars of expenses on a family trip to Disneyland to coincide with ICANN 51 in Los Angeles in 2014.
Shortly before the Herald published (overnight in Australia), Szyndler took to an Aussie domainer forum to admit the truth of the allegation, but explain that it was fully compliant with auDA’s expenses policy at the time.
“auDA had a very clear and well understood policy at the time, whereby staff — after receiving best-available business class airfare and accommodation quotes, could spend up to, but NOT MORE THAN that figure on personal arrangements,” Szyndler wrote.
“My family joined me on a number of international trips. None cost any more than it would have cost to send me alone,” he said.
In other words, if he’d left his family at home and skipped Disneyland, he would have spent the exact same amount on a business-class flight for himself.
The Herald also says that PPB identified thousands of dollars being spent on family member travel to exotic locations, credit card cash withdrawals, expensive restaurants and even a “butler service”.
It does not say which specific staffers or directors are alleged to have spent auDA money on those things.
Indeed, Szyndler is the only person connected to specific spending in the Herald’s report.
There’s no mention of any allegations against former CEO and current ICANN vice-chair Chris Disspain — under whose watch these expenses will have been incurred — though the piece does include his blanket denial of wrongdoing.
auDA’s new chair Chris Leptos — who also sits on the PPB board — revealed last week that “several” former directors have been referred to state police over “a number of practices” upon which he did not elaborate.
Szyndler and his other Grumpier auDA members have managed to rack up enough signatures on their petition to force auDA into a special members meeting, date to be determined, that will vote on whether to get rid of Leptos, CEO Cameron Boardman and two other independent directors.
The Australian government has also been probing the organization’s antics since October, and the Herald reports that its findings could be published as soon as tomorrow (today in Australia).
Could auDA be about to get Nominetted?

6 Comments Tagged: .au, auda, expenses, ppb

dotFM offers $1.1 million stash of emoji domains

BRS Media has started selling emoji domain names in its .fm ccTLD, and some of the more commonly used ones are quite pricey.
While a vanilla emoji will go for the standard .fm price of $95.95 a year when bought from dotFM’s web site, the company has set aside about 500 domains as “premiums”.
These reserved domains start at $995 for the first year, running to $4,995, according to a published price list.
In total, dotFM is sitting on a stash of premiums worth, it reckons, over $1.1 million in the first year.
The current Unicode standard supports 2,789 emojis, so if BRS manages to sell the lot it’s looking at a not-bad $267,000 a year in renewals.
Kicking off the registration process appears to be as simple as copy-pasting an emoji into the dotFM search box, but that may not work at its partner registrars.
It’s worth noting that emoji domains are what you might call an acquired taste, mainly attractive for their novelty value and not the kind of place you’d want to run your primary web site.
They’re also basically banned by ICANN policy in the gTLD space.
.fm is the ccTLD for Micronesia which BRS has been running as an open, if niche, TLD for the radio market for the last 20 years.

7 Comments Tagged: .fm., brs media, dotfm, emojis

Bling-maker kills off fifth dot-brand gTLD

Richemont, the company behind brands such as Cartier jewelry and Mont Blanc pens, has terminated its fifth dot-brand gTLD.
It filed with ICANN to terminate its registry contract for .iwc earlier this month.
IWC is a Swiss brand of expensive watches, but its dot-brand has never been used to any notable extent.
The company had registered the domain watches.iwc, which it apparently planned to use for URL redirection via Rebrandly.
It’s the third gTLD Richemont has voluntarily terminated, after .montblanc and .chloe last year.
The company also withdrew its unopposed applications for .netaporter and .mrporter back in 2014, before it actually signed contracts with ICANN.
Richemont was one of the more prolific dot-brand applicants, applying for 14 gTLDs in total back in 2012.
It also applied for (defensively?) and won the generic .watches and some translations.
While the .watches gTLD has been live in the DNS for two and a half years, Richemont has not yet set a launch date and has not yet said who will even be eligible to buy domains there.

Comment Tagged: .iwc, .watches, dot-brands, ICANN, richemont, termination

Now GNSO mulls emergency response to GDPR deadline

ICANN’s GNSO Council is thinking about deploying a never-before-used emergency mechanism to develop a Whois privacy policy in response to GDPR.
With the May 25 deadline for compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation fast approaching, the community is scrambling to figure out how it can bring ICANN’s policies and therefore its contracts into line with the Draconian privacy provisions of the new law.
Currently, ICANN contracts with registries and registrars demand the publication of full Whois records, something GDPR will not permit, so each company in the industry is busily figuring out how its own Whois database will comply.
Fearful of a “fragmented” Whois, ICANN’s board of directors is considering deploying its own top-down emergency measure — called a Temporary Policy in its contracts — to ensure uniformity across its contracts.
CEO Goran Marby revealed to DI earlier this month that a Temporary Policy was being considered, and he and other members of the board confirmed as much to GNSO leadership during a telephone briefing last week.
(It should be noted that the call took place prior to the receipt last week of guidance from the EU Article 29 Working Party, which prompted ICANN to start mulling legal options as one way to buy the industry some time to comply post-May.)
The call (recorded here with password Eur3wiEK and summarized in this letter (pdf)), focused almost exclusively on how the Council could respond to a board-mandated Temporary Policy, with the board suggesting a GNSO Expedited Policy Development Process might be the best way to proceed.
A Temporary Policy would expire within a year, so the GNSO would have to come up with a formal Consensus Policy within that time-frame if ICANN were to have any hope of having a uniform view of Whois across its contracts.
The Temporary Policy is a “strong option” for the board, and a “highly likely or likely” outcome, but nothing has been formally decided, the GNSO leaders heard from ICANN vice-chair Chris Disspain. He was briefly challenged by Marby, who appeared somewhat more committed to the move.
While the GNSO Council has not yet formally decided to deploy the EPDP, it appears to be the most-feasible option to meet the deadline a Temporary Policy would impose.
It is estimated that an EPDP could take as little as 360 days, compared to the estimated 849 days of a regular PDP.
The EPDP cuts out several of the initial steps of a regular PDP — mainly the need for an Initial Report and associated public comment period — which by my reading would shorten the process by at least 100 days.
It also seems to give the GNSO some wriggle room in how the actual policy creation takes place. It appears that the regular “working group” structure could be replaced, for example, with a “drafting team”.
If the EPDP has the Temporary Policy and WP29 guidance as its baseline for discussions, that could also help cut out some of the circular argument that usually characterizes Whois discussions.
Aware that the EPDP is a strong possibility, the Council is currently planning to give itself a crash course in the process, which has never been used before by any iteration of the Council.
It’s uncharted territory for both the GNSO and the ICANN board, and the only people who seem to have a firm grasp on how the two emergency mechanisms slot together are the ICANN staffers who are paid to know such things.
UPDATE: A couple of hours after this article was published, ICANN posted this three-page flow-chart (pdf) comparing EPDP to PDP. Lots of luck.

Comment Tagged: epdp, gdpr, gnso, ICANN, privacy, temporary policies, whois, wp29

auDA refers former directors to police

Imploding Australian ccTLD registry auDA has ratted out “several” of its former directors to the local cops, it was revealed this week.
In a message to its community to mark Chris Leptos’ 150th day as chair of the organization, he wrote:

I am disappointed to advise you that in my first week as Independent Chair I was briefed on a number of practices of several former auDA directors. Your Board concluded that those practices warranted referral to the Victoria Police. As you would appreciate, it is not appropriate at this stage to provide further details regarding this matter.

I’m told there are 48 former auDA directors, and auDA has not said which of them have been referred to the police.
Josh Rowe, a former director who’s orchestrating a campaign to oust Leptos, auDA CEO Cameron Boardman, and two other directors, called the move a “heinous act of bullying against all 48 ex auDA directors”.
Another former director, the Aussie domain industry blogger David Goldstein, has suggested that the timing of the revelation was designed to “silence” critics including Rowe.
The Grumpier.com.au petition organized by Rowe and others has forced auDA to hold a members meeting at which the four directors’ future employment will be voted on.
auDA lawyers contacted Grumpier earlier this week to warn that any defamatory or confidential information posted on the site could lead to litigation.
But Leptos has now seemingly confirmed that the special members meeting will in fact go ahead.
Goldstein also suggested that the police referrals are related to insinuations contained within a pair of Freedom of Information Act requests filed late last year by domain consultant Ron Andruff.
In one of Andruff’s FOIA requests, he suggests that auDA may have paid legal fees of up to AUD 120,000 incurred by Rowe when he was sued almost a decade ago by a alleged domain slammer he had regularly criticized.
Rowe has called these inferences “grossly inaccurate” and “defamatory”.
In the other, which we have reported on previously, Andruff has asked for records of expenses incurred by former auDA CEO Chris Disspain, current vice-chair of ICANN.
Both FOIA requests have been denied by the Aussie government and subsequently appealed by Andruff.
Andruff is known to have beef with Disspain after he was passed over for a prominent ICANN volunteer role.
I should note for the record that, for all of the allegations swirling around, I have not seen any evidence directly connecting any individual to any wrongdoing.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, foia, grumpier.com.au, ICANN