Saucy domain name commercials… in India?

By now everybody is familiar with attempts by American companies such as Go Daddy, and more recently ICM Registry, to make domain names appear sexy in TV commercials.
But did you know BigRock.com is doing something similar in India, where the boundaries of decency are even more strictly defined than in the US?
I just enountered BigRock’s YouTube channel for the first time, and I think it’s fair to say that its commercials are somewhat “edgy” too, at least as measured by Indian standards.
Here are a few examples.


It’s possible to pick up on some social commentary in some of the spots, even if you don’t speak fluent Hinglish.

1 Comment Tagged: bigrock

Former ICANN CFO sues Sedari over €100k deal

Kevin Wilson, who joined new gTLD consultancy Sedari as chief financial officer earlier this year, was fired in October and is now suing the company over a €100,000 investment deal gone bad.
Wilson, who spent four years as ICANN’s CFO, was one of a number of familiar domain name industry faces to join UK-based Sedari when it came out of stealth mode this summer.
But he was let go in October after falling out with CEO Liz Williams over financial matters.
Wilson claims that even as CFO he had to fight for access to Sedari’s financial records, and that when he finally questioned the company’s accounting he was terminated.
His termination letter said that Sedari had “very serious concerns” about his performance.
He had agreed to invest €100,000, in two €50,000 installments, and was fired shortly after deciding not to make the second payment, according to his legal complaint.
Wilson claims that he agreed to become an investor after being told about paying clients, including Cloud Registry, that he came to believe may not have existed.
He also alleges that “substantial sums” were taken from the company coffers by Williams for spa treatments and other personal expenditures.
The lawsuit alleges “fraud” on this basis, and seeks the return of Wilson’s initial €50,000 stake.
Wilson also wants the court to declare that, as a resident of California, he is not bound by the post-employment non-compete clauses of his contract.
He’s currently an independent new gTLDs consultant.
Sedari, through its solicitor Faegre & Benson, said in a statement:

Mr. Wilson has reneged on his legally binding obligations to Sedari both in relation to the payment by him of certain sums and his agreement not to act contrary to the best interest of the company. As a result, the Board has forfeited Mr. Wilson’s shares and taken further action to enforce its rights against him.

The statement notes that Sedari has not yet been formally served the complaint – which was filed in the Superior Court in Los Angeles on October 25 – adding:

In the event that Mr. Wilson proceeds with his complaint, it will be defended comprehensively.
The claim is devoid of merit, wrong in fact and all material allegations are rejected. Mr. Wilson will also be pursued for any further loss his actions may cause the alleged defendants.

Wilson said in a statement that he wants to “resolve matters amicably”.
According to exhibits filed with the lawsuit, Sedari’s other investors include Williams, with a majority 53.7% stake, as well as director Dennis Jennings and policy chief Philip Sheppard.
Registry services provider Afilias paid $375,000 for a 27.4% stake in the company, according to these documents. Its chairman, Philipp Grabensee, sits on the Sedari board.
Here’s the complaint.

4 Comments Tagged: afilias, new gTLDs, new TLDs, rsmp, sedari

Go Daddy to advertise .co at the Super Bowl

Go Daddy plans to advertise .co domain names during the Super Bowl broadcast for the second year in a row.
The company has bought two 30-second slots during the show, one of which will plug .co and will feature celebrity spokesmodels Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels.
Scripts for both ads have been approved by NBC censors already, Go Daddy said.
It will be the eighth consecutive year the company has advertised during the inexplicably popular sporting event, which had a record-breaking 111 million US viewers this February.
The 2011 ad revealed Joan Rivers, her head spliced onto the body of a much younger glamor model, as the .co Go Daddy Girl.
I estimated at the time that .CO Internet took roughly 30,000 to 50,000 extra registrations due to the Super Bowl commercial.

3 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, go daddy, super bowl

.xxx to tackle piracy, child abuse and censorship

The International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the policy oversight group for .xxx domains, says it wants to help fight piracy, child abuse material and internet censorship.
Those are the three priorities to emerge from IFFOR’s inaugural two-day meeting last month, according to the organization. It has set up three working groups to look at the issues.
On filtering, a pretty hot topic given the various pieces of copyright-related legislation currently under consideration in the US and elsewhere, IFFOR said:

The filtering working group will review the state of global filtering laws, regulations and plans with a view to educating legislators and others about the advantages and effectiveness of user-defined filtering as opposed to mandated filtering or blocking at the ISP or router-level.

While there’s yet to be a proven case of an entire nation blocking .xxx domains, some countries have said they are considering it and I’ve heard several anecdotal cases of companies blocking the TLD.
IFFOR also said wants to find a way to help combat piracy “that can work across the entire dot-xxx registry” and is looking at both technical and legal measures.
The child abuse imagery working group, headed by veteran cyber-cop Sharon Girling, plans to work with existing third-party organizations on reporting and policy-making.
All three goals are self-evidently noble. Whether IFFOR will be able to make a noticeable impact on any will of course depend on what policies its working groups come up with.
IFFOR’s Policy Council comprises nine members: five from the porn industry, a free speech advocate, a child protection advocate, a security expert and an ICM Registry representative.

12 Comments Tagged: censorship, icm registry, iffor, piracy, xxx

Borders sells IPv4 addresses for $12 each

The bankrupt book shop chain Borders intends to sell its IPv4 addresses for $12 each, raising over $786,000, according to a bankruptcy court filing.
The deal, which is subject to approval by ARIN, follows Nortel’s fire sale of its address block to Microsoft for $11.25 per address earlier this year.
The buyer is Cerner, a healthcare software consulting company.
I’ve reported the story for The Register, here.
You can download a PDF of the relevant court document here.

Comment Tagged: borders, cerner, ipv4

Clash over new gTLD risk fund

The ICANN community is split along predictable lines – domain registries versus intellectual property interests – in the latest controversy to hit the new top-level domains policy-making.
ICANN’s board of directors will meet this week to decide the fate of its new gTLD failure risk fund, an expensive buffer designed to protect registrants if new gTLD registries go bust.
The current plan is to ask each new gTLD applicant to front the entire cost of three years’ operation with a Continuing Operations Instrument – either a letter of credit or cash in escrow.
The idea is that if they go out of business, funds will be available to pay an emergency registry operator to, in the worst case scenario, gracefully wind down the gTLD.
Registries and some potential applicants are not happy about this idea. They say that the COI imposes too great a cost on start-up registries, which could lead to more failed businesses.
Since smaller businesses may not be able to secure letters of credit, they’ll have to escrow hundreds of thousands of dollars, rather than using the money to make sure they don’t fail in the first place.
Registries have proposed an alternative – a Continued Operations Fund – which would see all applicants deposit a flat fee of $50,000 into a central risk pool that ICANN would manage.
An ICANN public comment period on the COF that closed on Friday revealed the anticipated level of opposition from business and IP interests.
The main concern is that the COF represents a transfer of wealth from rich companies, which would easily and cheaply qualify for a letter of credit, to less well-funded applicants.
The COF “seeks to subsidize certain registry operators instead of allowing the market itself (via letter of credit based upon applicant viability) to determine the level of risk for each applicant”, Claudio DiGangi of the International Trademark Association wrote.
Steve Metalitz, president of ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency, echoed INTA’s concerns, adding the IPC’s suspicions about why the COF has been proposed:

[The COF] allows more underfunded applicants into the application pool which will in turn lead to more registry failures, cost to ICANN, and poor outcomes for registrants. While this may be good in the short term for members of the Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG) who desire to provide backend services to such underfunded applicants, the short term economic gain of members of one SG should not be prioritized over the risks to registrants and ICANN that the COF represents

One member of the IPC has suggested that if ICANN were to introduce a COF now, it would give opponents of the new gTLD program grounds to sue, under California insurance law, to put it to a halt.
On the pro-COF side, .org manger the Public Interest Registry said that the current COI plan discourages companies for applying for new gTLDs, which is at odds with ICANN’s goals of increasing competition in the registry space.
PIR’s director of policy Paul Diaz also points out that letters of credit will be hard to come by for companies in certain countries, which may lead to less geographically diverse applicants.
Somewhat surprisingly, Minds + Machines CEO Antony Van Couvering, perhaps sensing which way the wind is blowing at ICANN, has reluctantly backed the original COI model, but suggests a “simple short-term fix” to reduce the cost to applicants.
When determining the amount of the COI, applicants should be free to base it on their own “worst case scenario” registration volume projections, rather than their “most likely” models, on the basis that registries are unlikely to go out of business if they meet their revenue targets:

Presumably if you’re hitting your numbers you’re in good shape financially. It’s the low numbers you have to worry about. Setting the amount of the COI at this more reasonable and likely threshold will take care of the vast majority of failures.

ICANN only received comments from eight people on the COF proposal, and unsurprisingly they’re all (with one possible exception) looking out for their own financial interests.
Without a crystal ball, deciding which model will be “best” for the new gTLD program is a very tough call, but ICANN’s board of directors is expected to do so on Thursday.

3 Comments Tagged: cof, coi, ebero, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs

YouPorn imposes embargo on .xxx sites

Manwin, the company behind YouPorn, has stepped up its fight against ICM Registry by saying it will not do business with any .xxx web site.
Reported in the adult press this weekend, the ban seems to extend to webmasters hoping to promote their sites on Manwin’s “tube” sites, including YouPorn.
It also won’t allow its content to be used on .xxx sites, according to Xbiz.
Manwin is of course already suing ICM and ICANN under US monopoly laws, and has demanded an ICANN independent review, claiming the .xxx launch amounted to “extortion”.
The domain YouPorn.xxx is currently on ICM’s Registry Reserved list, meaning it was not acquired during sunrise and will not become available when .xxx opens its doors on Tuesday.
YouPorn is one of the web’s top 100 sites, according to Alexa.

11 Comments Tagged: antitrust, ICANN, icm registry, irp, manwin, xxx, youporn

US Senate to hold new gTLDs hearing

A US Senate committee is to hold a hearing into ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program next Thursday.
The Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will “examine the merits and implications of this new program and ICANN’s continuing efforts to address concerns raised by the Internet community.”
It will be webcast on the Committee’s web site.
It is believed to have been scheduled due to lobbying by the Association of National Advertisers, which has an ongoing campaign to put a stop to the new gTLD program.
It will follow a similar hearing by the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet in May, which was used to vent outrage about the program but ultimately delivered nothing.
(Note: this story has been updated from the originally posted version to reflect information contained in the official announcement.)

4 Comments Tagged: ana, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, senate

The world’s newest TLD – ICANN approves .sx

ICANN’s board of directors has finally approved .sx, the new country-code top-level domain for newly autonomous Dutch territory Sint Maarten.
In an unexpected non-meeting earlier this week, the board voted to delegate .sx to SX Registry, a joint venture of Luxembourg registry startup OpenRegistry and Canadian registrar MediaFusion.
The vote had been delayed from the board’s meeting in October as SX Registry went through the required pre-delegation motions with ICANN’s IANA department.
Sint Maarten was created in October 2010 when the Netherlands Antilles (.an) split into three separate territories.
The ccTLD .cw for Curacao was assigned to the University of the Netherlands Antilles in October this year, but .bq for Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba, has yet to be delegated.
The legacy .an domain is scheduled to be decommissioned before October 2014.

4 Comments Tagged: .sx, cctlds, iana, ICANN, openregistry, sint maarten, sx registry

ICANN says sorry for crappy hotel complaint

ICANN has apologized to the government of Senegal for its uppity letter of complaint about a hotel used for its recent Dakar meeting.
As I blogged (with sarcasm) earlier this week, ICANN marketing chief Barbara Clay had written to Senegal’s telecommunications minister Moustapha Guirassy to complain that the Hotel des Almadies was not up to the expected standards.
The poor service “damaged ICANN’s reputation as well as the reputation of the Hotel and Senegal”, the letter, which has since been removed from ICANN’s web site (read it here), stated.
Clay has now written to Guirassy to apologize. The letter (pdf) reads:

The letter was sent without appropriate clearance by ICANN’s leadership and so it was not an official statement of ICANN’s position.
ICANN’s leadership, and indeed the entire ICANN community, deeply appreciate the generosity shown by Senegal in hosting our 42nd public meeting. ICANN’s leadership – and I personally – truly regret any embarrassment or distress my letter may have caused you or the Government of Senegal.
I hope you will accept this sincere expression of regret.

The $124-a-night Almadies came in for a torrent of complaints from ICANN’s At Large Advisory Committee and others due to the substandard rooms, poor wifi, rats, smells and lack of security.

2 Comments Tagged: dakar, ICANN, senegal