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.taipei not blocked after all

Kevin Murphy, August 27, 2013, Domain Registries

Taipei City Government’s application for the .taipei new gTLD is still live, despite indications to the contrary from ICANN last week.
On Friday, we reported that there was some confusion about the status of the bid, which was flagged by ICANN as “Eligible for Extended Evaluation” in one place and “Ineligible for Further Review” in another.
We wondered aloud whether Taiwan’s controversial national identity was responsible for the application failing due to lack of governmental support.
But an ICANN spokesperson called last night to confirm that the “Eligible” status is the correct one. The ICANN web site has been corrected accordingly.
What this means is that .taipei is not rejected yet, but must provide more evidence of government support if it wants to pass Extended Evaluation and eventually get delegated.
The question remains, however: which government are we talking about here? If it’s the People’s Republic of China, which claims Taiwan as a province, Taipei may still face problems.

CNNIC hit by “largest ever” denial of service attack

Kevin Murphy, August 26, 2013, Domain Registries

Chinese ccTLD operator CNNIC suffered up to half a day of degraded performance and intermittent accessibility yesterday, after being hit by what it called its “largest ever” denial of service attack.
CNNIC is one of ICANN’s three Emergency Back-End Registry Operators, contracted to take over the running of any new gTLD registries that fail. It’s also the named back-end for seven new gTLD applications.
According to an announcement on its web site, as well as local reports and tips to DI, the first wave of DDoS hit it at about midnight yesterday. A second wave followed up at 4am local time and lasted up to six hours.
According to a tipster, all five of .cn’s name servers were inaccessible in China during the attack.
Local reports (translated) say that many Chinese web sites were also inaccessible to many users, but the full scale of the problem doesn’t seem to be clear yet.
China’s .cn is the fourth-largest ccTLD, with close to 10 million domains under management.

Failures mount up as ICANN releases penultimate week of IE results

Kevin Murphy, August 23, 2013, Domain Registries

Eight new gTLD applications flunked Initial Evaluation this week, according to ICANN’s just-released results.
One of them, the Taipei City Government’s bid for .taipei, has been flagged as “Ineligible for Further Review” — the only application to receive such a status to date — suggesting it is fully dead.
But the full IE report delivered by ICANN says .taipei is actually “Eligible for Extended Evaluation”. It’s not clear right now which of these statuses is the correct one.
Its IE report says “the required documentation of support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria” for Taipei’s bid to pass the Geographic Names Review.
While the city government seems to be the applicant, city bids also require national government support, which could be problematic given that the People’s Republic of China regards Taiwan as a province and the United Nations does not officially recognize it as a nation.
Also failing to receive a passing score this week was one of three bidders for the hotly contested gTLD .eco.
Planet Dot Eco failed on both its financial and technical questions, one of the first two applicants to suffer this double whammy. The other was Metaregistrar, which has just found out its app for .frl has failed on both counts.
The clothing retailer Express, noted for its failed Legal Rights Objection against Donuts, also failed its technical evaluation.
Express had a Verisign back-end, while Planet Dot Eco is using ARI Registry Services. Metaregistrar did not specify a third-party back-end provider in its application.
.olayan became the third application from the Saudi conglomerate Olayan Investments to fail because it did not provide its financial statements as required by the Applicant Guidebook.
.place, an application by 1589757 Alberta Ltd (‘DotPlace’) also failed to provide financial statements, as did the dot-brands .shaw, .alcon and .rexroth.
These applications received passing scores this week:

.mail .tech .kpn .play .weatherchannel .crown .aeg .statoil .app .cloud .honeywell .cruises .vig .netaporter .juegos .aramco .lamborghini .soccer .ping .surf .lol .gallo .parts .flowers .gree .webs .netflix .science .school .inc .rio .bbt .mutual .auspost .best .men .symantec .med .doctor .deals .insure .citadel .care .barcelona .racing .feedback .amfam .design .save .nhk .productions .forum .finish .spot .hitachi .web .dish .vistaprint .art .maison .properties .nissay .book .tiffany .haus .skin .hockey .phone .allfinanz .finance .通用电气公司 .手表 .電訊盈科 .珠宝 .ارامكو .hisamitsu .intuit .orientexpress .gecompany .team .church .panasonic .onyourside .ski

With only 141 applications left in evaluation, there’s only one week officially left on the IE timetable, though I expect ICANN will spend some time mopping up the stragglers afterwards.
There are 23 applications eligible for extended evaluation.

China pushes .pw to over 250,000 names

Directi’s .PW Registry has taken over 250,000 domain registrations in the two and a half months since it launched, largely thanks to growth in China.
According to recent DomainTools research, Chinese registrars such as DNSPod and Xin Net lead .pw sales, and .PW business head Sandeep Ramchandani told DI today that this trend is now even more noticeable.
The frankly surprising volume seems to be due largely to its low pricing and some aggressive registrar promotion. Xin Net, for example, sells .pw names for about $6 each, compared to $9 for .com.
While Chinese-script domains are available, most registrations are for Latin strings, Ramchandani said.
The 250,000 number excludes domains that have been deleted for abuse, of which there have been quite a lot.
Ramchandani said that the registry’s abuse department is staffed around the clock.
Directi is using NameSentry from Architelos to track abusive names and has made deals with the most-abused registrars to take down names at the registry level when they pop up, he said.

ICANN hires new VP from Yahoo!

Kevin Murphy, June 3, 2013, Domain Policy

ICANN has poached a Yahoo! executive to head up its outreach efforts in Asia.
Singapore-based Kuek Yu-Chuang, who held a similar role at Yahoo, has been named vice president for global stakeholder engagement for Asia. He starts August 1.
Asia is one of the regions in which ICANN is trying to establish itself a more prominent presence.
Singapore has been named as a “hub”, ostensibly of equal importance to its LA headquarters, and it was announced in April that a satellite office will also be opened in China.
Before Yahoo, Yu-Chuang had experience working for the Singapore government.

Chinese geo gTLD bidder drops out of two-way fight

The Chinese government-controlled news agency Xinhua has dropped out of the race for the new gTLD .广东 — the local name of Guangdong, China’s most populous province.
The withdrawal clears a path for the only other applicant for the string, Guangzhou Yu Wei Information Technology, to pass more quickly through the ICANN approval process.
Guangzhou Yu Wei is affiliated with Zodiac Holdings, the Cayman Islands-based portfolio applicant founded by James Seng, but it also has backing from the Guangdong provincial government.
As a formally designated Geographic string, government backing is necessary for approval.
Xinhua had not appeared especially enthusiastic about its bid. Its prioritization number of 1772 means it didn’t bother to participate in ICANN’s lottery last December.
Zodiac, on the other hand, took advantage of the IDN bias in the process and wound up with a priority of 79. It passed Initial Evaluation in early April.
The company filed a Community application, but a Community Priority Evaluation will obviously no longer be required. It intends to restrict .广东 to registrants that can prove a local presence.
Zodiac is using .cn registry CNNIC as its back-end registry provider.

Tiny Tokelau now has the biggest ccTLD in the world

The .tk domain is now the biggest ccTLD in the world, according to the latest stats from Centr.
In its just-published biannual Domainwire Stat Report, Centr says that .tk had 16.7 million registered domains in April, taking the #1 spot in the league table for the first time.
It now out-ranks Germany’s .de (15.4 million), the United Kingdom’s .uk (10.5 million), China’s .cn (7.5 million) and the Netherland’s .nl (5.2 million), despite Tokelau having a population of less than 1,500.
The reason for its success, of course, is that .tk domains are free to register. The ccTLD frequently pops up towards the top of abuse lists for that very reason.
At 54.7%, .tk wasn’t the fastest-growing ccTLD over the six months covered by Centr’s report, however. That honor belongs to .cn, which bounced back from previous declines with an 82.7% growth rate.

.pw sees strongest growth in China

The recently launched .pw domain, managed by Directi, is doing particularly well in China, according to an early analysis from DomainTools.
The survey of data from name servers supporting 63,736 .pw domains found that well over half — 38,356 — were on Chinese IP addresses.
The Chinese registrar XinNet, which promotes low-cost .pw heavily on its home page, runs the second-largest number of name servers for the ccTLD’s registrants, DomainTools said.
According to the data, Directi’s own PrivacyProtect.org service is the third-largest name server host for .pw, followed by NameCheap and Sedo.
While Directi said from the outset that it expected to see growth from less-developed regions of the world, it has also come under fire recently for a massive spam outbreak from .pw addresses.
The ccTLD already has over 100,000 domains, according to the company.

After eight months, similarity review creates only TWO new gTLD contention sets

Kevin Murphy, February 27, 2013, Domain Policy

ICANN has finally delivered its String Similarity Panel’s review of all 1,930 original new gTLD applications, finding that only four applied-for strings are confusingly similar to others.
Two new contention sets have been created:

  • .hotels (Booking.com B.V.) and .hoteis (Despegar Online SRL)
  • .unicorn (Unicorn a.s.) and .unicom (China United Network Communications Corporation Limited)

Only one applicant in each contention set will survive; the strings may go to auction.
The list is bafflingly short given that the panel’s review was originally due in October and has been delayed several times since.
ICANN last month said it was forcing the panel to address “process” issues and heavily suggested that it was trying to make sure the review process was legally defensible, leading to speculation that the list was going to be much longer than expected.
But the panel and ICANN appear to have taken a super-strict approach to finding similarity instead.
The string similarity panel was tasked with deciding whether each applied-for string “so nearly resembles another visually that it is likely to deceive or cause confusion”.
I think the four strings included in its final report pretty conclusively pass that test.
Even the controversial Sword tool – the software algorithm ICANN commissioned to compare string similarity on objective grounds — agrees, scoring them very highly.
According to Sword, .unicorn and .unicom are 94% similar and .hotels. v .hoteis have a score of 99%. For comparison, .hotel versus .hotels produces a score of 81%.
It all seems nice and logical and uncontroversial. But.
All four affected applicants are applying for single-registrant gTLDs, in which the registry owns all of the second-level domains, drastically reducing the chance of abuse.
One of the reasons ICANN doesn’t want to create too-similar TLDs is that they could be exploited by phishers and other bad guys to rip off internet users, or worse.
But with single-registrant TLDs, that’s not really as big of an issue.
It will be interesting to see the affected applicants’ response to these latest findings. Expect complaints.
The results of the review will be a huge relief to most other applicants, which have been wondering since the list of gTLD applications was released last June what the final contention sets would look like.
The high standard that appears to have been used to find similarity may set some interesting precedents.
For example, we now know that plurals are fair game: if Donuts’ application for .dentist is approved in this round, there’s nothing stopping somebody else applying for .dentists in a future application round.
Also, brands with very short acronyms have little to fear from from being found too similar to other existing acronym dot-brands. The applicants for .ged and .gea were among those to express concern about this.
But the question of confusing similarity is not yet completely settled. There’s a second phase.
Applicants and existing TLD registries now have about a week to prepare and submit formal String Confusion Objections, kicking off an arbitration process that could create more precedent for future rounds.
Unlike the just-published visual similarity review, SCOs can take issue with similar meanings and sounds too.
Losing an SCO means your application is dumped into a contention set with the winner; if you lose against an existing TLD operator, your bid is scrapped entirely.

ALAC likely to object to five .health gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, February 18, 2013, Domain Policy

ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee is planning to formally object to four applications for the .health gTLD and one for .健康, which means “.healthy” in Chinese.
Bids backed by Afilias, Donuts, Famous Four Media and Straat Investments (the investment vehicle of .CO Internet CEO Juan Diego Calle), as well as China’s StableTone, are affected.
Dev Anand Teelucksingh, chair of the ALAC’s new gTLD review group, posted the following to an ALAC mailing list this weekend:

Objection statements on community grounds will be drafted for the applications for .health given that the four tests for community objection grounds were passed. The gTLD RG will attempt to put together the objection statements to the applications for .health in time for RALO [Regional At-Large Organization] review around 22 February 2013.

The ALAC is able to file objections to new gTLD bids, using funds provided by ICANN, on only the Community or Limited Public Interest grounds.
Of the four strings before it (.health, .nyc, .patagonia and .amazon) the ALAC review group decided that only a Community objection against .health met its criteria.
These are the only confirmed ALAC objections to date.
The ALAC had received a request to object from the International Medical Informatics Association, which said:

These five proposals are seen as problematic by the global health community for the following reasons:

  • None of the applicants demonstrates that the name will be operated in the public interest.
  • None of the applicants demonstrates adequate consumer protection mechanisms.
  • All of the applicants are commercial in nature and none represent the health community.

Two governments — France and Mali — both expressed concerns about .health on similar grounds by filing Early Warnings last November.
ICANN’s deadline for filing objections is March 13.