Google loses Goggle.com cybersquatting complaint

File this one under: “Good for UDRP, terrible for internet users.”
Google has managed to lose a cybersquatting complaint over the domain name goggle.com, after a National Arbitration Forum panel declined to consider the case.
Goggle.com, like so many other typos of the world’s most-popular sites, is currently being used to get people to sign up to expensive text messaging services via bogus surveys and competitions.
As Domain Name Wire reported when the complaint was filed, up until recently the site was using a confusingly similar style to Google’s familiar look and feel.
It’s got bad faith written all over it.
But “goggle” it is also a genuine English word.
And it turns out that the previous owner of goggle.com, Knowledge Associates, had entered into a “co-existence relationship” with Google that enabled it to operate the domain without fear of litigation.
The current owner was able to present NAF with documentation showing that this right may have been transferred when he bought the domain.
So the three-person NAF panel decided not to consider the complaint, concluding: “this case is foremost a business and/or contractual dispute between two companies that falls outside the scope of the Policy.”
The panel wrote:

Does the Co-existence Agreement apply to the disputed domain names? Does Respondent stand in the shoes of the original registrant? Does the consent of Complainant extend in time to the current actions of Respondent and in person to the Respondent? Has the Respondent complied with the obligations of the original registrant? Does the “no public statements” provision in the Co-existence Agreement prohibit its disclosure or use as a defense by Respondent?
These are factual and legal issues that go far beyond the scope of the Policy.
These are factual and legal issues that must be resolved before any consideration of confusing similarity, legitimate rights and interest, and bad faith under the Policy can be made.

This means that the current registrant gets to keep the domain, and to keep making cash from what in the vast majority of cases are likely to be clumsy typists.
Google now of course can either decide to pay off the registrant, or take him to court.
The registrant, David Csumrik, was represented by Zak Muscovitch.

6 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, goggle.com, google, naf, udrp

Black Hawk Down writer pens domain name book

Worm — The First Digital World War, a new book from Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden, has a surprising cast of characters culled partially from the domain name industry.
The non-fiction hardback, released this month, covers the fight against the Conficker worm, which heavily leveraged DNS to spread when it arrived on the scene three years ago.
A glance inside at Amazon shows the dramatis personæ include then-CEO of ICANN Paul Twomey, Internet Systems Consortium chair Paul Vixie and Alice’s Registry founder Rick Wesson.
Conficker, you may recall, used algorithmically generated domain names to propagate. The coordinated effort aimed at stopping it worked in part by preemptively registering those domains.
Making a readable techno-thriller out of a bunch of geeks bickering sounds like a tough call. I’ve ordered a copy, and it will be interesting to see whether Bowden pulled it off.
In the meantime, I think some harmless speculation about the movie adaptation is called for.
For Twomey, I’m thinking Russell Crowe…

2 Comments Tagged: conficker, mark bowden, worm

VeriSign’s .com takedown power grab causing controversy

VeriSign’s request for a wide-ranging set of powers that would enable it to shut down .com and .net domain names that are suspected of abuse is already attracting criticism.
The proposals came in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request to ICANN that I reported on for The Register this morning.
It’s asking (pdf) to be able to create a new anti-abuse policy that would refocus many of the controls currently in the hands of registrars to the registry level instead.
The policy would “allow the denial, cancellation or transfer” of any VeriSign-managed domain if any any of these conditions were triggered:

(a) to protect the integrity, security and stability of the DNS;
(b) to comply with any applicable court orders, laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency, or any dispute resolution process;
(c) to avoid any liability, civil or criminal, on the part of Verisign, as well as its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers, directors, and employees;
(d) per the terms of the registration agreement,
(e) to respond to or protect against any form of malware (defined to include, without limitation, malicious code or software that might affect the operation of the Internet),
(f) to comply with specifications adopted by any industry group generally recognized as authoritative with respect to the Internet (e.g., RFCs),
(g) to correct mistakes made by Verisign or any Registrar in connection with a domain name registration, or
(h) for the non-payment of fees to Verisign. Verisign also reserves the right to place upon registry lock, hold or similar status a domain name during resolution of a dispute;

As you can see, that’s a pretty broad range of justifications.
Notably, it would enable a domain to be canceled or transferred at the “requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency”, which would seem to circumvent the current practice of a court order being obtained before a domain is seized.
The question of what constitutes a “quasi-governmental agency” is also interesting. Is ICANN itself such a thing?
The policy would also enable a take-down “to avoid any liability, civil or criminal”, which seems to be just begging for VeriSign to be named spuriously in commercial lawsuits between .com registrants.
The RSEP also suggests that VeriSign plans to extend its hand of friendship to law enforcement agencies from outside the US:

Pilots with European Law Enforcement, Government CERTS and Registrars are planned, and other global test pilots will follow, to ensure global collaboration in the continuing development of the procedures.

Today, US agencies can get court orders instructing VeriSign to hand over domains. While imposing US law on .com owners from other countries is controversial, at least overseas registrants know where they stand.
Now VeriSign is talking about cooperating with European law enforcement agencies too.
At the risk of getting dangerously close to invoking Godwin’s Law, this brings us back to an old jurisdictional problem – what if the French police demand the seizure of a .com site selling Nazi memorabilia, which is illegal in France but legal in the US, for example?
Taking it a step further, what if VeriSign starts entertaining takedown requests from some of the world’s least pleasant theocracies, banana republics and dictatorships?
Half of .com could disappear overnight.
Since VeriSign has a business to run, that’s obviously not going to happen. So the company is going to have to draw a line somewhere, separating criminality from legitimate behavior and free speech.
I’m speculating wildly here, of course, but the RSEP doesn’t contain nearly enough detailed information about VeriSign’s proposed procedures to make a more informed analysis.
VeriSign knows what it is proposing is controversial. The RSEP says:

Registrants may be concerned about an improper takedown of a legitimate website. Verisign will be offering a protest procedure to support restoring a domain name to the zone.

The proposals have been made following many months of discussions between registries, registrars, law enforcement agencies and other community stakeholders.
It’s not entirely clear from VeriSign’s RSEP, which sometimes confusingly conflates the abuse policy with a separate proposed malware scanning service, how a takedown notice would be processed.
One likely reading is that VeriSign would act almost like a centralized clearinghouse for takedown requests, forwarding them to individual registrars for enforcement.
The registrars could be obliged by the terms of an amended Registry-Registrar Agreement to follow whatever process had been laid down.
There seems to be some concern in the ICANN community about this.
ICANN senior VP of stakeholder relations Kurt Pritz recently sent a document to PIR’s David Maher and Oversee.net’s Mason Cole outlining the procedure for amending the RRA.
The flowchart (pdf) describes a trilateral negotiation between the registry proposing the change, the Registrars Stakeholder Group and ICANN, with the ICANN board having the ultimate decision-making authority.
However this proceeds through ICANN, it’s going to cause some heated community debate.

4 Comments Tagged: ICANN, rsep, seizures, takedown, verisign

ANA finds SEO more effective than Facebook

Advertisers are “beginning to question the effectiveness” of social media marketing, but they’re still mostly sold on the benefits of search engine optimization.
That’s according to a new study from the Association of National Advertisers, the results of which have just been published.
The ANA’s survey of 92 marketers gave SEO an “effectiveness rating” of 52%, the highest rating given to any of the six categories respondents were asked to comment on.
However, that represented a decline of three percentage points from a similar survey in 2009.
Social networking sites (presumably including Facebook, although names were not named) received an effectiveness rating of 28%, up from 17% two years ago, ANA reported.
SEO and social sites were used in marketing by 88% and 89% of respondents respectively.
ANA president Bob Liodice said in a press release:

While marketers have substantially increased their use of newer media platforms over the past few years, they are beginning to question the effectiveness of some of these vehicles. The ANA survey indicates a strong willingness by marketers to integrate innovative new approaches into their marketing mix; however, this enthusiasm is tempered by concerns regarding the return-on-investment of these emerging options.

While it’s all speculation at this point, SEO improvements are often pointed to as a potential (and I stress: potential) benefit of new dot-brand or category-killer top-level domains.
The ANA is the current opponent-in-chief of ICANN’s new gTLD program.

Comment Tagged: ana, association of national advertisers, facebook, ICANN, new gTLDs, seo

Corsica seeks new gTLD registry operator

The local government of the French island of Corsica is looking for contractors to apply for and manage a .corsica top-level domain.
The Executive Council of the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse issued an RFP in late September. The deadline for responses is October 17, a week from now.
The desired string appears to be the Anglicized .corsica, rather than the French .corse.
Corsica, situated in the Mediterranean, is one of France’s 22 official regions. According to Wikipedia, it has slightly more political power than its mainland counterparts.
Under ICANN’s new gTLD application rules, geographical strings need the approval of the relevant local government before they can be accepted.
I expect any .corsica application would need a letter of support or non-objection from the French national government as well as the Corsican executive, before it is approved.
(via Jean Guillon)

Comment Tagged: Corsica, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, rfp

ICANN hunts for anti-cybersquatting database provider

ICANN is in the process of looking for an operator for the Trademark Clearinghouse that will play a crucial brand protection role in new top-level domains.
An RFI published last week says that ICANN is looking for an exclusive contractor, but that it may consider splitting the deal between two companies — one to provide trademark validation services and the other to manage the database.
The TMCH is basically a big database of validated trademarks that registrars/registries will have to integrate with. It will be an integral part of any new gTLD launch.
Registries are obliged by ICANN rules to hold a sunrise period and a Trademark Claims service when they go live, both of which leverage the clearinghouse’s services.
Rather than having to submit proof of trademark rights to each gTLD operator, brand owners will only have to be validated by the TMCH in order to be pre-validated by all gTLDs.
I estimate that the contract is worth a few million dollars a year, minimum.
If the ongoing .xxx sunrise period is any guide, we might be looking at a database of some 30,000 to 40,000 trademark registrations in the first year of the TMCH.
One potential TMCH provider currently charges $100 for the initial first-year validation and a recurring $70 for re-validation in subsequent years.
ICANN has not ruled out the successful TMCH provider selling add-on services too.
But the organization also seems to be at pains to ensure that the clearinghouse is not seen as another gouge on the trademark industry.
The RFI contains questions such as: “How can it be assured that you will not maximize your registrations at the expense of security, quality, and technical and operational excellence?”
The two providers that immediately spring to mind as RFI respondents are IProta and the Clearinghouse for Intellectual Property (CHIP).
Belgium-based CHIP arguably has the most institutional experience. It’s handled sunrise periods for Somalia’s .so, the .asia IDN sunrise, a few pseudo-gTLD initiatives from the likes of CentralNIC (de.com, us.org, etc), and is signed up to do the same for .sx.
Its chief architect, Bart Lieben of the law firm Crowell & Moring, is also well-known in the industry for his work on several sunrise period policies.
IProta is a newer company, founded in London this year by Jonathan Robinson, an industry veteran best known for co-founding corporate domain registrar Group NBT.
The company is currently managing the .xxx sunrise period, which is believed to be the highest-volume launch since .eu in late 2005.
“IPRota is very well positioned on the basis of our recent and past experience so I think we almost certainly will go ahead and respond,” Robinson confirmed to DI.
Domain name registries and registrars could conceivably also apply, based on their experience handling high-volume transactional databases and their familiarity with the EPP protocol.
ICANN sees the potential for conflicts of interest — its RFI anticipates that any already-contracted party applying to run the TMCH will have to impose a Chinese wall to reduce that risk.
The RFI is open for responses until November 25. ICANN intends to name its selected provider February 14, a month after it starts accepting new gTLD applications.
This is another reason, in my view, why submitting an application in January may not be the smartest move in the world.

1 Comment Tagged: chip, ICANN, iprota, new gTLDs, new TLDs, tmch, trademark clearinghouse

IFFOR hires McCarthy to handle .xxx outreach

Kieren McCarthy, CEO of the .nxt new top-level domains conference, has reportedly joined the International Foundation For Online Responsibility to manage policy communications.
IFFOR is the sponsoring organization for ICM Registry’s new gTLD, responsible for setting the policies that will govern .xxx domain names.
ICM’s opponents in the Free Speech Coalition fear IFFOR, claiming it will be both toothless in the light of ICM’s “veto power” over policies (which ICM disputes) and dangerous to .xxx domain holders.
As well as outreach, McCarthy will be tasked with “developing the tools through which Internet community members and IFFOR Policy Council members can reach consensus positions”, according to Xbiz.
He has the right background. He’s the former general manager for public participation at ICANN, and lately one of its fiercest critics. More recently, he’s also done some consulting work for ICM.
Hopefully one of his first actions at IFFOR will be to add DI to the press release mailing list, so I don’t have to source Xbiz the next time the organization has news to report.

2 Comments Tagged: .nxt, free speech coalition, icm registry, iffor, international foundation for online responsibility, xxx

Pirates set up domain seizure workaround

Movie and music pirates are setting up alternative DNS services to help users work around the government seizure of domain names.
A new service, BlockAid.me, launched an open beta at the end of September. It’s currently being promoted prominently on at least one major movie/music/games-sharing site.
The site encourages internet users to reconfigure their computers to use BlockAid’s DNS servers. That way, if a domain name used by a piracy web site is seized by law enforcement, BlockAid will be able to direct surfers to the original owner’s IP address more or less transparently.
This is exactly what the experts predicted would happen.
Ever since the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency started seizing domain names associated with pirated content and US politicians have been discussing legislation to streamline the process, workarounds have been expected.
In May, DNS experts including Paul Vixie, Dan Kaminsky and now-ICANN chair Steve Crocker said that the Protect-IP Act in the US would persuade many users to switch to offshore DNS servers.
They warned that this would lead to a rise in cybercrime against consumers, as disreputable or insecure DNS providers send surfers to spoofs of banks and other sensitive sites.
While there’s no reason to believe the BlockAid project has this kind of nefarious activity in mind, if the idea catches on it’s probably inevitable that a similar service operated by crooks will emerge eventually.
Amusingly, BlockAid’s web site says that it may financially support itself in future by showing ad-laden web pages instead of returning NXDOMAIN errors, a much-criticized money-making tactic many ISPs already use.
Note also that the .me registry is managed by Afilias, a heavily US-based company, which likely makes BlockAid.me just as vulnerable to seizure as any .com address.

10 Comments Tagged: blockaid.me, piracy, protect ip, proxies

Domain Registry of America still slamming, still scamming

Domain name slamming is alive and well in the ICANN-accredited registrar community.
I’ve just received a letter in the mail offering me the chance to transfer and renew domainincite.com for the knock-down price of £25 ($38) a year.
It’s Domain Registry of America again, still slamming almost a decade after it was first sued for the completely unethical practice of conning people into transferring their domain names.
The letter looks like a renewal notice. Besides ostensibly coming from “Domain Renewal Group”, it also contains the prominent text “Domain Name Renewal Service”.
Domain Renewal Group and Domain Registry of America are one and the same – fronts for the ICANN-accredited registrar Brandon Gray Internet Services Inc, dba NameJuice.com.
The letter, as you can see from the scan, is a little less bogus than the ones DROA started sending out back in 2001. The text states now much more clearly that “this is not a bill”.
But domain slamming has always relied upon people not reading the letter properly and/or not understanding the intricacies of domain transfers, and this is no different.
DROA’s business depends upon its letters finding their way into the hands of gullible individual registrants or accounting departments that will blindly pay official-looking notices.
At the prices the company charges – pretty much the most expensive in the industry – very few people will have transferred their domains because they thought they were getting a good deal.
There have been numerous complaints and lawsuits against DROA over the last decade.
In November 2009, the UK Advertising Standards Agency found DROA in breach of truthfulness and honesty guidelines for a substantially similar mailshot and ruled:

The mailing must not appear again in its current form.

And last year, the .ca registry CIRA terminated Domain Registry of Canada, another Brandon Gray front, for slamming .ca registrants using the same methods.
So isn’t it about time ICANN shut these muppets down too?
Unfortunately, ICANN can only use contracts to enforce compliance, and I’m not sure there are any sticks in the 2001 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that it can use to beat them.
DROA has plainly breached Go Daddy’s Whois access policy by slamming me (the letter was sent to my Whois billing address, not my actual residence), but I don’t think there’s much Go Daddy can do about that short of suing.
As far as I can tell, Brandon Gray, which has about 130,000 domains under management, got its ICANN accreditation in about 2003. It was previously an eNom reseller.
So its accreditation is probably going to be up for renewal within the next couple of years.
Fortunately, ICANN has just this week introduced stricter new accreditation application rules that are specifically designed to weed out the scumbags.
Any company or individual with a track record of dishonesty is no longer welcome at ICANN.
So if there’s nothing that can be done before then, at the very least when Brandon Gray’s accreditation expires ICANN should not renew it.
What’s more, other registrars should lean on ICANN to make sure Brandon Gray is shown the door. It’s been bringing their industry into disrepute for the best part of a decade and it’s time for it to stop.

19 Comments Tagged: brandon gray internet services, domain registry of america, domain registry of canada, domain renewals group, go daddy, ICANN, slamming

ICANN to hire conflict of interest experts

ICANN is to bring in ethics experts to advise it on its conflicts of interest policy, addressing the ongoing controversy over its former chairman’s move to the domain industry.
The organization plans to “engage an external firm with expertise in advising on ethical issues”, according to the minutes of a September 15 meeting of its Board Governance Committee.
The consultants will be tasked with helping to “develop an ICANN Ethics Regime or set of Guidelines for the Board, the staff and the community.”
ICANN has been faced recently with calls to impose post-employment restrictions on board members and staff, in order to prevent a “revolving door” between it and the industry it essentially regulates.
This follows former chairman Peter Dengate Thrush’s move to new gTLD applicant Minds + Machines just a few weeks after voting to approve the new gTLD program.
Senator Ron Wyden and the Association of National Advertisers are among those making the call, and the US Department of Commerce, which oversees ICANN, appears to have heard it.
But as I reported earlier in the week, it may actually be illegal for ICANN, as a California corporation, to contractually ban employees from joining domain name companies after they quit.
However, the BGC has other ideas about how to strengthen ethics without imposing these potentially problematic employment restrictions.
It’s now talking about a ethics policy with “disclosure and abstention requirements” for directors “surrounding future interests or potential future interests”.
While the policy has yet to be written, one can imagine a scenario in which an ICANN director would be prevented from voting on a policy that would be likely to enrich them in a future job.
Cherine Chalaby, Bill Graham and Ray Plzak are the BGC members who will be leading the board discussions, which are expected to continue in Dakar later this month.
The ethics issue was first raised publicly by ICANN president Rod Beckstrom during his opening address at the Singapore meeting in June — before the new gTLD vote and before Dengate Thrush’s departure.

1 Comment Tagged: ana, conflict of interest, dakar, ethics, ICANN, m+m, Minds + Machines