ICANN says “no impact” from TMCH downtime

The 10-hour outage in the Trademark Clearinghouse’s key database had no impact on domain registrations, ICANN says.
We reported earlier this week that the TMCH’s Trademark Database had been offline for much of last Friday, for reasons unknown.
We’d heard concerns from some users that the downtime may have allowed registrants to register domain names matching trademarks without triggering Trademark Claims notices.
But that worry may have been unfounded. ICANN told DI:

The issue occurred when two nodes spontaneously restarted. The cause of this restart is still under investigation. Although both nodes came back up, several services such as the network interface, TSA Service IP and the SSH daemon did not. All TMDB Services except the CNIS service were unavailable during the outage. From a domain registration point of view there should have been no impact.

CNIS is the Claim Notice Information Service, which provides registrars with Trademark Claims notice data.

1 Comment Tagged: ibm, ICANN, new gTLDs, tmch, tmdb, trademark claims

Chehade quits as ICANN CEO

ICANN president and CEO Fadi Chehade will step down from the post March 2016, he said in the last hour.
The shock news means he will have served just three and a half years in the top job by the time he leaves. He started September 14, 2012.
It sounds like he might already has a new job lined up. (UPDATE: He’s told AFP that he does, and the identity of his employer will be disclosed later this year.)
He’s told ICANN he intends “to move into a new career in the private sector (outside the Domain Name Industry)”, according to a press release.
Chehade will probably leave just about the same time as the transition of the IANA functions from US government oversight is finalized, assuming ICANN misses the target date of September 2015 and gets a six-month extension.
Here’s the full text of the press release:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that President and CEO Fadi Chehadé has informed the Board he will be concluding his tenure in March 2016 to move into a new career in the private sector (outside the Domain Name Industry).
At the request of the Board, Chehadé will be available to work closely with ICANN after March 2016 to support the transition to a new leader, as well as to advise the Board on any issue they require including the implementation of the IANA Stewardship Transition from the US Government to ICANN and the technical operating community.
“I want to thank Fadi for his strong commitment,” said Dr. Stephen Crocker, Chair of the Board of Directors. I am very confident that with Fadi’s continued leadership and ICANN’s very experienced management team who have the breadth to ensure that ICANN continues to manage its key responsibilities effectively, that the organization’s work will proceed smoothly.”
“I am deeply committed to working with the Board, our staff, and our community to continue ICANN’s mission as we still have much to accomplish,” said Chehadé. “During the remaining 10 months of my tenure, it’s business-as-usual. My priority remains to continue strengthening ICANN’s operations and services to the global community.”

Personally, I think this is going to be horrible for continuity at ICANN. Chehade is a vision guy who had set out long-term goals for the organization that I don’t think he’ll be able to wrap up in his remaining 10 months.
What do you think?

13 Comments Tagged: ICANN

Concern over mystery TMCH outage

The Trademark Clearinghouse is investigating the causes and impact of an outage that is believed to have hit its primary database for 10 hours last Friday.
Some in the intellectual property community are concerned that the downtime may have allowed people to register domain names without receiving Trademark Claims notices.
The downtime was confirmed as unscheduled by the TMCH on a mailing list, but requests for more information sent its way today were deflected to ICANN.
An ICANN spokesperson said that the outage is being analyzed right now, which will take a couple of days.
The problem affected the IBM-administered Trademark Database, which registrars query to determine whether they need to serve up a Claims notice when a customer tries to register a domain that matches a trademark.
I gather that registries are supposed to reject registration attempts if they cannot get a definitive answer from the TMDB, but some are concerned that that may not have been the case during the downtime.
Over 145,000 Claims notices have been sent to trademark owners since the TMCH came online over a year ago.
(UPDATE: This story was edited May 21 to clarify that it is the TMCH conducting the investigation, rather than ICANN.)

Comment Tagged: ibm, ICANN, new gTLDs, tmch, tmdb, trademark claims, trademark clearinghouse

Wildly popular Facebook scam attack hits .ninja

Rightside’s .ninja appears to be the victim of a broad, highly effective affiliate marketing scam that targets Indians and exploits Facebook’s trademark.
Today, 11 of the top 12 most-visited .ninja domains are linked to the same attack. Each has an Alexa ranking of under 15,000. They’re all in the top 40 new gTLD domain names by traffic, according to Alexa.
The domains are com-news.ninja, com-finance-news.ninja, com-important-finance-update.ninja, com-important-finance-news.ninja, com-important-update.ninja, com-important-news.ninja, com-important-news-update.ninja, com-finance-now.ninja, com-finance.ninja, com-news-now.ninja and com-personal-finance.ninja.
The domains do not directly infringe any trademarks and appear innocuous enough when visited — they merely redirect to the genuine facebook.com.
However, adding “facebook” at the third level leads users to pages such as this one, which contains a “work at home” scam.

Indian visitors are told that that Facebook will pay them the rupee equivalent of about $250 per day just for posting links to Facebook, under some kind of deal between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s all nonsense of course. The page is filled with faked social media quotes and borrowed stock photos.
Not only that, but it uses Facebook’s logo and look-and-feel to make it appear, vaguely, like it’s a genuine Facebook site.
The links in the page all lead to an affiliate marketing campaign that appears, right now, to be misconfigured.
Infringing trademarks at the third level in order to spoof brands is not a new tactic — it’s commonly used in phishing attacks — but this is the first time I’ve seen it deployed so successfully in the new gTLD space.
It would be tricky, maybe impossible, for Facebook to seize the domains using UDRP or have them suspended using URS, given that the second-level domains are clean.
But it seems very probable that the domains are in violation of more than one element of Rightside’s anti-abuse policy, which among other things forbids trademark infringement and impersonation.

Comment Tagged: .ninja, affiliate marketing, facebook, rightside, scams

Eurovision deploys dot-brand for ludicrous song contest

It isn’t making a song and dance about it, but the European Broadcasting Union is promoting is annual Eurovision Song Contest using its new dot-brand gTLD, .eurovision.
The default registry domain, nic.eurovision, is mirroring its regular web site — found at eurovision.tv — ahead on Friday night’s televised show.
It’s the only domain in the .eurovision zone so far; the EBU does not seem to be properly promoting the dot-brand yet.
That’s a pity for the domain industry, as Eurovision has a TV viewership measured in the hundreds of millions.
For those outside of the EBU’s 40 participating countries… Eurovision is an annual song competition contested by singers from mostly European nations, viewed in the UK largely as an excuse to have a bit of a mildly derisive giggle at our beloved neighbors’ taste in music, dress, culture, language, and so on.
Last year it was won by an Austrian drag queen with a beard. It’s like that, you understand.

The 60th annual televised Eurovision final takes place on Friday Saturday night.

9 Comments Tagged: .eurovision, ebu

Obama, Apple, cancer and Taylor Swift’s cat top lists of most searched-for .sucks domains

You’ve got to hand it to .sucks registry Vox Populi.
The pricing may be “exploitative” and “predatory”, as the intellectual property community believes, but damn if the the company doesn’t know how to generate headlines.
Vox Pop has just added a new ticker stream to its web site, fingering the 50 most sucky celebrities, politicians, companies, social ills and abstract concepts.
The lists have been compiled from “more than a million” searches for .sucks domains that Vox Pop has seen pass through its system, according to CEO and veteran PR man John Berard.
For some reason, TayloySwiftsCat.sucks is the most searched-for in the “Personalities” category.
I’m guessing this relates to a meme that has yet to reach my isolated, middle-aged, non-country-music-loving corner of the world.
Whatever the cat did to earn this ire, it’s presumably equivalent to what Barack Obama, Apple, cancer and just life generally has done to searchers on the .sucks web site.
Here are the lists of most-searched-for terms, as it stands on the .sucks web site right now.
Top Personalities:

• 1. TaylorSwiftsCat
• 2. JustinBeiber
• 3. KevinSpacey
• 4. Oprah
• 5. KimKardashian
• 6. KayneWest
• 7. GuyFieri
• 8. TomBrady
• 9. DonaldTrump
• 10. OneDirection

Catch Phrases:

• 1. Life
• 2. YourMomma
• 3. This
• 4. Everyone
• 5. MyJob
• 6. MyLife
• 7. Reality
• 8. YouKnowWhat
• 9. Who
• 10. College

Causes:

• 1. Cancer
• 2. Technology
• 3. Obesity
• 4. Racism
• 5. Depression
• 6. Meat
• 7. AIDS
• 8. Hate
• 9. Poverty
• 10. Government

Companies:

• 1. Apple
• 2. Google
• 3. Microsoft
• 4. Facebook
• 5. Comcast
• 6. Walmart
• 7. CocaCola
• 8. McDonalds
• 9. Sony
• 10. Amazon

Politicians:

• 1. Obama
• 2. Hillary
• 3. TedCruz
• 4. RandPaul
• 5. StephenHarper
• 6. Putin
• 7. JebBush
• 8. TonyAbbott
• 9. DavidCameron
• 10. Democrats

Make no mistake, this is a headline-generating exercise by Vox Pop.
It comes as .sucks hits 10 days left on the clock for its $1,999+-a-pop sunrise period.
The company got a shed-load of mainstream media publicity when celebrities, starting with Kevin Spacey, started registering their names in .sucks several weeks ago.
It’s looking to get more headlines now, from lazy journalists and bloggers.
This is one of the first, for which I can only apologize.

1 Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, ICANN, new gTLDs, sucks, sunrise, taylor swift, trademarks, vox populi

Epic new gTLD fail? Gambling site named after new gTLD but doesn’t use it

Online gambling company bwin.party owns the domain name bwin.party but, bafflingly, hasn’t even turned it on.
The company runs PartyPoker and other betting sites and is in the business news today due to a takeover bid from rival 888.
Having just heard the story reported on the TV, I went to check out its web site — this was a significant company which had apparently rebranded to a new gTLD, and I hadn’t heard of it before.
But the domain name bwin.party doesn’t resolve, even though it’s an exact — exact, down to the lower case letters and the dot — match of the company name.
bwin.party actually uses bwinparty.com and bwin.com.
The domain is registered via Com Laude, so I assume it’s a defensive play.
.party is a new gTLD managed by Famous Four Media. It currently has over 134,000 names it its zone, growing by thousands of names per day, strongly suggesting it’s being sold for next to nothing at one or more registrars.

1 Comment Tagged: .party, bwin.party, famous four

XYZ and Uniregistry acquire .car from Google, launch joint venture

XYZ.com and Uniregistry have launched a joint venture to operate a trio of car-related new gTLDs, after acquiring .car from Google.
Cars Registry Ltd is a new company. It will launch .cars, .car and .auto later this year.
Uniregistry won .cars and .auto at auction last year. Google was the only applicant for .car.
It signed its ICANN contract in January but transferred it to Cars Registry a little under a month ago.
The newly formed venture plans to launch all three TLDs simultaneously in the fourth quarter this year.
.car is currently in pre-delegation testing. The other two are already in the root.
Cars Registry does not have the the car-related domain space completely sewn up, however.
Dominion Enterprises runs .autos, albeit with a plan to launch the TLD with restrictions that may well mean it does not directly compete with the other three TLDs.
Launch details for .cars, .car and .auto have not yet been released.
Judging by the gTLDs’ web site, they will run on the Uniregistry back-end.

2 Comments Tagged: .auto, .autos, .car, .cars, .xyz, cars registry, new gTLDs, uniregistry, xyz.com

Barclays confirms move away from .com to new gTLD

Barclays has become one of the first major companies to explicitly confirm it will dump traditional gTLDs and ccTLDs in favor of its new dot-brands.
The $25 billion-a-year bank said it will “transfer its online assets to proprietary domain names — .barclays and .barclaycard — away from the traditional location-specific .com and .co.uk web addresses.”
The transition is a “long-term” play, but it’s started already, with “non-transactional” parts of its web site already using the two new gTLDs.
Basically, we’ve entered the brochureware phase of the dot-brand evolution.
home.barclays already mirrors barclays.com — both are simultaneously live right now — but the online banking service remains at barclays.co.uk.
In a May 11 press release that seems to have slipped under everyone’s radar last week, Barclays chief security officer Troels Oerting, until a few months ago cyber-crime chief at Europol, said:

The launch of the .barclays and .barclaycard domain names creates a simplified online user experience, making it crystal clear to our customers that they are engaging with a genuine Barclays site.
This clarity, along with the advantages of controlling our own online environment, enables us to provide an even more secure service, which we know is of utmost importance to our customers, and ultimately serves to increase trust and confidence in Barclays’ online entities.

This is precisely what advocates of dot-brands pitched as the benefits of the new gTLD program.
While many applicants stated similar plans in their gTLD applications, I think there’s been a degree of skepticism about whether they would follow through.
Barclays’ moves are happening faster than I expected — the .barclays gTLD was delegated in January — showing a degree of enthusiasm.
The charitable Australian Cancer Research Foundation in February launched sites under its .cancerresearch (not technically a dot-brand), while Hong Kong conglomerate CITIC Group has already experimented with a shift from .com to .citic.
In related news, the non-branded .bank gTLD opened for its sunrise period today.

2 Comments Tagged: .barclaycard, barclays, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs

URS coming to .travel under big contract changes

The .travel gTLD, which was approved 10 years ago, will have to support the Uniform Rapid Suspension service, one of several significant changes proposed for its ICANN contract.
I believe it’s the first legacy gTLD to agree to use URS, which gives trademark owners a way to remove domain names that infringe their marks that is quicker and cheaper than UDRP.
Tralliance, the registry, saw its .travel Registry Agreement expire earlier this month. It’s been extended and the proposed new version, based on the New gTLD Registry Agreement, is now open for public comment.
While the adoption of URS may not have much of a direct impact — .travel is a restricted TLD with fewer than 20,000 names under management — it sets an interesting precedent.
IP interests have a keen interest in having URS cover more than just 2012-round gTLDs. They want it to cover .com, .org, .net and the rest too.
Domain investors, meanwhile, are usually cautious about any changes that tilt the balance of power in favor of big brands.
When .biz, .org and .info came up for renewal in 2013, the Intellectual Property Constituency filed comments asking for URS to be implemented in the new contracts, but the request was not heard.
I’m aware of two ccTLDs — .pw and .us — that voluntarily adopted URS in their zones.
Other changes include a requirement for all .travel registrars, with the exception of those already selling .travel domains, to be signatories of the stricter 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
That’s something Afilias and Neustar only agreed to put in their .info and .biz contracts if Verisign agrees to the same provisions for .com and .net.
The fees Tralliance pays ICANN have also changed.
It currently pays $10,000 in fixed fees every year and $2 per billable transaction. I estimate this works out at something like $40,000 to $50,000 a year.
The proposed new contract has the same fees as 2012-round new gTLDs — a $25,000 fixed fee and $0.25 per transaction. The transaction fee only kicks in after 50,000 names, however, and that’s volume .travel hasn’t seen in over five years.
Tralliance will probably save itself thousands under the new deal.
The contract public comment forum can be found here.

4 Comments Tagged: .travel, ICANN, renewal, tralliance, uniform rapid suspension, urs