dotShabaka Diary — Day 6, TMCH Integration Testing

Today, the sixth installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Monday 26 August 2013
We attended the second IBM webinar on the TMCH which ran smoothly. The guys at IBM were pretty responsive and helpful.
Having received our registration token from ICANN, we logged on to the TMDB System to create credentials for the OT&E platform, provide contact details and accept the TMCH Terms and Conditions. TMCH integration testing is now on hold since we were not able to download the DNL file or upload the LORDN file. IBM confirmed that this functionality will not be available until the Trademark Claims functionality update scheduled for the 9th of September.
The testing environment was communicated as the TMCH accreditation environment that would include all the functionality required for Sunrise processing. It’s currently a limited test environment but we’re looking forward to conducting further tests as IBM continue to add functionality.
We recommend those planning on conducting TMCH Integration Testing in the near future wait until the Claims functionality update scheduled for the 9th of September before proceeding.

Read previous and future diary entries here.

Comment Tagged: dotshabaka diary

Failures mount up as ICANN releases penultimate week of IE results

Eight new gTLD applications flunked Initial Evaluation this week, according to ICANN’s just-released results.
One of them, the Taipei City Government’s bid for .taipei, has been flagged as “Ineligible for Further Review” — the only application to receive such a status to date — suggesting it is fully dead.
But the full IE report delivered by ICANN says .taipei is actually “Eligible for Extended Evaluation”. It’s not clear right now which of these statuses is the correct one.
Its IE report says “the required documentation of support or non-objection was either not provided or did not meet the criteria” for Taipei’s bid to pass the Geographic Names Review.
While the city government seems to be the applicant, city bids also require national government support, which could be problematic given that the People’s Republic of China regards Taiwan as a province and the United Nations does not officially recognize it as a nation.
Also failing to receive a passing score this week was one of three bidders for the hotly contested gTLD .eco.
Planet Dot Eco failed on both its financial and technical questions, one of the first two applicants to suffer this double whammy. The other was Metaregistrar, which has just found out its app for .frl has failed on both counts.
The clothing retailer Express, noted for its failed Legal Rights Objection against Donuts, also failed its technical evaluation.
Express had a Verisign back-end, while Planet Dot Eco is using ARI Registry Services. Metaregistrar did not specify a third-party back-end provider in its application.
.olayan became the third application from the Saudi conglomerate Olayan Investments to fail because it did not provide its financial statements as required by the Applicant Guidebook.
.place, an application by 1589757 Alberta Ltd (‘DotPlace’) also failed to provide financial statements, as did the dot-brands .shaw, .alcon and .rexroth.
These applications received passing scores this week:

.mail .tech .kpn .play .weatherchannel .crown .aeg .statoil .app .cloud .honeywell .cruises .vig .netaporter .juegos .aramco .lamborghini .soccer .ping .surf .lol .gallo .parts .flowers .gree .webs .netflix .science .school .inc .rio .bbt .mutual .auspost .best .men .symantec .med .doctor .deals .insure .citadel .care .barcelona .racing .feedback .amfam .design .save .nhk .productions .forum .finish .spot .hitachi .web .dish .vistaprint .art .maison .properties .nissay .book .tiffany .haus .skin .hockey .phone .allfinanz .finance .通用电气公司 .手表 .電訊盈科 .珠宝 .ارامكو .hisamitsu .intuit .orientexpress .gecompany .team .church .panasonic .onyourside .ski

With only 141 applications left in evaluation, there’s only one week officially left on the IE timetable, though I expect ICANN will spend some time mopping up the stragglers afterwards.
There are 23 applications eligible for extended evaluation.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, initial evaluation, new gTLDs

Bank takes blame for gTLD name collision

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which has applied for the new gTLD .cba, has told ICANN that its own systems are to blame for most of the error traffic the string sees at the DNS root.
The company wants ICANN to downgrade its gTLD application to “low risk” from its current delay-laden “uncalculated” status, saying that it can remediate the problem itself.
Since the publication of Interisle Consulting’s name collisions report, CBA said it has discovered that its own systems “make extensive use of ‘.cba’ as a strictly internal domain.”
Leakage is the reason Interisle’s analysis of root error traffic saw so many occurrences of .cba, the bank claims:

As the cause of the name collision is primarily from CBA internal systems and associated certificate use, it is within the CBA realm of control to detect and remediate said systems and internal certificate use.

One has to wonder how CBA can be so confident based merely on an “internal investigation”, apparently without access to the same extensive and highly restricted data set Interisle used.
There are many uses of the string CBA and there can be no guarantees that CBA is the only organization spewing internal DNS queries out onto the internet.
CBA’s comment is however notable for being an example of a bank that is so unconcerned about the potential risks of name collision that it’s happy to let ICANN delegate its dot-brand without additional review.
This will surely help those who are skeptical about Interisle’s report and ICANN’s response to it.

2 Comments Tagged: .cba, commonwealth back of australia, ICANN, name collisions, new gTLDs, security

.vip and .now clear objections

The latest batch of Legal Rights Objection results has seen two proposed new gTLDs — .vip and .now — emerge unscathed from the objections phase of the new gTLD program.
There are six applications for .vip and one of the applicants, I-Registry, had filed LROs against its competitors.
Starbucks (HK), a cable company rather than a coffee chain, had also filed LROs against each of its five rivals for .now.
With yesterday’s decisions, all 10 objections have now been rejected.
In the case of .vip, every applicant wants to run it as a generic term, but I-Registry had obtained a European trademark on its proposed brand.
But Starbucks’ .now was to be a dot-brand reflecting a pre-existing mark unrelated to domain names. WIPO panelists found that trademark did not trump the proposed generic use by other applicants, however.
Both strings will now head to contention resolution, where an auction seems the most likely way to decide the winners.

1 Comment Tagged: .now, .vip, i-registry, ICANN, legal rights objection, new gTLDs, starbucks, wipo

Panel says .sport and .sports are confusingly similar

Olympics-backed new gTLD applicant SportAccord has won a String Confusion Objection against Donuts, with an arbitration panel finding that .sport and .sports are too similar to coexist.
It’s the second SCO case involving a plural to go against Donuts, after the shock .pet/.pets decision last week.
While the judgment is sure to fuel the debate about singular and plural gTLD coexistence, the strings in question in this case do have some unique characteristics.
As panelist M Scott Donahey noted, .sport is both singular and a collective noun, making it essentially a plural and synonymous with .sports.
The sentences “I like sports” and “I like sport” both make sense and mean the same thing. The same could not be said for, for example, “I like car” or “I like pet”.
Donahey was also persuaded by the argument that because “sport” is also a French word meaning the same thing, the fact that “sports” and “sport” are pronounced the same in French means the two strings confusingly similar aurally. He wrote:

The convergence of all these similarities, the fact that the words look very similar in English and sound the same in French, and that the words can be used interchangeably as nouns in English to indicate the panorama of sporting activities, and that the words are interchangeable when used as adjectives in English, all lead the Expert to conclude that it is probable that confusion will arise in the mind of the average, reasonable internet user.

The panelist had access to the rulings in the .pets v .pet case (cited by SportAccord) and the .car v cars case (which went the other way and was cited by Donuts).
Donahey’s ruling is notable also because of what he explicitly declined to consider, namely: the possible harms that could be created by string confusion. He wrote:

Objector’s many references to possible fraud, deceit, cybersquatting or other types of abuse through the use of the gTLD proposed by Applicant are in the nature of a legal rights objection, and mere speculation, and are unworthy of any consideration by an Expert in a string confusion analysis.

In other words, he focused just on the visual, aural and semantic similarity of the two strings. It’s going to be hard for anyone to argue that he overstepped the bounds of an SCO, which has happened following other decisions.
All in all it seems like a pretty sensible decision (pdf). It’s hard to fault Donahey’s logic.
(As an aside, I’ve started to notice that the SCO decisions with the soundest reasoning seem to be coming from panelists, such as Donahey, with extensive experience adjudicating UDRP complaints).
If the ruling stands — that is, if ICANN does not reopen the plurals/singulars policy debate — Donuts’ application for .sports will be forced into a contention set with the two applications for .sport.

1 Comment Tagged: .sport, .sports, donuts, icdr, plurals, sco, sportaccord, string confusion objection

New gTLDs: 23 community objections withdrawn

Almost a quarter of Community Objections against new gTLDs have been terminated without a decision, according to International Chamber of Commerce documentation.
The withdrawals leave the way open for the applied-for gTLDs .insure, .realty, .realestate, .cruises, .careers and .bio to proceed unencumbered by any objections at all.
In total 23 Community Objections, of the original 104 reported by ICANN, have been dropped. Two of the original 23 Limited Public Interest Objections have also been terminated, according to the ICC.
The terminated Community Objections seem to fall into a few categories.
Objections against applications for .autoinsurance, .carinsurance, .health, .mail and .patagonia appear to have been stopped because the applications themselves were withdrawn.
The Independent Objector, Alain Pellet, has withdrawn one Limited Public Interest — .health — and three Community objections — .patagonia, .indians, .hospital.
These seem to have been yanked due to either application withdrawals, matching objections filed by third parties, or by Governmental Advisory Committee advice.
Applications facing one fewer objection — but not zero objections — include those for .insurance, .broker, .hoteis, .hoteles, .health, and .kid.
GAC advice remains a concern for many of the affected applicants, even those that no longer face the uncertainty and expense of the objection process.
Donuts seems to have fared best from the terminations. Its .careers and .cruise bids seem to be the only ones to have emerged uncontested and with no outstanding objections or GAC advice.
The terminations were revealed in an updated list of objections published by the ICC on Monday.
The updated data is now indexed and searchable on the all-new, super-duper DI PRO Application Tracker.

7 Comments Tagged: community objection, ICANN, icc, independent objector, international chamber of commerce, limited public interest objection

GM down to one gTLD bid after dropping .chevy

General Motors looks set to leave the new gTLD program completely, after dumping its application for .chevy.
It’s the fourth of GM’s five dot-brand gTLD bids to be withdrawn after .chevrolet, .cadillac and .gmc. Only .buick remains in the Initial Evaluation process.
Of the 116 new gTLD applications to be withdrawn to date, 55 have been uncontested and for single-registrant zones. Almost all of the 55 applied-for strings are famous brands.
It would be wrong to assume that each of these was a “defensive” application — some represent discontinued brands — but it’s still a worryingly high number, representing over $10 million in ICANN fees.
That said, it’s still less than 3% of the total applications submitted in the current round.

Comment Tagged: .chevy, dot-brands, general motors, gm, withdrawals

Registrar rapped for failing to transfer UDRP domain

The domain name registrar Gal Comm has been warned by ICANN that it risks losing its accreditation for failing to transfer a cybersquatted name to Home Depot.
The compliance notice (pdf) concerns the domain name homedpeot.com, which was lost in a UDRP filed in early March and decided on April 21.
According to ICANN, Gal Comm, which has about 30,000 gTLD domains under management, failed to transfer the domain within 10 days of finding out about the decision, as required under the policy.
Whois records compiled by DomainTools show that the domain was instead deleted at in early April, and subsequently re-registered with a different registrar, where it’s currently under dubious-looking privacy.
According to the ICANN compliance notice, Gal Comm says that it deleted the domain because it received a Whois inaccuracy complaint about it.
Assuming that’s correct (and the Whois back in March was blatantly false) we have an interesting tension between policies that seems to have caused a slip-up at the registrar.
But registrars are supposed to lock domains they manage after they become aware of UDRP actions, so allowing the domain to delete seems to be a breach of the policy.
ICANN has given Gal Comm until September 10 to produce its records relating to the domain — and pay past-due accreditation fees — or face possible de-accreditation.
It’s very rare for ICANN to send compliance notices to registrars related to UDRP implementation.

1 Comment Tagged: compliance, gal comm, homedpeot.com, ICANN

dotShabaka Diary — Day 5

Today, the fifth installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Tuesday 20 August 2013
We thought it would be timely to offer a recap of our Pre-Delegation Testing (PDT) experience to date.
Prior to PDT
We entered the PDT process with confidence due to our positive experience during beta testing. While we had lots of questions and concerns before entering the PDT beta program, particularly with documentation and test cases, we remained positive because there was constant communication between ourselves and the PDT Service Provider (IIS).
Prior to entering the first production PDT, we found all issues were resolved efficiently. We were also able to speak with ICANN to clarify some of the more vexing issues we’d faced during the PDT Beta program. We were also thankful that Patrik Hildingsson, the Production Manager for PDT (at IIS), even reached out personally to warn us of some documentation issues they’d not yet had time to resolve.
Our experience with the PDT Helpdesk had improved significantly through the process, which is a credit to all those involved.
During PDT
When we finally entered the PDT testing window two weeks ago, there was a noticeable drop in dialogue between ourselves and the PDT Service Provider. This was not necessarily a concern as everything appeared to be going fine, although our technical logs were not showing a great deal of activity. We assume that no news is good news. However, one suggested area for improvement would be an increase in communication during the testing phase, even if it’s an email to say everything is fine and we have no concerns. The lack of communication had our technical team biting their nails everyday while they nervously watched the logs.
By the Wednesday of the second week, we sent an email to ask if there were any problems and if the third week of PDT (described by ICANN as the remedy period) would be required. The response was a little vague, but we think we’re in the clear and the testing is complete. While the system status has not changed, there has been no activity in our logs since last week, suggesting the third week is not required. Fingers crossed.
Overall, we are happy with the process and wish other applicants the best of luck with their PDT. One small tip we can offer is that the data submission window closes at 11:59 UTC on the Friday before your PDT appointment. Don’t mistake this as 23:59 UTC, or you’ll miss out. We uploaded our documents well in advance, but some of our staff almost got caught out when discussing when to hit the “submit” button. Luckily there were keen observers on our internal mailing list and no mistake was made.
Good luck!

Read previous and future diary entries here.

Comment Tagged: dotshabaka diary

String confusion in disarray as Demand’s .cam loses against Verisign’s .com

Demand Media is demanding an ICANN review of its objections policy, after its applied-for new gTLD .cam was beaten in a String Confusion Objection by .com registry Verisign.
A International Centre for Dispute Resolution panelist has ruled (pdf) that .cam and .com are too confusingly similar to coexist, meaning Demand’s bid for .cam must be rejected by ICANN.
But the ruling by Urs Laeuchli conflicts with two other ICDR panel decisions on .cam, which both found that the string is NOT confusingly similar to .com and therefore can be delegated.
So while Demand’s .cam bid, under a strict reading of the rules, is now supposed to be rejected, applications for identical strings filed by AC Webhosting and dotAgency can go ahead.
ICANN has been thrown a curve ball it is not yet fully prepared to deal with.
As Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Generic Domains Division, told DI last week, it’s possible that the policy or the implementation of that policy may need to be revisited by ICANN and the community.
United TLD, the Demand Media subsidiary that applied for .cam, is now calling for precisely that, with vice president of business and legal affairs Statton Hammock writing today:

String confusion objections are meant to be applicant agnostic and have nothing to do with the registration or use of the new gTLD. What matters in string confusion objections is whether a string is visually, aurally or, according to ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook, otherwise “so nearly resembles another that it is likely to deceive or cause confusion.” Individuals may disagree on whether .CAM and .COM are similarly confusing, but there can be no mistake that United TLD’s .CAM string, AC Webhosting’s .CAM string, and dotAgency Limited’s .CAM string are all identical. Either all three applications should move forward or none should move forward.

The .cam cases are not alone in presenting ICANN with SCO problems.
Last week, Donuts’ bid for .pets was ruled confusingly similar to Google’s .pet, despite previous ICDR cases finding that plurals and singulars are not too confusing to coexist.
Where the .cam panelists disagreed
While there were three .cam cases, two of them were decided by the same panelist. It seems that both panelists were provided with very similar sets of evidence in all three cases.
It’s relevant to note that neither panelist — unlike some of their colleagues in other cases — thought it was appropriate to apply trademark law such as the DuPont factors in their decisions.
They did, however, consider the expected use cases of .cam.
All three applicants take .cam as short for “webcam” or “camera” and would target registrants interested in those fields (a lot of the use will likely be pornographic — AC Webconnecting is a porn firm after all).
But all three applicants also want to run “open” gTLDs, with no registration restrictions.
ICDR panelist Murray Smith was in charge of both the AC Webconnecting and dotAgency cases. He addressed expected usage explicitly in dotAgency, and explained why:

It is not just the visual, phonetic and conceptual similarity between the words that must be taken into account. In my view the greater emphasis should be focused on the use of the disputed extensions in the context of modern Internet usage. It is this context that compels the conclusion that an average Internet user would not be confused and would know that a .com website is probably a commercial website while a .cam websites would be something more focused in a particular field.

In AC Webconnecting, he wrote:

I agree that a consumer would quickly realize that a .cam website is likely associated with photography or camera use and is different than a .com website in use generally by a myriad of commercial entities.

So he’s putting the “greater emphasis” on usage — a factor that is not explicitly mentioned in the Applicant Guidebook’s description of the SCO and which may quite often differ between applicants.
Right there, in Smith’s interpretation of his task, we have a reason why SCOs will produce different results for identical strings.
I find Smith’s thinking baffling for a couple of reasons.
First, “a consumer would quickly realize that a .cam website is likely associated with photography” seems to ignore the existence of a bazillion .com web sites that are also associated with photography.
When did “commercial entities” and “photography or camera use” become mutually exclusive? Is photographyblog.com not confusingly similar to photographyblog.cam?
Second, he ignores the fact that basically anyone will be able to register a .cam web site for basically any purpose. None of the applicants want to restrict the gTLD to camera-related stuff.
ICDR panelist Laeuchli, in the Demand Media .cam case, raised this precise point, saying:

“.com” and “.cam” would use the same channels appealing to a broad audience. Even though according to Applicant, its envisioned TLD will “likely appeal” to a specific audience, it plans to operate “.cam” as an open gTLD. This would lead to extensive overlap.

Panelist Smith has some other notions about confusion that seem to defy common sense. He wrote in the AC Webconnecting case:

The .com TLD is the most widely recognized string in the Internet world. No reasonable Internet user would fail to recognize the .com TLD. The very reputation of the .com name serves to limit the potential for an average Internet user to be confused by the proposed .cam TLD. It is indeed unlikely that an online consumer would confuse a .com website with a .cam website.

Does this not strike anyone else as bad thinking?
It seems to me to be a little like saying that it’s perfectly okay to market a brand of carbonated beverage called Cuke, because Coke is so famous that nobody could possibly be confused. I don’t know where the law stands on that issue, but I’m pretty sure Coke wouldn’t be happy about it.
There’s also some weirdness in Laeuchli’s decision in the Demand case.
He puts some weight on the similarity scores produced by the controversial Sword algorithm in his decision, but apparently without doing even the basic research. He writes in his findings:

No matter what the standards and purpose the ICANN SWORD algorithm includes, it has comparative value.
…
Since pairs such as “God” and “dog” (85%) reach similarity scores of 84% and higher, how much more similar would “cxm” and “cxm” be (x being replaced with a vowel)!

The answer is that, according to Sword, they’re less similar. Sword scores “cam” v “com” at 63%.
Laeuchli knows it’s 63%, because he makes reference to that fact in his summary of Verisign’s evidence. He doesn’t need to speculate about the number based on what “god” v “dog” scores (and if he did the “dog” v “god” query himself, why on earth didn’t he just query “com” v “cam” too?)
His finding that .cam and .com will cause probable confusion seems to be based largely on expert witness testimony provided by both Verisign and Demand, in which he found Verisign’s more persuasive.
This evidence seems to have largely comprised the opinions of linguists, examining mouth shapes and acoustic frequencies, and market research looking into internet user behavior. As none of it has been published, it’s difficult to judge which side had the better arguments.
But it’s undeniably about the similarity of the strings, rather than the proposed usage, which makes Demand Media’s statement today — that SCOs “are meant to be applicant agnostic and have nothing to do with the registration or use of the new gTLD” — quite confusing.
Demand lost its case based on the string similarity, whereas the other two applicants won theirs based on the usage.
Perhaps Demand senses that its .cam application will not be immediately rejected if ICANN reopens the debate about string similarity. If think it’s probably correct.

8 Comments Tagged: .cam, .com, ac webconnecting, demand media, dotagency, ICANN, icdr, international centre for dispute resolution, new gltds, sco, string confusion objection, united tld, verisign