XYZ fighting red tape to serve Chinese customers

XYZ.com is trying to become one of the first non-Chinese gTLD registries to be able to sell unhindered into the Chinese market, in the face of Draconian government regulations.
The company has filed a Registry Services Evaluation Process request with ICANN — the first of its kind — that would let it use a gateway service, based in China, to comply with strict local laws on registries, registrars and registrants.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology regulations have been in place for a decade, but it’s only in the last year or so, in light of the new gTLD program, that China has been strictly enforcing them.
Anyone in China can buy a domain, but you need a license if you want to put up a web site, according to Gavin Brown, CTO of .xyz back-end CentralNic. Registrants also need to have their Whois information verified and validated, he said.
The problem for Chinese residents today is if they buy a domain in a TLD that is not licensed by the government, they won’t be able to obtain a license to host a web site on that domain.
The .xyz gTLD is believed to have a few hundred thousand domains registered via Chinese registrars, a substantial portion of its total.
There’s a worry that China could demand the deletion of these names and others, as it has previously in .cn, if the proper licenses have not been obtained.
Naturally, the inability to use these domains has led to a lot of pissed-off registrants. XYZ says has been receiving complaints from its registrars in the country, which in turn have been receiving complaints from their customers.
XYZ proposes to fix the problem by using a gateway service provided by ZDNS, a DNS provider based in mainland China.
Registrars in the country would maintain a separate EPP connection to ZDNS, which would act as a proxy to CentralNic’s UK-based primary EPP system.
ZDNS, which is prominently promoting its gateway service on its web site, would handle the Whois verification and also proxy the .xyz Whois lookup service, but only as it pertains to Chinese registrants and queries originating in China.
Data on non-Chinese registrants would continue to be housed with CentralNic.
ZDNS would also prevent Chinese registrants registering domains containing strings that have been banned by the government.
XYZ’s RSEP request (pdf) is currently undergoing its technical/competition review with ICANN. Assuming it passes, it would be exposed to public comment before being approved.
The RSEP states: “we are confident that the entire Internet user base of China would endorse this service and that Chinese registrars would strongly endorse this service.”
It’s the first such request to ICANN, suggesting that an awful lot of gTLDs are still not compliant with the Chinese regulations.
As of April, only 14 TLDs — all managed by China-based companies — were licensed to operate in China.

5 Comments Tagged: .college, .xyz, centralnic, china, ICANN, miit, resep, zdns

Frakes to lead Moniker

Domain industry veteran Jothan Frakes has been tapped to take over leadership of troubled US registrar Moniker.
Frakes will take over from CEO Bonnie Wittenburg.
The news emerged during the DomainFest Asia conference in Macau, at which Frakes is a speaker, overnight.
Moniker will be his first CEO gig, but he’s a bit of a jack of all trades in the industry.
Frakes has previously worked for Sedari, Minds + Machines, Oversee.net and Moniker.
He was one of the technical evaluators for the new gTLD program, subcontracted to KPMG.
For the last couple of years he’s been a key figure behind the NamesCon and DomainFest conferences.
It might be a wise hire for Moniker — Frakes is well known and well liked in the domaining community, somewhere Moniker’s reputation has suffered horribly over the last year.
Its market share has been plummeting for years, but matters were exacerbated in June 2014 with a disastrous switch to a new registration platform that was uniformly despised (read these comments) and broke everything.

9 Comments Tagged: moniker

Reddit peppers Go Daddy boss with sexism questions

Go Daddy can’t seem to shake off the legacy of its long-running, sexually suggestive TV advertising.
In an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit yesterday, CEO Blake Irving seemed to face more questions about sexism, women in technology and equal opportunities hiring than any other topic.
He made about 70 posts during the session, at least 10 of which related to Go Daddy’s relationship with the equally-fair sex in some way. Some Reddit users wondered aloud whether some such questions had been planted by Go Daddy sock-puppets.
The “best”-rated question on the thread addressed the company’s old TV commercials, which in the early days regularly featured scantily-clad, large-breasted women. Irving said:

The old ads helped GoDaddy build massive brand awareness in the US. They weren’t helpful to our reputation as an egalitarian provider of services though, and they didn’t do enough to tell people what we actually do. One of the first things I did at GoDaddy was pivot the advertising to reflect what we did and who we did it for. When 58% of small businesses in the US are run by women you should reflect the great work they do as small businesses. That’s what we’ve done with our ads over the past two years.

Irving joined Go Daddy in December 2012. Its ads since then have focused less and less on the prurient interest.
Irving also pointed out in one answer than a third of the company’s executive team is female.
He was also asked a number of questions about the new .ski gTLD (he was wearing a branded baseball cap in the AMA’s accompanying photograph).
Go Daddy employees also seemed to be out in force, asking multiple questions about this year’s corporate Christmas party.
When asked about the prospects for new gTLDs versus .com, Irving sat on the fence:

We’re seeing steady increases in awareness and the first instances of big global brands using the names (like abc.xyz and brand TLDs like home.barclays). We expect this to continue to drive new gTLD sales over time. For the foreseeable future, COM will likely remain the most desired name in the US and outside. It’s universally recognizable around the world. Either way, our goal is to provide the best choices available for each customer and the new gTLDs make getting the perfect name for you much more likely.

When asked “Does your burning evil raise your body temperature?”, Iriving replied:

Ummmm …. GoDaddy is an eco-conscious company, so we are firmly against practices that are harmful to the environment, including the use of malevolent forces as a fuel source. But, I do like a good bike ride to get my heart pumping.

The whole AMA can be read here.

1 Comment Tagged: go daddy

Architelos: shadiest new gTLD is only 10% shady

Disputing the recent Blue Coat report into “shady” new gTLDs, domain security firm Architelos says that the shadiest namespace is just under 10% shady.
That’s a far cry from Blue Coat’s claim earlier this week that nine new gTLDs are 95% to 100% abusive.
Architelos shared with DI a few data points from its NameSentry service today.
NameSentry uses a metric the company calls NQI, for Namespace Quality Index, to rank TLDs by their abuse levels. NQI is basically a normalized count of abusive domains per million registered names.
According to Architelos CEO Alexa Raad, the new gTLD with the highest NQI at the end of June was .work.
Today’s NameSentry data shows that .work has a tad under 6,900 abusive domains — almost all domains found in spam, garnished with just one suspected malware site — which works out to just under 10% of the total number of domains in its zone file.
That number is pretty high — one in 10 is not a figure you want haunting your registry — but it’s a far cry from the 98.2% that Blue Coat published earlier this week.
Looking at the numbers for .science, which has over 324,000 names in its zone and 15,671 dodgy domains in NameSentry, you get a shadiness factor of 4.8%. Again, that’s a light year away from the 99.35% number published by Blue Coat.
Raad also shared data showing that hundreds of .work and .science domains are delisted from abuse feeds every day, suggesting that the registries are engaged in long games of whack-a-mole with spammers.
Blue Coat based its numbers on a sampling of 75 million attempted domain visits by its customers — whether or not they were valid domains.
Architelos, on the other hand, takes raw data feeds from numerous sources (such as SpamHaus and SURBL) and validates that the domains do actually appear in the TLD’s zone. There’s no requirement for the domain to have been visited by a customer.
In my view, that makes the NameSentry numbers a more realistic measurement of how dirty some of these new gTLDs are.

Comment Tagged: .science, .work, architelos, Famous Four Media, Minds + Machines, namesentry, new gTLDs, security

Two .cpa applicants lose CPE

Two applicants that applied for the gTLD .cpa as a “Community” have lost their Community Priority Evaluations.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants scored 11 points out of 16, CPA Australia scored 12.
While relatively high scores for CPE, they both failed to pass the 14-point winning threshold.
The string, which stands for “certified public accountant”, is contested by a total of six applicants, which will now have to fight it out at auction.
Both applicants failed to score any of the four available points on the “nexus” criteria, which require the applicant-defined community to closely match the community described by the string.
In both cases, the CPE panel noted that the applicant wanted to restrict .cpa to members of their organizations, which only represents a subset of CPAs in the world.
The decisions can be found here.
Only two CPEs now remain unresolved — the reevaluation of DotGay’s .gay, and DotMusic’s .music. The status of .med and .kids is currently unknown.

1 Comment Tagged: .cpa, community priority evaluation, cpe, ICANN, new gTLDs

Blue Coat explains .zip screw-up

Security vendor Blue Coat apparently doesn’t check whether domains are actually domains before it advises customers to block them.
The company yesterday published a blog post that sought to explain why it denounced Google’s unlaunched .zip gTLD as “100% shady” even though the only .zip domain in existence leads to google.com.
Unrepentant, Blue Coat continued to insist that businesses should consider blocking .zip domains, while acknowledging there aren’t any.
It said that its censorware treats anything entered into a browser’s address bar as a URL, so it has been treating file names that end in .zip — the common format for compressed archive files — as if they are .zip domain names. The blog states:

when one of those URLs shows up out on the public Internet, as a real Web request, we in turn treat it as a URL. Funny-looking URLs that don’t resolve tend to get treated as Suspicious — after all, we don’t see any counter-balancing legitimate traffic there.
Further, if a legal domain name gets enough shady-looking traffic — with no counter-evidence of legitimate Web traffic — it’s possible for one of our AI systems to conclude that the behavior isn’t changing, and that it deserves a Suspicious rating in the database. So it gets one.

In other words, Blue Coat has been categorizing Zip file names that somehow find their way into a browser address bar as .zip domain names.
That may sound like a software bug that Blue Coat needs to fix, but it’s still telling people to block Google’s gTLD anyway, writing:

In conclusion, none of the .zip “domains” we see in our traffic logs are requests to registered sites. Nevertheless, we recommend that people block these requests, until valid .zip domains start showing up.

That’s a slight change of position from its original “Businesses should consider blocking traffic that leads to the riskiest TLDs”, but it still strikes me as irresponsible.
The company has still not disclosed the real numbers behind any of the percentages in its report, so we still have no idea whether it was fair to label, for example, Famous Four’s .review as “100% shady”.

3 Comments Tagged: .zip, blue coat, google, new gTLDs, security

Anger as ICANN’s member flops before board

ICANN’s board of directors came to blows with its key accountability working group this week, over proposals that would give ICANN the community the right to sue ICANN the organization.
An extraordinary three-hour teleconference between the board and the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing Accountability (CCWG) Wednesday night came across like some kind of weird, Orwellian, passive-aggressive piece of emotional domestic abuse.
The CCWG, a group of volunteers coming from all parts of the ICANN community, has created a set of proposals for improving ICANN’s accountability to the community as part of its transition process away from US government oversight.
The idea is to create sufficient accountability mechanisms so that if in future the entire ICANN board grows goatee beards and turns Eeevil, the community will still be able to hold them to their bylaws commitments.
The CCWG, following the advice of an independent law firm, decided that the best way to do this was to turn ICANN into a membership organization with a “Sole Member”.
This member would be a legal entity run by community members that would have the right under California law to sue ICANN if it ever failed to live up to its bylaws.
For example, if ICANN refused to implement the decisions of an Independent Review Panel, the member could seek to have the ruling enforced by a court.
This is just one of many proposals made by the CCWG currently open for public comment.
Highly unusually for a public comment period, the ICANN board is going to be a commenter in this case. While its comments have not been published yet, it has taken advice from its lawyers at Jones Day that may give an indication of how it is leaning.
Wednesday night’s call was designed to give the board the chance to bring its initial thinking to the CCWG.
Instead, it wound up being almost entirely about the proposed membership model and the board’s statements that while it supported the CCWG’s proposals 100% it also wanted them fundamentally rewritten.
The board wants the idea of a Sole Member model thrown out and replaced with a new arbitration process that would be legally enforceable in California courts.
So, instead of a legal-entity “member” suing ICANN, some as-yet unidentified community entity would take ICANN to arbitration. The decision of the arbitration panel could then be enforced by the courts if ICANN failed to abide by it.
When CCWG members asked who, in the absence of a legal entity, would take ICANN to arbitration and then sue it, the board had no answer. Instead, directors said the CCWG’s legal advisers should talk to Jones Day to hammer out the “technical” details.
Some members claimed that it would be “impossible” to give the community legal standing to sue ICANN without a membership model. Others said that the board’s 11th hour suggested rewrites would make it “impossible” to hit the deadline for a final proposal by the Dublin meeting next month.
At least a third of the 2-hour 47-minute call was wasted as the CCWG struggled to understand the doublespeak the board had brought into the discussion.
Directors continually insisted that they “completely supported” CCWG’s proposals on enforcement “without reservation”, while simultaneously saying the Sole Member model should be thrown out.
Half way through the call, CCWG co-chair Thomas Rickert reflected exasperation among members: “There is obviously difficulty to understand by many on this call how you fully support what we are doing while proposing something which appears like a complete rewrite.”
Shortly thereafter, Chehade responded:

Why don’t we just agree that we are agreeing with you that the community must be able to get enforcement in California courts, that we will ensure that they have the standing to do it without question. And if we are all in agreement that we are in agreement with each other let’s then let the technical people go solve this. If they call come back and tell us that frankly that advice was flawed, then let’s deal with it then in good faith. But that’s what we’re sharing with you.

Directors said that the proposed member model might have unintended consequences, and that the US government may not approve a proposal that overly complicates ICANN’s legal structure.
An hour later, the CCWG was still scratching its head, nerves were beginning to wear, and the tone was getting increasingly testy as the CCWG repeatedly asked the board to explain how it could express support and simultaneously propose an alternative solution.
“There is absolutely no new proposal,” Chehade said, eventually. “We are embracing your proposal and the objectives of the community. Please hear me on this. There is no new proposal.”
He said:

Take your work and break it down: board removal, standing reconsideration, enhancing – getting the IRP back on the track we set, you know, fundamental bylaw, binding arbitration or mechanisms of enforceability. All of the things you have come up with, we are accepting. So when your reaction to our two last hours is that we’re refusing to add any accountability, I don’t know how you come to that frankly…
you yourself in the proposal say that this proposal is not finished, it needs a lot of work. So what we’re saying to you is let’s take this proposal which is not finished and let’s figure out ways to make it real, and real in the next few weeks so we can move forward…
The only area where we are telling you we would like to propose a different mechanism to achieve the same goal is the enforceability.

The whole three hours reminded me of a nightmare-scenario interview where the interviewee has been media-trained up the wazoo and refuses to sway from a set of vaguely scripted talking points.
But which proposal is the right one for ICANN?
Beats me. What does seem quite clear to me is that the board and CCWG are at odds now, despite what ICANN says, and that the expected delivery of a final accountability proposal by Dublin is in serious doubt.
Following the call, ICANN chair Steve Crocker posted a blog post that sought to clarify the board’s position, characterizing it as agreement in principle but disagreement on implementation. He wrote:

We have suggestions on how these [CCWG proposals] could be operationalized. With regards to the mechanisms for community enforceability, where the current proposal still warrants much detail that may not be achievable we have a suggestion on how to deliver on it in a stable way, as increased enforceability must not open up questions of, for example, capture or diminishing of checks and balances.

The Wednesday meeting’s audio, transcript and other notes can all be found here.

13 Comments Tagged: accountability, ccwg, iana, ICANN, irp, member, ntia, transition

.cam given the nod as Rightside wins confusion appeal

Rightside’s application for .cam will be un-rejected after the company beat Verisign in an appeal against a 2013 String Confusion Objection decision.
That’s right, .cam is officially no longer too confusingly similar to .com.
In a just-published August 26 decision (pdf) a three-person International Centre for Dispute Resolution panel overruled the original SCO panelist’s decision.
The new panel wrote:

Based on the average, reasonable Internet’s user’s experience, and the importance of search engines, in the [Final Review Panel]’s view, confusion, if any, between .COM and .CAM is highly likely to be fleeting. While a fleeting association may create some “possibility of confusion” or evoke an “association in the sense that the string brings another string to mind,” both such reactions are insufficient under the ICANN SCO standard to support a finding that confusion is probable.

It’s not quite as clear-cut a ruling as the .shop versus .通販 ruling last week, relying on the appeals panel essentially just disagreeing with some of the finer points of the original panel’s interpretation of the evidence.
Relating to one piece of evidence, the appeals panel found that the original panelist “improperly shifted the burden of proof” to Rightside to show that .cam was intended for camera-related uses.
Rightside was one of two applicants given the opportunity to appeal its SCO decision by ICANN last year, largely because two other .cam applicants managed to pass their Verisign objections with flying colors, creating obvious inconsistency.
Taryn Naidu, Rightside’s CEO, said in a statement:

We always felt strongly that the first panel’s decision was seriously flawed. How can .CAM in one application be different from the .CAM in another application when evaluated on the basis of string similarity? The fact is, it can’t.

It’s always struck me as unfair that Verisign did not get the chance to appeal the two SCOs it lost, given that the panelist in both cases was the same guy using the same thought processes.
The question now is: is the appeals panel correct?
I suppose we’ll find out after .cam goes on sale and unscrupulous domainers attempt to sell .cam names for inflated prices, hoping their would-be buyers don’t notice the difference.
The other two .cam applicants are AC Webconnecting and Famous Four Media. All three will now go to auction.

Comment Tagged: .cam, .com, appeal, ICANN, new gTLDs, rightside, string confusion objection, verisign

Another new gTLD goes to a closed generic applicant

Dish DBS has won the contention set for the .data gTLD, even though its proposed business model has been banned by ICANN.
Competing applicants Donuts and Minds + Machines have both withdrawn their competing applications.
It’s the second string this week to go to a “closed generic” applicant, that wants to keep all the domains in the TLD to itself even though it’s not a dot-brand.
Earlier this week, the company behind the Food Network TV show won .food.
Most companies that applied for closed generics changed their minds after the Governmental Advisory Committee issued advice against the model, but Dish was one of the ones that stuck to its original plans.
In June, ICANN ruled that .data, .food and a few others could either withdraw their bids, drop their exclusivity plans, or have their applications frozen until the next new gTLD round.
As withdrawal now seems to be off the cards, it seem that .data will not see the light of day for some time to come.

Comment Tagged: .data, closed generics, dish dbs, ICANN, new gTLDs

Third ICM windfall due as .sex hits sunrise

If we’ve learned one thing about new gTLD sunrise periods, it’s that adult-oriented TLDs sell quite well.
ICM Registry started its third such period yesterday, as .sex went into its “TMCH Sunrise” phase.
Until October 1, any company with a trademark in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to buy a matching .sex domain on a first-come, first-served basis.
From October 5 to October 30, anyone with a .xxx domain name or current .xxx “Sunrise B” block will be able to buy the matching .sex during the Domain Matching phase.
Anyone who buys a .xxx before October 1 will be able to participate in this second sunrise.
ICM reported in May that .porn received 3,995 sunrise registrations while .adult sold 3,902 — both via a combination of TMCH Sunrise sales and blocks.
At ICM’s prices, that’s enough to comfortably cover its ICANN application fees.
Every other new gTLD with the exception of .sucks has sold fewer than 1,000 sunrise names.
General availability for .sex starts November 4.

Comment Tagged: .sex, icm registry, new gTLDs, porn, sunrise, xxx