VeriSign’s .net contract renewed

VeriSign has been given the nod to continue to run the .net domain registry after a vote by ICANN’s board of directors today.
The vote was 14-0, with director Bertrand De La Chappelle abstaining without explanation.
The renewal is hardly surprising – nobody thought for a second that VeriSign would fail to retain the contract – but the deal was controversial anyway, due to a Boing-Boing misunderstanding.
The contract still allows VeriSign to carry on raising prices, by up to 10% in any given year, and it still calls for ICANN to receive $0.75 per domain, which currently adds up to over $10 million a year.
The money is still ostensibly earmarked for special projects including extending ICANN’s outreach into developing nations and DNS security, and the resolution passed by the board today says:

ICANN commits to provide annual reporting on the use of these funds from .NET transaction fees.

This is presumably designed to address criticisms that it basically ignored its commitment under the 2006 .net agreement to set up two “special restricted funds” to manage .net cash, as I reported on here.

1 Comment Tagged: .net, ICANN, singapore, verisign

OpenRegistry wins .gent registry deal

Add another city top-level domain to your lists, the Belgian city of Ghent is set to apply for .gent, using OpenRegistry as its back-end registry software provider
The application for .gent will be made to ICANN by ComBell, a smallish local registrar, which already has the required local government support.
Ghent is Belgium’s third-largest city, with 250,000 residents, so we’re probably looking at a relatively low-volume TLD.
The “Gent” spelling is Dutch.
It sounds like ComBell will be running the infrastructure, assuming the bid is approved, using OpenRegistry’s software, which has also been selected to run a couple of small new ccTLDs.

2 Comments Tagged: .gent, combell, ghent, openregistry

Crocker picked to lead ICANN

Steve Crocker has been elected chairman of ICANN’s board of directors, following the departure of Peter Dengate Thrush, whose term on the board expired today.
Described earlier this week by CEO Rod Beckstrom as “one of the uncles of the internet”, Crocker is the creator of the Request For Comment format for internet standards.
Replacing Crocker as vice-chair is fellow geek Bruce Tonkin, chief strategy officer of Melbourne IT, the Australian domain name registrar.
Both men were selected by secret board poll.
The board revealed the unsuccessful candidates for the first time too: Cherine Chalaby and Sebastien Bachollet stood for chair, while Bachollet and Ray Plzak stood for vice-chair.
Because Crocker’s term on the board ends in October, his long-term future depends now on whether the ICANN Nominating Committee decides to renew his term for another three years.
I expect it will. Last year, NomCom kicked out all three of its appointees whose terms were up, irking some. Declining to re-appoint Crocker this year could look like regicide by committee.
This leaves NomCom with only one pick in 2011. It will almost certainly be a woman from a region currently under-represented on the board. My guess is Russia.
Also joining the board today was .au’s Chris Disspain, who replaces Dengate Thrush as ccNSO appointee, and Canadian consultant Bill Graham, who replaces Rita Rodin Johnston from the GNSO.

Comment Tagged: board, elections, ICANN

ICANN names European vice president

ICANN has appointed Thomas Spiller to be its first vice president, Europe.
Spiller has worked for the French Prime Minister’s Office, but most recently was head of global policy strategy at the software vendor SAS.
He’s a French national, but will be based in ICANN’s Brussels office when he begins, August 29.
“I look forward to reinforcing ICANN’s outreach to all stakeholders and strengthening the ongoing inclusive dialogue with Europe’s Internet users, national governments, EU institutions and business,” he said in a press release.
If you’re counting, Spiller will be ICANN’s eighth vice president, the third to be appointed this year.

Comment Tagged: ICANN

ICM names former ACLU chief to policy board

ICM Registry has appointed former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen to the Policy Council of IFFOR, the oversight body responsible for the .xxx top-level domain.
Strossen held the role at the ACLU between 1991 and 2008. Her appointment to the largely volunteer role at IFFOR is a bit of a coup for the organization.
She fills the seat designated for a free speech advocate.
Also named to the council is Sharon Girling, a former British cop who was closely involved in many high-profile child abuse imagery stings, including Operation Ore.
Law professor Fred Cate has been appointed the council’s security/privacy expert, and first amendment lawyer Bob Corn-Revere is ICM’s appointed representative.
There will be five other policy council members, all drawn from the porn industry, named in July or August, IFFOR said in a press release.
IFFOR, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, will get $10 a year from every .xxx domain name registered.

Comment Tagged: icm registry, iffor, policy council, xxx

Kroes slams ICANN new gTLD approval

Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, has repeated her call for ICANN reform after it rejected governmental advice in its newly approved top-level domains program.
According to a statement from her official spokesperson sent to Intellectual Property Watch, Kroes said the approval of the program “disregard[ed] governmental advice on public policy issues” and “underscores the need for the model to be reformed to remain sustainable”.

The lack of an adequate response on the part of ICANN Board clearly points to some deficiencies in the current functioning of the model. This calls for specific actions in order to remedy the situation.

Kroes seems to believe that governments are entitled to every concession they demand from “multistakeholder” policy-making processes.
According to IP-Watch, she promised to coordinate a response with EU member states and the US.
While the Governmental Advisory Committee had filed about 80 objections to aspects of the Applicant Guidebook earlier this year, ICANN managed to whittle the list down to a small handful.
It refused to remove the requirement for trademark owners to provide proof of use before participating in sunrise periods, and to lower the burden of proof in certain anti-cybersquatting mechanisms.
Governments also don’t seem particularly convinced by ICANN’s decision to approve the program before consulting more deeply with competition authorities over the vertical integration issue.
GAC chair Heather Dryden delivered a more measured statement expressing “disappointment” with the decision yesterday.
EC GAC representative Gerard de Graaf, who’s earning himself a reputation in ICANN as a bit of a firebrand, was less measured in his response, accusing ICANN of potentially putting new gTLD applicants at risk of violating European competition laws.
More at Intellectual Property Watch.

9 Comments Tagged: european commission, gac, gerard de graaf, ICANN, neelie kroes, new TLDs

Facebok.com had 250 million hits a year

The typo domain name facebok.com was receiving an estimated 250 million visits per year, according to a Facebook attorney.
As I’ve previously reported, the domain was subject to controversy after Facebook won it in a UDRP adjudication and was subsequently sued by the cybersquatter.
“Obviously, it’s Facebook except lacking one O, and attracting a lot of traffic – 250 million was the estimate by our SEO team, 250 million hits a year,” Facebook’s Susan Kawaguchi said during a panel on UDRP here at the ICANN meeting in Singapore.
“Somebody was making a lot of money off of it,” she said.
Facebok.com bounced users to what Kawaguchi described as a “social survey scam” – a site that used Facebook’s look-and-feel to get users to sign up for expensive text message services.
After Facebook won the UDRP in September, a bogus Panama-based shell company sued Facebook and the registrar, EuroDNS, claiming to be the true owner of the domain.
The suit persuaded EuroDNS to put the transfer to Facebook on hold, and ICANN threatened to terminate the registrar’s accreditation as a result.
The situation has since been resolved, and Facebook owns the domain, but EuroDNS may find itself in trouble with the Luxembourg court.

6 Comments Tagged: eurodns, facebok.com, facebook, udrp

Afilias links up with Right Of The Dot

Afilias and Right Of The Dot have announced a partnership to jointly assist new top-level domain applicants.
Right Of The Dot is Monte Cahn and Mike Berkens’ latest venture, a consulting firm focused primarily on helping new registries price their “premium” second-level domains.
Afilias runs the .info registry and provides registry services for many other TLDs, including .org.
The Afilias deal is the first major partnership Right Of The Dot has announced.

3 Comments Tagged: afilias, ICANN, new TLDs, right of the dot

dotBerlin hires Nic.at

Austrian registry Nic.at has signed its second city top-level domain partner in the form of dotBerlin, the company that has been planning a .berlin bid for several years.
The news follows its deal with dotHamburg, announced last week.
Nic.at, which now manages over 1 million .at domains, is the largest German-speaking registry that is also offering back-end registry services to new gTLD applicants.
This, I’m told, makes it particularly reassuring to German local government, which get proven scale and a local(ish) partner which speaks the same lingo.
There’s another .berlin applicant, UniteBerlin, which is backed by Minds + Machines and, following its recent partnership announcement, Neustar.
The support of Berlin’s local authority will decide the winner.

2 Comments Tagged: dothamburg, nic.at. dotberlin, uniteberlin

Neustar eats own dog food, plans .neustar bid

Neustar has become the first domain name registry to publicly reveal its own “.brand” top-level domain application, announcing this week a .neustar bid.
The company is one of many offering registry services to brand owners that want to run their own custom TLD, so it makes marketing sense for Neustar to put its money where its mouth is.
But it may also run the risk of diluting its .biz brand (such as it is), depending on whether or not it plans to migrate its primary site, neustar.biz, entirely to .neustar.
Neustar is one of only a handful of companies to announce .brand bids. Canon and Hitachi are the two best-known, but others including IBM and Nokia have expressed serious interest.
ICANN has previously predicted as many as 200 .brand bids in the first round, which begins January 12, 2012.

6 Comments Tagged: .brand, ICANN, neustar, new TLDs