Oh, the irony! Banned anti-Islam activist shows up on “Turkish” new gTLD domain

Tommy Robinson, who has been banned from most major social media platforms due to his anti-Islam “hate speech”, is now conducting business via a domain name that some believe rightfully belongs to the Muslim-majority nation of Turkey.
The registration could add fuel to the fight between ICANN and its governmental advisers over whether certain domains should be blocked or restricted.
Robinson, the nom de guerre of the man born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is the founder and former leader of the far-right English Defence League and known primarily for stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK for the last decade.
He’s currently, controversially, an adviser to the UK Independence Party. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, also a thoroughly unpleasant bloke, considers Robinson so far to the right he quit the party in response to the appointment.
Over the last year, Robinson has been banned from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and had his YouTube account placed under serious restrictions. This month, he was also banned from SnapChat, and the EDL he used to lead was among a handful of far-right groups banned from Facebook.
Since his personal Facebook page went dark in February, he’s been promoting his new web site as the primary destination for his supporters.
It features news about his activities — mainly his ongoing fights against social media platforms and an overturned contempt of court conviction in the UK — as well as summaries of basically any sufficiently divisive anti-Islam, anti-immigration, or pro-Brexit stories his writers come across.
The domain he’s using is tr.news, a new gTLD domain in a Donuts-owned registry. It was registered in December via GoDaddy.
Given it’s a two-character domain, it will have been registry-reserved and would have commanded a premium price. Other two-character .news domains are currently available on GoDaddy for between $200 and $10,000 for the first year.
It will come as no surprise at all for you to learn that the domain was transferred out of GoDaddy, which occasionally kicks out customers with distasteful views, to Epik, now de facto home of those with far-right views, a couple of weeks after the web site launched.
The irony of the choice of domain is that many governments would claim that tr.news — indeed any two-character domain, in any gTLD, which matches any country-code — rightfully belongs to Turkey, a nation of about 80 million nominal Muslims.
TR is the ISO 3166-1 two-character code for Turkey, and until a couple of years ago new gTLD registries were banned from selling any of these ccTLD-match two-letter domains, due to complaints from ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
Many governments, including the UK and US, couldn’t care less who registers their matching domain. Others, such as France, Italy and Israel, want bans on specific domains such as it.pizza and il.army. Other countries have asked for blanket bans on their ccTLD-match being used at all, in any gTLD.
When new gTLDs initially launched in 2012, all ccTLD matches were banned by ICANN contract. In 2014, ICANN introduced a cumbersome government-approval system under which governments had to be consulted before their matches were released for registration.
Since December 2016, the policy (pdf) has been that registries can release any two-letter domains, subject to a provision that they not be used by registrants to falsely imply an affiliation with the country or registry with the matching ccTLD.
Robinson is certainly not making such an implication. I imagine he’d be as surprised as his readers to learn that his new domain has a Turkish connection. It’s likely the only people who noticed are ICANN nerds and the Turkish themselves.
Would the Turkish people look at tr.news and assume, from the domain alone, that it had some connection to Turkey? I think many would, though I have no idea whether they would assume it was endorsed by the government or the ccTLD registry.
Would Turkey — a government whose censorship regime makes Robinson’s social media plight look like unbounded liberalism — be happy to learn the domain matching its country code is being used primarily to deliver divisive content about the coreligionists of the vast majority of its citizens? Probably not.
But under current ICANN policy it does not appear there’s much that can be done about it. If Robinson is not attempting to pass himself of as an affiliate of the Turkish government or ccTLD registry, there’s no avenue for complaint.
However, after taking the cuffs off registries with its December 2016 pronouncement, allowing them to sell two-letter domains with barely any restrictions, ICANN has faced continued complaints from the GAC — complaints that have yet to be resolved.
The GAC has been telling ICANN for the last two years that some of its members believe the decision to release two-character names went against previous GAC advice, and ICANN has been patiently explaining the process it went through to arrive at the current policy, which included taking GAC advice and government comments into account.
In what appears to be a kind of peace offering, ICANN recently told the GAC (pdf) that it is developing an online tool that “will provide awareness of the registration of two-character domains and allow for governments to report concerns”.
The GAC, in its most-recent communique, told ICANN its members would test the tool and report back at the public meeting in Montreal this November.
The tool was not available in December, when tr.news was registered, so it’s not clear whether Turkey will have received a formal notification that its ccTLD-match domain is now registered, live, and being used to whip up mistrust of Muslims.
Update April 30: ICANN informs me that the tool has been available since February, but that it does not push notifications to governments. Rather, governments can search to see if their two-letter codes have been registered in which gTLDs.

Comment Tagged: .islam, .news, .tr, censorship, donuts, epik, geographic, godaddy, ICANN, new gTLDs, tommy robinson, turkey, two-character

ICANN got hacked by crypto bots

ICANN had to take down its community wiki for several hours last week after it got hacked by crypto-currency miners.
The bad guys got in via one of two “critical” vulnerabilities in Confluence, the wiki software that ICANN licences from Atlassian Systems, which ICANN had not yet patched.
ICANN’s techies noticed the wiki, which is used by many of its policy-making bodies to coordinate their work, was running slowly April 11.
They quickly discovered that Atlassian had issued a vulnerability warning on March 20, but ICANN was not on its mailing list (doh!) so hadn’t been directly notified.
They also determined that a malicious “Crypto-Miner” — software that uses spare CPU cycles to attempt to create new cryptocurrency coins — had been installed and was responsible for the poor performance.
ICANN said it took the wiki down, restored it to a recent backup, patched Confluence, and brought the system back online. It seems to have taken a matter of hours from discovery to resolution.
The organization said it has now subscribed to Atlassian’s mailing list, so it will be notified of future vulnerabilities directly.

Comment Tagged: .wiki, atlassian, bitcoin, confuence, cryptocurrency, glitch, hacked, ICANN, miner, security

Revenue dips as Brexit whacks .eu in 2018

.eu saw its registrations sink substantially in 2018, largely due to Brexit, which affected its revenue and profit.
Registry EURid said yesterday that it was managing 3,684,750 .eu domains at the end of the year, down by 130,305 over the year.
It’s .eu’s lowest end-of-year domain count since 2012.
The UK, which voted to leave the EU in 2016 but has yet to follow through, sank from the fourth-largest .eu country to the sixth, now behind less populous countries Poland and Italy.
EURid and the UK government have warned UK-based registrants that they stand to lose their domains after Brexit is actually executed (if it ever is)
As Brits abandoned their .eu names by the tens of thousands, EURid also suspended over 36,000 domains for abuse, which affected its annual total.
The decline hit EURid’s revenue, which was down to €12.7 million, from €13.3 million in 2017. Profit was down from €1.7 million, from €2 million.
The data was published in the registry’s annual report (pdf), published yesterday.

Comment Tagged: .eu, brexit, earnings, eurid, financials

auDA rejects domaining ban but approves second-level domains

Australian ccTLD registry auDA has rejected a proposal that would have essentially banned domainers from the .au space.
In response to recommendations of its Policy Review Panel, auDA management said that the PRP “has not provided any evidentiary material” that so-called “warehousing” is harmful.
It further concluded that the policies proposed for monitoring and rooting out suspected domainers would disproportionately increase compliance costs for both registrants and auDA itself.
In management’s response (pdf) to the PRP, auDA wrote that the ban would make investors second-class citizens when compared to powerful trademark owners:

The warehousing prohibition appears to disproportionately target domain investors as the licence portfolios or holdings of trademark and brand owners will be excluded under the PRP proposal. This proposal elevates the rights of trademark and other intellectual property owners over other licence holders in the .au domain, which may give rise to issues of market power and anti-competitive practices. Management believes that further information is required to assess whether the net benefit to the community of prohibiting warehousing in respect of a class of registrants outweighs the competition issues. For these reasons Management believes that there should be no change to the existing policy position.

It added:

Management does not support the PRP recommendation for a resale and warehousing prohibition for the reasons set out earlier. The proposed test for determining whether a registrant has contravened the resale and warehousing prohibition will increase compliance costs for registrants and administration, monitoring and enforcement costs for auDA. These costs may be disproportionate to the risk or severity of the harm to the community from warehousing and the cost of a licence in the .au domain.

Not only did it decide not to crack down on domainers, but auDA also plans to make their lives a little easier by updating current eligibility policy to explicitly state that parking, or “monetization”, is permitted.

To ensure there is no ambiguity or reliance on interpreting ‘content’, auDA management has recommended an additional allocation criteria can be applied to com.au and net.au which would include that a domain name could be used for the purpose of pay-per-click or affiliate web advertising/ lead generation, or electronic information services including email, file transfer protocol, cloud storage or managing Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

It’s a comprehensive win for domainers, such as those represented by the Internet Commerce Association, which had been outraged by the PRP’s findings.
It’s less good news when it comes to the perhaps more controversial plans to allow direct, second-level registrations under .au.
auDA has decided to go ahead with these longstanding plans, which domainers worry will promote confusion and dilute the value of their third-level .com.au portfolios.
The new draft plans (pdf) for the launch of 2LDs would see existing 3LD registrants given “priority status” to register the exact-match 2LD.
There would be a six-month application window for registrants to lodge their claims, beginning October 1 this year.
If the .com.au version and .org.au version, for example, were owned by different parties, the registrant with the earliest registration date would have priority.
After the application window closed, any unclaimed domains would be made available on a first-come, first-served basis.
These rules, and all the results of auDA’s response to the PRP, are open for public comment until May 10.

5 Comments Tagged: .au, auda, direct, domaining, second-level, warehousing

KPMG dumps .com for dot-brand gTLD

KPMG has become the latest company to dump its .com domain in favor of its dot-brand gTLD.
The company recently announced that it is now using home.kpmg as its primary web site domain, replacing kpmg.com.
The migration appears to be complete already. URLs on the old .com address now bounce users to the equivalent page on .kpmg. Web searches for KPMG return the .kpmg domain as the top hit.
KPMG said in a press release:

The move enhances the KPMG brand through a strong, simplified name, and provides end users with a level of assurance that any site that ends with .kpmg is owned and operated by KPMG.
Since the top level domain can only be used by KPMG, visitors to sites that use the new top level domain can easily confirm its authenticity and be assured that the information they contain is reliable and secure.

The company said that it is the first of the “Big Four” professional services firms to make the switch.
This is technically correct. Rival Deloitte uses several .deloitte domains, but it has not bit the bullet and migrated from its .com.
Of the other two, Ernst & Young does not have a dot-brand, and PricewaterhouseCoopers does not use its .pwc extension beyond a single experimental domain that redirects to pwc.com.
KPMG had revenue just shy of $29 billion last year and is one of the most recognizable brands in the corporate world.

33 Comments Tagged: .com, dot-brands, kpmg, new gTLDs, pwc

David and Goliath? DotMusic confirms .music win

Cyprus-based registry upstart DotMusic Ltd has confirmed that it has secured the rights to the .music gTLD.
Founder and CEO Constantinos Roussos tweeted the news overnight.

Excited to announce that after more than a decade, DotMusic has prevailed and will be the .MUSIC registry 🙂 https://t.co/XSnCkQVn28 #ICANN #DotMusic #DavidandGoliath #Music #Domains pic.twitter.com/tQX14eYyKu

— Constantine Roussos (@mus) April 11, 2019

It is not known how much DotMusic paid for the string, which I believe was auctioned in late March.
DotMusic fought off competition from seven other applicants, including some heavy-hitters: Google, Amazon, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and MMX.
MMX’s application was the last to be withdrawn, last night.
It’s not impossible that .music could launch before the end of the year, after DotMusic has completed the remaining pre-delegation steps such as signing its ICANN registry contract.
There will also be a couple of launch phases that give priority to members of the music industry.
Even when it goes to general availability, it won’t be a free-for-all, however.
DotMusic, in its efforts to secure support from the piracy-fearful music industry, proposed relatively strict “enhanced safeguards” for .music.
Registrants will have to verify their identity by phone as well as email in order to register a domain. They’ll also be restricted to strings matching their “their own name, acronym or Doing Business As”.
I don’t think the policies as outlined will be enough to prevent speculation, but they will add friction, possibly throttling sales volume.
In other news, it turns out Dewey did in fact defeat Truman.

2 Comments Tagged: .music, dotmusic, ICANN, new gTLDs, piracy

Neustar loses most of its Amazon back-end biz to Nominet

Amazon has switched two thirds of its large portfolio of new gTLDs over to Nominet’s back-end registry services, replacing Neustar.
Judging by changes to IANA records this week, Amazon has moved 35 gTLDs to Nominet, leaving 17 at Neustar.
A Neustar spokesperson confirmed the changes, telling DI:

in an effort to diversify their back-end support, Amazon has chosen to move some, but not all, of their TLDs to another provider. Neustar will still manage multiple Amazon TLDs after the transition and we look forward to our continued partnership.

The switch more than doubles Nominet’s number of TLDs under management. Its biggest customer to date was MMX, which pushed 20 of its TLDs to the .uk registry in a restructuring a few years ago.
The Amazon loss, and a few others recently, also mean that Neustar is by my back-of-the-envelope calculation no longer the largest back-end when measured by the number of TLDs under management.
Those bragging rights would go to Donuts, which self-manages its own rather large portfolio of 241 TLDs. Neustar would remain the largest provider in terms of service provided to third-party clients.
The Neustar-to-Nominet technical migration appears to have kicked off a couple of weeks ago and emerged Wednesday when Nominet’s Technical Contact information replaced Neustar’s in most of Amazon’s IANA records.
Customers will not have noticed, because the TLDs in question barely have any customers.
The only one of the 35 affected TLDs with any registrations at all is .moi, which has just a couple hundred domains in its zone.
The other affected TLDs, none of which have launched, are: .moi, .yamaxun, .author, .book, .buy, .call, .circle, .fast, .got, .jot, .joy, .like, .pin, .read, .room, .safe, .smile, .tushu, .wanggou, .spot, .tunes, .you, .talk, .audible, .deal, .fire, .now, .kindle, .silk, .save, .hot, .pay, .secure, .wow and .free.
The TLDs remaining with Neustar are: .bot, .zero, .ポイント, .書籍, .クラウド, .ストア, .セール, .coupon, .zappos, .ファッション, .食品, .song, .家電, .aws, .imdb, .prime, and .通販.
Six of the TLDs staying with Neustar have launched, but only one, .bot, has more than 100 registrations.
.bot is a tightly restricted, experimental space currently in a long-term “limited registration period” which is not due to end until next January. It has around 1,500 names in its zone file.
Four of Amazon’s dot-brands are staying with Neustar, which is probably the most enthusiastic cheerleader for dot-brands out there, and four are going to Nominet.
Neustar appears to be keeping all of Amazon’s internationalized domain names. Nominet currently manages no IDNs.
How important the adjustment is from a dollar perspective would rather depend on what the per-domain component of the deals were, and whether Amazon ever plans to actually make its gTLDs commercially available.
In recent weeks, XYZ.com also moved its recently acquired .baby gTLD from Neustar, where it had been an unused dot-brand, to preferred provider CentralNic, while .kred and .ceo, both under the same ownership, also switched to CentralNic.

Comment Tagged: amazon, dot-brands, idns, neustar, new gTLDs, nominet

ICANN takes the reins again as .amazon talks fail

ICANN has re-involved itself in the fight over the .amazon gTLD, after Amazon and eight South American governments failed to reach agreement over the name.
ICANN chair Cherine Chalaby wrote this week to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization to inform the group that it is now ICANN that will decide whether the proposed dot-brand domain is approved or not.
ICANN’s board had given Amazon and ACTO until April 7 to come to a mutual agreement that addressed ACTO’s sovereignty concerns, but they missed that deadline.
According to the BBC World Service, citing unnamed diplomats, ACTO wanted Amazon to create a kind of policy committee, with seats at the table for governments to veto second-level domains Amazon decides it wants to register in .amazon in future.
Amazon declined this demand, instead offering each of the eight ACTO countries its two-letter country-code under .amazon — br.amazon for Brazil, for example — the Beeb reported at the weekend.
Now that ICANN’s deadline has passed, ACTO appears to have lost its chance to negotiate with Amazon.
ICANN has now asked the company to submit a plan to address ACTO’s concerns directly to ICANN by April 21.
From that point, it could go either way. ICANN might approve the .amazon application, reject it, or push it back to Amazon for further work.
But .amazon may not necessarily be on the home straight yet. A straightforward approval or rejection will very likely provoke howls of anguish, and further appeals action, from the losing side.

Comment Tagged: .amazon, acto, gac, geographic, ICANN, new gTLDs

Italian bank is the latest dot-brand to bow out

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Italy’s sixth-largest bank, has become the latest new gTLD owner to tell ICANN it no longer wishes to run its dot-brand.
It’s the 47th new gTLD to request termination of its registry contract. The affected TLD is .bnl.
ICANN has already decided not to transition the contract to a new owner, as usual.
Also as usual, the gTLD has never been used above and beyond the obligatory nic. site.
What makes this termination somewhat noteworthy is that BNL is a subsidiary of French bank BNP Paribas, which is one of the most enthusiastic dot-brand owners out there.
BNP Paribas dumped its .fr and .net domains in favor of its domains under .bnpparibas back in 2015 and currently has roughly 250 domains in its zone file and dozens of live sites.
The domain mabanque.bnpparibas, used for its French retail banking services, was for some time a top 10 most-visited new gTLD domain names, per Alexa rankings, but that has slipped as new gTLDs’ popularity have increased overall.

Comment Tagged: .bnl, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, dot-brands, new gTLDs, termination, trademarks

.music update: I’m calling it for Costa

Amazon has pulled out of the fight for the .music gTLD, and I’m ready to call the race.
In full knowledge that this could be my “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment, it seems to me the balance of evidence right now is strongly pointing to a win for DotMusic over sole remaining rival bidder MMX.
The contention set originally had eight applicants, but six — Google, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and last night Amazon — have withdrawn over the last week or so.
This is a sure sign that the battle is over, and that the rights to .music have been auctioned off.
The two remaining applicants yet to withdraw are DotMusic Ltd, the Cyprus-based company founded and managed by music enthusiast and entrepreneur Constantinos Roussos, and Entertainment Names Inc, a joint venture managed by MMX (aka Minds + Machines).
One of them will withdraw its application soon, and my money’s on MMX.
Neither company will talk to me about the result.
But, as I observed Monday, DotMusic has recently substantially revamped its web site, and appears to be accepting “pre-registrations” for .music domains. These are not the actions of a loser.
MMX, on the other hand, has never shared Roussos’ public enthusiasm for .music and has never been particularly enthusiastic about winning private gTLD auctions, usually preferring instead to enjoy the proceeds of losing.
There are only two wildcard factors at play here that may soon make me look foolish.
First, the joint venture partner for Entertainment Names is an unknown quantity. Its two directors, listed in its .music application, are a pair of Hollywood entertainment lawyers with no previous strong connection to the ICANN ecosystem. I’ve no idea what their agenda is.
Second, MMX did not mention .music once in the “Post Period Highlights” of its recently filed 2018 financial results statement. It did mention the resolution of the .gay and .cpa contention sets, but not .music.
That filing came out April 3, at least a few days after the contention set had been won, but I’m assuming that the tight timing and/or non-disclosure agreements are probably to blame for the lack of a mention for .music.
So, on balance, I’m calling it for Roussos.
With a bit of luck we’ll have confirmation and maybe a bit of detail about potential launch dates before the week is out.

8 Comments Tagged: .music, amazon, auctions, dotmusic, ICANN, Minds + Machines, mmx, new gTLDs