Pinyin to beat IDN? .wang ready to overtake .在线

The .wang gTLD has seen great success, relatively, in its first week of general availability, crossing the 30,000 mark yesterday and entering the top 10 new gTLDs by registration volume.
At its current rate of growth, the Zodiac Holdings domain is going to overtake .在线, the highest-ranking Chinese gTLD so far, this week.
.wang went to GA June 30. After its initial spike, it’s added one to two thousand names per day and, with 31,011 names today, currently sits at 9th place in the new gTLD program’s league table.
That’s a whisker behind TLD Registry’s .在线 (“.online”), which had a strong start when it launched at the end of April but has since plateaued at around 33,000 names, adding just a handful each day.
A skim through the zone files reveals that the vast majority of the names in .wang appear to be, like .wang itself, Pinyin — the official Latin-script transliterations of Chinese-script words.
.wang, which would be “网” in Chinese script, means “net”.
To pluck a couple of names from the zone at random, I see tanpan.wang, which could mean something like “negotiation.net” and xingshi.wang, which may or may not mean “shape.net”.
I suspect that many of the registered domains are personal names rather than dictionary words. Wang is a popular surname in China.
The vast majority of the names also appear to be registered via China-based registrars, some of which are promoting the TLD strongly on their home pages.
There certainly appears to be a lot of domainer activity in .wang, but I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest a massive orchestrated effort that would throw out the numbers considerably.
Either way, I find it fascinating that a Latin transliteration of a Chinese word seems set to out-perform the actual Chinese IDNs currently on the market.

GAC rejects multistakeholderism, tells ICANN to ignore the GNSO

The Governmental Advisory Committee has advised ICANN to do as it’s told and stop listening to the views of other stakeholders, on the issue of protection mechanisms for the Red Cross.
In a barely believable piece of formal advice to the ICANN board this morning, part of its London communique (pdf), the GAC said:

the protections due to the Red Cross and Red Crescent terms and names should not be subjected to, or conditioned upon, a policy development process

That’s the GAC telling the ICANN board to do what the GAC says without involving the rest of the ICANN community, specifically the multi-stakeholder Generic Names Supporting Organization.
Some in the GNSO have already informally expressed their anger about this. More, and more formal, responses are expected to follow.
It’s a baffling GAC move given that most governments have spent much of the ICANN 50 meeting this week professing how much they support the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance.
Now the GAC is explicitly telling ICANN to ignore anyone that isn’t the GAC, on this particular issue.
That’s unprecedented, though many would say that GAC statements often sound like the existence of other advisory committees and supporting organizations is little more than an annoyance to members.
During a meeting between the ICANN board and the GAC on Tuesday, UK GAC member Mark Carvell expressed some of that frustration, saying ICANN’s approach to the issue has been “completely unacceptable”.
Carvell said:

we’re talking about names that are protected under international law and implemented in national legislation
So, for example, if you go down Pride Street around the corner, you won’t find Red Cross Burgers. You won’t find Patisserie Croix Rouge in Paris anywhere, or in London, indeed, because it’s against the law to use those names.
So the response that we’ve had from the Board is equating these names to trademarks by referring to the GNSO response, saying that this is a matter for incorporation of policy development that would use the trademark clearinghouse.
So I just wanted to make the point here that this is completely unacceptable to us. We’re in a position as governments and administrations in implementing national law. So our advice continues to be that these names need to be protected and not subject to some policy development process that equates these names to trademarks
and brands.

That point of view seems to have translated directly into the GAC’s communique today.
The GAC statement is doubly baffling because the Red Cross and Red Crescent already enjoy protections in the new gTLD program, and the GNSO has voted to make these protections permanent.
The GAC has been pushing for protections for the Red Cross for years.
It’s a noble effort in principle, designed to help thwart fraudsters who would use the Red Cross brand to bilk money out of well-meaning internet users in the wake of human tragedies such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
The ICANN board of directors first agreed to adopt such protections in 2011, when it approved the new gTLD program.
Red Cross protections were added to the program rules then on a temporary basis, pending a formal GNSO policy on the matter.
The GNSO took a while to get there, but it formally passed a resolution in November last year that would protect a list of Red Cross organizations at both the top and second levels in the new gTLD program.
So what’s the GAC’s problem?
ICANN director Chris Disspain asked Carvell during the Tuesday GAC-board session. Carvell responded:

I’m talking about our advice with regard to protection of national entities at the second level. So, for example, British Red Cross dot whatever. That protection does not exist, and is not agreed as we understand it.

The original list of Red Cross/Red Crescent strings for which the GAC demanded protection includes strings like “redcross” and “croissant-rouge”, but it does not include strings such as “americanredcross”.
There are 189 national Red Cross organizations that are not currently protected, according to the GAC.
Why are these strings not on the list?
It appears to be because the GAC didn’t ask for such protections until March this year, six months after the GNSO concluded its PDP and close to three years after the temporary protections were originally implemented.
The GAC communique from the latest Singapore meeting (pdf) contains a request for national Red Cross organizations to be protected, but I can’t find any matching GAC advice that predates March 2014.
The GAC seems to have screwed up, in other words, by not asking for all the protections it wanted three years ago.
And now it’s apparently demanding that its new, very late demands for protection get implemented by ICANN without a PDP and with no input from any other area of the ICANN community.
The GAC spent a lot of time this week talking up the multistakeholder process, but now it seems prepared to throw the concept under a bus either in the name of expediency or to cover up the fact that it seriously dropped the ball.
Nobody can deny that its heart is in the right place, but is abandoning support for multistakeholderism really the best way to go about getting what it wants, at a time when everyone is claiming governments won’t control the newly liberated ICANN?

How much are new gTLDs really costing trademark owners? We have some numbers.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last six months of new gTLDs, it’s that predictions about massive levels of defensive registrations were way off the mark.
New gTLDs are not seeing anywhere near the same numbers of sales during sunrise periods as their predecessors.
I have managed to collate some data that I think gives a pretty accurate picture of how many sunrise registrations are being made and therefore how much new gTLDs are costing trademark owners.
About 128 gTLDs have finished their sunrise periods to date, and I have the sunrise sales figures for 101 of them. All of these numbers were provided by the respective registry operator.
The biggest sunrise, per these numbers, was for .clothing, which had 675 registrations. That’s 5.97% of the 11,301 overall names in the .clothing zone file today, over three months after launch.
At the other end of the scale is شبكة. (“.shabaka” or “.web” in Arabic), which sold just five names during its sunrise, the first of the program, which was restricted to Arabic trademarks.
The total number of sunrise sales across across all 101 gTLDs is 14,567, making for an average of 144.2 domains per new gTLD sunrise.
Sunrise currently accounts for 1.87% of all names in these 101 gTLDs, but that’s an artificially high number because some of the gTLDs I have sunrise numbers for are not yet in general availability.
But compare the real numbers to .co, which sold over 11,000 names at sunrise when it launched in summer 2010, or .xxx, which took 80,000 sunrise applications in late 2011.
Trademark owners are not defensively registering with anywhere near the same fervor as they once did.
If that 144.2 average names holds true for all 128 gTLDs that have completed sunrise, we can approximate that 18,461 names have been sold during sunrise periods to date.
I should point out that I’m assuming in these calculations that all sunrise registrations are “defensive” and that brand owners are not defensively registering during general availability.
Neither of those assumptions will be fully true.
Not all sunrise sales are made to genuine brand owners, of course. Some number of generic dictionary domains have been registered by people who obtained trademarks just in order to get the matching domain.
And only a psychic could know whether a GA registration is “defensive” or not at this stage.
But let’s assume that every sunrise reg went to a genuine brand owner. How much have they had to pay for these names?
It’s difficult to calculate a precise dollar value because each registry has a different pricing scheme and sometimes the price of a name can vary even within a specific given TLD.
I looked to the prices listed at 101domain, which has pretty exhaustive coverage of new gTLDs, for a guide.
The average first-year cost for a sunrise registration in the 75 or so new gTLDs currently being sold to trademark owners at 101domain is a little shy of $165.
Assuming that’s a good guide for pricing in sunrise periods that have already closed, we can calculate that 18,461 names at $165 a pop equals $3,046,089 out of the pockets of trademark owners in the first year.
But the sunrise fees are not the only costs, of course. In order to participate in a sunrise you must first register your mark in the Trademark Clearinghouse.
There are 30,251 marks registered in the TMCH, according to the TMCH itself. At $150 a pop — the minimum you can pay for a TMCH registration — that’s $4,537,650 spent on defensive measures.
Add in the cost of the sunrise registrations and a generous $100,000 to cover the cost of the 50 Uniform Rapid Suspension cases that have been filed to date and the total cost to brand owners so far over the first 128 new gTLDs comes to $7,683,739.
Whether this is “a lot” or not probably depends on your perspective.
It’s certainly not the billions of dollars that were being predicted by some as recently as last year.
In September the Better Business Bureau and the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse speculated that 600 “open” new gTLDs could lead to $10 billion being spent on defensive registrations.
That statement was made in a press release calling for stronger cybersquatting legislation in the US.
But if 101 open gTLDs leads to $3,046,089 being spent, 600 such gTLDs should lead to a total cost of about $18 million, not including the fixed TMCH costs (which probably won’t grow very fast in future).
That’s not the same ballpark, not the same league, not even the same sport.

.club pips .berlin to #2 spot

.CLUB Domains moved into the number two spot on the new gTLD league table overnight, but its growth appears to be slowing.
In today’s zone files, .club has 47,362 domains under management, having added 734 on Sunday; .berlin stood at 47,243, having added 33 yesterday.
.guru still leads with 56,813 names.
Sunday is typically a slow day for domain registrations across the industry, but .club’s growth does appear to be slowing compared to its first few days of general availability, regardless.
It saw 1,141 net new names on Friday and 1,351 on Saturday. The previous Friday and Saturday adds were at 4,904 and 3,828.
It’s difficult to get a comprehensive picture of daily growth due to the registry missing a few days of zone files last week.

Six ways ICANN is ballsing up the IANA transition

ICANN has been subjected to its first wave of criticism over its handling to date of the IANA transition process, which will see oversight of the DNS root leave US government hands.
Yesterday was the deadline for comments to be submitted on ICANN’s proposal for a way to handle what some are calling the “sunsetting” of the Department of Commerce’s stewardship of the IANA function.
As DI previously reported, it’s “a proposal for a process to develop a process to develop a proposal”.
ICANN basically proposed a 22-member “Steering Group”, comprised of members of the various ICANN constituencies, that would guide the bottom-up, multistakeholder IANA transition discussion.
The group would ultimately steer the community towards creating a proposal for replacing the US government as IANA’s overseer, which would then be checked and rubber-stamped by Commerce.
As part of ICANN’s initial proposal, a “scoping document” was provided, laying out what in ICANN’s view should and should not be open for discussion.
Dozens of comments were received covering a diverse range of issues related to the make-up of the Steering Group and the range of the scoping document.
Here I’m going to attempt to cover half a dozen key themes that seemed to emerge across multiple commenters.
Note: 1) it’s not a comprehensive overview, 2) I don’t necessarily agree with all of the comments cited below, 3) that most of the links throughout this article are to PDFs.
Registries are apparently not “affected parties”
Given that one of IANA’s key roles (for DI’s purposes, it’s its primary role) is assigning TLDs to registries, you might have expected registries to be classed as “affected parties”.
But they’re not. Bafflingly, only the IAB, IETF, ISOC and NRO — none of which primarily concern themselves with domain names — get that definition in ICANN’s proposal.

Naturally enough, the ccTLD and gTLD operators are not happy about this state of affairs.
The ccNSO, proposing that gTLDs and ccTLDs get two seats each on the Steering Group, wrote:

These organizations, which also participate directly in ICANN’s multistakeholder process, are appropriate and important participants in this transition planning process, but they are not adequate substitutes for registry stakeholders with respect to processing root zone change requests and other functions that uniquely affect TLD registry operators… It is imperative that registry operators sit at the table on equal footing with those organizations and without ICANN intermediation.

The Registries Stakeholder Group of the GNSO concurred, stating:

we feel this list is incomplete as it does not include direct customers of the IANA functions, such as gTLD, nTLD and ccTLD registries, which is incomprehensible and appears to be self-serving of the convener

The GNSO is under-represented
If the registries feel badly treated, they’re not alone.
The Generic Names Supporting Organization comprises seven distinct stakeholder groups: registries, registrars, non-commercial users, non-profits, businesses, ISPs and intellectual property owners.
While there is overlap (registries and registrars often vote en bloc, as do businesses and IP owners), there are at least three camps that rarely fully agree with each other.
The ICANN proposal would provide two seats on the Steering Group between them.
The Intellectual Property Constituency, in its comments, said that each GNSO constituency should get one seat each.
The US Chamber of Commerce asked for at least one seat to be set aside for business interests.
A group of registrars, including most of the big ones, agreed, and put forward a rather more expansive proposal:

Several members of the Registrar Stakeholder Group believe that having two Steering Group representatives for the GNSO will not be sufficient in ensuring that the interests of all GNSO stakeholders are properly reflected. As the GNSO is the largest and most diverse structure within ICANN, we find that a “one size fits all” approach to delegation is not appropriate. Instead, we propose that each SO/AC submit a number of representatives that it believes to be sufficiently representative, but be encouraged to keep the number as small as possible.

The selection process is top-down
Given that this is supposed to be a community-driven process, you’d expect the community to be tasked with picking their representatives on the Steering Group. But that’s not what ICANN proposes.
ICANN instead reckons that membership should be selected by ICANN chair Steve Crocker and GAC chair Heather Dryden from the pool of people who volunteer themselves.
Unsurprisingly, there’s lots of opposition to this. Most groups commenting on this aspect of the proposal said that committee members should be selected by the groups they represent.
The Business Constituency stated:

Appointments to the Steering/Convening Committee should come from constituency groups — not as appointments made by ICANN chair and GAC chair. Nor should any stakeholder group be excluded as a result of consolidating within stakeholder organizations such as the GNSO.

The Center for Democracy and Technology agreed, saying:

The Chairs of ICANN and the GAC should not be the ones to select the Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee representatives; the SO/AC representatives should be selected within their own communities.

Inappropriate framing of the discussion
Many commenters took issue with the way ICANN has configured the discussion, accusing it of acting in the interests of its own self-preservation rather than the stability of the IANA function.
Chiefly, there’s concern that the discussion has been framed in such a way that it assumes ICANN will continue in its role as performer of the IANA functions in more or less the same way as today.
This concern appears to be extremely broad.
The RySG said it was “suspicious” of what appeared to be a “self-interested” framing of the debate:

we feel that it is premature for ICANN staff to assert that ICANN’s role is out of scope. This sentiment is not included in the NTIA announcement and we believe ICANN’s role is an issue that should be left to the bottom-up, multistakeholder process to decide. In particular, we believe whether “structural review of ICANN or its functions” should be included in the scope should be a matter for the community.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group agreed that this should be open for discussion:

ICANN-controlled entities both develop and approve DNS policies and also implements the IANA functions. Only a requirement of the NTIA contract guarantees separation of policy and DNS root zone implementation activities. Because of this, we cannot currently support language in ICANN’s proposed Scoping Document which explicitly rules out any discussion of separating the IANA functions from ICANN. How or whether to separate those activities in lieu of the NTIA contract should be openly discussed.

Google said in its comments:

The role of ICANN’s Board is to oversee all of ICANN’s business and operational actions and to ensure its continued solvency as an organization. As such, the Board has a vested interest in ensuring ICANN’s continued relevancy within the Internet governance ecosystem and arguably has an interest in scoping the process to preserve ICANN’s existing role. While we are confident that ICANN’s Board would not act in a way that would harm the Internet or the IANA functions transition, the presence of a conflict of interest — even if perceived — could impact the overall integrity of the process

The Business Constituency said:

this transition should not presume that the only possible outcome is to award IANA functions to ICANN. It is possible that some other third party could replace the US government role as counterparty.

Accountability is being handled in a separate track
ICANN was initially of the view that its own accountability mechanisms — things designed to prevent capture, allow appeals of decisions etc — were out of scope for the IANA transition discussion.
It’s since backtracked, this week launching a new “Enhancing ICANN Accountability” process that will run in parallel — and be “interdependent and interrelated” — to the IANA transition debate.
If these two discussions are so interdependent, why not just lump them together in the same policy track? It’s surely a recipe for mass confusion to keep them separate.
The NCSG stated in its comments:

We do not support ICANN’s efforts to discuss the IANA transition and accountability mechanisms on separate tracks. Specifically, ICANN’s draft proposal and scoping document might prevent any discussion of options for structurally separating IANA function operations from DNS policy making activities.

The ccNSO seemed resigned to the separation, but noted:

To the extent that ICANN continues to insist on maintaining separate tracks to address each of these issues, it must ensure that the two tracks come together in advance of the transition itself.

The IPC said that the discussions need to be more closely synchronized:

The resolution of these two issues is inextricably intertwined and the processes and mechanism for doing so need to be tightly coordinated; this is impossible if the processes and mechanisms are not being developed at the same time.

There’s far from consensus on this issue, however.
The BC and Google both explicitly support the continued separation of the two tracks, while the International Trademark Association implicitly supported the parallel moves, noting:

We generally would be opposed to any approval of an IANA functions transition plan unless it is accompanied by an acceptable globalization and accountability plan that assures continued ICANN accountability at optimal levels.

Everyone only had 30 days to comment
Given that we’re talking about management of the DNS root here, you’d imagine that ICANN would take it just as if not more seriously than, I dunno, its “Future Meetings Strategy” or how much its directors are paid.
But while these and most other comment periods get 45 too 60 days of public comment, the IANA transition proposal only got 30.
ICANN is evidently in a rush to get things finalized before its next public meeting, scheduled for next month in London, rather than wait until the Los Angeles meeting in October.
Some groups, such as the Governmental Advisory Committee, couldn’t get their act together in time to provide a meaningful response given the tight deadline.
Many others, such as the Registries Stakeholder Group, complained:

it is unacceptable that an issue as critical as the transition of the IANA functions would be allowed only a short public comment period

The IPC stated that the whole timetable is out of whack:

The group is supposed to convene for the first time in London in approximately 6 weeks, yet the concept of a Steering Group is not finalized, much less its composition or how it would be chosen… The Steering Group is also supposed to “finalize the group’s charter” “in the London 50 timeframe.” Charters are critical documents, and they take a number of hours over a number of weeks to be created, much less finalized. How would the group have a draft charter before London that could be finalized in London?

Herding cats
In my opinion, this may be “a proposal for a process to develop a process to develop a proposal”, but it’s also a process to demonstrate the effectiveness and inclusiveness of the process.
Given the parallel focus on internet governance in the non-ICANN world (eg NetMundial), the multistakeholder model itself is under intense scrutiny.
How ICANN responds to this first wave of comments will be crucial.
While there are certainly divergent views (not half of which I’ve covered here) among the various parties, it seems to me that some clear areas of agreement have emerged, even among groups that don’t often see eye to eye.
Will ICANN bow to a clear call for its scoping document to be relaxed — putting its own neck on the chopping block in the process — because the multistakeholder community seems to be asking for it?

ICANN split between GNSO and GAC on IGO names

ICANN’s board of directors has refused to choose between the Generic Names Supporting Organization and the Governmental Advisory Committee on the issue of intergovernmental organization protections.
In a resolution last week, the board decided to approve only the parts of the GNSO’s unanimous consensus recommendations that the GAC does not disagree with.
The GNSO said last November that IGOs should not have their acronyms blocked forever at the second level in new gTLDs, going against the GAC consensus view that the acronyms should be “permanently protected”.
The GAC wants IGOs to enjoy a permanent version of the Trademark Claims notifications mechanism, whereas the GNSO thinks they should only get the 90 days enjoyed by trademark owners.
Instead of choosing a side, ICANN passed a resolution last Wednesday requesting “additional time” to reach a decision on these points of difference and said it wants to:

facilitate discussions among the relevant parties to reconcile any remaining differences between the policy recommendations and the GAC advice

The decision is not unexpected. Board member Bruce Tonkin basically revealed the board’s intention to go this way during the Singapore meeting a couple of months ago.
The differences between the GAC and the GNSO are relatively minor now, and the board did approve a large part of the GNSO’s recommendations in its resolution.
IGOs, the Olympics, Red Cross and Red Crescent will all get permanent blocks for their full names (but not acronyms) at the top level and second level in the new gTLD program.
International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) will also get top-level blocks for their full names and protection in the style of the Trademark Claims service at the second level.
The dispute over acronyms was important because many obscure IGOs, which arguably don’t need protection from cybersquatters, have useful or potentially valuable acronyms that new gTLD registries want to keep.

Microsoft dumps .live gTLD bid

Microsoft has abandoned its application for the .live new gTLD, leaving the erstwhile dot-brand in the hands of either Donuts or Google.
I found this quite surprising initially, as “Live” has been a core, cross-platform brand for the company, covering services such as Windows Live, Xbox Live and Office Live. The company also owns live.com.
But it recent years the brand has started to be phased out.
While Xbox Live is still a thing, Windows Live was closed down in April 2013 and Office Live seems to have suffered a similar fate in 2012, after the new gTLD application phase ended.
The withdrawal means that the .live contention set now only comprises Google’s Charleston Road Registry and a Donuts subsidiary. It’s likely headed to ICANN auction.
Unlike Microsoft, both remaining applicants propose open-registration spaces.

US unhappy with ICANN, urges more delay to many new gTLDs

The US government is not pleased with ICANN’s rather liberal interpretation of Governmental Advisory Committee advice on new gTLDs and wants more talks about “safeguards”.
Not only that, but it wants to start talking to ICANN about extending safeguards applicable to new gTLDs to old gTLDs, presumably including the likes of .com, too.
A letter to ICANN from Department of Commerce assistant secretary Larry Strickling, obtained by DI today, calls for more talks before ICANN finalizes its handling of the GAC’s Beijing communique.
Strickling notes, as DI has previously, that ICANN softened the meaning of the advice in order to smooth its implementation.

as can be the case when translating GAC Advice to contractual provisions, the NGPC [the ICANN board’s New gTLD Program Committee] made adjustments to the GAC Advice that the United States believes could cause enforcement problems and as such merits further discussion. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), on behalf of the United States, is planning to raise these concerns for discussion at the March GAC meeting in Singapore and requests that ICANN take this fact into account before moving forward with applications for strings impacted by the relevant portions of GAC advice

The letter (pdf) was sent February 4, just a day before the NGPC held a meeting — the results of which we do not yet know — that had the GAC Advice on its agenda.
The New gTLD Applicants Group had urged the NGPC to finally put the GAC Advice to rest, highlighting the “heavy burden that the delay in the implementation of GAC Category 1 Advice has imposed upon affected applicants” in a letter last week.
The Category 1 advice, you may recall, comprised eight “safeguards” mandating policies such as industry engagement and registrant authentication, applicable to at least 386 gTLD applications.
Back in November, ICANN announced how it planned to handle this advice, but changed its meaning to make it more palatable to ICANN and applicants.
Those changes are what Strickling is not happy with.
He’s particularly unhappy with changes made to the GAC’s demand for many gTLDs to be restricted to only card-carrying members of the industries the strings seem to represent.
The GAC said in Beijing:

At the time of registration, the registry operator must verify and validate the registrants’ authorisations, charters, licenses and/or other related credentials for participation in that sector.

In other words, you’d have to provide your doctor license before you could register a .doctor domain.
But ICANN proposed to implement it like this:

Registry operators will include a provision in their Registry-Registrar Agreements that requires Registrars to include in their Registration Agreements a provision requiring a representation that the Registrant possesses any necessary authorisations, charters, licenses and/or other related credentials for participation in the sector associated with the Registry TLD string.

The doctor under this policy would only require the doctor to check a box confirming she’s a doctor. As Strickling said:

The NGPC has changed the GAC-coveyed concept of “verification and validation” to “representation”

Requirements for registries to mandate adherence to government regulations on the protection of financial and healthcare data are also his targets for further discussion.
What all this boils down to is that, assuming ICANN paid heed to Strickling’s letter, it seems unlikely that NTAG will get closure it so desperately wants until the Singapore meeting in late March — a year after the original Beijing communique — at the earliest.
In other words, lots of new gTLD applicants are probably going to be in limbo for a bit longer yet.
But Strickling also has another bombshell to drop in the final sentence of the letter, writing:

In addition, we will recommend that cross community discussion begin in earnest on how the safeguards that are being applied to new gTLDs can be applied to existing gTLDs.

So it seems the GAC is likely to start pressing to retroactively apply its new gTLDs advice to legacy gTLDs too.
Registrant verification in .com? Stricter Whois checks and enforcement? That conversation has now started, it seems.

TMCH sees cybersquatting in 1&1’s pre-reg requests

Would-be cybersquatters have pre-registered new gTLD domains matching many famous brands, according to the Trademark Clearinghouse.
According to a bit of TMCH PR fluff coming out tomorrow, there are pre-registrations in .web for 40 out of the 50 most-valuable British brands.
I gather that the data came from 1&1, the most aggressive registrar in its pursuit of new gTLD leads, which has reported over three million pre-regs.
In what appears to be outreach to drum up additional trademark registrations, the TMCH said:

According to the Trademark Clearinghouse’s data, unknown entities have already pre-reserved their interest in registering the domain names of 80 per cent of the UK’s 50 most valuable under the .WEB domain name. Similarly, third parties have attempted to pre-order 78 per cent of the UK’s top 50 most valuable brands under the .ONLINE domain name, 72 per cent under .APP, 70 per cent under .SHOP and 68 per cent under .BLOG.

It doesn’t seem to be a problem peculiar to new gTLDs, however. The TMCH also said that 54% of these brands have holes in their defensive registration portfolio across existing TLDs such as .biz, .net and .co.
There were roughly 23,000 marks in the TMCH database as of January 21.
UPDATE: 1&1 has asked me to clarify that the company took no part in this research. TMCH says it obtained the numbers through searches on the 1&1 web site.

Yes, there is cybersquatting in new gTLDs

With new TLDs, comes cybersquatting. It’s inevitable. And it’s also true of the new gTLDs that hit general availability this week.
The question of what is or is not cybersquatting is best left to a judge or UDRP panel, of course, but I’ve already come across plenty of newly registered domains that I do not believe would pass the UDRP test.
Sifting through select Whois records of domains that were registered in Donuts’ first seven gTLDs over the last few days, and without leaving the A’s, I’ve found the likes of: adidas.clothing, americanapparel.clothing, akamai.guru, americanexpress.guru. appleservice.guru and accenture.ventures.
Delving a little deeper into .clothing, I see the likes of kanyewest.clothing, ralphlauren.clothing, kardashiankollection.clothing, lauraashley.clothin, michaeljordan.clothing and more.
One Los Angeles clothing store appears to have registered several .clothing domains matching brands it does not own, possibly unaware that such behavior is frowned upon.
While there could be legitimate uses of the names I’ve highlighted here, possibly, they all appear to me to be registered to people unaffiliated with the referenced brands or celebrities.
I found more that are registered behind Whois privacy services, where it’s not possible to tell whether the domain belongs to the brand or not. Domains such as ibm.guru and ibm.ventures use Whois privacy, yet resolve to the IBM web site.
Cases of obvious UDRP losses seem to be few and far between, however. The vast majority of domains registered in these new gTLDs this week seem to be straightforward generic terms.
While I’m using the UDRP sniff test to highlight domains I feel may be cybersquatting, there’s a new process in town when it comes to disputes: the faster, cheaper Uniform Rapid Suspension policy.
URS has a higher burden of proof — “clear and convincing evidence” of bad faith registration and use — and it’s not yet clear how panelists will handle these cases.
There’s only been one URS case to date, that of facebok.pw, in which the domain was suspended following a complaint by Facebook.
In that case, Facebook was able to show bad faith by presenting the panelist with a list of other typo domains the respondent had registered.