Now NetNames complains about digital archery

Another big domain name registrar has come out in opposition to ICANN’s “digital archery” system for batching new top-level domain applications.
NetNames, part of Group NBT, has asked ICANN to delay digital archery – currently scheduled to kick off this Friday – until a better batching solution can be found.
In a letter to ICANN, general manager Stephane Van Gelder wrote:

As it stands, DA risks generating applicant confusion. It is a contentious system that seems to favour those with in-depth knowledge of the second-hand domain industry and more specifically, its drop-catching techniques.

There’s no denying that, of course. Pool.com and Digital Archery Experts are both offering archery services to new gTLD applicants based on this kind of insight.
NetNames is also concerned that the archery system was created without any formal community input, and therefore suggests it be delayed until after the Prague meeting later this month.

ICANN saw fit to take its TLD Application System (TAS) offline at the last minute and keep it that way for over a month as it sought to identify and correct a computer problem. We urge that the same flexibility be exercised with regards to batching, so that the currently proposed system, which is clearly flawed and unfair, be re-examined and adapted.

NetNames follows Melbourne IT, which expressed similar concerns to ICANN last week.
Van Gelder is of course also chair of the GNSO Council, though he wasn’t wearing that hat whilst writing this particular letter (pdf).

8 Comments Tagged: batching, digital archery, group nbt, ICANN, netnames, new gTLDs

Donuts applies for 307 (yes, 307) gTLDs

Donuts Inc has finally showed its hand.
The company, which was set up as a portfolio gTLD player by domain industry veterans Paul Stahura, Richard Tindal, Jonathon Nevett and Daniel Schindler, is applying for 307 gTLDs.
Yes, 307. That’s roughly 15% of all the applications ICANN has received.
We were all expecting big plans from Donuts, but I’m not sure many people thought it would go for so many strings.
The company has raised $100 million from Austin Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, TL Ventures, Generation Partners and Stahurricane to fund the ambitious plans.
Demand Media has been chosen to provide the back-end registry.
Donuts has also staffed up with some familiar faces. Former ICANN CFO Kevin Wilson is its new CFO, former Oversee marketing chief Mason Cole has joined as vice president of communications and industry relations.
The company says it has created almost two dozen new rights protection mechanisms for its gTLDs, but that it has an “open internet” philosophy.
“We have resources set aside for handling objections by parties who, for whatever reason, believe only they are equipped to administer a generic term,” Stahura said in a press release.
“The Internet is an engine of information, ideas and commerce, and one that’s not restrictive unnecessarily. Donuts intends to preserve that openness for all users, not operate a ‘by invitation only’ section of the Internet.”
I’m guessing this means there’s going to be fireworks in contention sets such as, say, .music.
The full list of applied-for strings doesn’t seem to be available yet.

6 Comments Tagged: donuts, ICANN, new gTLDs

GAC gets its way in new Applicant Guidebook

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is the beneficiary of the biggest changes in the new version of the new gTLD program Applicant Guidebook.
Published late last night, the Guidebook has been revised with mainly cosmetic changes.
The exception is the updated text on GAC Advice on New gTLDs, the mechanism through which the GAC can effectively torpedo any new gTLD application it doesn’t like.
The new text is exactly what the GAC asked for following the ICANN meeting in Dakar last October, rather than the edited version ICANN chose to put in the Guidebook in January.
Basically, the GAC put ICANN staff on the naughty step in Costa Rica this March for failing to insert its advice into the Guidebook verbatim, and this has now been rectified.
The changes don’t mean a heck of a lot for applicants.
Essentially, if the GAC finds a consensus against an application, there’s still a “strong presumption” that the ICANN board should reject it.
If only some governments object, the board is still expected to enter into talks to understand the scope of the concern before making its call.
The new Guidebook has removed two references to the fact that the ICANN board can overrule a GAC advice-objection, but that power still exists in ICANN’s bylaws.
The main reason the text has been removed was that the GAC complained in Costa Rica that it appeared to weaken the consultation process required by the bylaws.
And it was pissed off that ICANN staff had edited its text without consultation.

Comment Tagged: applicant guidebook, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, new gTLDs

Dot Registry applying for four US-only gTLDs

Dot Registry LLC, a new company to the domain name industry, has applied to ICANN for four company-themed gTLDs, saying it has the backing of US secretaries of state.
It’s going for .inc, .corp, .llc and .llp.
CEO Shaul Jolles says the plan is for all four to be restricted to US-registered companies, even though some other countries give their companies the same labels.
“While the extensions do exist in other countries, they do not have definitions similar to the entity classifications in the US,” Jolles said in an email.
“We will not offer registrations to companies not registered in the US,” he said. “We chose this option because we are able to easily verify business entity registration in the US.”
Dot Registry, which is using .us contractor Neustar as its registry services provider, says it has support from various US secretaries of state.
As we blogged in April, the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State wrote to ICANN to express reservations about these types of gTLD strings.
But Delaware Secretary of State Jeffrey Bullock indicated in a separate letter that Dot Registry’s propose regime of restrictions, which would manually match domains to company names, might be acceptable.
I’m still somewhat skeptical about the value of these kind of gTLDs. You can pretty much guarantee plenty of pointless defensive registrations, and the benefits seem fuzzy.
“The benefit of these strings is two-fold,” Jolles said. “For consumers it creates a level of reassurance and the ability to quickly ascertain if a company is legitimate or not.”
“From a company perspective it has simple benefits such as guaranteeing that you receive a domain name that matches your registered business name, increased consumer confidence which increases revenue, and a decreased possibility of business identity theft in a cyber setting,” he said.

12 Comments Tagged: .corp, .inc, .llc, .llp, dot registry, ICANN, new gTLDs

Third .app gTLD applicant revealed

A Ukrainian software developer has become the third company to publicly reveal that it has applied for the .app top-level domain.
MacPaw’s main business is developing software for Apple platforms, as the name suggests. It’s formed a new company, Dot App Inc, based in California, to manage the gTLD bid.
The application imagines a very pro-developer space. Domainers, it appears, will not be welcome.
Some policies from its web site:

– Only application developers or publishers will be able to register domain names in this zone
– Misused domains will be analyzed and repurposed if found to violate the Registration policy
– No need to pay a small fortune for a great but squatted .com or .net domain.
– The rights of app creators will be protected in the same way trademark rights are

Top Level Domain Holdings and Directi both last week announced plays for .app among their large portfolios of gTLD applications.
More applicants will no doubt be revealed next week.

5 Comments Tagged: .app, directi, dot app, macpaw, tldh

Afnic working with 16 gTLD applicants in France

Sixteen French new top-level domain applicants have selected .fr manager Afnic to provide the back-end registry for their applications, according to the company.
The applicants are from “local public authorities, companies and associations”, Afnic said in a press release. An application for .paris is thought to be among them.
The announcement puts Afnic in the customer-win lead in terms of European ccTLD operators branching out into the gTLD back-end market.
Austria’s Nic.at is involved with 11 applications, while .uk’s Nominet is involved with seven.

2 Comments Tagged: afnic, ICANN, new gTLDs

Hilton Prague screws over ICANN delegates

Lots of people attending ICANN’s public meeting in Prague later this month are complaining that the venue, the Hilton Prague Hotel, has rebooked them into hotels miles away.
It’s not clear how widespread the problem is, but I’d guess dozens of people are affected, judging by the chatter.
Amusingly, given recent events, it appears that a technical glitch with the hotel’s booking system is to blame.
One attendee, who was bumped to a hotel an hour’s walk away from the venue, was told the rebooking was “due to the unexpected circumstances with the reservation system”.
The Hilton is the venue and the first-choice hotel for the week-long meeting. ICANN had negotiated a special rate for attendees.
It’s not the first snafu to hit a meeting hotel recently. Last October, the venue one of the hotels chosen for the meeting in Dakar, Senegal, was slammed as smelly, dirty and insecure by many delegates.
However, with regard to the Prague snafu, I’ve been unable to confirm whether ICANN has filed an official complaint with the Czech minister of telecommunications yet.
While DI is attending Prague, your humble reporter is not affected by the mix-up. I’ll be sleeping on public transport and doing my morning ablutions in McDonald’s as usual.

15 Comments Tagged: hilton, ICANN, prague

Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock can now be removed

One of Go Daddy’s most unpopular practices – the infamous 60-day domain name transfer lock – has essentially come to an end.
From today, customers will be able to unlock their domains before the period is up, by contacting a special support team, according to director of policy planning James Bladel.
For many years Go Daddy has blocked domains from being transferred to other registrars if changes have been made to the registrant contact information within the last 60 days.
The company alerts users to the lock before they make changes to their Whois data, but that hasn’t stopped the policy bugging the hell out of domainers and regular registrants.
It’s designed to prevent domain hijackings – something Go Daddy says it does very well – but when false positives occur it often looks like a nefarious customer retention strategy.
“It’s a very effective tool for preventing harm, but it does catch out a lot of folks who want to legitimately change registrant data,” Bladel said.
Under the new policy, if Go Daddy blocks a transfer because of the 60-day lock, registrants will be given an email address to contact in order to appeal the block.
According to Bladel, after a human review the locks will be lifted and the Whois data will revert to its original state, unless the Go Daddy support team suspects a hijacking is in progress.
“The bad guys are not going to call and ask us to take a second look at this,” he said. “The bad guys want it to happen under the radar.”
The changes come thanks largely to a new revision of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which came into effect today and specifies that transferring registrants need to be given a way to remove the locks on their domains within five days.
But Bladel said the way the policy is written gave Go Daddy a lot of leeway in how to interpret it – it could have kept the locks in place as before – but it decided to revise its policy to improve the customer experience.

17 Comments Tagged: 60-day lock, go daddy, inter-registrar transfer policy, irtp, transfers

TLDH applies for 92 gTLDs, 68 for itself

Top Level Domain Holdings is involved in a grand total of 92 new generic top-level domain applications, many of them already known to be contested.
Sixty-eight applications are being filed on its own behalf, six have been submitted via joint ventures, and 18 more have been submitted on behalf of Minds + Machines clients.
Here’s the list of its own applications:

.abogado (Spanish for .lawyer), .app, .art, .baby, .beauty, .beer, .blog, .book, .casa (Spanish for .home), .cloud, .cooking, .country, .coupon, .cpa, .cricket, .data, .dds, .deals, .design, .dog, .eco, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .flowers, .free, .garden, .gay, .green, .guide, .home, .horse, .hotel, .immo, .inc, .latino, .law, .lawyer, .llc, .love, .luxe, .pizza, .property, .realestate, .restaurant, .review, .rodeo, .roma, .sale, .school, .science, .site, .soccer, .spa, .store, .style, .surf, .tech, .video, .vip, .vodka, .website, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .zulu, 网址 (.site in Chinese), 购物 (.shopping in Chinese).

There’s a lot to note in that list.
First, it’s interesting to see that TLDH is hedging its bets on the environmental front, applying for both .eco (which we’ve known about for years) and .green.
This puts it into contention with the longstanding Neustar-backed DotGreen bid, and possibly others we don’t yet know about, which should make for some interesting negotiations.
Also, both of TLDH’s previously announced Indian city gTLDs, .mumbai and .bangaluru, seem to have fallen through, as suspected.
Other contention sets TLDH is now confirmed to be involved in include: .blog, .site, .immo, .hotel, .home, .casa, .love, .law, .cloud, .baby, .art, .gay, .style and .store.
The company said in a statement:

During the next six months, TLDH will focus its efforts on marketing and operations for geographic names such as dot London and dot Bayern where it has the exclusive support of the relevant governing authority, as well as any other gTLDs that TLDH has filed for that are confirmed to be uncontested on the Reveal Date. Discussions with other applicants regarding contested names will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

10 Comments Tagged: .abogado, .app, .art, .baby, .beauty, .beer, .blog, .book, .casa, .cloud, .cooking, .country, .coupon, .cpa, .cricket, .data, .dds, .deals, .design, .dog, .eco, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .flowers, .free, .garden, .gay, .green, .guide, .home, .horse, .hotel, .immo, .inc, .latino, .law, .lawyer, .llc, .love, .luxe, .pizza, .property, .realestate, .restaurant, .review, .rodeo, .roma, .sale, .school, .science, .site, .soccer, .spa, .store, .style, .surf, .tech, .video, .vip, .vodka, .website, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .zulu, tldh, top level domain holdings, 网址, 购物

Will India’s biggest dot-brand be blocked?

TATA Group, the $83-billion-a-year Indian conglomerate, has confirmed to local media that it has applied for the new dot-brand top-level domain .tata.
Reporting on the approximately 50 new gTLD applications known so far to originate in India, the Business Standard confirmed the .tata bid.
But the company may find itself on the receiving end of nasty surprise — Tata is a protected geographical string under ICANN’s new gTLD rules.
Tata is also a Moroccan province listed in the ISO 3166-2 standard and the string is therefore recognized as a “sub-national place name” that gets special privileges.
Such strings are “considered geographic names and must be accompanied by documentation of support or non-objection from the relevant governments or public authorities”, according to the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
While it will be up to the Geographic Names Panel to make the call, “tata” looks to me like a pretty straightforward case of a protected string.
Has Tata obtained this consent from Morocco already? I guess we’ll find out on June 13, when ICANN reveals the public portions of all 1,900-plus new gTLD applications.
Tata also colloquially means “boob” in American.

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