ARI confirms place in Big Four with 161 gTLD bids

ARI Registry Services has signed up to provide registry services for 161 new generic top-level domain applications.
The announcement this morning confirms that the domain name industry now has a Big Four – at least – set of dominant gTLD back-end providers.
ARI said it has signed 85 generic, 70 brand and 6 geographic gTLDs applications. CEO Adrian Kinderis said in a statement:

Non-disclosure statements restrict me from revealing our full client list at this point in time, but what I can say is that our technology will support some of the world’s largest and most recognised brands within the electronics, media, telecommunications, automotive and banking segments.

The company, part of the AusRegistry Group, was previously only known for its .au registry and some software consulting work on internationalized ccTLDs. It had expected 100 gTLD clients.
In Verisign’s most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, it has started identifying ARI as one of its key competitors, along with Neustar and Afilias.
Verisign is providing the back-end for 220 applications.
Neustar and Afilias have not yet announced their respective numbers. I expect both figures could quite easily be higher, but maybe not a great deal higher, than Verisign’s.
Top Level Domain Holdings also has not revealed numbers for Minds + Machines, but that’s a slightly different model due to the fact that M+M will also be the applicant in many cases.
With about 1,900 new gTLD applications filed, and barring any surprise back-end announcements, we could well be looking at hundreds of gTLD applications that propose a self-managed registry.

Comment Tagged: ari registry services, ausregistry, ICANN, new gTLDs

As new gTLDs enter a new phase, the first wave of announcements crashes

Go Daddy, Web.com and the Public Interest Registry were among the first to reveal their new generic top-level domain plans as ICANN’s new gTLD program enters the “reveal” phase.
Announcements from several companies were timed to closely coincide with the closure of ICANN’s TLD Application System at a minute before midnight UTC last night.
After a false start (false end?) on April 12, and weeks of subsequent procrastination, the end of the new gTLD application window seems to have gone off without a hitch.
We’re now entering a new phase of the program, one which is expected to hold far fewer secrets.
Between now and the official Big Reveal, currently targeted for June 13, I’m expecting a deluge of announcements from new gTLD applicants, no longer scared of encouraging competitive bids.
Any company with any hope of standing out from the crowd of almost 2,000 applications needs to make its presence felt as loudly and as early as possible.
.web
The first to do so was number-three registrar Web.com, owner of Network Solutions and Register.com, which confirmed its long-expected bid for .web shortly before midnight.
It’s one of many companies with a claim to the gTLD, in what is certain to be a fiercely fought contention set.
The firm reckons, dubiously, that it has rights due to its trademark on Web.com, which I predict will be anything but a slam dunk argument when it comes to a Legal Rights Objection.
“We believe we possess the natural platform from which to successfully market the new .WEB top level domain since we are the sole owner of the Web.com trademark as issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office,” CEO David Brown said.
I wonder what the other 300 or so owners of web.[tld] domain names think about that.
.bank and .insurance
The Association of National Bankers and the Financial Services Roundtable, both US trade groups for the banking industry, provided the first post-TAS announcement to hit my inbox, at 0006 UTC.
The groups have confirmed their joint bids for .bank and .insurance, having wisely decided against the less SEO-friendly, less intuitive .banking, .invest, .investment, and .insure.
These proposed gTLDs will be secured and restricted, but they still face the substantial risk of objections from European banking regulators.
There’s also one other unconfirmed .bank applicant.
.home and .casa
Go Daddy has also revealed its two applications, giving the scoop to Domain Name Wire. It’s applied for .home and the Spanish translation, .casa, in addition to the previously announced .godaddy.
While they look benign on the face of it, I’m expecting .home to face opposition on technical grounds.
It’s on DI PRO’s list of frequently requested invalid TLDs, due to the amount of traffic it already gets from misconfigured routers.
Go Daddy may also face competition scrutiny if it wants to act as a registry and registrar, given its overwhelming dominance of the registrar market.
Both applications are also likely to find themselves in contention sets.
.ngo and .ong
The Public Interest Registry cleverly got its .ngo and .ong bids some big-readership attention a few hours ago by letting Mashable think it was getting a scoop. Ahem.
To be fair, the .ong application – a translation of .ngo for Spanish, French and Italian markets – was news. Both will target non-governmental organizations, of which there are millions.
The .ong bid stands a reasonable chance of being challenged due to its visual similarity with .org – which PIR already manages – but ICANN’s similarity tool only gives it a score of 63%.
.cloud and .global
Finally this morning, CloudNames announced applications for .cloud and .global, two unrestricted gTLDs being pitched explicitly as alternatives to .com, .biz and .info.
“A .cloud domain will allow businesses and individuals to have their own cloud on the Internet. Likewise, a .global domain will allow businesses to secure a position on an international level,” CEO Rolf Larsen said in a statement.
They’re the first examples of both strings to be announced, but CloudNames expects them both to be contested. I suspect the buzzy .cloud will be the harder to obtain.

Comment Tagged: .bank, .casa, .cloud, .home, .insurance, .ngo, .ong, .web, aba, cloudnames, fsr, go daddy, ICANN, new gTLDs, pir, public interest registry, web.com

Olympic domain watch list shows hundreds of squats, legit names too

Lawyers for the International Olympic Committee have released a list of hundreds of domain names allegedly cybersquatting the Olympic trademark, all registered in just a couple of weeks.
But as well as showing that there are hundreds of idiots out there, the list also sheds light on substantial numbers of apparently legitimate uses of the word “olympic” by small businesses.
The insight comes from two weekly zone file monitoring reports, compiled for the IOC by Thomson Compumark, which were circulated to an ICANN working group this week.
There are about 300 domains on the lists. At first glance, it looks like the IOC has a serious problem on its hands.
According to IOC outside counsel Jim Bikoff:

These unauthorized registrations–often for pornographic, phishing, gambling or parked sites–dilute and tarnish the Olympic trademarks, and attempt to exploit for commercial gain the good will created by the Olympic Movement. The unauthorized domains already oblige the IOC and its National Olympic Committees to expend significant amounts of time and money on monitoring and enforcement activities.

Based on a perusal of the lists and a non-exhaustive, non-scientific sampling of the sites the domains lead to, I’d say a comfortable majority are fairly straightforward cases of bad faith.
I couldn’t find any porn or phishing, but most of the domains I checked either do not resolve or resolve to placeholder or parking pages. If they resolved to a developed site, it was usually a splog.
However, a non-trivial minority of the domains are being used by apparently legitimate small businesses that have absolutely no connection to sports whatsoever.
Check out, for example, olympic-grill.com, olympicautorecycling.com, olympicbuildersgc.com, olympicco.com, olympiclandscapes.com, olympicrollingshutters.com, or olympicpromotions.info.
These are domains all apparently registered in the same week, and all appear to be kosher uses of domain names (though the logo choice at olympicpromotions.info is just begging for trouble).
A fair number of the domains on the list appear to be re-registrations of domains that have previously expired, judging by historical Whois records.
One would imagine that if there was value in cybersquatting a nice-looking domain such as 2012olympicstickets.com, for example, the former squatter probably wouldn’t have let it go.
Perhaps the “best” typo I found on the list, ollympics.com, is registered to a British guy called Olly. Assuming that’s his actual name, it seems like pretty good evidence of good faith.
The IOC, incidentally, has only ever filed 15 UDRP cases, on average fewer than two per year, so claims about spending “significant amounts” on enforcement are questionable.

1 Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, ICANN, ioc, london 2012, new gTLDs, olympics, udrp

As TAS closes, ICANN reveals new gTLD runway

ICANN has confirmed plans to open up the next phase of its new generic top-level domain program next week.
The controversial “digital archery” process, used to assign priority batches to applications, will begin June 8 and end June 28, according to a statement issued in the early hours of this morning.
That means digital archery will close the same day as ICANN’s public meeting in Prague ends.
The results of the batching will not be revealed until July 11.
And ICANN has confirmed that June 13 is indeed the date for the Big Reveal, when details of all the applications will be published for public perusal, as we reported Friday.
That would make June 12 or thereabouts the deadline for getting a full $185,000 refund.
Applicants have until a minute before midnight UTC tonight to finalize their applications if they have not done so already. Then, the TLD Application System closes for at least a few years.
Surprisingly, as many as a quarter of the anticipated 2,000+ applications were not yet complete as of last night, according to ICANN.

As of today, over 500 applications remain incomplete in TAS – either a complete application has not been submitted, and/or the full fee has not been paid. If you have not completed your application, we urge you to do so in TAS as quickly as possible.

Let’s hope the upgrades ICANN made to TAS are sufficient to handle a hammering today as so many applicants log in to the system.

Comment Tagged: batching, digital archery, ICANN, new gTLDs, reveal

New gTLD reveal day is probably June 13

ICANN is set to reveal its list of new generic top-level domain applications on or around June 13, according to several sources.
My understanding is that the date has not yet been set in stone – it could be a day or so either side – but that June 13 is the current target.
The unveiling of all 2,000+ applications is expected to be accompanied by a press conference and panel discussion in London, both of which will be webcast for those unable to attend in person.
Confirming the venue for this event is, I believe, one of the factors contributing to the current uncertainty about the date.
A June 13 date means that the “digital archery” batching process will – barring unforeseen circumstances – kick off at some point during the first two weeks of June and end after the reveal.
ICANN said earlier this week that the archery process will start before reveal day and will last for three weeks.

1 Comment Tagged: batching, digital archery, ICANN, new gTLDs, reveal

ICANN is about as fast as a pregnant elephant

Making a binding policy at ICANN takes about the same amount of time as gestating a human fetus, but only when the organization and community are working at their absolute fastest.
It’s much more often comparable to an elephant pregnancy.
That’s according to a timetable researched by ICANN senior policy director Marika Konings and circulated to the GNSO Council this week.
Konings found that the latest iteration of the GNSO’s Policy Development Process has to last for a bare minimum of 263 days, three days shorter than the average human pregnancy.
However, that deadline would only be met if ICANN staff were fully resourced, all community participants were firing on all cylinders, and there was full agreement about the policy from the outset.
That’s obviously a completely fanciful, largely theoretical scenario.
The more realistic estimated average time for a PDP to run to completion – from the GNSO Council kick-starting the process with a request for an Issue Report to the ICANN board voting to approve or reject the policy – is 620 days, Konings found.
That’s slightly slower than the gestation period of an Asian elephant.
In other words, if some hypothetical policy work were to start in the GNSO today, we could not reasonably expect to see an outcome one way or the other until February 3, 2014.
Konings’ findings were accompanied by an assessment of eight relatively recent PDPs, which took between 415 days and 1,073 days to reach a board vote. The median time was 639 days.
Some GNSO Councilors think ICANN needs a fast-track PDP for no-brainer policies. I tend to agree.

3 Comments Tagged: gnso, ICANN, pdp

OpenSRS now offering .jobs and .aero

Tucows has started offering .jobs and .aero domain names through its OpenSRS reseller channel.
According to a blog posting, resellers will have to opt in to offering these gTLDs. Prices are $125/year for .jobs and $50/year for .aero.
It’s potentially good news for both registries, particularly .jobs. Both are restricted, sponsored gTLDs, but .jobs has a much less strict set of entry requirements than .aero.
The OpenSRS network has about 11,000 resellers, according to the company, which is largely responsible for Tucows being the third-largest ICANN-accredited registrar by domain volume.

2 Comments Tagged: .aero, .jobs, employ media, opensrs, tucows

June .nxt conference canceled

The .nxt conference on new generic top-level domains, planned for London next month, has been postponed until later this year, the organizers have announced.
.nxt CEO Kieren McCarthy blamed the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the new gTLD program timetable following ICANN’s six-week TLD Application System outage.
McCarthy wrote on the .nxt web site:

Our main goal for this conference is to give a comprehensive overview of the new gTLD process, including: providing an understanding of this new market; assisting applicants in moving forward; learning lessons from the past; and giving everyone a significant new industry an opportunity to meet, debate and network. We just don’t feel this is going to be possible for the 20-22 June timeframe.
…
We gave serious consideration to running the conference despite the lack of information and tight timeline but decided in the end it would be better for everyone to hold a conference that was in a position to achieve its aims.

The conference had already signed up almost twice the number of attendees than the previous two San Francisco-based events (which were in the 150-200 range), according to McCarthy.
Tickets for the June event will be honored for the rescheduled .nxt, which is likely to happen in the late third or early fourth quarter, he said.
People who booked hotels through official channels will get a full refund, but those who made their own arrangements will have to make their own cancellations.

1 Comment Tagged: .nxt

New gTLD applicant asks for money back

At least one new generic top-level domain applicant has requested a full $185,000 refund of its application fee, according to ICANN.
This exchange is from last night’s Twitter chat with ICANN executives:

@icann Has anyone asked for a refund yet? #icannchat

— Kevin Murphy (@DomainIncite) May 22, 2012

A11: As of last night we had received two new requests for refund since full refund offer: one for $185k & one for $5K #newgTLD #ICANNchat

— ICANN (@ICANN) May 22, 2012

It’s interesting that the answer was qualified with “since full refund offer”, suggesting there may have been more requests for refunds prior to ICANN’s decision to up the maximum refund from $180,000 to $185,000.
It’s not known which applicant asked for the refund or why.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, new gTLDs, refund

Chinese DDoS knocks 123-reg offline

Customers of major UK domain registrar 123-reg suffered a couple of hours of downtime this afternoon due to an apparently “massive” denial of service attack.
The attack targeted its DNS servers and originated in China, according to a report in The Register.
Users reported sites offline or with spotty availability, but the company managed to mitigate the effects of the attack fairly quickly. It’s now reporting mostly normal service.
123-reg, part of the Host Europe Group, has hundreds of thousands of domains under management in the gTLD space alone.

Comment Tagged: 123-reg, ddos, host europe, security