ICANN signs contracts for .wang and .democrat

The new gTLD applicants behind .wang and .democract are the latest to sign Registry Agreements with ICANN.
Demand Media’s United TLD is behind .democrat, while .wang was applied for by small Chinese portfolio applicant Zodiac Holdings. Both were uncontested applications.
Both are to be open gTLDs.
For .democrat, Demand expects names to be registered by anyone who identifies themselves as a democrat. There were no objections, and to the best of my knowledge no explicit support, from “Democrat” parties
.wang is a weird one.
It’s the Latin-script transliteration of the Chinese character 网, which means “net”. Zodiac couldn’t apply for the Chinese because it’s a single character, which are not yet allowed under ICANN rules.
I understand that 网 is often used by Chinese speakers to mean “network” or “website”, but I don’t know how commonly the ASCII “wang” is used instead. Seems like a stretch.
It also of course is a common Chinese surname and a juvenile euphemism for “penis”.

5 Comments Tagged: .democrat, .wang, demand media, ICANN, new gTLDs, united tld, zodiac

TLDH raises $5 million from gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings made almost $5 million by losing auctions for the .lawyer and .website gTLDs this week, according to the company.
The London-listed company told the markets today that it has added £2.97 million ($4.81 million) to its coffers as a result of the auctions, in which Radix won .website and Donuts won .lawyer.
The number is net of the 4% cut taken by Innovative, which conducted the auctions, and the two $65,000 refunds TLDH will receive from ICANN when it withdraws the applications.
Some portion of the $4.8 million TLDH will have received from Donuts, where .lawyer was a two-horse race.
Radix’s winning bid for .website will have been split evenly between TLDH and Donuts.
At least one of these TLDs seems to have sold for significantly more than the average private auction selling price, which was $1.33 million after the first 14 Innovative auctions.
Innovative has managed auctions for 18 strings, but we don’t know the total price of the latest four.
The .website and .lawyer deals means TLDH now has £10.1 million ($16.3 million) in cash reserves, according to a company press release.
It still has 43 contested applications, however. On a $16 million budget — quite a lot less than some of its portfolio rivals — the company is going to have to make some smart tactical moves to maximize its gTLD portfolio.
“Our strategy remains to best monetise those applications where we see least value so that we can maximise our ability to acquire those names in which we see greatest value,” chairman Fred Krueger said in the press release.
It still has stakes in 25 uncontested gTLDs.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate statements — failing to take into account that .website was a three-way contest — about the average selling price of new gTLDs at auction.

Comment Tagged: .lawyer, .website, auctions, donuts, innovative auctions, new gTLDs, radix, tldh, top level domain holdings

First URS case decided with Facebook the victor

Facebook has become the first company to win a Uniform Rapid Suspension complaint.
The case, which dealt with the domain facebok.pw, took 37 days from start to finish.
This is what the suspended site now looks like:

The URS was designed for new gTLDs, but .PW Registry decided to adopt it too, to help it deal with some of the abuse it started to experience when it launched earlier this year.
Facebook was the first to file a complaint, on August 21. According to the decision, the case commenced about three weeks later, September 11, and was decided September 26.
I don’t know when the decision was published, but World Trademark Review appears to have been the first to spot it.
It was pretty much a slam-dunk, uncontroversial decision, as you might imagine given the domain. The standard is “clear and convincing evidence”, a heavier burden than UDRP.
The registrant did not respond to the complaint, but Facebook provided evidence showing he was a serial cybersquatter.
The decision was made by the National Arbitration Forum’s Darryl Wilson, who has over 100 UDRP cases under his belt. Here’s the meat of it:

IDENTICAL OR CONFUSINGLY SIMILAR
The only difference between the Domain Name, facebok.pw, and the Complainant’s FACEBOOK mark is the absence of one letter (“o”) in the Domain Name. In addition, it is well accepted that the top level domain is irrelevant in assessing identity or confusing similarity, thus the “.pw” is of no consequence here. The Examiner finds that the Domain Name is confusingly similar to Complainant’s FACEBOOK mark.
NO RIGHTS OR LEGITIMATE INTERESTS
To the best of the Complainant’s knowledge, the Respondent does not have any rights in the name FACEBOOK or “facebok” nor is the Respondent commonly known by either name. Complainant has not authorized Respondent’s use of its mark and has no affiliation with Respondent. The Domain Name points to a web page listing links for popular search topics which Respondent appears to use to generate click through fees for Respondent’s personal financial gain. Such use does not constitute a bona fide offering of goods or services and wrongfully misappropriates Complainant’s mark’s goodwill. The Examiner finds that the Respondent has established no rights or legitimate interests in the Domain Name.
BAD FAITH REGISTRATION AND USE
The Domain Name was registered and is being used in bad faith.
The Domain Name was registered on or about March 26, 2013, nine years after the Complainant’s FACEBOOK marks were first used and began gaining global notoriety.
The Examiner finds that the Respondent has engaged in a pattern of illegitimate domain name registrations (See Complainant’s exhibit URS Site Screenshot) whereby Respondent has either altered letters in, or added new letters to, well-known trademarks. Such behavior supports a conclusion of Respondent’s bad faith registration and use. Furthermore, the Complainant submits that the Respondent is using the Domain Name in order to attract for commercial gain Internet users to its parking website by creating a likelihood of confusion as to the source, sponsorship or affiliation of the website. The Examiner finds such behavior to further evidence Respondent’s bad faith registration and use.

The only remedy for URS is suspension of the domain. According to Whois, it still belongs to the respondent.
Read the decision in full here.

Comment Tagged: .pw, cybersquatting, facebok.pw, facebook, trademarks, uniform rapid suspension, urs

Here’s how to display new IDN gTLDs in Chrome

A lot of people have noticed since the first four new gTLDs were delegated yesterday that Google’s Chrome browser doesn’t seem to handle internationalized domain names.
In fact it does, but if you’re an English-speaking user you’ll probably need to make a few small configuration changes, which should take less than a minute, to make it work.
If you’re using Chrome and you click this link http://nic.сайт chances are your address bar is going to automatically translate it and display it as http://nic.xn--80aswg/.
As far as the DNS is concerned, these are the same URLs. They’re just displayed differently by Chrome, depending on your browser’s display languages settings.
If you want to see the Cyrillic version in your address bar, simply:

• Go to the Chrome Settings menu via the toolbar menu or by typing chrome://settings into the address bar.
• Click the “Language and input settings” button. It’s in the Advanced options bit, which may be hidden at first. Scroll all the way down to unhide.
• Click the Add button to add the languages you want to support in the address bar.

Right now, you can see all three active IDN gTLDs in their intended scripts by adding Arabic, Chinese (Simplified Han) and Russian. As gTLDs in other scripts are added, you’ll need to add those too.
Simple.
Thanks to DNS jack o’ all trades Jothan Frakes for telling me how to do this.

12 Comments Tagged: chrome, google, idns, new gTLDs

ICANN helps bust Russian child porn ring

ICANN recently helped break up a Russian child pornography ring.
That’s according to a remarkable anecdote from CEO Fadi Chehade, speaking during a session at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia today.
The “investigative effort” took “months” and seems to have entailed ICANN staff sifting through company records and liaising with law enforcement and domain name companies on three continents.
Here’s the anecdote in full:

We participated in a global effort to break down a child pornography ring.
You think: what is ICANN doing with a child pornography ring? Well, simple answer: where does child pornography get put up? On a web site. Where’s that web site hosted? Well, probably at some hosting company that was given the web site name by a registrar that is hopefully a registrar or reseller in the ICANN network.
We have a public responsibility to help with that.
We have some of the smartest people in the world in that space.
It took us months to nail the child pornography ring.
It took us through LA to Panama. We had to work with the attorney general of Panama to find the roots of that company. One of our team members who speaks Spanish went into public company records until he found, connected — these are investigative efforts that we do with law enforcement — then we brought in the registrars, the registries… and it turned out that this ring was actually in Russia and then we had to involve the Russian authorities.
ICANN does all of this work quietly, in the background, for the public interest.

Wow.
At first I wasn’t sure what to make of this. On the one hand: this obviously excellent news for abused kids and ICANN should be congratulated for whatever role it took in bringing the perpetrators to justice.
On the other hand: is it really ICANN’s job to take a leading role in covert criminal investigations? Why are ICANN staffers needed to trawl through Panamanian company records? Isn’t this what the police are for?
ICANN is, after all, a technical coordination body that repeatedly professes to not want to involve itself in “content” issues.
Session moderator Bertrand de La Chappelle, currently serving out his last month on the ICANN board of directors, addressed this apparent disconnect directly, asking Chehade to clarify that ICANN is not trying to expand its role.
In response, Chehade seemed to characterize ICANN as something of an ad hoc coordinator in these kinds of circumstances:

There are many topics that there is no home for them to be addressed, so ICANN gets the pressure. People come to us and say: “Well you solve this, aren’t you running the internet?”
We are not running the internet. We do names and numbers. We’re a technical community, that’s what we do.
But the pressure is mounting on us. So it’s part of our goal to address the larger issues that we’re not part of, is to frankly keep us focused on our remit. In fact, ICANN should become smaller, not bigger. It should focus on what it does. The only area we should get bigger in is involving more people so we can truly say we’re legitimate and inclusive.
The bigger issues and the other issues of content and how the internet is used and who does what, we should be very much in the background. If there is a legal issue, if we are approached legally by an edict of a court or… if it’s a process we have to respond to it.
We don’t want to be instigating or participating or leading… we don’t, we really don’t.

A desire to make ICANN smaller doesn’t seem to tally with the rapid expansion of its global footprint of hubs and branch offices and the planned doubling of its staff count.
Indeed, the very next person to speak on today’s panel was Chehade’s senior advisor and head of communications Sally Costerton, who talked about her team doubling in size this year.
I don’t personally subscribe to the idea that ICANN should be shrinking — too much is being asked of it, even if it does stick to its original remit — but I’m also not convinced that it’s the right place to be be carrying out criminal investigations. That’s what the cops are for.

9 Comments Tagged: child abuse imagery, ICANN, igf, law enforcement

Donuts wins three new gTLD auctions

Donuts has added .lawyer, .fish and .discount to its portfolio of new gTLDs, having won private auctions against its competitors for the strings this week.
It beat Top Level Domain Holdings for .lawyer and WhatBox for .fish and .discount, according to a blog post from Innovative Auctions, which managed the auction.
The winning bids were, as usual, not disclosed. The losing bidders receive most of the cash the winning bidder was willing to pay.
The three auctions were part of a surprisingly small batch that included .website, where Radix beat TLDH yesterday. Innovative says it has settled 18 contention sets to date.
The gTLD strings .discount and .lawyer are still subject to Governmental Advisory Committee “Category 1” advice, meaning the GAC wants them to be regulated for consumer protection reasons.

Comment Tagged: .discount, .fish, .lawyer, donuts, tldh, whatbox

On day one, Donuts in breach of new gTLD contract

Ooops! Donuts accidentally broke the terms of its first new gTLD Registry Agreement last night, just hours after its first string, .游戏, was delegated to the DNS root.
If you’ve been following the name collisions debate closely, you’ll recall that all new gTLD registries are banned from activating any second-level domains for 120 days after they sign their contracts:

Registry Operator shall not activate any names in the DNS zone for the Registry TLD (except for “NIC”) until at least 120 calendar days after the effective date of this agreement.

For the first four gTLDs to go live, that clock doesn’t stop ticking until November 12.
And yet, last night, Donuts activated donuts.游戏, apparently in violation of its new contractual obligations with ICANN.
The name was live and resolving for at least an hour. Donuts pulled it after we asked a company executive whether it might be a breach of contract.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, and I doubt ICANN needs to take any action.
Chalk it down to the understandable ebullience that naturally accompanies finally getting delegated to the root after such a long and painful evaluation process.
The 120-day rule was also a late amendment to Specification 6 of the RA, added by ICANN just seven days before .游戏 was delegated and over three months after Donuts signed the original contract.
It’s designed to address the potential for collisions between second-level domains in new gTLDs and names used on internal networks that already have working SSL certificates.
The no-activation window was chosen to match the 120-day period that the CA/Browser Forum gives its certificate authority members to revoke clashing certificates.
It seems unlikely donuts.游戏 will have caused any security issues during the brief period it was alive.

12 Comments Tagged: ..游戏, ca/browser forum, donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs, registry agreement

First new gTLDs delegated (really!)

ICANN has delegated the first new gTLDs to the DNS root.
All four of the first batch of internationalized domain names appear to be present right now in root zone file:

• .xn--ngbc5azd (شبكة.) — means “.web” in Arabic. Operated by dotShabaka Registry.
• .xn--unup4y (.游戏) — means “.games” in Chinese. Operated by Donuts.
• .xn--80aswg (.сайт) — means “.site” in several Cyrillic languages. Operated by CORE Association.
• .xn--80asehdb (.онлайн) — means “.online” in several Cyrillic languages. Also operated by CORE Association.

Infuriatingly, and appropriately given the glitches that have plagued the program for the last 18 months, the news seems to have been announced unexpectedly by ICANN VP Christine Willett during a webinar that most listeners had been kicked out of due to a technical problem.
The race is now one to see which of the four will be the first to go live with a resolving web site.

9 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs

Directi’s Radix wins .website gTLD auction

Directi-affiliated TLD registry Radix, has won the private auction for the .website gTLD, according to Radix.
The company beat rival portfolio applicants Donuts and Top Level Domain Holdings to the string, in an auction that was managed by Innovative Auctions, likely one of several going on this week.
There’s no outstanding Governmental Advisory Committee advice or objections to the Radix application, so its path to contracting and eventual delegation should be relatively uncontroversial now.
The price was undisclosed, Innovative’s standard terms.
Directi is in the process of being acquired by Endurance International, owner of Domain.com, which promised Radix up to $62 million to help with its gTLD auctions.

Comment Tagged: auctions, directi, donuts, ICANN, innovative auctions, new gTLDs, radix, tldh

Let’s Learn IDNs!

The eagle-eyed regular DI reader will have noticed earlier today that I published an article claiming the first new gTLD had already gone live. Not only that, it already had a resolving web site!
That was dead wrong. The story lasted about a minute before I yanked it.
I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that the confusion arose because I don’t read a word of Arabic.
I don’t read a character of Arabic either. I don’t even know where one character ends and the next begins. Or, given the way the script functions, where one begins and the next ends.
So I thought today would be an excellent time to launch Let’s Learn IDNs!, an irregular series of posts in which I, with a significant amount of help from new gTLD registries, attempt to explain IDN strings.
I’m guessing there are a large number of readers out there whose eyes, like mine, glaze over whenever they see an IDN.
We can’t tell one Chinese (or Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew…) TLD from another, but it would probably make our professional lives a fair bit easier if we could.
Let’s Learn IDNs! will therefore contain just enough information to help DI’s largely Latin-script-using readers recognize an IDN when they see one.
I’m not going to attempt to teach anyone Greek, but hopefully you’ll be able to come away from the series with a better chance of telling the difference between .新闻 and .八卦.
Which is obviously hugely, hugely important.
(That’s DI’s first joke in Chinese. Thanks.)
The first post, coming later today or tomorrow, will focus on TLD Registry’s .中文网 (“.chinesewebsite”).
If you’re an IDN gTLD registry and I’ve not reached out to you already, feel free to get in touch to find out how to get a Let’s Learn IDNs! post for your own string.

5 Comments Tagged: idns, let's learn idns, new gTLDs