Fox takes control of squatted .xxx domain

Twentieth Century Fox has withdrawn its cybersquatting complaint about the domain name foxstudios.xxx after the domain was transferred into its control.
As I reported on Tuesday, the UDRP case was a no-brainer. Fox Studios is Fox’s production subsidiary, and the owner of foxstudios.xxx had offered the domain for sale on eBay for a ludicrous $1.9 million.
This would have been more than enough to show bad faith.
The Whois record for the domain shows it is now owned by Fox, with an email address corresponding to an outside law firm. From here, it still resolves to a for-sale page, however.
Three more .xxx UDRP complaints have been filed this week, all by Turkish companies, bringing the total since December 29 to eight.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, fox, foxstudios.xxx, icm registry, udrp, xxx

End in sight for Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock

Go Daddy’s unpopular 60-day domain name lockdown period, which prevents customers moving to other registrars, could be reduced to as little as five days under new ICANN policy.
ICANN’s GNSO Council this week voted to amend the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which is binding on all registrars, to clarify when and how a registrar is allowed to block a transfer.
Today, Go Daddy has a policy of preventing transfers for 60 days whenever the registrant’s name is changed in the Whois record.
It’s designed to help prevent domain name hijacking, but to many customers it’s frustrating and looks shady; as a result it’s one of the most frequently cited criticisms of the company.
Other registrars may have similar policies, but Go Daddy is the only one you ever really hear complaints about.
Some have even posited that the practice violates the IRTP, which explicitly prevents registrars spuriously locking domains when customers update their Whois.
But ICANN’s compliance department has disagreed with that interpretation, drawing a distinction between “Whois changes” (cannot block a transfer) and “registrant changes” (can block a transfer).
Essentially, if you change your name in a Whois record the domain can be locked by your registrar, but if you change other fields such as mailing address or phone number it cannot.
Go Daddy and other registrars would still be able prevent transfers under the revised policy, but they would have to remove the block within five days of a customer request.
This is how ICANN explains the changes:

Registrar may only impose a lock that would prohibit transfer of the domain name if it includes in its registration agreement the terms and conditions for imposing such lock and obtains express consent from the Registered Name Holder: and
Registrar must remove the “Registrar Lock” status within five (5) calendar days of the Registered Name Holder’s initial request, if the Registrar does not provide facilities for the Registered Name Holder to remove the “Registrar Lock” status

Registrars may have some freedom in how they implement the new policy. Unblocking could be as simple as checking a box in the user interface, or it could mean a phone call.
Go Daddy, which was an active participant in the IRTP review and says it supports the changes, supplied a statement from director of policy planning James Bladel:

In the coming months, Go Daddy is making a few changes to our policy for domains in which the registrant information has changed.
We believe this new procedure will continue to prevent hijacked domain names from being transferred away, while making the transfer experience more user-friendly for our customers.

The changes were approved unanimously by the GNSO Council at its meeting on Thursday.
Before they become binding on registrars, they will have to be approved by the ICANN board of directors too, and the soonest that could happen is at its February 16 meeting.
The changes are part of a package of IRTP revisions – more to come in the near future – that have been under discussion in the ICANN community since 2007. Seriously.

2 Comments Tagged: go daddy, ICANN, inter-registrar transfer policy, irtp

.bank trademark canceled after “mistake”

A US trademark on the term “.bank” granted to a likely .bank top-level domain applicant has been canceled just over a week after it was approved.
The Patent & Trademark Office withdrew trademark 4,085,335 yesterday, stating that it had been issued to Asif LLC in error.
The USPTO noticed that the application was for a gTLD string after receiving a letter of protest on January 6, which it forgot to process before granting the trademark.
In a letter to Asif’s lawyers, the USPTO noted that it has a policy of not approving trademarks for TLDs, adding:

The USPTO has broad authority to correct mistakes…
In view of the letter of protest prior to registration and the clear violation of the USPTO’s established policy that marks such as this do not function as trademarks, this registration is canceled as inadvertently issued

Asif, which recently changed its name to Domain Security Company, intends to apply to ICANN for .bank and .secure, but as I reported last week it faces an uphill battle given rival .bank bids.
It used a Wild West Domains reseller account to demonstrate to the USPTO it was using the .bank mark.
It’s not currently clear who was responsible for the letter of protest.

4 Comments Tagged: .bank, asif, bits, domain security company, trademarks, uspto

M+M wins contract for ‘laptops and lederhosen’ gTLD

Minds + Machines has won governmental approval for its .bayern new gTLD application, according to the company.
The Bavarian state government has said it will back a bid for .bayern from Bayern Connect, which is majority-owned by M+M parent Top Level Domain Holdings, TLDH said today.
According to its press release, M+M will provide the back-end registry services, which strongly suggests that it does not plan to outsource to Neustar on this occasion.
Bayern Connect is not the only company to have announced a .bayern application, however.
Rival applicant PunktBayern, which is backed by United Domains and InterNetX among others, has been public about its plans for a couple of years too. Last year, it selected Afilias to provide its registry back-end.
If the Bavarian government is offering its exclusive support to Bayern Connect, as TLDH now says, it puts a serious question mark over the viability of the PunktBayern bid.
Under ICANN’s rules, any gTLD purporting to represent a state must secure the support or non-objection of the relevant government. Without that support, applications will be rejected.
PunktBayern does have a registered trademark on “.bayern”, however, so the tussle may not be quite over yet.
Bayern is the German name for Bavaria. The state has a population of about 12.5 million and quite a strong sense of its own identity.
It’s often referred to as the land of “laptops and lederhosen” due to a long-running government policy of friendliness to the tech industry.

Comment Tagged: .bayern, afilias, bavaria, bayern connect, internetx, Minds + Machines, punktbayern, tldh, top level domain holdings, united domains

25 companies register for new gTLDs

ICANN has just announced that 25 companies have registered with its TLD Application System, one week after it opened the application window for its new generic top-level domains program.
This does not necessarily mean that only 25 gTLDs have been applied for. Each TAS account can handle up to 50 applications, according to ICANN.
We already know that one of the signed-up TAS users is Minds + Machines, and it has applied for 20 gTLDs already.
“I can state firmly that one week into the process, the application system for the new domain names is functioning just as it should,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in a press release.
The application window opened January 12 and will close April 12. The deadline for registering with TAS is March 29.
Most registry service providers and other industry observers have predicted 1,000 to 1,500 applications in total, possibly a little more depending how crazy the dot-brand applicants get.
But ICANN isn’t commenting. It stated: “Until [May 1], ICANN will not comment publicly about any specific application, the total number of applications received, or who has submitted applications.”

8 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, tas

Another .tel-only registrar accredited

A Chinese firm has become the second company to emerge as a seemingly pure-play .tel registrar.
Unlike most registrars, Beijing Tong Guan Xin Tian Technology Ltd is not approved to sell .com domains. According to ICANN’s records it’s only been accredited in .tel so far.
The company, which does business as Novaltel, even has a .tel domain listed as its official site in ICANN’s registrar directory, which is a first.
Its customer-facing site, at novaltel.com, which I don’t think is fully live yet, is heavy on the .tel branding.
This all makes me wonder whether Telnic, the .tel registry, has another big deal in the works.
At the moment, the reason .tel is a gTLD of roughly 270,000 domains rather than 220,000 is that another pure-play .tel registrar distributed about 50,000 names in one big batch in January 2011.
Unusual as it is, Novaltel is not the first Chinese registrar to devote itself entirely to .tel.
The other is Tong Ji Ming Lian Technology Corporation Ltd, also based in Beijing, which does business as Trename.
Trename is currently responsible for 20% of .tel’s total domains under management, about 55,000 names, according to the most recent official registry reports.
Those domains were registered a year ago as part of a deal Telnic announced with HC International, a business-to-business e-commerce firm also based in China.
That deal is basically the reason that .tel’s overall volumes have not been affected so badly by two years of speculators dropping post-landrush registrations following its 2009 launch.
So does .tel have another spike on the cards?

Comment Tagged: .tel, novaltel, telnic, trename

Stop the nonsense about TLD-squatting

Barely a day has passed recently without a news report about how companies are being forced to apply for new top-level domains to prevent cybersquatters moving in on their brands.
It’s complete nonsense, of course, brought about by a lack of basic research coupled with years of bad feeling towards the domain name industry and an ICANN new gTLDs outreach campaign that spent six months failing to effectively tackle widely held misconceptions.
Cybersquatters are not going to apply for new gTLDs. If they do, they won’t be approved.
Unfortunately, this does not mean that we’re not going to see lots of “defensive” new gTLD applications.
Due to the way the program is structured, it may actually make strategic sense for some companies to apply for a dot-brand gTLD even if they are otherwise pretty clueless about domain names.
It worries me to think that a few years from now the TLD space – which is currently running at almost 100% utilization – will start to resemble the second level in pretty much every major TLD, with lots of essentially unused, redundant defensive domain names.
I don’t think this will be good for the domain name industry or ICANN.
That said, what looks good for ICANN and the domain name industry is of little concern to brand owners – they just want to make sure their brands are not damaged by the program.
I’ve written a 4,500-word paper analyzing the actual need for companies to file “defensive” gTLD applications, which is now available to DomainIncite PRO subscribers.

Comment Tagged: .brands, .pro, cybersquatting, defensive applications, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, trademarks

YouPorn owner acquires fellow .xxx plaintiff

Manwin, the porn company currently suing ICANN and ICM Registry over the .xxx launch, has acquired co-plaintiff Digital Playground.
“To me this deal is no different than the acquisition of Pixar by Disney,” Digital Playground CEO Ali Joone said, according to Xbiz.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While Digital Playground was named as a plaintiff on the .xxx lawsuit, Manwin was clearly the lead. Manwin has also launched a solo Independent Review Process arbitration case against ICANN.
The company is one of the biggest porn producers on the internet, owning YouPorn as well as managing Playboy’s web presence under license.
Manwin claims that ICM’s launch amounted to “extortion”, and that it gave away its lack of respect for the porn industry by selling premium names to domainers including Frank Schilling and Mike Berkens.
ICM’s response to the lawsuit is due later this week.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, digital playground, icm registry, lawsuit, manwin, playboy, sunrise, xxx, youporn

Little interest in Russian gTLDs?

Despite being given the opportunity to launch top-level domains in Cyrillic script, only a handful of companies from Russia are expected to apply to ICANN for new gTLDs.
That’s according to Andrey Kolesnikov, CEO of Coordination Center for TLD RU, which runs the country’s .ru and .РФ registries.
“There won’t be many applications from Russia, only from about 10 companies,” he said at a recent press conference, while estimating at least 1,000 applications overall.
Just 10 applicants is a surprisingly low estimate, given the resurgence of interest in Russian domain names in 2011.
The year-old .РФ (.rf, for Russian Federation) domain has been a roaring success in volume terms. Launched in late 2010, it now has about a million registered domains.
CC itself is planning to apply for .ДЕТИ, which means “.children” in Russian.
RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar, intends to apply for the city-gTLDs .МОСКВА and .moscow.
Other IDN-friendly nations may be more enthusiastic about new gTLDs. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said last week that he heard that Indian companies could apply for as many as 100.

Comment Tagged: .moscow, .ru, .ДЕТИ, .МОСКВА, cctld.ru, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, new TLDs

Afilias acquires .pro operator RegistryPro

Afilias has acquired .pro registry manager Registry Services Corporation, which does business as RegistryPro, for an undisclosed sum.
The deal will see .pro domain names migrate to Afilias’s back-end, bringing the number of TLDs the company supplies registry services for to 17, the largest of which is .info .org.
It’s not yet clear whether the deal includes Zip.pro, a “local search” service operated by RegistryPro’s former parent Hostway using tens of thousands of self-owned zip code .pro domains.
(UPDATE: Afilias has confirmed that Zip.pro is staying with Hostway. The former owner of .pro is essentially now its biggest customer.)
Hostway bought RegistryPro in early 2004 shortly before .pro went live. The deal was somewhat controversial at the time.
Since May last year the company has been headed by CEO Karim Jiwani, a former Afilias executive. Jiwani will stay in place as president of RegistryPro, Afilias said.
While RegistryPro has been offering new gTLD back-end registry services since last June, the acquisition “is specifically in support of the .pro domain,” the Afilias spokesperson said.
The gTLD will be migrated to Afilias’ back-end infrastructure, he confirmed.
“A migration plan is being put into place,” the spokesperson said. “Current .pro customers will see no issues; the platform change will be invisible to them (and as easy as possible for registrars.)”
ICANN was told about the deal, but did not need to approve it because the corporate structure of RegistryPro has not changed, he said.
The .pro gTLD has about 45 registrars, though only four of them have taken more than 10,000 registrations. EnCirca, which signed up on day one, leads the pack with 13,000 domains.
However, Network Solutions and RU-Center came on board in 2008 and have been responsible for contributing most of the gTLD’s organic growth in the last few years.
Despite these modest improvements, .pro is still broadly considered very much an also-ran gTLD.
It had roughly 117,000 registered .pro domains at the last official count, but 43,000 of those are US zip codes registered by a shell company belonging to Hostway back in 2008.
It appears that this Zip.pro service is a similar concept to the Employ Media-backed Universe.jobs services – an exercise in mass domain development backed by the (former) registry itself.
At some point quite recently, some of these zip code domains have started going live with what could be loosely be described as “content”.
If you visit 94110.pro, for example, you’ll see a bunch of stuff about the Mission district in San Francisco, an old haunt of mine.

5 Comments Tagged: .pro, acquisition, afilias, registrypro, zip.pro