Laos to reclaim .la from Los Angeles?

An effort has kicked off in the south-east Asian nation of Laos to “reclaim and relaunch” the .la top-level domain, which is currently being marketed to businesses in Los Angeles.
According to a press release from Dot VN, the “exclusive registrar” for Vietnam’s .vn ccTLD, the two governments came to an agreement to move .la late last month. Dot VN said:

On March 23, Mr. Nguyen Thanh Hung – Deputy Minister of Information and Communications of Vietnam and Mr. Padaphet Sayakhot – Deputy of Laos National Posts and Telecommunications Management Agency signed a memorandum for Vietnam to support Laos to retrieve and manage the Laotian country code Top Level Domain (“ccTLD”) “.LA”.

The announcement talks about a transition plan under which VNNIC, the .vn registry, will temporarily take over the management of .la domain names on behalf of LANIC, the nominal .la registry.

Under the current plan Vietnam will support LANIC in the management and operation of the ccTLD “.LA” by hosting the registry platform in Hanoi while concurrently training LANIC staff, with the eventual goal of turning over complete management of “.LA” to LANIC by 2012.

Today, .la domains are sold from www.la as “the internet address for Los Angeles” and “the first city top-level domain”, equivalent to possible future TLDs such as .paris and .rome.
That site, as well as the the name servers for .la, are currently operated by CentralNIC, the London-based registry services provider, under an agreement with a company called LA Registry Pte Ltd.
But according to IANA records, LANIC has been the designated .la sponsoring organization, as well as its technical and administrative contact, since 2002.
That being the case, there will presumably be no requirement for a lengthy IANA redelegation request if any transition is to take place.
Dot VN’s statement does not mention CentralNIC or existing registrants at all. I’ve been unable to obtain clarification from either company so far, but will provide a follow-up when I do.
LANIC’s web site, incidentally, is currently a parked page.
Local news coverage from the region, in Vietnamese, can be found here and here.

3 Comments Tagged: .la, .vn, centralnic, dot vn, iana, lanic, vnnic

Surf any .com with a text message?

A company called DotGo has launched a service it says will enable mobile phone users to access specially built web-based services using SMS text messaging.
This is (borderline) relevant to the domain name industry because DotGo has obtained the phone numbers that spell out DOTCOM, DOTORG, DOTNET, DOTEDU and DOTGOV when typed on handsets.
Using the system, developers use the company’s custom markup language to create a text-based service, for example a news feed, which they dump into their web server’s root directory.
Consumers can then access this service by sending the name of the service’s domain, minus the extension, to the number 368266 (DOTCOM).
So for cnn.com, you’d send the message “cnn” to 368266. CNN would then reply with a list of headlines from its RSS feed, say. You’d then reply with the number of the story you want to read.
Or you could text “weather 94110” to the same number to quiz weather.com about the forecast in San Francisco.
If this sounds overly complicated, there are a few demos you can try in a normal browser that may explain it better.
The DotGo service has been around for about 18 months, but it’s only today that the company has launched its suite of tools for developers.
The service appears to be ad-supported, free to both developers and users at the basic level with subscription-based upgrades available.
It’s all very clever, but will anyone want to use it? I hear there’s a thing called an “iPhone” nowadays that does a pretty good job at bringing the web to mobile users.
The service seems to be only available in the US (though the web site is pretty vague on that count) and no, DOTMOBI isn’t an option.

Comment Tagged: dotgo

Two-letter domain bx.com for sale

BX.com, an e-commerce software vendor, is inviting offers for its domain name, bx.com.
The company said in a press release that it intends to rebrand itself around its main product, pureCommerce, and is soliciting offers for the domain via sealed bid.
Two-letter .com domains are obviously a scarce commodity. There are only 676 possible combinations, excluding numerals, and they’ve all been long registered.
Many have changed hands, typically with six-figure sums attached, such as li.com, which sold for $500,000 in 2007, and jf.com, which sold for $101,000 a few months ago.
Apparently trying to pump up the price, BX.com’s press release contains this statement:

Companies, both inside and outside of the US, have pursued the BX.COM domain over the years. Most recently, offers have come from the competitors of The Blackstone Group, whose stock symbol is BX, as well as from Chinese multinational corporations.

If the company did not have such well-established rights in the domain – it’s owned it since 1995 – that would look a lot like evidence of a bad-faith shakedown to many UDRP panelists.

1 Comment Tagged: bx.com

NAF sees rise in UDRP cases

The National Arbitration Forum saw a steep increase in the number of cybersquatting complaints filed under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy last year.
According to a NAF announcement, 2,177 cases were filed in 2010, up 24% on the previous year.
That seems to be roughly in line with the experience of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which recently reported a 28% increase in UDRP complaints to 2,696 last year.
On that basis, it appears that WIPO has ever so slightly widened the market share gap between itself and NAF.
Between 1999 and the end of last year, NAF had handled 15,763 domain disputes, compared to WIPO’s over 20,000.
A basic UDRP filing covering a few domain names with a single panelist presiding costs about $1,500 with both providers, not including lawyers’ fees and other expenses.
With roughly 35,000 complaints filed to date, we can estimate that the revenue from UDRP flowing to WIPO and NAF together has been in the ball park of $50 million in slightly over 11 years.

7 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, naf, national arbitration forum, udrp, wipo

Go Daddy: let registrars seize domain names

Go Daddy has called for domain name registrars, not registries, to be responsible for seizing domain names associated with criminal activity.
In testimony submitted yesterday to the US House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet, general counsel Christine Jones said that instructing registries to turn off domains can sometimes cause more harm than good.
Registrars, she said, often aid law enforcement with investigations into, for example, child pornography, and that registry interference can be dangerous.
In her prepared remarks (pdf), Jones wrote:

The registry in many instances has no knowledge of these highly confidential and sensitive matters, and we have experienced several occasions in which the sudden disabling of a domain name by a registry disrupted weeks or months of work investigating serious criminal activity by the registrant.
We would like to see future government and private industry efforts focused on naming the registrar as the primary contact for courts and law enforcement regarding all criminal and civil matters relating to domain names.

Also testifying was John Morton of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for recent controversial domain name seizures under Operation In Our Sites.
The ICE operation has so far bypassed registrars, going directly to registry operators such as VeriSign. This is arguably more efficient, and avoids jurisdictional problems associated with non-US registrars.
Other registrars have previously echoed Jones’ remarks. Registrars have the relationship with the customer, after all. When a domain is seized by a registry, they have to deal with the fallout.
As we saw with the first phase of the ICE seizures last year, the fact that the registrar had no knowledge of the matter led to a misunderstanding and ICANN being blamed in several media reports.
But yesterday’s Congressional hearing, which aimed to gather information for legislation expected to replace the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act (COICA), spent very little time discussing domains.
At one point, Rep. John Conyers took Morton to task for ICE’s accidental seizure of over 80,000 third-level domains as part of a child porn sting.
Jones was also quizzed about the difference between filtering domains at the ISP level (which she said was unworkable and potentially dangerous) and blocking them at the registry-registrar level.
But Google was in the room, in the form of general counsel Kent Walker, and he took most of the flak, with Congressmen lining up to grill him over Google’s apparently happiness to connect users to bootleg digital content and counterfeit physical goods.

3 Comments Tagged: coica, go daddy, google

Man writes to ICANN with Whois look-up

A second person has asked ICANN for “a list of all registered domains”, using the organization’s freedom of information policy.
Jorge Sabate made a Documentary Information Disclosure Policy filing (pdf) last December, published this week, in which he made the request. He added:

If you are unable to provide the whole information, i would like to know the dste [date] was created the domain name christiansmith.com

That’s right. Sabate’s method of doing a Whois look-up on a single domain name appears to involve asking ICANN for a database of all 200 million registered domain names.
He’s not the first person to use the DIDP to make such a strange request. One Barry Carter asked for the same list last September, and was similarly unsuccessful.
No such database exists, of course, so ICANN had to rebuff both men.
But to answer your question, Mr Sabate: christiansmith.com was originally registered November 13, 1998.

2 Comments Tagged: didp, documentary information disclosure policy, ICANN

ICANN sponsors line up for Singapore

ICANN’s web page for its Singapore meeting has gone live, and the organization looks to have already attracted almost $200,000 in sponsorship fees.
The meeting, which officially begins June 19 at the Raffles City Convention Center, is widely expected to be the meeting when ICANN finally signs off on its Applicant Guidebook for new top-level domains.
As such, I expect it’s going to see a fair bit of sponsor interest.
Prices have been reduced somewhat since the San Francisco meet last month, due to some complaints from domain name companies, but there are still some big-ticket opportunities, including a $250,000 Diamond deal and two $150,000 Platinum Elite deals.
So far, five sponsors have already signed up, the biggest spenders being Neustar and the Public Interest Registry, which have both opted for $75,000 Platinum-tier arrangements.
Don’t expect any lengthy security briefings this time around – Singapore is one of the safest cities in the world, due in part to its harsh judicial system. You’re more likely to get beaten up under court order than by a mugger.
The weather: hot and wet.
The host of the meeting, which is ICANN’s 41st, is the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.

2 Comments Tagged: ICANN, new TLDs, singapore

ICM faces porn anger over .xxx

ICM Registry executives took the brunt of angry opposition to the .xxx top-level domain from pornographers at an adult industry trade show this week.
A two-hour session on .xxx, which took place at The Phoenix Forum in Arizona the day after ICM and ICANN signed their registry contract, saw the new TLD attacked on multiple fronts.
Defending, ICM’s Vaughn Liley tried to explain why .xxx isn’t as bad as many in the US adult industry believe but, on the back foot from a misjudged opening gambit (asking the openly hostile audience of pornographers if any of them supported child porn), often found himself adding to the confusion.
Now that .xxx has been approved and the contract signed, the discussion focused largely on how ICM and its policy body, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, will actually function.
Pornographers wanted to know, for example, why anybody would want to invest in marketing a .xxx domain if IFFOR could one day make a policy that excluded their business from the TLD.
I get the impression that the pro-ICM speakers, which included Greg Dumas of GEC Media, could have benefited from having copies of the company’s policy documents in front of them.
At one point, Liley flatly denied that ICM plans to “spider” .xxx domains to enforce compliance with IFFOR policies, such as the prohibition on meta tags that suggest the presence of child pornography.
Minutes later, a .xxx opponent read aloud from the IFFOR policy (pdf) that says all registrants must consent to “automated monitoring”.
A semantic misunderstanding? Possibly. But it left Liley facing calls of “liar” from the audience.
The question of whether this monitoring will extend to, say, .com domains, if the registrant chooses to redirect their .xxx names, was left unanswered.
IFFOR policies will be created by a Policy Council of nine members, five of which will be drawn from the adult entertainment industry.
Earlier in the discussion, Liley denied that IFFOR’s board of directors or ICM will have “veto” power over these Policy Council policies, calling it “factually incorrect”.
Again, an audience member reading aloud from the IFFOR Policy Development Process document (pdf) showed that the IFFOR board has the ability to block a policy under certain circumstances.
Not only that, but ICM gets to object to policies that emerge from IFFOR, under certain circumstances. If this happens, ICM will work with IFFOR “to modify the Proposed Policy to address any concerns identified by ICM”.
There may be enough limitations on ICM’s powers to mean it’s not technically a “veto”, but it’s close.
It makes perfect sense for ICM to have this safeguard, of course. If IFFOR were to be captured by the haters, they could easily make mischief that could ruin its business.
Many of the other questions raised at the forum related to issues that will effect all new TLD launches and concern all new TLD opponents, such as brand protection.
My conclusion after watching the two-hour session: ICM needs to work on its messaging.
The company actually has several ideas for how it could help the porn industry make money, but you wouldn’t know it from any of its public statements to date.
If you have a free couple of hours, the video can be watched here.

5 Comments Tagged: icm registry, iffor, phoenix forum, xxx

Namecheap poaches 20,000 domains from Go Daddy

A protest promo launched after Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons came under fire for shooting an elephant appears to have netted Namecheap about 20,000 domain name transfers.
The company tweeted from its official account last night: “Thank you Namecheap customers, new and old! We have raised $20,433 to savetheelephants.org. We appreciate your support!”
Given Namecheap had offered to donate $1 for every domain transferred using a special $4.99 coupon code, it looks like it received 20,433 transfers over the last week.
Parsons won’t lose any sleep over this. Go Daddy’s domains under management ticks up by the same amount every five hours.
It may be a more significant amount for Namecheap, which says it has over a million domains under its belt.
UPDATE: As Adam Strong notes in the comments, the 20,000 domains did not necessarily all come from Go Daddy, as the offer was open to anybody.

8 Comments Tagged: bob parsons, elephant, go daddy, namecheap

New Russian TLD hits 800,000 domains mark

Russia’s Cyrillic internationalized domain name, .РФ, received its 800,000th registration last night, according to the registry.
Coordination Center for TLD RU said this puts it 15th place in terms of European ccTLDs, pushing past the Czech Republic’s .cz in the rankings.
That’s pretty good going for an IDN TLD of interest primarily only to citizens of one country, a ccTLD which didn’t exist until early November 2010, less than five months ago.
It’s probably even larger than .co, which I believe has yet to reach the 700,000 domains mark.
The Russian Federation has almost 60 million internet users, 43% penetration, according to InternetWorldStats. That’s about 10 times more than the Czechs.

2 Comments Tagged: .РФ, cctlds, idns