.nz second-level names now available

The New Zealand Domain Name Commission has started making second-level domains under .nz available for the first time.
Like .uk, which opened up the second level this year, .nz names have previously only been available at the third level, under .co.nz, .net.nz and over a dozen other extensions.
But from this week, existing registrants will be able to register the shorter version of their name via their choice of registrar.
Registry fees are the same as under existing .nz SLDs, while a two-year reservation is free.
The priority period for existing registrants runs through March 30 next year. After that, .nz will open for first-come first-served general availability.
People who first registered their names between May 30 2012 and February 11 2014 — when the DNC was considering the second-level liberalization — get automatic rights to their names.
But for names registered before May 30 2012 there’s the possibility of conflicts — for example between the owners of matching .co.nz and .org.nz names.
In those cases, either party can either give up their rights, claim their rights, or demand that the .nz name not be registered to anyone.
It seems that while the DNC may offer a reconciliation service for conflicted registrants, any registrant of a 3LD registered before May 2012 will be able to dig their heels in and prevent the matching SLD being registered.
There were 551,024 domains across all .nz SLDs at the end of August.

Comment

“Frustrated” Morocco denies it supported .tata gTLD

The Moroccan government claims that it did not give its support to the .tata dot-brand gTLD, which was granted to Tata Group, the massive Indian conglomerate, in July.
According to Boubker Seddik Badr, director of digital economy at Morocco’s ministry of trade, .tata “did not receive any endorsement from any Moroccan authority”.
In a September 17 letter (pdf), he expressed his “surprise and very deep frustration” that .tata had been approved by ICANN regardless.
Under ICANN rules, .tata was classified as a “geographic” string because it matches the name of a Moroccan province found on an International Standards Organization list of protected names.
But Tata’s application was finally approved — it was the last bid to pass through evaluation — after a period Extended Evaluation. Its evaluation report (pdf) reads:

The Geographic Names Panel has determined that your application falls within the criteria for a geographic name contained in the Applicant Guidebook Section 2.2.1.4, and the documentation of support or non-objection provided has met all relevant criteria in Section 2.2.1.4.3 of the Applicant Guidebook.

The Guidebook states that letters of support or non-objection:

could be signed by the minister with the portfolio responsible for domain name administration, ICT, foreign affairs, or the Office of the Prime Minister or President of the relevant jurisdiction; or a senior representative of the agency or department responsible for domain name administration, ICT, foreign affairs, or the Office of the Prime Minister.

It’s not clear what documentation Tata provided in order to pass the geographic names review.
Tata Group is a family-owned, $103.27 billion-a-year conglomerate involved in everything from oil to tea to cars to IT consulting to airlines.
The company does not yet appear to have signed a Registry Agreement with ICANN for .tata.
ICANN is to hold its 52nd week-long public meeting in Marrakech, Morocco in February 2015.

2 Comments Tagged: .tata, geographic names, ICANN, morocco, new gTLDs, tata group

OVH to give away 50,000 new gTLD names for free

France-based registrar OVH is to make up to 50,000 domain names in its new gTLD .ovh available for free.
According to its web site and a bulletin send to customers today, the regular price of £2.69 ($4.35) will be waived for the first year and renewal pricing will be discounted.
The first 20,000 names registered will renew at £1.01 ($1.63), the remaining 30,000 names will renew at £2.03 ($3.29). There will be a limit of five domains per customer.
While “free” is not an unusual business model in the new gTLD round, .ovh is noteworthy for several other reasons.
It’s the first “dot-brand” new gTLD to accept registrations from third parties, for starters.
It’s also the only live dot-brand belonging to an accredited domain name registrar.
The restrictions on the gTLD also raise eyebrows — in order to register a name in .ovh, you need an OVH customer number.
So while the .ovh names should in theory be available via third-party registrars, such registrars would have to capture the OVH customer number of their own customers — or encourage their own customers to become OVH customers — in order to process the registration.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of any approved third-party registrars on the official .ovh web site.
General availability begins at 1000 UTC Wednesday October 2.
Thanks to Andrew Bennett for the tip.

7 Comments Tagged: dot-brands, new gTLDs, ovh

.bayern starts GA with almost 20,000 names

Bayern Connect took its .bayern new gTLD into general availability yesterday and secured close to 20,000 registrations.
This morning’s zone file count shows that at least 19,121 domains were registered during .bayern’s combined sunrise/landrush period, which ended a few weeks ago.
GA kicked off at 1300 local time yesterday.
There are no local presence requirements to register names, according to the registry’s web site.
Bayern in the German word for Bavaria, Germany’s second most-populous state. It has 12.5 million inhabitants, 1.5 million of whom live in its capital, Munich.
It’s the third most-successful geographic gTLD launch of the current round, after .london’s 35,000 names and .berlin’s 33,000.
On a per-head basis, however, the numbers don’t look so good.
While .koeln, the gTLD for the city of Cologne, had one registered domain for every 79 inhabitants at the end of its first GA day, .bayern has one domain per 663 people. The numbers for .berlin and .london were 106 and 240 respectively.

8 Comments Tagged: .bayern, bayern connect, new gTLDs

Phishers prefer free ccTLDs to new gTLDs

Domains in free and cheap ccTLDs are much more likely to host phishing attacks than new gTLDs.
That’s one of the conclusions of the latest report of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which found that Freenom’s re-purposed African ccTLDs were particularly risky.
The first-half 2014 report found 22,679 “maliciously registered” domains used in phishing attacks. That’s flat on the second half of 2013 and almost double the first half of 2013.
Only roughly a quarter of the domains used in phishing had been registered for the purpose. The rest were pointing to compromised web servers.
On new gTLDs, the APWG said:

As of this writing, the new gTLD program has not resulted in a bonanza of phishing. A few phishers experimented with new gTLD domain names, perhaps to see if anyone noticed. But most of the new gTLD domains that were used for phishing were actually on compromised web sites.

The new gTLDs .agency, .center, .club, .email and .tips were the only ones to see any maliciously registered phishing domains in the half — each had one — according to the report.
The APWG speculates quite reasonably that the relatively high price of most new gTLD domains has kept phishers away but warns that this could change as competition pushes prices down.
While .com hosts 54% of all phishing domains, small ccTLDs that give away domains for free or cheap are disproportionately likely to have such domains in their zones, the report reveals.
The Freenom-operated ccTLDs .cf (Central African Republic), .ml (Mali) and .ga (Gabon) top the table of most-polluted TLDs, alongside PW Registry’s .pw (Palau).
Freenom, which also runs .tk, offers free domains, while PW Registry has a very low registry fee.
APWG measures the risk of phishing by TLD by counting phishing domains per 10,000 registered names, where the median score is 4.7 and .com’s score is 4.1.
.cf tops the charts with 320.8, followed by .ml with 118.9, .pw with 122, .ga with 42,9 and .th (Thailand) with 27.5. These number include compromised as well as phisher-registered domains.
Read the APWG report here.

1 Comment Tagged: .pw registry, anti-phishing working group, apwg, freenom, phishing, radix

Safeway pulls all four new gTLD apps

Retail giant Safeway has removed itself from the new gTLD program entirely, last week withdrawing all four of its applications.
The $139-billion-a-year company had applied for the dot-brands .safeway, .vons, .justforu and the generic .grocery, but all four bids are now showing as withdrawn.
Now that Safeway has withdrawn, the only remaining applicant for .grocery is rival retailer Wal-Mart.
.grocery had been applied for as a “closed generic”, in which Safeway would be the only eligible registrant.
The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee had advised against closed generics on consumer protection grounds.
When ICANN pressed applicants for such strings to clarify whether they were in fact “closed generics”, Safeway denied (pdf) that .grocery was.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, said that its .grocery would be restricted to Wal-Mart and its affiliates.

22 Comments Tagged: .grocery, dot-brands, new gTLDs, safeway, wal-mart, withdrawals

Korean registrar suspended

ICANN has suspended the accreditation of Korean registrar Dotname Korea over failures to comply with Whois accuracy rules.
The company was told this week that it will lose the ability to sell names for three months.
“No new registrations or inbound transfers will be accepted from 7 October 2014 through 5 January 2015,” ICANN compliance chief Maguy Serad told the company (pdf).
The suspension follows breach notices earlier in the year pertaining to Dotname’s failure to show that it was responding adequately to Whois inaccuracy complaints.
Other breaches of the Whois-related parts of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement were also alleged.
The company has until December 16 to show compliance of face the possibility of termination.

1 Comment Tagged: compliance, dotname korea, ICANN, suspension

Iraq to get IDN ccTLD

Iraq was this week granted the right to use a new Arabic-script country-code top-level domain.
ICANN said the war-torn nation’s request for عراق., which is Arabic for “Iraq”, has passed the String Evaluation phase of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track program.
Like .iq, the registry will be the government’s Communications and Media Commission.
Once delegated, the Punycode inserted into the root will be .xn--mgbtx2b.
ICANN said Iraq is the 33rd nation to have an IDN ccTLD request approved. There are currently 26 IDN ccTLDs in the root. Most of them aren’t doing very well.

1 Comment Tagged: .iq, fast track, ICANN, idn cctlds, iraq, عراق.

Brewers Association backs .beer

Continuing its strategy of getting well-known anchor tenants involved in its new gTLD launches, Minds + Machines has recruited the Brewers Association to back its just-launched .beer.
The BA represents over 2,300 independent breweries in the US, according to its web site.
.beer hit general availability yesterday. Due to delays with ICANN’s zone file publishing system this morning I can’t yet bring you the first-day figures for the TLD.
The launch was timed to coincide with the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado.
Two weeks ago, M+M launched .country with backing from music legend Dolly Parton, who claimed dolly.country, dollyparton.country, queenof.country, dollywood.country and 9to5.country.
If nothing else, the endorsement reminded non-Americans that .country is supposed to relate to music, not geography.

Comment Tagged: .beer, brewers association, m+m, Minds + Machines

Second new gTLD round “possible” but not “probable” in 2016

If there are any companies clamoring to get on the new gTLD bandwagon, they’ve got some waiting to do.
Based on a sketchy timetable published by ICANN this week, it seems unlikely that a second application round will open before 2017, and even that might be optimistic.
While ICANN said that “based on current estimates, a subsequent application round is not expected to launch until 2016 at the earliest”, that date seems unlikely even to senior ICANN staffers.
“The possibility exists,” ICANN vice president Cyrus Namazi told DI, “but the probability, from my perspective, is not that high when you think about all the pieces that have to come together.”
Here’s an ICANN graphic illustrating these pieces:

As you can see, the two biggest time-eaters on the road-map, pushing it into 2017, are a GNSO Policy Development Process (green) and the Affirmation of Commitments Review (yellow).
The timetable envisages the PDP, which will focus on what changes need to be made to the program, lasting two and a half years, starting in the first quarter 2015 and running until mid-2017.
That could be a realistic time-frame, but the GNSO has been known to work quicker.
An ICANN study in 2012 found that 263 days is the absolute minimum amount of time a PDP has to last from start to finish, but 620 days — one year and nine months — is the average.
So the GNSO could, conceivably, wrap up in late 2016 rather than mid-2017. It will depend on how cooperative everybody is feeling and how tricky it is to find consensus on the issues.
The AoC review, which will focus on “competition, consumer trust and consumer choice” is a bit harder to gauge.
The 2009 Affirmation of Commitments is ICANN’s deal with the US government that gives it some of its authority over the DNS. On the review, it states:

If and when new gTLDs (whether in ASCII or other language character sets) have been in operation for one year, ICANN will organize a review that will examine the extent to which the introduction or expansion of gTLDs has promoted competition, consumer trust and consumer choice, as well as effectiveness of (a) the application and evaluation process, and (b) safeguards put in place to mitigate issues involved in the introduction or expansion.

The AoC does not specify how long the review must last, just when it must begin, though it does say the ICANN board must react to it within six months.
That six-month window is a maximum, however, not a minimum. The board could easily take action on the review’s findings in a month or less.
ICANN’s timeline anticipates the review itself taking a year, starting in Q3 2015 and broken down like this:

Based on the timelines of previous Review Team processes, a rough estimate for this process is that the convening of the team occurs across 3-5 months, a draft report is issued within 6-9 months, and a final report is issued within 3-6 months from the draft.

Working from these estimates, it seems that the review could in fact take anywhere from 12 to 20 months. That would mean a final report would be delivered between September 2016 and July 2017.
If the review and board consideration of its report take the longest amount of time permitted or envisaged, the AoC process might not complete until early 2018, a little over three years from now.
Clearly there are a lot of variables to consider here.
Namazi is probably on safe ground by urging caution over the hypothetical launch of a second round in 2016.
Given than new gTLD evaluations were always seen as a “rolling” process, one of the things that the GNSO surely needs to look into is a mechanism to reduce the delay between rounds.

2 Comments Tagged: affirmation of commitments, aoc, ICANN, new gTLDs, second round