New gTLDs still a crappy choice for email — study

New gTLDs may not be the best choice of domain for a primary email address, judging by new research.
Over 20% of the most-popular web sites do not fully understand email addresses containing long TLDs, and Arabic email addresses are supported by fewer than one in 10 sites, a study by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group has found.
Twitter, IBM and the Financial Times are among those sites highlighted as having only partial support for today’s wide variety of possible email addresses.
Only 7% of the sites tested were able to support all types of email address.
The study, carried out by Donuts and ICANN staff, looked at 749 websites (in the top 1,000 or so as ranked by Alexa) that have forms for filling in email addresses.
On each site, seven different email addresses were input, to see whether the site would accept them as valid.
The emails used different combinations of ASCII and Unicode before the dot and mixes of internationalized domain name and ASCII at the second and top levels.
These were the results (click to enlarge or download the PDF of the report here):

The problem with these numbers, it seems to me, is the lack of a control. There’s no real baseline to judge the numbers against.
There’s no mention in the paper about testing addresses that use .com or decades-old ccTLDs, which would have highlighted web sites that with broken scripts that reject all emails.
But if we assume, as the paper appears to, that all the tested web sites were 100% compliant for .com domains, the scores for new gTLDs are not great.
There are currently over 800 TLDs over four characters in length, but according to the UASG research 22% of web sites will not recognize them.
There are 150 IDN TLDs, but a maximum of 30% of sites will accept them in email addresses.
When it comes to right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, the vast majority of sites are totally hopeless.
UASG dug into the code of the tested sites when it could and found that most of them use client-side code — JavaScript processing a regular expression — to verify addresses.
A regular expression is complex bit of code that can look something like this: /^.+@(?:[^.]+\.)+(?:[^.]{2,})$
It’s not every coder’s cup of tea, but it can get the job done with minimal client-side resource overheads. Most coders, the UASG concludes, copy regex they found on a forum and maybe tweak it a bit.
This should not be shocking news to anyone. I’ve known about it since 2009 or earlier when I first started ripping code from StackOverflow.
However, the UASG seems to be have been working on the assumption that more sites are using off-the-shelf software libraries, which would have allowed the problem to be fixed in a more centralized fashion.
It concludes in its paper that much greater “awareness raising” needs to happen before universal acceptance comes closer to reality.

8 Comments Tagged: donuts, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, uasg, universal acceptance

ICANN just came thiiis close to breaking the internet

ICANN has decided to postpone an unprecedented change at the DNS root after discovering it could break internet for potentially millions of users.
The so-called KSK Rollover was due to go ahead on October 11, but it’s now been pushed back to — tentatively — some time in the first quarter 2018.
The delay was decided after ICANN realized that there were still plenty of ISPs and network operators that weren’t ready for the change.
Had ICANN gone ahead anyway with the change anyway, it could have seen subscribers of affected ISPs lose access to millions of DNSSEC-supporting domain names.
So the postponement is a good thing.
A KSK or Key Signing Key is a public-private cryptographic key pair used to sign other keys called Zone Signing Keys. The root KSK signs the root ZSK and is in effect the apex of the DNSSEC hierarchy.
The same KSK has been in operation at the root since 2010, when the root was first signed, but it’s considered good practice to change it every so often to mitigate the risk of brute-force attacks against the public key.
While it’s important enough to get dramatized in US spy shows, in practice it only affects ISPs and domain names that voluntarily support DNSSEC.
ICANN estimates that 750 million people use DNSSEC, which is designed to prevent problems such as man-in-the-middle attacks against domain names.
That’s a hell of a lot of people, but it’s still a minority of the world’s internet-using population. It’s not been revealed how many of those would have been affected by a premature rollover.
When DNSSEC fails, people whose DNS resolvers have DNSSEC turned on (Comcast and Google are two of the largest such providers) can’t access domain names that have DNSSEC turned on (such as domainincite.com).
Preventing the internet breaking is pretty much ICANN’s only job, so it first flagged up its intention to roll the root KSK back in July last year.
In July this year, the new public KSK was uploaded as part of a transition phase that is seeing the 2010 keys and 2017 keys online simultaneously.
Last year, CTO David Conrad told us the long lead time and cautious approach was necessary to get the word out that ISPs needed to test their resolvers to make sure they would work with the new keys.
In June, ICANN CEO Goran Marby spammed the telecommunications regulators in every country in the world with a letter (pdf) asking them to coordinate their home ISPs to be ready for the change.
The organization’s comms teams has also been doing a pretty good job getting word of the rollover into the tech press over the last few months.
But, with a flashback to the new gTLD program, that outreach doesn’t seem to have reached out as far as it needed to.
ICANN said last night that a “significant number” of ISPs are still not ready for the rollover.
It seems ICANN only became aware of this problem due to a new feature of DNS that reports back to the root which keys it is configured to use.
Without being able to collate that data, it’s possible it could have been assumed that the situation was hunky-dory and the rollover might have gone ahead.
ICANN still isn’t sure why so many resolvers are not yet ready for the 2017 KSK. It said in a statement:

There may be multiple reasons why operators do not have the new key installed in their systems: some may not have their resolver software properly configured and a recently discovered issue in one widely used resolver program appears to not be automatically updating the key as it should, for reasons that are still being explored.

It’s not clear why the broken resolver software has not been named — one would assume that getting the word out would be a priority unless issues of responsible disclosure were in play.
ICANN said it is “reaching out to its community, including its Security and Stability Advisory Committee, the Regional Internet Registries, Network Operator Groups and others to help explore and resolve the issues.”
The organization is hopeful that it will be able to go ahead with the rollover in Q1 2018, but noted that would be dependent on “more fully understanding the new information and mitigating as many potential failures as possible.”
While it’s excellent news that ICANN is on top of the situation, the delay is unlikely to do anything to help the perception that DNSSEC is mainly just an administrative ball-ache and far more trouble than it’s worth.

3 Comments Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover

Chalaby named next ICANN chair

Cherine Chalaby is to be the next chair of ICANN.
In a case of burying the lede extreme even by ICANN standards, current chair Steve Crocker announced the news in the 11th paragraph of a blog post entitled “Chairman’s Blog: The Montevideo Workshop Wrap-Up” this evening.
Crocker wrote: “the Board had an opportunity to participate in the discussion of the Board’s future leadership, and have indicated unanimous support for the future election of Cherine Chalaby as the next Chair of the ICANN Board.”
No formal election has happened yet, but the board decided to come to a consensus on which way they will vote anyway.
Chris Disspain has been selected future vice-chair using the same informal process, Crocker wrote.
The actual raising of hands will take place during the board’s Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi at ICANN 60 in early November.
Chalaby was born in Egypt, also holds British citizenship, and lives in ICANN’s home town of Los Angeles.
He’s the first ICANN chair to come from the financial services world, having served a career at Accenture before joining Rasmala Investments.
He’s been a member of the ICANN board since the Nominating Committee selected him in December 2010 and was elected vice-chair a few years back.
His stint as chair will not be long. I believe he’s term-limited and will have to step aside at the end of 2019.
Crocker, an early internet pioneer, has been chair since 2011. No doubt ICANN is planning a big send-off for him at ICANN 60.

Comment Tagged: abu dhabi, ICANN, icann 60

Millions spent as three more new gTLDs auctioned

Two or three new gTLDs have been sold in a private auction that may well have seen over $20 million spent.
The not-yet-delegated strings .inc, .llc and (I think) .llp hit the block at some point this month.
They are the first new gTLDs to be auctioned since Verisign paid $135 million for .web a little over a year ago.
At this point, nobody wants to talk about which applicant(s) won which of the newly sold strings, but it seems that the proceeds ran into many millions.
MMX, which applied for .inc and .llc, said this morning that it has benefited from a $2.4 million windfall by losing both auctions.
The auctions evidently took place in September, but CEO Toby Hall declined to comment any further, citing non-disclosure agreements.
There were nine remaining applicants for .inc and eight for .llc.
I don’t think it’s possible to work out which sold for how much using just MMX’s disclosure.
But private auctions typically see the winning bid divided equally between the losers.
I believe .llp was probably sold off by auction at the same time.
The reason for this is that .llc, .inc and .llp were contention sets all being held up by one applicant’s dispute with ICANN.
Dot Registry LLC had applied for all three as “community” gTLDs, which meant it had to go through the Community Evaluation Process.
While it failed the CPE on all three counts, the company subsequently filed an Independent Review Process complaint against ICANN, which it won last August.
You may recall that this was the IRP that found disturbing levels of ICANN meddling in the drafting of the CPE panel’s findings.
Ever since then, ICANN has been conducting an internal review, assisted by outside experts, into how the CPE process worked (or didn’t).
Lawyers for Dot Registry and other affected applications (for .music and .gay) have been haranguing ICANN all year to get a move on and resolve the issue.
And yet, just as the end appeared to be in sight, Dot Registry seems to have decided to give up (or, possibly, cash out) and allow the strings to go to auction.
CEO Shaul Jolles declined to comment on the auctions today.
All I can currently tell you is that at least two of the Dot Registry holdout strings have been sold and that MMX did not win either of them.
The applicants for .inc were: Uniregistry, Dot Registry, Afilias, GMO, GTLD Limited, MMX, Nu Dot Co (now a known Verisign front), Donuts and Google.
The applicants for .llc were: MMX, Dot Registry, Nu Dot Co, Donuts, Afilias, Top Level Design, myLLC and Google.

4 Comments Tagged: .inc, .llc, .llp, auctions, dot registry, ICANN, mmx, new gTLDs

MMX revenue slips despite domain growth

MMX today posted a smaller loss for the first half of the year, despite managing to grow domains under management and hit some important financial milestones.
The new gTLD registry formerly known as Mind + Machines, which announced a few months ago that it’s looking to be acquired, reported an H1 loss of $526,000 compared to a loss of $1.9 million a year earlier.
Revenue and billings were both down due to the lack of any big launches in the period; H1 2016 had benefited from the strong launch of .vip in China.
Revenue, which is recognized over the duration of the domain registrations, was $5.3 million compared to $7.4 million in 2016. Billings, a measure of cash sales, were $5.6 million compared to $8.1 million.
Despite these dips, MMX is happy enough that the “quality” of its revenue is getting better.
The company said that revenue from domain renewals more than doubled to $2.4 million and represented 45% of revenue. A year ago, it was 15%.
As another measure of the health of its business, it also said that its renewal billings was greater than its operating expenditure for the first time, after cost-cutting.
Domains under management went into seven figures for the first time, to 1.1 million. That was up from 821,000 at the start of the year.
It processed 318,000 new registrations in the six months, compared to 452,000 a year earlier (when .vip’s launch provided a boost).

Comment Tagged: .vip, earnings, mmx, new gTLDs

More delay for Amazon as ICANN punts rejected gTLD

Amazon is going to have to wait a bit longer to discover whether its 2012 application for the gTLD .amazon will remain rejected.
ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend discussed whether to revive the application in light of the recent Independent Review Process panel ruling that the bid had been kicked out for no good reason.
Instead of making a firm decision, or punting it to the Government Advisory Committee (as I had predicted), the board instead referred the matter to a subcommittee for further thought.
The newly constituted Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which has taken over key functions of the Board Governance Committee, has been asked to:

review and consider the Panel’s recommendation that the Board “promptly re-evaluate Amazon’s applications” and “make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications,” and to provide options for the Board to consider in addressing the Panel’s recommendation.

The notion of a “prompt” resolution appears to be subjective, but Amazon might not have much longer to wait for a firmer decision.
While the BAMC’s charter requires it to have meetings at least quarterly, if it follows the practice of its predecessor they will be far more frequent.
It’s possible Amazon could get an answer by the time of the public meeting in Abu Dhabi at the end of next month.
ICANN’s board did also resolve to immediately pay Amazon the $163,045.51 in fees the IRP panel said was owed.
The .amazon gTLD application, along with its Chinese and Japanese versions, was rejected by ICANN a few years ago purely on the basis of consensus GAC advice, led by the geographic name collisions concerns of Peru and Brazil.
However, the IRP panel found that the GAC advice appeared to based on not a great deal more than whim, and that the ICANN board should have at least checked whether there was a sound rationale to reject the bids before doing so.

Comment Tagged: amazon, bamc, ICANN, irp, new gTLDs

.xyz back on sale in China

Chinese registrars have started to carry .xyz domains again, about five months after a Chinese government ban.
West.cn and Net.cn are two of the China-based companies that appear to be selling .xyz names at the yuan equivalent of a US dollar, based on a spot check this morning.
West.cn flagged the “restoration” of service on its blog today, saying it was “overjoyed” to resume sales.
XYZ.com revealed back in May that its new gTLD domains were “temporarily” no longer available via Chinese registrars, after the government there suspended its license.
The reason for the suspension has always been a little vague, but the registry told DNW back in May that it related to Real Names Verification.
RNV is the government-mandated identity check that must take place before anyone in China can register and use a domain name.
XYZ had been outsourcing the function to ZDNS, but that relationship fell apart for some reason (rumor has it there was a money dispute) and XYZ decided to switch to Tele-info.
In the interim, Chinese registrars, apparently under order of their government, dutifully stopped carrying .xyz domains.
XYZ also went through ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process to get its move to Tele-info approved at the Registry Agreement level.
The downtime prevented XYZ from masking the precipitous decline in its number of domains under management, which has fallen by over three million since May.
XYZ and the Chinese government have yet to issue statements about the newly reinstated license.
UPDATE 10/10/2017 — XYZ.com got in touch last week to say that .xyz was never “banned” in China.
A spokesperson said in an email: “We had RNV in place with ZDNS and opted to switch. To be compliant with ICANN, we suspended registrations in China.”
He declined to clarify whether the suspension was voluntary or ICANN-mandated.
He also declined to confirm or deny that Chinese registrars been told to suspend .xyz registrations by the government, as local sources have previously told DI and Domain Name Wire.
Other gTLDs owned by other registries have previously obtained Chinese licenses without ICANN first approving their RNV providers.

Comment Tagged: .xyz, china, new gTLDs, west.cn, xyz.com

puntCAT head of IT charged with “sedition”

Catalan gTLD registry puntCAT has confirmed that its head of IT, Pep Masoliver, has been arrested as part of a Spanish government crackdown on pushes for independence.
He’s been charged with “sedition” and is still in police custody this evening, a company spokesperson told DI.
His arrest coincided with the military police raid of puntCAT’s office in Barcelona that started this morning, related to a forthcoming Catalan independence referendum.
Spanish authorities had called for the registry to delete .cat domain names used to host content related to the referendum, which has been ruled illegal by the Spanish courts.
puntCAT, which had already alerted ICANN to what it characterized as the sweeping “censorship” of .cat, has now started up a social media campaign calling for Masoliver’s release.

Outraged by the arrest of our friend and colleague. We demand his immediate release #totsambtupep pic.twitter.com/TLsFwmlnQX

— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

The hashtag appears to translate as “All With You, Pep”.
Masoliver was among a dozen people arrested today by Spanish national authorities in a series of raids that have been condemned as anti-democratic.
The Guardian has a good round-up of the day’s events and local reaction.
“Sedition” isn’t a word you hear very often nowadays, particularly in democratic Western Europe, and I’m not going to pretend to have the first idea how it is treated under Spanish law.
UPDATE 1944 UTC: puntCAT issued a statement condemning the events of today in very strong terms. It’s worth quoting in its entirety.

The Fundació puntCAT wants to express its utmost condemnation, indignation and reprobation for the actions that it has been suffering lately with successive judicial mandates, searches and finally the arrest of our Director of Innovation and Information Systems, Pep Masoliver.
We are a private and non for profit foundation devoted to ensuring that Catalan – a persecuted and maltreated language – has its space in the digital world. We assist all our users with the greatest professionalism and we are a reference entity in Catalonia and in the world.
The show that we have experienced in our offices this morning has been shameful and degrading, unworthy of a civilized country. We feel helpless in the face of these immensely disproportionate facts.
We demand the immediate release of our colleague and friend.
We will continue to work for our foundational objectives as well as for the defense of freedom of expression on the Internet.

13 Comments Tagged: .cat, Fundació puntCAT, independence, puntcat, referendum, sedition

Spanish cops raid .cat registry offices in referendum censorship row

Spanish police this morning raided the offices of .cat gTLD registry Fundació puntCAT, just days after demanding the company shut down any domains referring to a forthcoming referendum.
There are reports, unconfirmed by puntCAT at this time, that head of IT Pep Masoliver has been arrested in connection with the incident.
On Twitter, puntCAT said shortly after 10am local time (translation by Google Translate): “At this time @guardiacivil is performing an intervention in our offices.”
Guardia Civil is one of Spain’s various police forces.

En aquests moments la @guardiacivil està realitzant una intervenció a les nostres oficines. pic.twitter.com/j7JeLkjfXO

— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 20, 2017

The raid comes as the national government cracks down on a local referendum on independence for the Catalonia region.
Catalonia was to go to the polls October 1 to decide whether it should split from Spain, but the vote was recently declared illegal by Spain’s highest constitutional court.
Local government officials have reportedly been arrested this morning as part of the crackdown.
It has been reported by Spanish media that puntCAT’s head of IT Pep Masoliver was been arrested at his home.
puntCAT declined to confirm the arrest immediately, telling DI: “Our IT manager has been required for the intervention at our office.”
At the weekend, the registry wrote to ICANN to warn it that Spanish authorities had instructed it on Friday to “block all .cat domains that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum”.
“We are being requested to censor content and suppress freedom of speech,” the letter, which condemned the “unprecedented and absolute scope” of the order, said.
The letter was posted to Twitter in its entirety.

We have denounced to @ICANN the disproportionate action of the courts. Committed to freedom on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/NkvTMYJ79d

— Fundació puntCAT (@puntcat) September 17, 2017

.cat, which is designed for people from the Catalonia region or who speak Catalan, went live in 2006 following ICANN’s 2003 round of “sponsored” gTLD applications.
It had 112,000 domains under management at the last count and a smooth growth curve that would make most new gTLD operators salivate.
As the raid happened just a couple of hours ago and appears to be ongoing, this is breaking news. I’ll provide updates throughout the day as more information emerges.
UPDATE 0950 UTC: The raid appears to have been temporarily frozen while the parties await the arrival of the court order authorizing the raid and the company’s CTO.
UPDATE 1022 UTC: Story updated to reflect reports of a puntCAT employee arrest.
UPDATE 1056 UTC: Updated with statement from puntCAT.
UPDATE 1653 UTC: Masoliver has been charged with “sedition”.

4 Comments Tagged: .cat, catalonia, Fundació puntCAT, independence, police, referendum

Uniregistry: sales prices down for “first time ever”

Uniregistry today said that it sold $29 million of domain names through its Uniregistry Market platform so far this year.
But the company said that average sales prices dipped for the “first time ever” over the period.
The 3,617 names it sold in the first eight months of the year went for on average $8,017 per domain, compared to $9,110 in the same 2016 period.
Average prices had been steadily rising since 2011, Uniregistry said in a press release. It blamed the reversal on “expansion into exploratory, nontraditional markets” — the mix leaning more towards new gTLDs and ccTLDs, in other words.
On the bright side, the total dollar value of sales were up to $29 million from the $25 million in the comparable period. Transactions were up 24%, the company said.
Eight months is an unusual period to report results for, making me wonder whether today’s statement is in response to some recent bad press, but as a private company I guess Uniregistry can report figures for whatever period it wishes.
The numbers, to reiterate, refer to its Uniregistry Market secondary sales platform, not its own cache of registry-reserved new gTLD domains.

2 Comments Tagged: secondary market, uniregistry, uniregistry market