Famous Four following .sucks playbook with premium pricing for brands?

New gTLD registry Famous Four Media has slapped general availability prices of $500 and up on domain names matching famous brands.
The company plans to shortly introduce eight “premium” pricing tiers, ranging from $200 a year to $10,000 a year.
The first to launch, on July 8, will be its “brand protection tier”, which will carry a $498 registry fee.
Famous Four told its registrars that the tier “will provide an additional deterrent to cyber-squatters for well-known brands ensuring that domain names in this tier will not be eligible for price promotions”.
The gTLDs .date, .faith and .review will be first to use the tiered pricing structure.
It’s not entirely clear what brands will be a part of the $498 tier, or how the registry has compiled its list, but registrars have been given the ability to ask for their clients’ trademarks to be included.
I asked Famous Four for clarification a few days ago but have not yet had a response.
While other registries, such as Donuts, used tiered pricing for GA domains, I’m only aware of one other that puts premium prices on brands: .sucks.
Vox Populi has a trademark-heavy list of .sucks domains it calls Market Premium — formerly Sunrise Premium — that carry a $1,999-a-year registry fee.
Unlike Vox Pop, Famous Four does not appear to be planning a subsidy that would make brand-match domains available at much cheaper prices to third parties.
Famous Four’s gTLDs have seen huge growth in the last month or two, largely because it’s been selling domains at a loss.
.science, for example, has over 300,000 registrations — making it the third-largest new gTLD — because Famous Four’s registry fee has been discounted to just $0.25 from May to July.
The same discount applies to .party (over 195,000 names in its zone) and .webcam (over 60,000).
Those three gTLDs account for exactly half of the over 22,000 spam attacks that used new gTLD domains in March and April, according to Architelos’ latest abuse report.
With names available at such cheap prices, it would not be surprising if cybersquatters are abusing these gTLDs as much as the spammers.
Will intellectual property owners believe a $498+ reg fee is a useful deterrent to cybersquatting?
Or will they look upon this move as “predatory”, as they did with .sucks?

3 Comments Tagged: .brands, .date, .faith, .party, .review, .science, .webcam, Famous Four Media, ICANN, new gTLDs, premiums, sucks, sunrise, tiered pricing, vox populi

Donuts makes private deal with wine-makers

Donuts inked a private side-deal with wine-making regions in order to launch the .wine and .vin new gTLDs
The company signed both Registry Agreements with ICANN late last week, after the wine regions and the European Union stopped complaining.
The EU and regions had filed Cooperative Engagement Process objections with ICANN, saying that Donuts should be forced to protect “geographic indicators” such as Napa Valley and Champagne.
CEPs are often precursors to Independent Review Process complaints, but both were dropped after Donuts came to a private deal.
“The CEP filed by the Wine Regions was withdrawn because we came to a satisfactory private arrangement with the Registry concerned, Donuts,” David Taylor of Hogan Lovells, who represented the wine-making regions, told DI.
Details of the deal have not been disclosed, but Donuts does not appear to have committed to anything that could create compliance problems with ICANN in future.
“It has been a successful negotiation between private parties that avoids policy precedents,” Taylor said. “There are no special changes to these registry agreements (e.g., no new PICs)”
PICs are Public Interest Commitments, enforceable addenda to Registry Agreements that oblige the registry to adhere to extra rules.
So are GIs protected in .wine or not? For now, Taylor won’t say.
“My view is that this is not a victory for either side of the GI debate,” he said. “This is a victory for the wine community (consumers and producers) and ultimately the new gTLD program.”

Comment Tagged: .vin, donuts, geographic indicators, ICANN, new gTLDs, wine

New DNA social media site highlights “in the wild” domains

The Domain Name Association has launched a new web site to show off domains, primarily new gTLD names, that have been spotted “in the wild”.
InTheWild.domains points to a Tumblr blog where members and others can share, for example, photos of billboards or promotional videos that prominently feature new domains.
“Tumblr offers the DNA a very efficient and flexible platform that will help the DNA social media team and you find and post more domains, rather on non-productive management tasks,” the DNA told members.
The site currently has a few dozen posts, such as a WePark.nyc billboard and a VSquared.rocks red carpet video.
Most listed domains are in 2012-round new gTLDs, but there’s a .info, a .us and a .co in there too. I don’t see any .com names.
The submission process appears to be open to everyone, but submissions are moderated by the DNA’s social media people.

3 Comments Tagged: dna, domain name association, inthewild.rocks, new gTLDs

Grogan hopeful of content policing clarity within “a few weeks”

ICANN may be able to provide registrars, intellectual property interests and others with clarity about when domain names should be suspended as early as next month, according to compliance chief Allen Grogan.
With ICANN 53 kicking off in Buenos Aires this weekend, Grogan said he intends to meet with a diverse set of constituents in order to figure out what the Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires registrars to do when they receive abuse complaints.
“I’m hopeful we can publish something in the next few weeks,” he told DI. “It depends to some extent on what direction the discussions take.”
The discussions center on whether registrars are doing enough to take down domains that are being used, for example, to host pirated content or to sell medicines across borders.
Specifically at issue is section 3.18 of the 2013 RAA.
It requires registrars to take “reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately” when they receive abuse reports.
The people who are noisiest about filing such reports — IP owners and pharmacy watchdogs such as LegitScript — reckon “appropriate action” means the domain in question should be suspended.
The US Congress heard these arguments in hearings last month, but there were no witnesses from the ICANN or registrar side to respond.
Registrars don’t think they should be put in the position of having to turn off what may be a perfectly legitimate web site due to a unilateral complaint that may be flawed or frivolous.
ICANN seems to be erring strongly towards the registrars’ view.
“Whatever the terms of the 2013 RAA mean, it can’t really be interpreted as a broad global commitment for ICANN to enforce all illegal activity or all laws on the internet,” Grogan told DI.
“I don’t think ICANN is capable of that, I don’t think we have the expertise or resources to do that, and I don’t think the ICANN multistakeholder community has ever had that discussion and delegated that authority to ICANN,” he said.
CEO Fadi Chehade recently told the Washington Post that it isn’t ICANN’s job to police web content, and Grogan has expanded on that view in a blog post last week.
Grogan notes that what kind of content violates the law varies wildly from country to country — some states will kill you for blasphemy, in some you can get jail time for denying the Holocaust, in others political dissent is a crime.
“Virtually everybody I’ve spoken with has said that is far outside the scope of ICANN’s remit,” he said.
However, he’s leaving some areas open for discussion,
“There are some constituents, including some participants in the [Congressional] hearing — from the intellectual property community and LegitScript — who think there’s a way to distinguish some kinds of illegal activities from others,” he said. “That’s a discussion I’m willing to have.”
The dividing line could be substantial risk to public health or activities that are broadly, globally deemed to be illegal. Child abuse material is the obvious one, but copyright infringement — where Grogan said treaties show “near unanimity” — could be too.
So is ICANN saying it’s not the content police except when it comes to pharmacies and intellectual property?
“No,” said Grogan. “I’m saying I’m willing to engage in that dialogue and have that conversation with the community to see if there’s consensus that some activities are different to others.”
“In a multistakeholder model I don’t think any one constituency should control,” he said.
In practical terms, this all boils down to 3.18 of the RAA, and what steps registrars must take to comply with it.
It’s a surprisingly tricky one even if, like Grogan, you’re talking about “minimum criteria” for compliance.
Should registrars, for example, be required to always check out the content of domains that are the subject of abuse reports? It seems like a no-brainer.
But Grogan points out that even though there could be broad consensus that child abuse material should be taken down immediately upon discovery, in many places it could be illegal for a registrar employee to even check the reported URL, lest they download unwanted child porn.
Similarly, it might seem obvious that abuse reports should be referred to the domain’s registrant for a response. But what of registrars owned by domain investors, where registrar and registrant are one and the same?
These and other topics will come up for discussion in various sessions next week, and Grogan said he’s hopeful that decisions can be made that do not need to involve formal policy development processes or ICANN board action.

4 Comments Tagged: copyright, fake pharma, ICANN, icann 53, legitscript, piracy, raa, takedown

Barclays probably not breaching contract, says ICANN compliance chief

Barclays doesn’t seem to have violated its new gTLD registry agreements, despite admitting to criminal charges related to currency manipulation, according to ICANN’s top compliance executive.
Allen Grogan, chief contract compliance officer, told DI today that a “literal” reading of the Registry Agreements for .barclays and .barclaycard would not see the bank in breach.
“As far as I know we haven’t received a formal compliance complaint about it. If we received a complaint we would investigate it,” Grogan said.
“At first blush I wouldn’t see a clear-cut violation of the literal language of the agreement,” he said.
Barclays’ suitability to be a new gTLD registry has come under the spotlight in CircleID blog posts recently, first by domainer George Kirikos and then Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin.
All RAs contain a provision that allows ICANN to terminate the contract if any officer or director of the registry is convicted of a financially-related misdemeanor or any felony.
Barclays was one of five banks that recently fessed up to felony currency market fixing charges in the US, paying a combined $2.5 billion fine.
However, as Kirikos, Corwin and now Grogan have pointed out, the RA only talks about crimes committed by officers and directors, not the companies themselves.
Grogran pointed out that to hold a corporation accountable for its crimes long after the fact might be a bit excessive.
Criminal employees and directors can be fired, but a company cannot fire itself.
“Does that means for the next hundred years ICANN or no other corporation should do business with them?” he said.

7 Comments Tagged: .barclaycard, barclays, compliance, ICANN

.so leaves GMO for local provider, hikes prices

The Somalian government has switched registry provider for its .so ccTLD from GMO Registry to soNIC, apparently a local provider.
The IANA records for .so were updated yesterday to indicate that Mogadishu-based soNIC is now the technical contact.
According to the current GMO-managed registry web site, new registrations were halted June 9 and will reopen at some point after July 8, when soNIC takes over.
In the meantime, renewal prices have been cranked up.
The .so domain opened up worldwide in late 2010, having been delegated the previous year.
The new registry tried to ride the wave created by .co’s launch a few months earlier, with middling results.
soNIC will evidently “ramp up abusive use monitoring and enforcement of acceptable use policies”. I wonder if that involves anti-piracy measures (sorry).
At the time the ccTLD launched, I noted that Somalia was pretty much the worst place in the world to live.
But, just as the new registry plans to clean up its namespace, the nation itself has started to clean up its act somewhat in the meantime. It’s now only number two on the Failed State Index.

Comment Tagged: .so, cctlds, gmo registry, somalia, sonic

ICANN ponders rejecting all closed generics

ICANN is thinking about rejecting all the remaining “closed generic” new gTLD applications from the current round.
According to minutes of a June 5 New gTLD Program Committee meeting published last night, ICANN is considering two options.
First, it could “prohibit exclusive generic TLDs in this round of the New gTLD Program and consult with the GNSO about developing consensus policy for future rounds”.
Or, it could initiate a “community process… to develop criteria to be used to evaluate whether an exclusive generic applicant’s proposed exclusive registry access serves a public interest goal.”
The NGPC has not yet reached a decision.
The rejection option would be fastest and easiest, but risks the wrath of companies that applied for closed generics — which were always envisaged when the new gTLD rules were being developed — in good faith.
Alternatively, developing a process to measure the applications against the “public interest” would be very time-consuming, possibly not even feasible, and would add even more delay to competing applicants.
This is one of the longest-delayed responses to the Governmental Advisory Committee’s April 2013 Beijing communique, which said “exclusive registry access should serve a public interest goal.”.
Closed generics, which ICANN now calls “exclusive access” gTLDs, are dictionary words that the applicant proposes to keep for itself, allowing no third parties to register names.
There are currently only six new gTLD applications that are stubbornly sticking to their original closed generic position.
Applicants for another 175 gTLDs have either changed their applications to allow third-party registrants or denied that they ever even planned to give themselves exclusive access.
Of the six hold-outs, three are delaying their respective contention sets while ICANN endlessly mulls the problem.
Here’s a table showing the affected strings.
[table id=33 /]
The applicants for the closed generics have each submitted responses explaining why they believe their proposals serve the public interest. They’re largely corporate legalese bibble.

5 Comments Tagged: closed generics, ICANN, new gTLDs

.berlin zone drops off a cliff

The number of domains in the .berlin zone file appears to have stabilized after falling off a cliff late last week.
The new gTLD, which was an early leader in the space, peaked at 151,295 names on June 10.
It was down by 68,841 to 82,481 domains on June 12 and has been relatively flat, down by just a dozen or so domains per day, ever since.
A possible explanation for the decrease is the expiration of domains that were given away for free a year ago, but the dates don’t quite tally.
On June 16 2014, the zone file rocketed by over 67,000 names, most of which were registered via InternetX.
The promotion was yanked just a few days later, with the dotBerlin registry citing unexpectedly high demand.
One of dotBerlin’s registration policies requires .berlin names to be “put to use” within 12 months of registration, in such a way that demonstrates the nexus with the Berlin community.
Given that most of the free domains were registered by a handful of speculators, it seems unlikely that there’s been a whole lot of development of those names.

Comment Tagged: .berlin, dotberlin, new gTLDs

ICM claws back 68 .porn names it accidentally released

ICM Registry has recovered nine .porn and .adult domain names from their registrants after they were accidentally released into the market.
Domains such as ads.porn, hosting.adult and buy.porn were among those snapped up by registrants, despite the fact that they were supposed to be registry-reserved.
ICM CEO Stuart Lawley told DI that a list of 68 .porn/.adult names (34 strings in each of the two gTLDs) have been brought back into the registry’s portfolio.
Only nine had been registered in the less than 24 hours the names were in the available pool, he said.
Lawley said it was his own personal fault for not sending the reserved list to back-end provider Afilias.
The affected registrants have been offered a domain from ICM’s premium list up to the value of $2,500 for each of the names ICM took back, he said.
Only one registrant has so far declined the offer, Lawley said.
Konstantinos Zournas of OnlineDomain, who broke the news about ads.porn yesterday, identifies this former registrant as “James” and reported that he is taking legal advice.
This is not the first time that a registry has accidentally released reserved names into the pool, where they were subsequently snapped up by domainers.
In January, .CLUB Domains accidentally sold credit.club, a name it had planned to keep on its premium reserved list for $200,000, for $10.99.
In that case, .CLUB honored the purchase after the buyer agreed to develop the site, scoring many brownie points in the domain investor community.
Both .CLUB and ICM have terms in their agreements allowing domains accidentally released to be recovered.
In ICM’s case, the names it accidentally released were not premiums, but rather domains that the registry plans to use as part of its own business — not to be sold at any price.
It used buy.xxx as a cornerstone of its .xxx marketing, for example, and it plans to use buy.porn and buy.adult for the exact same purpose.

4 Comments Tagged: .adult, icm registry, new gTLDs, porn, premium, reserved, xxx

US Congresspeople tell ICANN to ignore GAC “interference”

A bispartisan group of US Congresspeople have called on ICANN to stop bowing to Governmental Advisory Committee meddling.
Showing characteristic chutzpah, the governmental body advises ICANN that advice from governments should be viewed less deferentially in future, lest the GAC gain too much power.
The members wrote (pdf):

Recent reports indicate that the GAC has sought to increase its power at the expense of the multistakeholder system. Although government engagement in Internet governance is prudent, we are concerned that allowing government interference threatens to undermine the multistakeholder system, increasing the risk of government capture of the ICANN Board.

The letter was signed by 11 members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, which is one of the House committees that most frequently hauls ICANN to Capitol Hill to explain itself.
Most of the signatories are from the Republican majority, but some are Democrats.
It’s not entirely clear where they draw the line between “engagement” and “interference”.
The letter highlights two specific pieces of GAC input that the signatories seem to believe constitute interference.
First, the GAC’s objection to Amazon’s application for .amazon. The letter says this objection came “without legal basis” and that ICANN “succumbed to political pressure” when it rejected the application.
In reality, the GAC’s advice was consensus advice as envisaged by the Application Guidebook rules. It was the US government that succumbed to political pressure, when it decided to keep its mouth shut and allow the rest of the GAC to reach consensus.
The one thing the GAC did wrong was filing its .amazon objection outside of the window envisaged by the Guidebook, but that’s true of almost every piece of advice it’s given about new gTLD applications.
Second, the Congresspeople are worried that the GAC has seized for its members the right to ban the two-letter code representing their country from any new gTLD of their choosing.
I’ve gone into some depth into how stupid and hypocritical this is before.
The letter says that it has “negative implications for speech and the world economy”, which probably has a grain of truth in it.
But does it cross the line from “engagement” to “interference”?
The Applicant Guidebook explicitly “initially reserved” all two-letter strings at the second level in all new gTLDs.
It goes on to say that they “may be released to the extent that Registry Operator reaches agreement with the government and country-code manager.”
While the rule is pointless and the current implementation convoluted, it comes as a result of the GAC engaging before the new gTLD program kicked off. It was something that all registries were aware of when they applied for their gTLDs.
However, the GAC’s more recent behavior on the two-letter domain subject has been incoherent and looks much more like meddling.
At the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles last October, faced with requests for two-character domains to be released, the GAC issued formal advice saying it was “not in a position to offer consensus advice on the use of two-character second level domain names”.
ICANN’s board of directors accordingly passed a resolution calling for a release mechanism to be developed by ICANN staff.
But by the time February ICANN meeting rolled around, it had emerged that registries’ release requests had been put on hold by ICANN due to letters from the GAC.
The GAC then used its Singapore communique to advise ICANN to “amend the current process… so that relevant governments can be alerted as requests are initiated.” It added that “Comments from relevant governments should be fully considered.”
ICANN interpreted “fully considered” to mean an effective veto, which has led to domains such as it.pizza and fr.domains being banned.
So it does look like thirteenth-hour interference but that’s largely because the GAC is often incapable of making its mind up, rarely talks in specifics, and doesn’t meet frequently enough to work within timelines set by the rest of the community.
However, while there’s undoubtedly harm from registries being messed around by the GAC recently, governments don’t seem to have given themselves any powers that they did not already have in the Applicant Guidebook.

Comment Tagged: amazon, congress, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, two-character, two-letter