Afilias to apply for Chinese .info

Afilias has announced that it plans to apply for the traditional and simplified Chinese script equivalents of .info under ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
The company becomes the last of the Big Three registries to give a glimpse into its new gTLD strategy.
VeriSign has said it wants transliterations of .com in multiple scripts, while Neustar has said it plans to apply for its own dot-brand, .neustar.
Afilias did not disclose the exact strings it wants in its announcement. There was no mention of .mobi, which the company also runs.
According to the last official count, there are close to 7.9 million registered .info domains. Marketing director Roland LaPlante said in September that about 19% host unique web sites.

5 Comments Tagged: .info, afilias, chinese, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs, new TLDs

Over 7,500 .uk cybersquatting cases heard

Nominet is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of its Dispute Resolution Service this week, saying that it has settled over 7,500 cybersquatting cases.
Based on a £15,000 estimated cost of legal action, the .uk registry reckons DRS has saved companies about £110 million ($176 million) over the last decade.
DRS has similarities but differences to UDRP. Notably, DRS has a formal mediation phase and an appeals process for registrants who believe their domains were wrongly taken from them.
The .uk zone currently has fewer than 10 million registrations, compared to the 135 million gTLD domains to which the UDRP applies.
WIPO and the National Arbitration Forum have settled about 35,000 UDRP complaints over the last decade. With that in mind, cybersquatting enforcement in .uk appears to have been relatively heavy.

Comment Tagged: .uk, dispute resolution service, drs, naf, nominet, udrp, wipo

Marriott: we probably won’t use .hotel

Could .hotel be the next .travel?
That’s one view that emerged from a conference organized by the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse discussing ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program earlier this week.
“We think .hotel will launch,” Elizabeth Escobar, a senior IP lawyer with the hotel chain Marriott, said during one session at What’s At Stake on Tuesday. “We will probably blanket .hotel with a slew of defensive registrations most of which, like .travel, we will never use.”
Does she have a point?
The most prominent .hotel applicant, Luxembourg-based DotHotel, is backed by the International Hotel & Restaurant Association, suggesting that the concept does enjoy some support.
But restricted gTLD have performed poorly in the past. The .travel space, which launched in 2006, is generally regarded as having failed to live up to expectations.
It’s currently a 26,000-domain gTLD, and has only ever topped 50,000 domains under management due to a desperate, experimental foray into pay-per-click speculation.
It’s barely making enough money to fulfill its financial commitments to former owner TheGlobe.com, which acquired the original registry, Tralliance, during the later stages of its own death rattle, before .travel ever had a chance to execute.
But its lackluster performance is also no doubt also a result of its restrictive registration policies, which may well be mimicked by a .hotel gTLD approved next year, and its lack of channel adoption.
Could a .hotel succeed, where .travel has (so far) failed, if leading hotel chains see it purely as a defensive play?

6 Comments Tagged: .hotel, .travel, cadna, marriott, theglobe.com, tralliance

CADNA calls for second new gTLDs round in 2012

The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse wants ICANN to name the date for its second new top-level domains application round, and suggested that it could come as early as one year from now.
President Josh Bourne told DI that the lobbyist, a long-time opponent of new gTLDs, has “switched gears”, taking a more pragmatic position since the program was approved in June.
“It’s not just about big companies at this point,” he said. “We’ve got hundreds of entrepreneurs and governments planning to apply for a range of gTLDs, – .wales, .london, .paris, .health, .green, .eco…”
“It’s not just about brands, so to cancel the policy now, that’s just never going to happen,” he said.
Bourne said that CADNA’s policy shift created a vacuum of opposition that was quickly filled by groups such as the Association of National Advertisers, which is now loudly demanding that the program be killed off or delayed indefinitely.
CADNA is not aligned with the ANA. Instead, it intends to write to ICANN soon to ask it to start planning for the second round already, saying this would help relieve the pressure on businesses.
“The best thing they could do for businesses and other applicants like entrepreneurs is to say ‘We’ve got the first round planned for January 12 to April 12, we’re going to tell the world right now that we’re going to have a vote in Costa Rica in March to approve a plan to have the second round in the fall of 2012’,” Bourne said.
He admitted that he doesn’t know if late 2012 is feasible – ICANN expects to still be early in the evaluation process for the first round at that time – but suggested that the windfall from first-round fees will be sufficient to ramp up bandwidth.
The lack of a second-round date is forcing companies to act quickly on new gTLDs with no idea whether they really want or need them. No company wants to be left behind for years or perhaps forever if their competitors are successfully exploiting their new gTLDs.
“People in businesses thinking of applying mainly do so not because they have a grand scheme, it’s because they’re scared,” he said.
“For the most part they’re getting accustomed to the notion that they’re buying an option, the right to use it in 2013 if other companies are using them,” he added.
The reason ICANN has not yet said when a second round will be offered is its commitment to review the impact of the first round before accepting any more applications.
The Applicant Guidebook currently states:

ICANN has committed to reviewing the effects of the New gTLD Program on the operations of the root zone system after the first application round, and will defer the delegations in a second application round until it is determined that the delegations resulting from the first round did not jeopardize root zone system security or stability.

That paragraph was added in April, following consultations between ICANN and its Governmental Advisory Committee, which based its demands on ICANN’s Affirmation of Commitments.
The AoC, which was based in part on feedback from businesses and IP interests, also calls for a more substantial review of the program, taking into account consumer choice and abuse.

1 Comment Tagged: cadna, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, second round

.xxx sunrise auctions delayed after 80k applications

ICM Registry has apparently delayed the results of its just-closed .xxx sunrise period until December to give it a chance to clear its backlog of unverified applications.
Corporation Services Company, a major brand-protection registrar, is reporting tonight that ICM and its validation firm, IProta, does not expect to finish validating trademark claims until November 28.
That’s a week later than ICM had planned to kick off the auction phase of the sunrise period, during which contested domains will be awarded to the highest bidder.
“The results of the applications that were submitted during the Sunrise phase will therefore not be available until the first week of December,” CSC said on its blog.
ICM announced yesterday that it has received almost 80,000 sunrise applications from trademark owners and porn companies seeking .xxx domains to match their .coms.
Almost half of those applications were filed during the last week of sunrise. Each trademark claim needs to be individually validated against government databases by IProta.
The plan, according to ICM’s web site, was to start auctioning contested sunrise domains November 21 and to take .xxx into general availability December 6.
Landrush kicks off next Tuesday, running for 17 days. Landrush auctions are scheduled to commence December 12, according to ICM’s web site.

Comment Tagged: auctions, corporation services company, csc, icm registry, iprota, landrush, sunrise, xxx

Court throws out Russian gaming scandal claims

Russian registrar RU-Center has won its appeal against a $7.5 million government fine, following claims that it gamed the launch of .РФ, registering tens of thousands of names to itself.
The Moscow Arbitration Court yesterday reversed the decision of the Federal Antimonoply Service, according to a statement from RU-Center, the .РФ registry and local media reports.
The dispute centers on the launch of the Cyrillic-script ccTLD last November, which saw over 200,000 registrations in the first six hours and half a million domains registered in the first few weeks.
RU-Center was quickly hit by claims that it had used its access to the registry, ccTLD Coordination Center, to register over 65,000 premium names to itself in order to auction them to users.
It later emerged that some of the Coordination Center’s launch policy-setters had ownership interests in RU-Center either directly or through family members.
In challenging the FAS ruling, RU-Center said that it only registered domains in its own name, via other registrars, because it had taken over 120,000 pre-orders from customers but was limited to filing 4,800 registrations per hour by the registry.
It also said that the domains remained in its own name because registry rules prohibited transfers during the first year of registration. The transfers will be effective November 11, it said.

Comment Tagged: .rf, .ru, cctld coordination center, gaming, landrush, ru-center, рф

GAC new gTLD veto refuses to die

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee seems to be trying yet again to resurrect the government right of veto over controversial new top-level domain applications.
The GAC has proposed changes to the new gTLDs Applicant Guidebook that – at least on the face of it – would remove ICANN’s power to overrule GAC objections.
The changes would also make it much more likely that a gTLD application could be killed off due to the objections of a single nation.
If adopted, they would also make the already unpredictable process of anticipating the result of GAC objections considerably more ambiguous.
The supposedly “complete” Guidebook published by ICANN last month currently includes a warning that the GAC is working on its objecting rules, and that these will be included in future.
The GAC Communique (pdf) issued at the ICANN meeting in Dakar on Friday includes these proposed rules as an annex, and they’re not great if you’re a likely new gTLD applicant.
Consensus objections
If the GAC issues a consensus objection to an application, the Guidebook currently states that a “strong presumption” would be created that the application should fail.
But ICANN’s board would be able to overrule it with a so-called “Bylaws consultation”, the same process it used to approve .xxx earlier this year.
In its proposed revisions, the GAC inexplicably wants to delete the references to the Bylaws consultation.
My understanding is that the GAC is not proposing a change to the Bylaws, so the right of the board to initiate a consultation and overrule a GAC objection would still exist.
But the GAC seems to be asking for applicants to be given far less information about that process than they need, making its own powers appear greater than they are.
This could raise the psychological barrier to initiating a Bylaws consultation and create the perception that a consensus GAC objection always kills an application, which may not be the case.
The Dakar communique defines GAC consensus as “the practice of adopting decisions by general agreement in the absence of any formal objection”, which creates its own set of worries.
Non-consensus objections
A much bigger change is proposed to the way ICANN handles GAC “concerns” about an application.
This is GAC code for a non-consensus objection, where one or more governments has a problem with an application but the GAC as a whole cannot agree to object.
This is the objection mechanism that will very likely capture applications for gTLDs such as .gay, but it could basically cover any string for any reason.
Using the Guidebook’s current wording, there would be no presumption that this kind of application should be rejected. It would be in ICANN’s discretion to initiate a Bylaws consultation.
But the GAC wants something that sounds rather a lot like a Bylaws consultation made mandatory.
“The ICANN Board is expected to enter into dialogue with the GAC to understand the scope of concerns,” it says. “The ICANN Board is also expected to provide a rationale for its decision.”
This basically means that an application for .gay that was objected to by just two or three governments would have to undergo the pretty much the same level of scrutiny as .xxx did.
The political pressure on ICANN to kill the application would be much more intense than it would under the Guidebook’s current rules.
Here’s a table of the GAC’s proposed changes.
[table id=2 /]
In summary, the GAC wants to give more weight to fringe objections and to make the whole process potentially much more confusing for applicants.
I can’t see ICANN sensibly adding the GAC’s text to the Guidebook without at the very least some edits for clarity.

2 Comments Tagged: applicant guidebook, dakar, gac, gac early warning, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, objections

ICM extends .xxx sunrise

ICM Registry, which has evidently seen a last-minute rush of defensive registration applications this week, has extended its sunrise period until Monday.
It had been due to end at 4pm UTC today.
The company just issued this statement:

Due to unprecedented demand in the last week and following several requests from major registrars for more processing time for their backlogs, ICM Registry has extended the Sunrise A and Sunrise B registration periods for an additional three days to conclude Monday, October 31, 2011 at 16:00 UTC (Noon ET). This extension provides prospective registrants valuable time to secure their domains and protect their brands.

Sunrise A is for people in the porn business, B is the “block” for companies outside the “biz” that want to make sure their brands do not become associated with porn.
Guess which has been most popular. (It’s B.)
ICM originally said it expected 10,000 sunrise registrations, but it blew through that estimate weeks ago. The last published count was 42,000, on Monday, with “thousands” coming in daily,
If it hits 70,000 by Monday I will not be surprised.

Comment Tagged: icm registry, sunrise, xxx

Today’s new gTLDs decisions in full

ICANN’s board of directors passed two resolutions relating to new generic top-level domains at is meeting in Dakar, Senegal today.
While neither is particularly Earth-shattering, they are notable and therefore reproduced here in full.
The first relates to financial support for new gTLD applicants from developing nations.
ICANN has not figured out how to implement the recommendations of the JAS working group yet, but it hopes to do so before the end of the year.

Joint Applicant Support
Whereas, the Board has received the Final Report of the Joint Applicant Support Working Group (JAS WG), appreciates the work of the JAS WG created in April 2010 by the ALAC and GNSO, and thanks the entire ICANN community for the constructive dialogue leading up to and during this week in Dakar.
Whereas, the Board expresses its appreciation to the GAC and ALAC for their joint statement on the JAS WG report.
Whereas, the Board is committed to ensuring that the implementation of a support program for deserving applicants will be done in a manner to enable those applicants to effectively participate in and benefit from the first round of the New gTLD Program.
Resolved (2011.10.28.21), the Board takes the JAS WG Final Report seriously, and a working group of Board members has been convened to oversee the scoping and implementation of the recommendations arising out of that Report, as feasible.
Resolved (2011.10.28.22), the President and CEO is expected to commence work immediately and provide a detailed plan for consideration. If the plan is complete sufficiently in advance of its next scheduled Board Meeting set for 8 December 2011, the Board will seek to add a special meeting to its schedule prior to that date.
Rationale for Resolutions 2011.10.28.21 – 2011.10.28.22
In Singapore, the Board resolved that it would consider the report and recommendations of the Joint Applicant Support Working Group. The Board takes seriously the assertions of the ICANN community that applicant support will encourage diverse participation in the New gTLD Program and promote ICANN’s goal of broadening the scope of the multi-stakeholder model. In its deliberations, the Board is balancing its fiscal responsibility in launching the New gTLD Program, the desire to provide a support program in the first round, and the time required to obtain additional funding. While the Board solution is not complete, there is a vision for accomplishing each of those three goals.  As required for assessment within the Affirmation of Commitments, there is no security and stability impact on the DNS. Part of the further work required through this resolution will assess the affect of this work; however there is no affect on ICANN’s fiscal resources as a result of this immediate action.

The second resolution, which caused considerable debate among board members, relates to funding of the much-criticized new gTLDs communications campaign.
The board approved an additional $900,000 for outreach, much of which will apparently go into the pockets of newly hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller.

Budget Request – New gTLD Communications Plan
Whereas, at the Paris ICANN meeting in 2008, the Board adopted the GNSO policy recommendations to introduce new Generic Top-Level Domains (new gTLDs), including at least a four-month communications period to raise global awareness.
Whereas, the Draft New gTLD Communications Plan (link) describes the global outreach and education activities that will be conducted in each of the ICANN geographic regions.
Whereas, the FY 12 budget allocates US $805,000 to fund this effort.
Whereas, planning and subsequent execution of the Communications Plan has indicated the need for a full service global public relations firm to ensure ICANN effectiveness in this effort.
Whereas, funds can be re-allocated in the adopted ICANN Budget to support the augmented communications effort without materially affecting performance in other areas.
Whereas, at its 22 October 2011 meeting the Board Finance Committee approved a recommendation that the Board approve an additional expenditure of US$900,000 for the execution of the Communications Plan.
Resolved (2011.10.28.23), the Board approves an additional expenditure of up to US $900,000 for the remaining three months of the Communications Plan, to be used for the retention of Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm, to work towards the goal of raising global awareness of new Generic Top Levels Domains consistent with the terms of the Communications Plan.
Resolved (2011.10.28.24), the Board authorizes the President and CEO to enter into any contracts necessary to fulfill the objectives of the New gTLD Communications Plan to the extent those contracts do not exceed the budget for the Communications Plan.
Rationale for Resolution 2011.10.28.23 – 2011.10.28.24
The budget for the Board-mandated new gTLD communications program is currently US $805,000. That figure was based on an earlier draft communications plan.
The current plan is more expansive and ambitious. It is based on the premise that every potential applicant should be aware of the program’s opportunities and risks, and thus it is aimed at building maximum awareness through multiple communications channels. It also focuses more strongly on developing countries.
The Plan is built on four principal efforts:
1. Regional “road shows” and public events;
2. Earned media – broadcast, online and print;
3. Social media; and
4. Global information through paid advertising, and multiplying these efforts through the community.
The New gTLD Communications Plan is neutral in its presentation. ICANN is not promoting applications for new gTLDs or advocating that any organization apply for one. Rather, ICANN is providing essential information and raising awareness of the New gTLD Program.
The current efforts limited in scope. ICANN has determined that retaining a full-service worldwide public relations firm to further coordinate ICANN’s efforts will assure that ICANN is able to attain the goal of the New gTLD Communications Plan.
ICANN has identified a well-respected global public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, that can provide a broad range of awareness-raising services. ICANN will have access to the firm’s extensive network with an established presence in 91 countries, over 40 of them developing nations. These local and regional assets are invaluable. ICANN also will benefit from the firm’s expertise in digital and social media. ICANN will retain editorial control over all implementation aspects of the New gTLD Communications Plan.
Securing a global public relations firm of this caliber will contribute greatly toward ensuring success of the New gTLD Communications Plan. And as the first deliverable of the New gTLD Program, success of the New gTLD Communications Plan is critical.
Approval of this resolution will positively affect ICANN’s accountability and transparency by globally maximizing the spread of information about ICANN itself. This action will have no effect on the security, stability and resiliency of the domain name system.
The New gTLD Communications Plan will be conducted within the existing ICANN budget. This effort will be funded out of contingency funds, so the expenditure will not affect ICANN’s ability to perform and accomplish its other goals and objectives.

More later.

Comment Tagged: applicant support, dakar, ICANN, jas, new gTLDs, new TLDs, outreach

dotFree settles Microsoft botnet lawsuit

One of the companies that plans to apply for the .free top-level domain next year has settled a lawsuit filed by Microsoft over claims it was involved in running the Kelihos botnet.
The suit, filed in late September, had alleged that Czech-based dotFree Group and its CEO, Dominique Piatti, were behind dozens of domains used to spread malware.
dotFree already runs the free .cz.cc subdomain service, which isn’t what you’d call a trustworthy namespace. The whole .cz.cc zone appears to be currently banned from Google’s index.
This week, Microsoft has dropped its claims against the company and Piatti, saying it will instead work with the company to try to help clean up the free .cz.cc space.
Microsoft said on its official blog:

Since the Kelihos takedown, we have been in talks with Mr. Piatti and dotFREE Group s.r.o. and, after reviewing the evidence voluntarily provided by Mr. Piatti, we believe that neither he nor his business were involved in controlling the subdomains used to host the Kelihos botnet. Rather, the controllers of the Kelihos botnet leveraged the subdomain services offered by Mr. Piatti’s cz.cc domain.
As part of the settlement, Mr. Piatti has agreed to delete or transfer all the subdomains used to either operate the Kelihos botnet, or used for other illegitimate purposes, to Microsoft. Additionally, Mr. Piatti and dotFREE Group have agreed to work with us to create and implement best practices to prevent abuse of free subdomains and, ultimately, apply these same best practices to establish a secure free Top Level Domain as they expand their business going forward.

Expect this issue to be raised if and when .free becomes a contested gTLD application.

Comment Tagged: .cz.cc, .free, dotfree group, Kelihos, Microsoft