.eu names to be sold outside the EU

EURid is to expand sales of .eu domains to three countries outside the European Union from January 8.
Companies and individuals from Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway will get to register .eu names, due to a rule change at the registry.
The three countries are members of the European Economic Area, which enjoys many of the trade benefits of the Union but without full EU membership.
EURid said that the 2002 European Parliament regulation that created .eu always envisaged the eventual expansion of the ccTLD to the EEA.
The change expands the registry’s addressable market by fewer than 5.4 million people, five million of whom are Norwegian.

Comment Tagged: .eu, eurid

DotKiwi puts $7 million of premium names on sale

DotKiwi has put NZD 8.5 milion ($7 million) of “premium” domain names on the market in advance of the delegation of .kiwi, which it expects to happen this week.
There are 4,668 names on sale right now, ranging in price from NZD 501.50 ($410) to NZD 124,626.71 ($102,000).
The highest price belongs to hotels.kiwi.
The average asking price is NZD 1,832.39 ($1,500).
The registry said:

All premium names have been valued in collaboration with third parties that specialise in valuing domain names around the globe. The value of a .kiwi premium name is determined using historical sales data, search engine popularity and traffic.

There are 32 domains priced at over $10,000. These are the top 10 highest-priced names:
[table id=23 /]
Unlike other new gTLD registries that have introduced tiered renewal pricing for premium names, DotKiwi plans to charge a standard NZD 40 ($33) annual fee for premiums.
DotKiwi tells us that the names have all been reserved, so they’re ineligible for the mandatory Sunrise period (expected to start later this month).
But the names won’t actually be activated until after Sunrise is over. Then, they’ll still be subject to the Trademark Claims service, which alerts trademark owners when their mark has been registered.

14 Comments Tagged: .kiwi, dotkiwi, new gTLDs, premium names, sunrise

Let’s Learn IDNs — .中文网 (Chinese Website)

Today, the belated first in an irregular series of articles devoted to making new IDN gTLDs more recognizable to the majority of DI readers who use the Latin alphabet in their native tongue.
Let’s Learn IDNs, as I said in my introduction to the series, won’t teach you Greek, but it will hopefully make it easier to instinctively know what a Greek IDN means when you see it.
I’m hoping this will prove very useful for everyone with an interest in the new gTLD program, bringing meaning to what otherwise would be an incomprehensible string of gibberish.
For the first lesson, we’re looking at TLD Registry‘s .中文网, which I guarantee after today you’ll never forget.
U-Label
.中文网
A-Label
.xn--fiq228c5hs
Translation
“.chinesewebsite”
Script
Chinese (Simplified)
Language(s)
Chinese. According to the registry, this includes “Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka and over 250 other Chinese dialects.”
Transliteration
Zhōng Wén Wǎng
Pronunciation
Jong (rhymes with long)
When (as in “when are you arriving”)
Wong (rhymes with long)
How to Learn this IDN
In Chinese, each character generally represents a syllable and will often also have meaning as a word in its own right, which is the case with the three characters of .中文网.
Helpfully, these characters are also pictograms that pretty much explain themselves.
中 (Zhōng) is a line going through the middle of a box. It means “middle”. It’s also the first character of the Chinese word for “China” — 中国, which literally means “Middle Kingdom”.
文 (Wén) looks like a little writing desk with a quill on top. It means “language”. Combine it with 中 to get 中文, which means “Chinese Language”.
网 (Wǎng) looks like a net (or maybe a cobweb). It’s the Simplified Chinese word for “net”, which the Chinese also use to refer to the internet or web.
“Altogether, 中文网 as a gTLD string, is two words that make one common Chinese language expression: Chinese-language (中文) website (网),” said TLD Registry’s head of comms Simon Cousins.
Dead easy, right?
Certainly, since Cousins first explained this to me a few months ago, I’ve never failed to recognize .中文网 whenever I’ve seen it.

7 Comments Tagged: .中文网, let's learn idns, tld registry

Two more new gTLDs delegated

The new gTLDs .menu and .uno have gone live on the internet.
Both appear to have been delegated to the DNS root zone at some point over the last few days — nic.menu and nic.uno are both resolving right now, though nic.uno takes you to an Apache status page.
The Latino-focused .uno is the first gTLD of the 10 applications linked to Kanasas-based DotRegistry to become active; .menu is the first for What Box?, which now has three remaining applications.
What Box has already partnered with Go Daddy to offer .menu domains, priced at $49.99 a year or $199.99 a year if you buy a “priority pre-registration”.
I believe the current total of new gTLDs in the root is 34, 26 of which belong to Donuts.

Comment Tagged: .menu, .uno, delegation, dotregistry, ICANN, new gTLDs, what box

Nominet drops libel lawsuit against domain blogger

UK registry Nominet has withdrawn its lawsuit against a domainer who had allegedly published “defamatory” remarks about CEO Lesley Cowley on his blog.
The defamation complaint was filed against Graeme Wingate over his blog Avoid.co.uk in January.
Nominet said yesterday that it “continues to refute entirely the untrue allegations made” on the site, which focuses on Cowley’s “dishonest” behavior surrounding Direct.uk and the ongoing controversy related to the 2008 board-level scandal and subsequent employment tribunal of former policy chief Emily Taylor.
Cowley said in a statement:

With a major programme of work underway to transform the .uk namespace, this action is now an unwelcome distraction. I refute the allegations entirely, but recognise that a far better use of the team’s time and energy is to focus on steering Nominet safely through a period of unprecedented change.

Nominet will pay Wingate’s costs.
It’s difficult to see this as anything other than a win for Wingate, who has continued to blog throughout the legal proceedings.
Wingate stood unsuccessfully for a seat on Nominet’s board of directors this year, alongside fellow Nominet critic Lucien Taylor, husband to Emily.

Comment Tagged: avoid.co.uk, direct.uk, nominet

DNS Namespace Collisions: Detection and Response [Guest Post]

Those tracking the namespace collision issue in Buenos Aries heard a lot regarding the potential response scenarios and capabilities. Because this is an important, deep, and potentially controversial topic, we wanted to get some ideas out early on potential solutions to start the conversation.
Since risk can almost never be driven to zero, a comprehensive approach to risk management contains some level of a priori risk mitigation combined with investment in detection and response capabilities.
In my city of Chicago, we tend to be particularly sensitive about fires. In Chicago, like in most cities, we have a priori protection in the form of building codes, detection in the form of smoke/fire alarms, and response in the form of 9-1-1, sprinklers, and the very capable Chicago Fire Department.
Let’s think a little about what the detection and response capabilities might look like for DNS namespace collisions.
Detection: How do we know there is a problem?
Rapid detection and diagnosis of problems helps to both reduce damage and reduce the time to recovery. Physical security practitioners invest considerably in detection, typically in the form of guards and sensors.
Most meteorological events are detected (with some advance warning) through the use of radars and predictive modeling. Information security practitioners are notoriously light with respect to systematic detection, but we’re getting better!
If there are problematic DNS namespace collisions, the initial symptoms will almost certainly appear through various IT support mechanisms, namely corporate IT departments and the support channels offered by hardware/software/service vendors and Internet Service Providers.
When presented with a new and non-obvious problem, professional and non-professional IT practitioners alike will turn to Internet search engines for answers. This suggests that a good detection/response investment would be to “seed” support vendors/fora with information/documentation about this issue in advance and in a way that will surface when IT folks begin troubleshooting.
We collectively refer to such documentation as “self-help” information. ICANN has already begun developing documentation designed to assist IT support professionals with namespace-related issues.
In the same way that radar gives us some idea where a meteorological storm might hit, we can make reasonable predictions about where issues related to DNS namespace collisions are most likely to first appear.
While problems could appear anywhere, we believe it is most likely that scenarios involving remote (“road warrior”) use cases, branch offices/locations, and Virtual Private Networks are the best places to focus advance preparation.
This educated guess is based on the observation that DNS configurations in these use cases are often brittle due to complexities associated with dynamic and/or location-dependent parameters. Issues may also appear in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) with limited IT sophistication.
This suggests that proactively reaching out to vendors and support mechanisms with a footprint in those areas would also be a wise investment.
Response: Options, Roles, and Responsibilities
In the vast majority of expected cases, the IT professional “detectors” will also be the “responders” and the issue will be resolved without involving other parties. However, let’s consider the situations where other parties may be expected to have a role in response.
For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that an Internet user is experiencing a problem related to a DNS namespace collision. I use the term “Internet user” broadly as any “consumer” of the global Internet DNS.
At this point in the thought experiment, let’s disregard the severity of the problem. The affected party (or parties) will likely exercise the full range of typical IT support options available to them – vendors, professional support, IT savvy friends and family, and Internet search.
If any of these support vectors are aware of ICANN, they may choose to contact ICANN at any point. Let’s further assume the affected party is unable and/or unwilling to correct the technical problem themselves and ICANN is contacted – directly or indirectly.
There is a critical fork in the road here: Is the expectation that ICANN provide technical “self-help” information or that ICANN will go further and “do something” to technically remedy the issue for the user? The scope of both paths needs substantial consideration.
For the rest of this blog, I want to focus on the various “do something” options. I see a few options; they aren’t mutually exclusive (one could imagine an escalation through these and potentially other options). The options are enumerated for discussion only and order is not meaningful.

• Option 1: ICANN provides technical support above and beyond “self-help” information to the impacted parties directly, including the provision of services/experts. Stated differently, ICANN becomes an extension of the impacted party’s IT support structure and provides customized/specific troubleshooting and assistance.
• Option 2: The Registry provides technical support above and beyond “self-help” information to the impacted parties directly, including the provision of services/experts. Stated differently, the Registry becomes an extension of the impacted party’s IT support structure and provides customized/specific troubleshooting and assistance.
• Option 3: ICANN forwards the issue to the Registry with a specific request to remedy. In this option, assuming all attempts to provide “self-help” are not successful, ICANN would request that the Registry make changes to their zone to technically remedy the issue. This could include temporary or permanent removal of second level names and/or other technical measures that constitute a “registry-level rollback” to a “last known good” configuration.
• Option 4: ICANN initiates a “root-level rollback” procedure to revert the state of the root zone to a “last known good” configuration, thus (presumably) de-delegating the impacted TLD. In this case, ICANN would attempt – on an emergency basis – to revert the root zone to a state that is not causing harm to the impacted party/parties. Root-level rollback is an impactful and potentially controversial topic and will be the subject of a follow-up blog.

One could imagine all sorts of variations on these options, but I think these are the basic high-level degrees of freedom. We note that ICANN’s New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan and SAC062 contemplate some of these options in a broad sense.
Some key considerations:

• In the broader sense, what are the appropriate roles and responsibilities for all parties?
• What are the likely sources to receive complaints when a collision has a deleterious effect?
• What might the Service Level Agreements look like in the above options? How are they monitored and enforced?
• How do we avoid the “cure is worse than the disease” problem – limiting the harm without increasing risk of creating new harms and unintended consequences?
• How do we craft the triggering criteria for each of the above options?
• How are the “last known good” configurations determined quickly, deterministically, and with low risk?
• Do we give equal consideration to actors that are following the technical standards vs. those depending on technical happenstance for proper functionality?
• Are there other options we’re missing?

On Severity of the Harm
Obviously, the severity of the harm can’t be ignored. Short of situations where there is a clear and present danger of bodily harm, severity will almost certainly be measured economically and from multiple points of view. Any party expected to “do something” will be forced to choose between two or more economically motivated actors: users, Registrants, Registrars, and/or Registries experiencing harm.
We must also consider that just as there may be users negatively impacted by new DNS behavior, there may also be users that are depending on the new DNS behavior. A fair and deterministic way to factor severity into the response equation is needed, and the mechanism must be compatible with emergency invocation and the need for rapid action.
Request for Feedback
There is a lot here, which is why we’ve published this early in the process. We eagerly await your ideas, feedback, pushback, corrections, and augmentations.
This is a guest post written by Jeff Schmidt, CEO of JAS Global Advisors LLC. JAS is currently authoring a “Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework” for the new gTLD program under contract with ICANN.

1 Comment Tagged: collisions, ICANN, jas, name collisions, new gTLDs, security

Google’s first new gTLD hits the root

Google has become the latest new gTLD registry with a string live in the DNS root.
Its .みんな — Japanese for “everyone” — was delegated by ICANN last night. The URL nic.みんな resolves already to charlestonroadregistry.com, the name of Google’s registry subsidiary.
Google plans to operate it as an open, unrestricted namespace, aimed at Japanese-speaking registrants.
It’s the fifth internationalized domain name to go live and one of only three IDN applications from Google.
Google has 96 more active new gTLD applications, 57 of which are contested.

2 Comments Tagged: .みんな, charleston road registry, delegation, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs

ICANN cans “Spam King” registrar

ICANN has terminated the registrar accreditation of Dynamic Dolphin, which it turned out was owned by self-professed “Spam King” Scott Richter.
The company has until December 20 to take down its ICANN logo and cease acting as a registrar.
ICANN, in its termination notice (pdf) late last week, said that it only became aware earlier this month that Richter was the 100% owner of Dynamic Dolphin.
Richter grew to fame a decade ago for being one of the world’s highest-profile spammers. He was sued for spamming by Microsoft and Myspace and was featured on the popular TV program The Daily Show.
As well as being a thoroughly unpleasant chap, he has a 2003 conviction for grand larceny, which should disqualify him from being the director of an ICANN-accredited registrar.
He removed himself as an officer on October 9 in response to ICANN’s persistent inquiries, according to ICANN’s compliance notice.
But he was much too late. ICANN has terminated the accreditation due to the “material misrepresentation, material inaccuracy, or materially misleading statement in its application”.
The question now has to be asked: why didn’t ICANN get to this sooner? In fact, why was Dynamic Dolphin allowed to get an accreditation in the first place?
Former Washington Post security reporter Brian Krebs has been all over this story for five years.
Back in 2008, with a little help from anti-spam outfit KnujOn, he outed Richter’s links to Dynamic Dolphin when it was just a Directi reseller.
Yesterday, Krebs wrote a piece on his blog going into a lot of the background.
Another question now is: which registrar is going to risk taking over Dynamic Dolphin’s registrations?
As of the last registry reports, Dynamic Dolphin had fewer than 25,000 gTLD domains under management.
According to ICANN’s termination notice, 13,280 of these use the company’s in-house privacy service, and 9,933 of those belong to just three individuals.
According to DomainTools, “Dynamic Dolphin Inc” is listed as the registrant for about 23,000 names.
According to KnujOn’s research and Krebs’s reporting, the registrar was once among the most spam-friendly on the market.

2 Comments Tagged: compliance, dynamic dolphin, ICANN, knujon, spam

Could new gTLD auctions last until April 2016?

April 2016. That’s the likely date of the final new gTLD contention set auction under the rules currently anticipated by ICANN.
As you might imagine, many applicants are not happy about this.
In a series of presentations over the last couple of weeks, ICANN has laid out how it sees its “last resort” auctions playing out.
Preliminary timetables have been sketched out, from which three data points are noteworthy:

• Auctions will start in “early March” 2014.
• There will be one “auction event” every four weeks.
• Applicants can bid on a maximum of five gTLDs per auction.

Currently, the applicant in the most contention sets is Donuts, as you might have guessed given the size of its portfolio. By my reckoning it’s currently contesting 141 gTLD strings.
With a March 1 date for the first auction, and taking into account the aforementioned timing restrictions, it would be April 23, 2016 before the final Donuts contention set is resolved.
That’s four years after the application window closed.
Google would be in auctions until January 2015. TLDH, Uniregistry and Amazon’s contested strings would be tied up until at least October next year.
This is obviously terrible news for applicants competing with portfolio applicants where the contention set has quite a high position in ICANN’s prioritization queue.
A year or two is a long time to wait — burning through your funding and not taking in any revenue — if you’re a single-string applicant on a tight budget. Every dollar spent waiting is a dollar less to spend at auction.
According to ICANN, applicants will be able to waive the five-gTLDs-per-month maximum.
But that only seems to help the larger portfolio applicants, which will be seeing revenue from launched, uncontested gTLDs and could take the opportunity to starve out their smaller rivals.
Auctions themselves are shaping up to be a controversial subject in general, with several community members taking the mic at the ICANN 48 Public Forum last week to call for ICANN to change the process.
A few people pointed the ICANN board to the recent withdrawal of DotGreen — a popular but evidently poorly funded community effort — from the new gTLD program as a harbinger of things to come.
“By not allowing applicants to be in more than five auctions simultaneously it means those applicants, particularly portfolio applicants, are not going to be able to move through their contention sets,” Google policy manager Sarah Falvey said at the Forum.
“It drags in all the single applicants, because they’re stuck on that exact same time schedule and can’t move their applications through as well,” she said, adding that ICANN should create a new process that sets the time limit for auctions at about six months.
“People could be waiting two years to delegate through no fault of their own,” she said.
Later responding to Afilias director Jonathan Robinson, who backed up Falvey’s call for an accelerated schedule, ICANN president of generic domains Akram Atallah said that the rules are not yet set in stone.
The five-a-day rule was created to give applicants the ability to plan payments better, he said, and ICANN is still soliciting input on how the system could be improved.

5 Comments Tagged: auctions, ICANN, icann 48, new gTLDs

Is this the worst new gTLD video yet?

If you’re trying to market a new gTLD aimed solely at CEOs, and your messaging is security, credibility and authority, what’s the best medium to get that message across?
Why, it’s white rap of course! In Donald Trump masks!
That’s apparently the thought process of PeopleBrowsr, the applicant for .ceo, anyway.
The video below got its first airing during a joint PeopleBrowsr/TLDH party at ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires last week.
I was on a bio break at the time and missed the premiere, but I was assured by other party-goers that it was the most painfully awkward video ever screened at an ICANN meeting.
After PeopleBrowsr published it on YouTube today, I was not disappointed. Enjoy a true classic:

44 Comments Tagged: ceo, icann 48, new gTLDs, peoplebrowsr