So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?

Amazon went into sunrise with three gTLDs this week, and I thought it might be interesting to pore over the latest zone files to see which companies are the most motivated to protect their brands nowadays.

First, because sometimes the results are just weird. Second, because countless new gTLD consultants are trawling the business world for prospects right now, and sunrise participation data might be useful as lead generation.

Amazon launched .you, .talk and .fast on Tuesday, so these results are for the first two days of sunrise, a period that lasts for a month. As such, there are only a few dozen registered domains in each TLD, at most.

Let’s start with the weird: dog food companies seem to fear cybersquatting more than you might imagine. Mars brands Orijen, Champion Pet Foods and Acana are all protected (though no more of Mars’ dozens of consumer brands), as is independent retailer PetSmart.

An AI company have a presence on the list, which is a relatively new phenomenon for sunrise periods. Anthropic has registered both “anthropic” and “claude”, for its chatbot, in all three TLDs.

Financial companies have a strong presence on the lists, with Freddie Mac, Bank of America, Intesa Sanpaolo, Merrill and Astorg all registering names. Energy brands Iberdrola and Avangrid are registered.

Conscious Capital, a Swiss investment company that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, has defended its brand. That’s notable because the company uses a .us domain for its web site and the .com is listed for sale by a domainer for $2 million.

1-800-Flowers.com, which has somehow managed to get a Trademark Clearinghouse listing for “flowers” — the product it sells — participated in the sunrises as usual. The gTLD .flowers belongs to XYZ.com.

Hotel chain Hilton, podcasters Wondery, construction company VINCI Concessions (vinci-concessions.you???) and tech firms Broadcom and AT&T have all also got in quick to grab their matching domains.

The sunrise periods run until September 25, with general availability following hot on their heels.

1 Comment Tagged: .fast, .talk, .you, amazon, sunrise

Cloud gTLD gets launch dates

Another long-dormant gTLD from the 2012 round is set to launch soon.

Documents filed with ICANN show that the Chinese software company Qihoo 360 is set to launch .yun, the Pinyin transliteration of the Chinese word and Mandarin character meaning “cloud”.

The ICANN web site states that .yun will enter a one-month sunrise period September 24, with general availability likely coming around October 28.

Qihoo stated in its 2012 application that the domain would be marketed via its existing cloud storage services.

The company also is contacted to run .xihuan (“like”), .anquan (“security”) and .shouji (“cellphone”), but it hasn’t launched any of them yet.

Qihoo has been sanctioned by the US government for the last five years due to its alleged links to the Chinese military.

Comment Tagged: .yun, ICANN, new gTLDs, qihoo 360

Governments say new gTLD program “credibility” at stake

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is “deeply concerned” about the credibility of the new gTLD program’s Next Round, after a scheme to broaden the geographic spread of applicants has started to look like a failure.

The GAC and ALAC are calling for ICANN to address urgently what is seen as flaws in its Applicant Support Program, which offers deep discounts on application fees to small businesses in non-developed countries and to non-profit applicants.

GAC chair Nicolas Caballero and ALAC chair Jonathan Zuck said governments are “deeply concerned about the program’s current trajectory, particularly given the limited time remaining in the application window and the disproportionately low representation from underserved regions”.

ICANN said last week that it has approved the first three ASP applicants. One applicant is from Europe and two are from the Asia-Pacific region.

The latest monthly stats, dated July 23, show that only five applications were classified as “Submitted & in Review”, while 25 were “Initiated” and 26 were “In Draft”. By geography, 10 potential applications come from Africa, 16 from Asia-Pacific, four from Europe, 19 from North America and just two from Latin America.

Caballero and Zuck wrote (pdf):

we also identified a geographic imbalance from ICANN’s data… despite seven months of outreach, potential applications from North America (33%) vastly outnumber those from the LAC region (3%), raising questions about the inclusivity of the program.

…

we really think that the ASP is not merely a procedural requirement but a cornerstone of the Next Round’s credibility. At minimum, failure to address its structural challenges risks perpetuating the dominance of well-resourced entities, undermining ICANN’s multistakeholder principles. We kindly request the Board to treat this matter with the urgency it demands

They want ICANN to conduct a fast review of why the geographic balance is tilted towards North America at the expense of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

As I’ve previously noted, the North America region by ICANN’s definition is small. It doesn’t even include Mexico. Small businesses from the USA and Canada don’t qualify for the ASP and the only other places in the region are US island territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam.

The GAC and ALAC want to know whether the low uptake elsewhere is due to ICANN’s lack of local outreach, complexities in the application process, or costs. Why are draft applications not being submitted?

With the clock ticking down to the November 19 closure of the application window, The August 15 letter calls for ICANN to figure out what’s going wrong and let it know by August 22 — this coming Friday.

Even if it wasn’t August, and we weren’t talking about ICANN, that’s a pretty tight deadline.

5 Comments Tagged: applicant support program, asp, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round

NIXI planning doomed new gTLD bids

Indian national ccTLD registry NIXI is reportedly planning to branch out into new gTLDs, unfortunately it’s picked two strings that are strictly banned under ICANN rules.

According to an Economic Times interview with CEO Devesh Tyagi today, NIXI has eyes on applications for .india and .bharat in next year’s application round. “Bharat” is the Latin transliteration of the Hindi endonym for India.

Unfortunately for NIXI, applications for both strings would be doomed to failure under ICANN rules, according to the current draft of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.

The AGB says: “Applications for strings that are country or territory names will not be approved”.

Such names are defined as, among other things: “It is a short-form name listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard, or a translation of the short-form name in any language.”

Both “india” and “bharat” fall into those categories. India is in the ISO 3166-1 standard and Bharat is its translation.

There are no carve-outs or exceptions for national ccTLD registries, even with local governmental approval. The prohibition is based on government advice and pretty much welded into the AGB at this point.

Should NIXI apply for these strings regardless, it would be able to request a partial refund but would still potentially lose tens of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable expenses.

NIXI already runs .भारत (.bharat in the Devanagari script used in Hindi), but that was applied for and won under ICANN’s entirely separate IDN ccTLD Fast Track program, which allows ccTLD operators to apply for internationalized domain name versions of their existing ccTLDs.

1 Comment Tagged: agb, geographic names, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, nixi

AI experts replace Chapman on ICANN board

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has announced its annual picks for the Org’s board of directors, with two new fresh faces, both of whom have notable AI policy experience, joining.

Constance Bommelaer de Leusse and Raúl Echeberría, respectively French and Uruguayan internet policy experts, are the newcomers. Australian former regulator Chris Chapman is leaving after just one three-year term.

Echeberría is perhaps the more-familiar name, having been involved with ICANN since its early days. He’s a founder and former long-time CEO of LACNIC, and has held roles in ISOC, WSIS, and the IGF. He’s also former chair of ICANN’s Number Resource Organization.

De Leusse is a French academic, raised in the US, currently employed by the Sciences Po and Ecole normale supérieure (ENS-PLS) universities in Paris. She is a former ISOC VP.

Both have AI policy experience. Echeberría earlier this year sat on the steering committee of the AI Action Summit, hosted in Paris by President Macron, while de Leusse works for the AI & Society Institute at ENS-PLS.

On social media, de Leusse describes herself as a winemaker, which may or may not prove interesting.

NomCom also reappointed Sajid Rahman for a second three-year term. One of the two new appointees replaces former board chair Maarten Botterman, who is term-limited after nine years’ service. The other replaces Chapman.

In terms of geographic balance, it means a director from the Asia-Pacific region has been replaced by one from Latin America. I don’t believe this causes any significant issues in terms of limiting other groups’ election options.

NomCom, which also selected seven other people for non-board roles, said 37% of its candidates were from Africa, with 25% from Asia-Pac, 16% from Latin America, and 8% from Europe.

Only 2% were from North America, perhaps due to the fact that NomCom was unable to pick anyone from that region for a directorship due to its geographic diversity quotas.

NomCom said that 27% of its candidates were female, 73% male, which is broadly in line with previous years and historical stats for general ICANN participation.

The new appointees take their seats at the conclusion of ICANN’s AGM in October.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, nomcom

RDRS may not be dead

ICANN’s pilot Registration Data Request Service could live on beyond its original shelf life, if new recommendations are approved.

The GNSO’s RDRS Standing Committee has reached consensus on six proposals concerning the service’s future, the first of which is that it should carry on operating beyond its original November 2025 cut-off date.

RDRS is the system ICANN put in place to connect people who want access to unredacted Whois records with the registrars holding that data. It hasn’t been a spectacular success, and some large registrars have recently opted out of participation.

But the volunteer Standing Committee, which has been meeting every two weeks to monitor RDRS since it launched in November 2023, says that the service is useful and recommends that the pilot should carry on. Its report states:

The SC recommends maintaining the RDRS pilot service and continuing to promote voluntary registrar participation beyond its initial two-year term until a long-term permanent solution or a successor system is agreed upon.

The draft also recommends upgrading the service to improve the user interface, enable API access for both requestors and registrars, and enabling authentication for users starting with law enforcement.

ccTLD registries should also be allowed to opt in, the report says. Currently, the voluntary service is limited to ICANN-accredited gTLD registrars. At the last count, 78 registrars were participating, covering 47% of all registered gTLD domains.

Five of the committee’s recommendations reached “Full Consensus”, the highest degree of agreement, while one recommendation, discussing future policy work, had some objections and only received “Consensus”.

The report will now be put to the GNSO Council before going to the ICANN board of directors for possible final approval.

Apart from the ongoing running costs, some of the recommendations would require software development work, which costs money.

At the last count, there were 11,360 registered RDRS users and since launch they had submitted 3,344 data requests. That works out to a mean average of 167 per month.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, privacy, rdrs, whois

Single-letter .com lawsuit thrown out of court

A domainer trying to lay claim to all remaining unregistered single-character .com and .net domain names has had his lawsuit against ICANN thrown out of court for a third time.

Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com (dba First Place Internet) reckons he is owed the rights to domains such as 1.com and a.net because he registered the matching second-level domains in the non-Latin versions of both gTLDs.

His original lawsuit, filed two years ago, stated that he paid Verisign, via registrar CSC Global, $25,285 for 1.닷넷 on the understanding that this would give him exclusive rights to 1.com and 1.net, which would be worth many millions of dollars.

.닷넷 is Verisign’s transliteration of .net in the Hangul script. Tallman registered dozens of other single-character Latin domains in internationalized domain name .com/.net transliterated gTLDs, thinking he could later get the .com/.net equivalents.

His argument was pretty flimsy, based primarily not on ICANN policy but on an ambiguously worded letter from Verisign to ICANN.

The first complaint was rejected by the Los Angeles Superior Court in March 2024. Tallman amended his complaint, but this was also thrown out this January. Tallman plodded on, regardless, with a third amended complaint.

This time, the judge has run out of patience. Last month, he threw out the lawsuit entirely, with no leave to amend, saying Tallman did not have standing to sue as he had failed to show that he had any contractual relationship with ICANN at all.

With a few grandfathered exceptions such as x.com, owned by Elon Musk, all single-character .com and .net domain names have been reserved from reservation since the 1990s for stability reasons that are probably no longer particularly applicable.

A move by Verisign to experimentally auction o.com to a motivated buyer fizzled out a few years ago, likely indirectly due to the likely buyer’s relationship to a sexy Russian spy.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, lawsuit, scdn, single-character, verandaglobal, verisign

Golding challenges McCarthy for Nominet board seat

Nominet has revealed the names of just two candidates who are standing in its non-executive director election this year.

Rob Golding of Astutium is on the ballot again, this time challenging incumbent Kieren McCarthy, who is standing for re-election for a second three-year term.

Golding stood last year and came a very close third place when there were two seats available. McCarthy won his seat in 2022 with a more comfortable margin, but only after a second round of voting.

Voting this year opens September 26 and the winner would take his seat in October at Nominet’s AGM.

Comment Tagged: election, nominet

Three applicants qualify for cheapo gTLDs

Three organizations have been given ICANN’s approval to apply for new gTLDs next year at a deeply discounted rate.

All three are non-profit or nongovernmental organizations, ICANN said. Two come from the Asia-Pacific region and one comes from Europe.

The identities of the applicants have not and will not be disclosed — to publish their names would likely tip the applicants’ hands in terms of what strings they intend to apply for, inviting competition.

The Applicant Support Program offers non-profit entities worldwide or small businesses in non-developed nations a discount of 75% to 85% on the base $227,000 application fee, along with a selection of other benefits.

As of today, there are 45 active applications, ICANN said. Seven come from Africa, 14 from Asia-Pac, five from Europe, two from Latin America, and 12 from North America. Another five haven’t said where they’re based yet.

According to July 23 stats, only five applications — three of which presumably have now been approved — had been fully submitted and were in review.

In the 2012 round, there were only three ASP applications and only one, from the company that now runs .kids, was successful in obtaining the discount.

The window for ASP applications closes in November.

Comment Tagged: applicant support program, asp, ICANN, new gTLDs

Blockchain crisis looming for new gTLD next round

New gTLD applicants could face more of a threat from blockchain-based alternative naming systems next year than perhaps they first thought.

ICANN is coming under pressure to give additional rights to the owners of top-level strings that act like TLDs on blockchains, potentially adding friction — and six figures of extra costs — to applications for matching strings.

In the recently closed public comment period on the current draft Applicant Guidebook, two blockchain naming firms focused on the risk posed from name collisions should a gTLD get delegated that matches a blockchain TLD.

More importantly, ICANN’s influential Security and Stability Advisory Committee expressed the same views.

Alexander Urbelis, general counsel and CISO of Ethereum Name Service, said in his comments that many operators of alt-TLDs will apply for their DNS matches in next year’s application round, adding:

ICANN should consider that a new gTLD, for which an identical string already exists in an alternative name space, should be considered a compromised asset, and that delegating such gTLDs may subject ICANN, and applicants, to substantial liability. In addition to the technical issues posed by name collision, such delegations could also result in consumer confusion, difficulties with resolving queries (particularly as access to alternative names is increasingly integrated into mainstream web browsers), security risks, and broken authentication systems

Shifting gears, Urbelis then goes on to espouse the exactly opposite view to what you might expect from an operator of a blockchain naming system:

We urge ICANN to ensure that operators of strings in alternative names spaces are not given preferential treatment in the upcoming new gTLD application round, either deliberately or inadvertently. Such operators should not be rewarded for choosing to operate outside of ICANN governance and policies, particularly when the results of such preferential treatment could be so devastating for the stability of the DNS, as well as consumer trust in the new gTLD program and the DNS itself.

However, he concludes that alt-TLDs should be considered during the application process, specifically when ICANN’s evaluators conduct the String Similarity Evaluation.

we note that the string similarity evaluation does not appear to account for strings that may exist in alternative name spaces that are not under ICANN governance. Given the proliferation of such strings and alternative name spaces in recent years, ICANN should not ignore their existence by considering string similarity within only the ICANN-governed DNS, particularly due to the technical issues outlined above in connection with name collision.

Currently, this evaluation stage only looks at similarity to existing TLDs, some strings blocked by policy, and other applied-for strings.

If Urbelis’ advice were taken on board, an application for .clown, for example, could find itself ruled similar to alt-TLD .down, which is on the Handshake naming system and available at some registrars.

ENS runs .eth as a blockchain TLD. While the company claims over 1.6 million names registered there, .eth can never make it to the consensus DNS because ETH is the protected three-letter code for Ethiopia and therefore blocked by a Guidebook policy that is pretty much locked-in.

Unstoppable Domains, which markets dozens of alt-TLDs, focused on name collisions in its brief comment to ICANN, seeking extra clarity in how the collision assessors will decide whether a string is “high risk”.

The current AGB says evaluators will look at both quantitative data — measurements of traffic for non-existent TLDs to the root servers for example — and unspecified “qualitative” factors. Unstoppable’s head of operations Michael Campagnolo wrote:

If ICANN wants to help applicants to assess their risk pre-application submission, examples and sources of qualitative evidence should be described and made available to applicants prior to, and in a reasonable amount of time before the opening of the application window, similar to the quantitative information.

The subtext here, it appears, is that Unstoppable wants to know if non-DNS qualitative factors, such as the existence of an alt-TLD matching an applied-for string, will be taken into account.

That’s a good question, and as the AGB currently stands it appears to be up to the Technical Review Team that will conduct the name collision evaluation on each application.

The Name Collision Analysis Project working group, which came up with most of the current name collision rules, seemed to have mostly ignored alt-TLDs in its work due to difficulty and timing.

Unstoppable points out that applicants with strings deemed at high risk of collisions could incur extra fees of $100,000 to $150,000, on top of the $227,000 standard application fee, so the extra clarity on the rules could avoid applicants having to reach deeper into their pockets.

While ICANN is adept at ignoring or merely paying lip service to self-serving public comments filed by commercial entities, it is bound by its bylaws to take the advice of its Advisory Committees seriously.

Comments filed by the 17-member SSAC will carry more weight, and SSAC is warning that collisions between DNS and non-DNS naming systems could raise security risks, promote instability, and create user confusion.

SSAC’s SAC130 (pdf) — formal Advisory Committee advice — makes four recommendations related to name collisions. One is:

The AGB should explicitly state that the TRT is allowed to include evaluating potential collisions with known, widely used alternative naming systems and other external sources, as these can create foreseeable security and stability risks for DNS users.

If ICANN adopts the SSAC recommendations, it seems the TRT will be encumbered with the heavy burden of figuring out how, when and why an alt-TLD and an applied-for gTLD create risks so unacceptable that the applied-for string should be blocked.

Another question that has been raised in recent weeks is whether alt-TLD operators should be able to use mechanisms such as Community Priority Evaluation and Community Objection to secure their TLDs or disrupt other applications.

Could Unstoppable, for example, claim that its cohort of .wallet alt-TLD registrants constitute a protected “community” and thus get a priority approval?

The company could certainly try, but experts in the policy-making community and ICANN staff seem to think the point-based CPE mechanism is designed in such a way to make such a claim incredibly difficult to back up.

ICANN will consider all of the public comments over the coming weeks and months before making changes, if any, to the AGB.

There are hundreds of thousands of alt-TLDs out there — over 6,000 are even carried by a handful of ICANN-accredited registrars — but it’s not clear how many are actually used.

With that in mind, should ICANN offer additional protections to blockchain-based alt-TLDs, many new gTLD applicants would face the very real risk of additional friction and huge extra costs.

15 Comments Tagged: .eth, alt-roots, blockchain, community, cpe, ens, ICANN, name collisions, new gTLDs, ssac, unstoppable