Architelos launches new gTLD anti-abuse tool

Architelos, having consulted on about 50 new gTLD applications, has refocused on its longer-term software-based game plan with the recent launch of a new anti-abuse tool for registries.
NameSentry is a software-as-a-service offering, currently being trialed by an undisclosed number of potential customers, designed to make it easier to track abusive domains.
Architelos gave us a demo of the web site yesterday.
The service integrates real-time data feeds from up to nine third-party blocklists – such as SURBL and SpamHaus – into one interface, enabling users to see how many domains in their TLD are flagged as abusive.
Users can then drill down to see why each domain has been flagged – whether it’s spamming, phishing, hosting malware, etc – and, with built-in Whois, which registrar is responsible for it.
There’s also the ability to generate custom abuse reports on the fly and to automate the sending of takedown notices to registrars.
CEO Alexa Raad and CTO Michael Young said the service can help streamline the abuse management workflow at TLD registries.
Currently, Architelos is targeting mainly ccTLDs – there’s more of them – but before too long it expects start signing new gTLD registries as they start coming online.
With many new gTLD applicants promising cleaner-than-clean zones, and with governments leaning on their ccTLDs in some countries, there could be some demand for services such as this.
NameSentry is priced on a subscription basis, based on the size of the TLD zone.

Tiny Russian registrar gets canned

ICANN is to terminate a Russian registrar’s accreditation.
Name For Name Inc, which was given a breach notice last month, is being shut down for basically failing to act as a registrar.
Verisign had already cut off its .com/.net registrar contract and the company was not managing names, providing Whois, or doing any of the other things registrars are supposed to.
Under normal circumstances, a termination sees a mass transfer of all the domains under management to a nominated registrar, but in Name For Name’s case I can’t see that happening.
The company only had five gTLD domain names under management, according to the latest count.
Its accreditation will be terminated September 6.
ICANN also this week issued a breach notice to Visesh Infotecnics (Signdomains.com), apparently as the result of a badly handled domain name hijacking.

How Uniregistry wants to make Whois “two-way”

If someone uses a Whois database to look up personal information such as your home address and phone number, wouldn’t it be nice to know a little something about them, too?
That’s the philosophy behind one of Uniregistry’s more interesting new gTLD policies, according to Frank Schilling, founder of the new new gTLD portfolio applicant.
Uniregistry has applied for dozens of gTLDs and says it has a “registrant-centered” outlook that extends to the mandatory thick Whois databases.
If its gTLDs are approved, the company will record the IP addresses of people doing Whois queries and make the records available to its registrants, Schilling said.
He suggested that Whois users may have to give up more info about themselves, in certain cases, too.
“To get certain pieces of information, you’ll have to agree to share some information about yourself,” Schilling said in an interview with DI yesterday.
Registrants would be able to view archived data about who’s been looking them up, which could help them during subsequent legal disputes about names, or during sales negotiations.
For domainers, this could be handy. Imagine you own the domain soft.drink and you receive a low-ball offer from a random stranger you suspect might be a proxy for a large corporation. Wouldn’t it be nice to know Coca-Cola has recently been checking out your Whois?
It’s going to be interesting to see how IP interests and law enforcement agencies – the two ICANN lobbies most deeply invested in Whois accuracy – react to Uniregistry turning the tables.

Schilling applies for “scores” of new gTLDs

Domaining icon Frank Schilling’s new venture, Uniregistry, has applied for “scores” of new generic top-level domains, “most” of which he expects to be contested.
Schilling won’t say exactly how many or which strings Uniregistry is pursuing, but he did reveal that while he is not going for .web, he will be in contention with Google for .lol.
“It’s closer to TLDH than Donuts,” Schilling told DI in an interview this evening, referring to the announcements of Top Level Domain Holdings’ 68 and Donuts’ 307 applications.
I’m guessing it’s around the 40 to 50 mark.
Despite the portfolio and Schilling’s history in domain investing, Uniregistry isn’t what you might call a “domainer” play.
The company doesn’t plan on keeping whole swathes of premium real estate for itself or for auction, Schilling said. Nor does it intend to rip off trademark owners.
“We’ve seen good TLDs fail with bad business plans,” he said, pointing to premium-priced .tv as an example. “You need to allow other people to profit, to evangelize your space.”
“I’m not going to get as rich from this as some of our registrants,” he said.
Uniregistry only plans to hold back a “handful” of premium names, Schilling said. The rest will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
To avoid creating wastelands of parked domains, the company plans to deploy technical countermeasures to prevent too many domains falling into too few hands.
“The way we’re going stage the landrush it will be very difficult to game it,” he said. “There’ll be significant rate limiting, so you can’t come and take 500 domains in ten milliseconds.”
“What we want to avoid is someone going in and getting 100,000 of the best ones on day one. It’s not fair, and it’s unhealthy for the space.”
Schilling is one of the industry’s most successful domainers. His company, Name Administration, is one of the largest single owners of second-level domain names.
Now Schilling says he’s brought his considerable experience as a domain name registrant Uniregistry’s business model and policies.
The company’s message is that it’s “registrant-centered”.
While that sounds like an easy, glib marketing statement, Schilling is backing it up with some interesting policies.
He’s thinking about a much closer relationship between the registry and the registrant that you’d see in the .com space.
When a second-level domain in a Uniregistry gTLD expires, registrants will get 180 days to claim it back from the registry, possibly even circumventing the registrar.
Uniregistry will even directly alert the registrant that their name is going to expire, a policy that Schilling said has been modeled in part on what Nominet does in the .uk space.
“Registrants have the ability to go to the registry to manage their .co.uk, to transfer the domain, to change certain pieces of information,” he said.
The 180-day policy is designed in part to prevent registrars harvesting their customers most valuable domains when they forget to renew them.
Rogue registrars and registrars competing against their own customers are things that evidently irk Schilling.
“I prefer a system that protects registrants,” he said.
But existing registrars are still the company’s proposed primary channel to market, he said. Uniregistry plans to price its domains in such a way as to give registrars a 50% margin.
“I think there’s enough margin in these strings for registrars to make a great living,” Schilling said.
Schilling hasn’t ruled out an in-house pocket registrar, but said it wouldn’t be created to undercut the regular channel.
The company has hired Internet Systems Consortium, maker of BIND and operator of the F-Root, as its back-end registry provider.
Judging by Uniregistry’s web site, which carries photos of many ISC staff, it’s an unusually close relationship.
I’ll have more on Uniregistry’s plans for Whois and trademark protection in a post later.

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.

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.

Five registrars on the ICANN naughty step

ICANN has sent breach notices to five domain name registrars, including two owned by Epik and DomainTools, for failing to cooperate with a Whois accuracy audit.
InTrust Domains, Planet Online, Server Plan, Infocom Network and DomainAllies.com did not respond to ICANN’s 2011 Whois Data Reminder Policy audit, according to ICANN.
The WDRP is the longstanding policy that requires all ICANN-accredited registrars to remind their customers to keep their Whois records up to date once a year.
The annual WDRP audit asks registrars to state how many reminders they sent out and how many Whois records were updated as a result, among other things.
The non-compliant registrars, with the exception of Server Plan, are also evidently past due paying their ICANN accreditation fees, according to the breach notices.
All five registrars have been given 15 days to rectify the problems or risk losing their accreditations.
Given that the audit is, I believe, a simple web-based form, I don’t think anyone is going to go out of business as a result of these breaches.
It’s interesting to dig a little bit into who owns these registrars.
DomainAllies.com belongs to DomainTools parent Thought Convergence.
InTrust, which has come in for criticism for shady marketing practices under its previous management, was acquired by Epik last July.
Planet Online, meanwhile, is one of those odd registrars that hides its own contact information behind a Whois privacy service (though its web site does carry a physical address).

Newbie domain registrant discovers Whois, has Twitter meltdown

The need for the domain name industry to enforce accurate Whois is often cited by law enforcement and intellectual property interests as a consumer protection measure.
But most regular internet users haven’t got a clue that Whois even exists, let alone what data it contains or how to use it.
A study (pdf) carried out for ICANN’s Whois Review Team last year found that only 24% of consumers know what Whois is.
This stream of tweets I chanced across this afternoon, from what appears to be a first-time domain registrant, is probably more representative of consumer attitudes to Whois.
UPDATE (April 27): I’ve removed the tweets per the request of the Twitter user in question.

Did a university just pay $3,000 for its .xxx domain?

The domain name sju.xxx has changed hands for $3,000 on Sedo.
It’s the first .xxx domain I recall popping up in Sedo’s sales feed.
However, I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s a damage-mitigation move by an American university.
SJU is the acronym used by Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA. The college uses sju.edu as its primary domain.
Knowing how paranoid universities have been about protecting their reputations in .xxx, and given that the sale came in just below the price of a cheap UDRP, I suspect we’re looking at a defensive move.
The Whois record for the domain is currently under privacy protection. Until recently, it belonged to one Jay Camina. It resolves to a suggestive Go Daddy parking page.

Domain hijack leads to registrar shutdown threat

ICANN has threatened to terminate Chinese domain name registrar eName Technology after the domain 1111.com was allegedly hijacked.
According to ICANN’s notice of breach (pdf), eName has refused to hand over data documenting the transfer of 1111.com as required by the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
ICANN claims that when it tried to get eName’s help investigating a hijacking complaint, the company did not return its calls or emails.
The registrar now has 15 days to provide the transfer records as called for by the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
According to historical Whois records, 1111.com was transferred to eName between February 12 and 16 this year. After a complaint, ICANN started chasing eName for the data on February 28.
The domain appears to have been owned by at least four different parties and three different registrars – Network Solutions, then Joker, then eName – since the start of 2012.
It’s the second time that ICANN has sent a breach notice to a registrar over an alleged mishandling of a domain name hijacking, and the first time it’s actually named the domain in question.
In February, the organization threatened Turkish registrar Alantron with the suspension of its contract over the botched handling of pricewire.com.