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Rules for registry-registrar mergers proposed

ICANN has revealed how it intends to enable incumbent domain name registries to also become registrars, ending a decade of cross-ownership restrictions.
The industry shake-up could allow companies such as VeriSign, Neustar and Afilias to become accredited registrars in their own top-level domains later this year.
Hypothetically, before long you could be able to go directly to VeriSign for your .com domains, to Afilias and Public Interest Registry for .info and .org, or to Neustar for .biz.
The changes could potentially also kick off a wave of consolidation in the industry, with registry operators buying previously independent registrars.
ICANN’s proposed process is straightforward, requiring just a few amendments to the registries’ existing contracts, but it could also call for governmental competition reviews.
Registries will have to agree to abide by a Code of Conduct substantially the same as the one binding on wannabe registries applying later this year under the new gTLD program.
The Code is designed to stop registries giving their affiliated registrars unfair advantages, such as lower prices or preferential access to data, over other ICANN-accredited registrars.
Registries would also have the option to adopt the registry contract from the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook wholesale, although I expect in practice this is unlikely to happen.
ICANN would be able to refer vertical integration requests to national competition authorities if it determined that cross-ownership could cause “significant competition issues”.
VeriSign would be the most likely to be hit by such a review, but it’s also the only registry that does not appear to have been particularly hamstrung over the years by the forced separation rules.
The proposed process for registries to request the contract changes has been posted to the ICANN web site and is now open for public comment.

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Congress to hear from new TLD opponents

Kevin Murphy, May 2, 2011, Domain Policy

ICANN senior vice president Kurt Pritz is set to face a grilling at a Congressional hearing into new top-level domains on Wednesday, judging from the just-published witness list.
Of the other five panelists before the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet, all are quite critical of ICANN and/or its new gTLDs program:
Steve Metalitz, an IP lawyer and vice-chair of ICANN’s intellectual property constituency, which continues to push for even tougher rights protection mechanisms in the Applicant Guidebook.
Mei-lan Stark, senior VP of IP at Fox Group Legal, also closely involved with the International Trademark Association.
Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice (of which VeriSign is a member), part of the ICANN business constituency. Last time he appeared before a Congressional committee, he called for more rights protections mechanisms and a slower new TLD rollout.
Michael Palage, lawyer/consultant and former ICANN board member. He has recently written articles calling for ICANN to pay more attention to its Governmental Advisory Committee (which, as we know, has a strong focus on IP protection nowadays).
Josh Bourne of the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, CADNA, one of the fiercest critics of the program. CADNA thinks new TLDs will cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in defensive registrations.
It’s a one-sided panel, with no strong proponents of new TLDs — such as likely applicants — among the witnesses.
Pritz is going to be in the firing line, and no mistake.

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Who owns Osama Bin Laden domains?

Kevin Murphy, May 2, 2011, Domain Sales

With the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death reverberating throughout the world today, I wonder if the price of domain names matching his name just went up or down?
Doubtless, traffic to such domains will go up in the near term.
In terms of resale, I expect the domains may become slightly less “untouchable” now the guy’s been put out of business.
Before too long, he could be a figure of mainly historical interest, a Big Bad from the past, like Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot.
On the other hand, how many people really want to risk raising the ire of terrorists (or risk encouraging them) by buying and developing a web site at a Bin Laden-related domain name?
It’s too early to say for sure, but it’s quite possible Bin Laden’s name may acquire some kind of legend/martyr status in certain parts of the world, making it even more untouchable.
osamabinladen.com was originally registered in 2000 and belongs to a Karachi, Pakistan-based company called Computer Reflexes International. It resolves to a “for sale” notice.
usamabinladen.com and usamabinladin.com, alternate spellings used by some in the media and US government, are parked and have been registered to Frank Schilling’s Name Administration since 2003.
binladen.com is also parked, owned by “Pool.com In Trust”, apparently one of a bunch of domains it was awarded in a lawsuit against a former partner registrar.
osama.com belongs to an Italian pen company actually called Osama.
Schilling also owns polpot.com, incidentally, while adolfhitler.com belongs to Rick Latona.

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Over 1 million .mobi domains registered

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2011, Domain Registries

The .mobi top-level domain now reportedly has more than a million registered domains.
HosterStats, which tracks the size of TLD zone files, reported today that .mobi currently has 1,002,232 domains.
This would make it only the sixth gTLD to break into seven figures, the third if you only include gTLDs created by ICANN.
The .mobi domain was approved in 2005 and launched by the registry, mTLD, in 2006. The company was acquired by Afilias in February 2010.
It would be far too pedantic to point out that Afilias still has over 5,000 .mobi domains reserved for auction, which would bring the total below a million, so I won’t.
In other news, .CO Internet has had to deny that the .co namespace has also broken through one million registrations, following reports to the contrary.
Barring a sudden spike in demand for .co domains, I’d guess that’s unlikely to happen until the second half of the year.

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ICANN hires hacker Dark Tangent as security chief

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2011, Domain Tech

Noted white-hat hacker Jeff “Dark Tangent” Moss is to join ICANN as its new chief security officer.
Moss founded the Black Hat and Def Con hacker conferences (which I highly recommend), and was once a director of firewall vendor Secure Computing.
If you’re not familiar with security lingo, “hacker” in this context means he’s one of the good guys. He’s also one of a couple dozen members of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council.
The ICANN press release announcing the appointment (pdf) is filled with plaudits from some of the industry’s top DNS security geeks.
Paul Vixie, chairman and chief scientist of the Internet Systems Consortium is quoted as saying:

This is a great hire for ICANN. Jeff’s been in the infosec community since the dawn of time and not only knows where the weak spots are but also how they got that way, and what needs to be done and by whom. He’s the ideal person to drive ICANN’s security agenda.

He’s also been named vice-president. He starts work at the ICANN Washington DC office tomorrow.

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ICM adds another .xxx registrar

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2011, Domain Registrars

DomainMonster has become the latest registrar, the first in the UK, to announce support for ICM Registry’s upcoming .xxx porn-only top-level domain.
The company said it has been accredited by ICM, and that it will start taking pre-orders for the domains on its Domainbox reseller platform soon.
Others registrars to have announced that they plan to carry .xxx domains over the last few months include Network Solutions, Blacknight, EnCirca, RRPProxy.net and United Domains.
I’m not sure if any have been officially accredited yet — no .xxx registrars show up on ICANN’s offical list.
DomainMonster CEO Matt Mansell said: “We anticipate the .XXX launch to be the biggest we’ve seen in recent years. The demand our support teams are seeing already far outstrips anything that’s gone before.”
ICM has previously projected somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 registrations after launch. It took around 600,000 pre-reservations in the few years before it was approved by ICANN.
Getting .xxx accrediation is said to be quite a lengthy process. Registrars have to answer 14 detailed questions, including agreeing to abide by ICM’s policies and detailing how they plan to promote the domains.

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More government domain name censorship?

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2011, Domain Policy

The government of Turkey has reportedly just kicked off a Draconian crackdown on domain names that contain words relating to sex and pornography.
According to the Hürriyet Daily News, a local daily newspaper, the telecommunications authority today send a list of 138 banned strings, many of them English words, to Turkish web hosts.
If the report is to be believed, any web sites containing any of the banned words in the domain will be shut down, even if the offending string is caused by two unrelated words running together.

The affect of the decision could see the closure of many website that feature the banned words. For example, the website “donanimalemi.com” (hardwareworld.com) because the domain name has “animal” in it, a banned word and likewise “sanaldestekunitesi.com,” (virtualsupportunit.com) would not be able to operate under its current name because it has “anal” in it; also among the 138 banned words.

In addition to many Turkish and English words, apparently the number 31 is also verboten, because it is local slang for “masturbation”.
The report suggests that the ban affects domain names in .com, not just in Turkey’s .tr country-code domain, but that it only affects web hosts, rather than access providers or registrars.
If the report is accurate (a machine translation of this regulator press release, in Turkish, suggests that it may be), it may be the strangest piece of government domain censorship in the internet’s short history.
Thankfully, if it only applies to web hosts (rather than to ISPs and domain registrars) I can’t see it having much of an impact.
If you host in Turkey, I expect that switching to a foreign provider will in many cases be fairly straightforward.
If there are any Turkish speakers reading this who are able to shed light upon this bizarre story, please do get in touch.

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Did Apple buy iCloud.com for $4.5m?

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2011, Domain Sales

Apple is rumored to have spent $4.5 million on the domain name icloud.com.
If it’s true, and domain-only sale, the deal, first reported by GigaOm today, would be in the top 15 most-expensive reported domain name transactions of all time, according to my records.
The Whois for icloud.com currently shows Xcerion, a Swedish company, as the registrant, mostly behind Network Solutions’ privacy service.
According to GigaOm, Xcerion recently rebranded its iCloud service as CloudMe, which is a useful indicator that it doesn’t plan on using the domain for much longer.

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Some Kate Middleton domains still available

Kevin Murphy, April 27, 2011, Domain Sales

Apparently there’s a royal wedding happening this week.
I know this because a bunch of news stories have popped up in my RSS reader relating the story of how a Canadian couple dropped $2,500 on the domain name katemiddleton.com.
It struck me as an unusual purchase, not only because it could very easily be lost to a UDRP complaint, but also because the woman is getting married on Friday.
In a few days, her name won’t be Kate (or, strictly speaking, Catherine) Middleton. This is a domain name with a seriously limited shelf life.
It then struck me that I had no idea what her name would be after she gets married.
This is what Wikipedia is for.
William’s family name, it turns out, is not what I thought it was either. While the British royal family is known as the Windsors, his last name is officially Mountbatten-Windsor.
katemountbattenwindsor.com – Parked since April 22
katemountbatten-windsor.com – Parked since April 22
catherinemountbattenwindsor.com – Available!
catherinemountbatten-windsor.com – Available!
Amazingly, given the level of interest and speculation in Middleton, her actual married name is still available, with and without the hyphen.
But William actually goes by the surname Wales, on account of his father being the Prince of Wales. In the RAF, for example, he’s known as Flight Lieutenant Wales.
katewales.com – parked since November
kateofwales.com – For sale at $7,311 since April 22.
catherinewales.com – parked since 2008
catherineofwales – For sale since November
Of course, Middleton won’t be known popularly by any of those names. I expect most people will refer to her as “Princess Kate” or something.
But she won’t be a Princess, of course. Oh, no.
Apparently, you only get to call yourself Princess Whatever if you’re born royal, which Middleton was not. William’s mother, Diana, was Diana, Princess of Wales, not Princess Diana.
So, while the owners of princesskate.com (tribute site) and princesskate.co.uk (parked) may have the best-sounding domains, they’re not strictly accurate.
Middleton’s official title after she joins the Windsors is going to be Duchess of Something, depending on what Duchy is given to William by his grandmother as a wedding present.
The speculation is that William will become Duke of one of the following open spots: Albany, Connaught, Clarence, Sussex, Strathearn, Kendal, Avondale or Cambridge.
Domain speculators have already hit most, but not all, of these.
duchessofalbany.com – Parked since November 2010.
duchessofconnaught.com – Parked since November 2010.
duchessofclarence.com – Parked since March 2010.
duchessofsussex.com – For sale since November 2010.
duchessofstrathearn.com – Available!
duchessofkendal.com – Bounces to herroyalhighnesscatherine.com
duchessofavondale.com – Available!
duchessofcambridge.com – Parked since November 2006.
I expect there’s plenty of related names available in the .uk space too, but I didn’t check.
The one official title she will definitely be granted is Princess William of Wales, to differentiate her from Camilla, her future step-mother-in-law (I think), who is Princess of Wales.
The domain princesswilliam.com, registered in December last year, is currently parked.
Honestly, you’d have to be American to care about any of this stuff.
It makes ICANN look sensible.

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Pritz to defend ICANN in Congress

Kevin Murphy, April 27, 2011, Domain Policy

ICANN has confirmed that Kurt Pritz, its point man for the new top-level domains program, will represent the organization at a Congressional hearing next week.
As I reported yesterday, The House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet will hold an “ICANN Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) Oversight Hearing” on May 4.
Pritz is senior vice president of stakeholder relations. He has led the development of the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook for the last few years.
Some, such as GNSO Council chair Stephane Van Gelder, have already expressed surprise that ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom will not be attending.
The last time Congress dragged ICANN to Capitol Hill, in 2009, it was former CEO Paul Twomey who took the brunt of the questioning.
As Domain Name Wire recounts, ICANN took a good kicking on that particular occasion.
The focus of next week’s hearing is expected to be the intellectual property implications of new TLDs.

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