New TLDs may face more GAC delay

ICANN has finally confirmed the date for its groundbreaking meeting with its Governmental Advisory Committee, and it doesn’t look like great news for new top-level domain applicants.
The GAC and ICANN’s board of directors will meet for a two-day consultation in Brussels, starting February 28, according to an announcement late yesterday.
Attendees will be tasked with identifying the problems the GAC still has with the Applicant Guidebook, and trying to resolve as many as possible.
The devil is in the detail, however. ICANN stated:

This meeting is not intended to address the requirements/steps outlined in the Bylaws mandated Board-GAC consultation process.

This means that, post-Brussels, a second GAC consultation will be required before the ICANN board will be able to approve the Guidebook.
Under ICANN’s bylaws, when it disagrees with the GAC, it has to first state its reasons, and then they must “try, in good faith and in a timely and efficient manner, to find a mutually acceptable solution.”
ICANN appears to have now confirmed that it has not yet invoked this part of the bylaws, and that Brussels will not be the “mutually acceptable solution” meeting.
The best case scenario, if you’re an impatient new TLD applicant, would see the second consultation take place during the San Francisco meeting, which kicks off March 13.
The board would presumably have to convene a special quickie meeting, in order to officially invoke the bylaws, at some point during the two weeks between Brussels and San Francisco.
That scenario is not impossible, but it’s not as desirable as putting the GAC’s concerns to bed in Brussels, which is what some applicants had hoped and expected.
The GAC is currently writing up a number of “scorecards” that enumerate its outstanding concerns with the Guidebook.
Mark Carvell, the UK representative, has been tasked with writing the scorecard for trademark protection. Other scorecards will likely also discuss, for example, the problem of objecting to TLD applications on “morality and public order” grounds.
ICANN’s board, meanwhile, is due to meet this coming Tuesday to agree upon the “rules of engagement” for handling disagreements with the GAC under its bylaws.
When these rules are published, we should have a better idea of how likely a San Francisco approval of the Applicant Guidebook is.
Surprisingly, the ICANN announcement yesterday makes no mention of ICM Registry’s .xxx TLD application, which is the only area where the board has officially invoked the bylaws with regards the GAC’s objections.
The Brussels meeting, ICANN said, will be open to observers, transcribed live, and webcast.

5 Comments Tagged: gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, icm registry, new TLDs, xxx

Google to crack down on “content farms”?

Bad news for domain developers? Bad news for Demand Media?
Google is to take another look at how its search engine ranks “content farms”, according to a new blog post by principal engineer Matt Cutts.
In a discussion about search quality and web spam, Cutts wrote:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

The post does not get into any details about what hearing feedback “loud and clear” means, but it certainly suggests that Google will rethink how low-quality content sites are ranked.
This could be problematic Demand Media, which generates a lot of its revenue from “content mill” sites such as eHow, which is widely derided but ranks highly for many searches.
Demand Media is on the verge of going public.
It might also not be great news for domain investors who choose to develop their domains with low-quality content, although I suspect that kind of site would be harder to detect than a large mill.

7 Comments Tagged: demand media, ehow, enom, google

TorrentReactor.net wins TorrentReactor.com case

The World Intellectual Property Organization has handed the domain name TorrentReactor.com to the owner of TorrentReactor.net, one of the internet’s most-popular BitTorrent movie piracy sites.
Really.
TorrentReactor.net owner Alexey Kistenev filed a UDRP complaint over the .com version with WIPO last year and won it earlier this month.
It was actually the second time he had taken the domain to arbitration.
Kistenev’s first complaint was dismissed by WIPO in March 2009, on the grounds that he did not have a valid trademark.
A month later, he applied for a US trademark on “TorrentReactor”, which was granted in July last year, and the UDRP was refiled in October.
In the latest case, Kistenev was helped by not only the fact that he now owns the trademark but also the fact that the domain has changed hands since the original complaint.
I wonder how much the current owner paid. In 2008, the then-owner had tried to sell it to Kistenev for $150,000. When he countered with a $30,000 offer, the owner asked for $50,000.
TorrentReactor.net is a page-one Google hit for searches including [torrent movies] and [torrent music].
Its front page contains links to torrents of recent, copyrighted movies such as The Social Network, Red and Let Me In, as well as new software, TV shows and music.
What we seem to have here is a case of WIPO indirectly helping piracy.
I guess it shows that WIPO arbitration panels can apply the UDRP uniformly when they want to.

Comment Tagged: torrentreactor.com, torrentreactor.net, udrp, wipo

Verizon subpoenas DirectNIC whistleblower

Verizon has subpoenaed a former DirectNIC employee as part of its ongoing cybersquatting lawsuit against the domain name registrar.
Mark Deshong filed a “whistleblower” suit against his former employer – Keypath LLC, which he said shares ownership with DirectNIC – last August, but it was quickly settled out of court.
He alleged Keypath was engaged in a fraudulent domain arbitrage scheme using Yahoo Search Marketing and credit cards applied for in the name of bogus companies.
Keypath’s lawyers (who denied the links to DirectNIC) in turn accused Deshong of trying to extort the company for a larger severance package. The case was settled in October.
Now, in a Florida court filing (pdf), Verizon said it has subpoenaed Deshong for information related to its own case, which is currently tied up in pretrial discovery arguments.
He was scheduled to provide a deposition on Tuesday.
Verizon claims DirectNIC engaged in cybersquatting via shell companies such as Kenyatech/Kentech and Belize Domain WHOIS Service.
While there’s circumstantial evidence connecting the companies, CEO Sigmund Solares signed a sworn affidavit in a previous case denying Kenyatech and DirectNIC were affiliated.
Verizon’s interest in Deshong appears to be limited to information about DirectNIC’s ownership structure and its affiliations, rather than his allegations about domain arbitrage practices.

1 Comment Tagged: belize domain whois, directnic, kenyatech, mark deshong, sigmund solares, whistleblower

What O.co says about new TLDs

Overstock.com’s shock rebranding move yesterday is not only a big marketing coup for .CO Internet, it also may be good news for new top-level domains in general.
In a pair of US TV commercials (available here and here if you’re overseas) Overstock has started calling itself O.co, the domain it bought privately from the .co registry for $350,000 last July.
When I wrote, last November, “Overstock’s .com domain is its brand, and that’s not about to change”, I may well have been wrong. Go to overstock.com and look at the logo.
This is good evidence, if it were needed, that the very same trademark interests currently opposed to ICANN’s new TLDs program are also keenly aware of the benefits.
Overstock has had its eyes on O.com for over five years, and fought unsuccessfully within ICANN to have single-letter .com domains released from the VeriSign reserved list.
It was not until .co relaunched last summer – essentially a new TLD – that Overstock got the opportunity to register a domain (almost?) as good as the one it wanted.
I find this interesting because Overstock, like many other major brand owners, has been a vocal opponent of new TLDs.
In a July 2009 letter to ICANN (pdf), for example, Overstock expresses many of the same views about new TLDs that are still being expressed by the trademark interests currently holding up the program.
I’m not suggesting that Overstock’s eagerness to use O.co negates its specific criticisms of the new TLDs program, but its conflicting behavior does seem to suggest a certain degree of cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, it opposed new TLDs. But when a new TLD launched, it grasped the opportunity with both hands and rebranded the whole company around it.
If what I hear is true, many of the companies publicly opposed to new TLDs are also the ones simultaneously investigating their own “.brand” domains.
Could Overstock’s latest move represent a pent-up demand for new TLDs among big brands? What does that mean for the future of .com as the internet’s premium real estate?

6 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, ICANN, new TLDs, o.co, overstock.com

Surge in new domain registrars

ICANN is seeing a spike in newly accredited domain name registrars.
Since the start of the year, the organization has approved 16 new companies, compared to only about 40 in the whole of 2010.
About half a dozen of the new registrars appear to belong to domain investor Andrew Reberry of TurnCommerce, which owns domains such as Glossary.com, Bulldozers.com and Fluff.com.
Many of the others were accredited yesterday and have very generic registrar names, such as Host Name Services Inc, International Registration Services Inc and Online Name Services Inc.
There are no web sites associated with this latest batch yet, but I’d be surprised if many turn out to have sought accreditation with customer-facing domain services in mind.
This is pure speculation, but I wonder if any of this may be related to ICANN’s recent decision to loosen the restrictions on cross-ownership between registrars and registries.
If and when ICANN opens up its new top-level domains program to applications, which could happen as soon as August, potential registries will also be allowed to own registrars.
Could the market for flipping accredited companies return? It’s happened before, but it may not be the most efficient or economical way of achieving accreditation nowadays.
The uptick in newly approved registrars may of course just be an anomaly.

1 Comment Tagged: accreditation, ICANN, registrar

Eleven new ccTLDs coming next week

ICANN is set to approve 11 new internationalized domain name ccTLDs, representing four nations in Asia and the Middle East, at its board meeting next week.
On the January 25 consent agenda – which is typically rubber-stamped without discussion – is the approval of IDN ccTLDs for South Korea, India, Singapore and Syria.
Korea is due to get .한국, Singapore gets . 新加坡 (Chinese) and .சிங்கப்பூர் (Tamil), while Syria gets the Arabic string .سورية.
Massively polyglot India will be delegated its ccTLD in seven of its most-popular languages.
The delegations will push the number of TLDs in IANA’s database to over 300 for the first time.
This week, the ccTLD for Thailand went live with Thai-language registrations under .ไทย. You can watch a video of ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom congratulating the nation here.
Also on ICANN’s agenda next week is the re-delegation of the ASCII ccTLDs for Burkina Faso, Congo and Syria – .bf, .cd and .sy respectively – to new registry managers.

4 Comments Tagged: cctlds, ICANN, idns

RIAA threatens ICANN over new TLDs

The Recording Industry Association of America has added itself to the list of organizations making vague legal threats over ICANN’s new top-level domains program.
The RIAA, no stranger to playing the bogeyman when it comes to technological change, is concerned that .music, for example, could be used to encourage copyright infringement.
It wants ICANN to “ensure best practices are developed” to prevent musical TLDs being used to enable music piracy. In a letter, RIAA deputy general counsel Victoria Sheckler wrote:

We are concerned that a music themed gTLD will be used to enable wide scale copyright and trademark infringement.
…
We would like to work with ICANN and others to ensure that best practices are developed and used to ensure this type of malicious behavior does not occur.

She signs off with a barely veiled threat:

We strongly urge you to take these concerns seriously… we prefer a practical solution to these issues, and hope to avoid the need to escalate the issue further.

One of the RIAA’s objections to the current Applicant Guidebook for new TLDs is the “community objection” procedure, which the RIAA doesn’t think gives it a good enough chance of blocking a .music TLD application.
I wonder if the RIAA is planning its own .music bid.
There is already one very public .music initiative, championed for the last couple of years by Constantine Roussos, an active and vocal ICANN community member.
But the string is valuable, is likely to be contested, and there’s a not insignificant chance that Roussos will be beaten to it by an applicant with deeper pockets.
Regardless, the RIAA’s argument that .music equals piracy is pretty poor, possibly disingenuous, and unlikely to influence the Guidebook.
ICANN constantly walks the tightrope between technical coordination and content regulation; getting into the business of fighting piracy is not going to make it onto the agenda any time soon.

18 Comments Tagged: .music, icnan, new TLDs, recording industry association of america, riaa

Banks to write security rules for “.bank”

Financial services firms unhappy with ICANN’s new top-level domains program are to take matters into their own hands by writing security guidelines for TLDs like “.bank”.
BITS, the technology policy arm of the Financial Services Roundtable, said it plans to develop “elevated security standards for financial gTLDs” and wants ICANN to make them mandatory.
The organization, which counts many major world banks as members, is concerned that a “.bank” in the hands of a registry with lax security could increase fraud and reduce confidence in banking online.
BITS said its guidelines would be drafted by a globally diverse working group and submitted to an international standards-setting organization for ratification.
It wants ICANN to include a single sentence in its new TLDs Applicant Guidebook, apparently incorporating the guidelines by reference:

Evaluators will use standards published by the financial services industry to determine if the applicant’s proposed security approach is commensurate with the level of trust necessary for financial services gTLDs.

An ICANN working group is working on the concept of a High Security Zone TLD for precisely this kind of application, but in September the ICANN board abruptly decided that it “will not be certifying or enforcing” the idea, apparently in order to mitigate its own corporate risk.
The BITS project appears to be in direct response to that move.
It certainly seems to be a more productive avenue of engagement than hinting at a lawsuit, which it did in a November letter to ICANN.
I’m attempting to confirm whether the BITS plan, submitted as a response to the Applicant Guidebook public comment period, is being proposed with ICANN’s backing. (UPDATE: it isn’t.)

2 Comments Tagged: .bank, bits, financial services roundtable, hstld, ICANN, new TLDs, security

Red Bull files UDRP after domain expires

Energy drink maker Red Bull has filed a UDRP complaint over the domain name red-bull.com, which until recently it actually owned.
It’s moderately embarrassing, but not unheard of, for companies to turn to the UDRP after domains they allow to expire are then snapped up by squatters.
What makes the complaint unusual is that the domain red-bull.com is not an obscure fringe case – it’s virtually identical to the company’s trademark and to its primary domain, redbull.com.
Also, according to Whois records, Red Bull also appears to use MarkMonitor, the brand-protection registrar, for its domain name needs.
Whois history shows that Red Bull acquired the domain in about 2005, but allowed it to expire in September 2010, after which it was quickly acquired by a third party.
Did Red Bull deliberately allow it to expire? There’s a case to be made for rationalizing defensive registration portfolios to reduce costs, but this domain would seem (to me) to be a definite keeper.
MarkMonitor has a policy of declining to comment on clients, which it chose to exercise when I inquired.
The domain red-bull.com currently resolves to what can only be described as a splog. It shows up on page two of Google for the search [red bull], which may go some way to explaining the UDRP.
Red Bull acquired red-bull.net, red-bull.cc and red-bull.tv via UDRP proceedings between 2001 and 2004, but has since allowed all three, as well as the .org, which it also owned, to expire.
The .tv and .net versions are currently parked, meaning they don’t rank so well in search engines.
It’s not the first odd UDRP Red Bull has filed. Last year, it lost a UDRP complaint despite winning a court case over the same domain name, as I reported in June.

10 Comments Tagged: markmonitor, red bull, udrp