Hitachi to apply for .hitachi

Japanese electronics giant Hitachi has emerged as the second big consumer brand to officially announce it will apply for a “.brand” top-level domain.
GMO Registry, also based in Japan, is the company’s back-end provider of choice, according to this news release (pdf).
GMO is also working with Canon, which was the first company to announce its .brand TLD bid, .canon.
As I noted yesterday, IBM is also a likely candidate for a .brand domain, but it has not officially announced its intentions yet.
Nokia, Deloitte and Unicef are also known to be considering their options.
(via UrbanBrain)

5 Comments Tagged: .brand, gmo registry, hitachi, ICANN, new TLDs

Clinton confirmed for ICANN’s SF meeting

Former US president Bill Clinton has been confirmed as the star guest speaker of ICANN’s 40th public meeting, which kicks off in San Francisco in a little under two weeks.
According to a tweet minutes ago from CEO Rod Beckstrom, Clinton will address ICANN’s Gala event, March 16 in Union Square.
This is usually an evening drinks-n-canapes event or a sit-down dinner. The SF Gala is scheduled for 7pm.
Given the central, outdoor location, I’m sure security will be tight. We could be looking at another limited-numbers, invitation-only event.
Beckstrom has previously stated that Clinton’s fee will be covered by a special sponsorship deal, but the identity of the sponsor does not appear to have been revealed yet.

9 Comments Tagged: bill clinton, ICANN, san francisco

ICANN director has .xxx job offer

Sebastien Bachollet, recently installed on the ICANN board as its first elected “At Large” director, has been offered a job working for the .xxx top-level domain, it has emerged.
According to a board “statement of interests” (pdf) released yesterday, independent technology consultant Bachollet:

has been invited to be a member of the Board of the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR), which is set up to be the sponsoring organization for the .XXX sTLD, should ICM be awarded a contract for the .XXX sTLD.

He’s only the second person to be named as a potential member of the IFFOR board, after Canadian entrepreneur Clyde Beattie.
It goes without saying that Bachollet will be recusing himself from the (final?) ICANN board vote on ICM Registry’s .xxx contract, set for the San Francisco ICANN meeting March 18.
If .xxx is approved, IFFOR will create policies governing the .xxx TLD. It will be made up of a mixture of the adult industry, security, child protection and free speech advocates.
The SOI also revealed, in an ambiguously plural statement, that: “IBM may apply for new gTLD”.

13 Comments Tagged: ICANN, icm registry, iffor, Sebastien Bachollet, xxx

Registry objects to .jobs shutdown threat

Employ Media will appeal ICANN’s threatened termination of its .jobs registry contract.
The company released a statement (pdf) late yesterday, following ICANN’s unprecedented threat, in which it said ICANN’s claims are “utterly without merit”.
“We view the substance of this notice to be a surprising reversal of position and contradictory to prior decisions issued by its Board of Directors,” the company said.
ICANN yesterday gave Employ Media until the end of the month to cancel its agreement to provide 40,000 .jobs domains to the DirectEmployers Association for its Universe.jobs employment board.
The organization said the allocation of the domains for non-human-resources purposes went against the letter, spirit and intent of the registry’s contract and Charter.
It essentially boils down to a claim that Employ Media hacked its contract to allow it to start making money on names beyond the limited scope of its original “sponsored” community TLD.
The .jobs TLD was originally pitched as a space for corporate HR pages, not independent jobs sites. With Universe.jobs, half of the namespace is an independent jobs site. Employ Media is believed to have a revenue-sharing arrangement with DirectEmployers.
The ICANN breach notice was welcomed by the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, the ad hoc trade group formed by major commercial jobs sites to fight Universe.jobs.
Peter Weddle, executive director of the International Association of Employment Web Sites, said in a press release:

the Dot Jobs Universe was not an innovation but rather an unprecedented attempt by a registry operator to misappropriate an entire TLD for itself and its alliance partner in blatant disregard of ICANN’s rules.

Employ Media disagrees, of course, saying that Universe.jobs came about as a result of its “Phased Allocation” liberalization plan, which was approved by ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process and then survived a Reconsideration Request filed by the Coalition.
The company said: “it is imperative for registry operators to have predictability in the performance of duties and that ICANN has a responsibility to honor its commitments with contracted parties.”
Its registry contract contains a dispute resolution procedure that first calls for bilateral talks and, failing agreement, arbitration via the International Chamber of Commerce.

Comment Tagged: .jobs, .jobs charter compliance coalition, employ media, ICANN, international association of employment web sites, reconsideration, rsep, universe.jobs

Is Ireland’s .ie to change hands?

The Irish country-code domain, .ie, may be up for redelegation, according to Ireland’s largest domain name registrar.
Michele Neylon, managing director of Blacknight Solutions, has written to ICANN (pdf) to demand answers, after his inquiries about the potential changes were rebuffed.
The .ie ccTLD is currently delegated to University College Dublin, but since 2000 its operation has been contracted to IE Domain Registry, a spin-off company. Since 2007, it’s essentially been controlled by the Irish government.
According to Neylon, IEDR is “aggressively” pursuing a redelegation. If successful, this would put its own name in the IANA database, rather than the University’s. He wrote:

The management and development of the IE namespace should be with an entity that has made a strong commitment to holding the .ie domain in trust for the public good, and a strong commitment to a policy process that is driven by the Internet community and by the explicit consideration of the public good. This is not the case with IEDR, a private company that has practically no transparency and has zero representation of the internet community in its board or ongoing development.

It has been longstanding ICANN/IANA policy not to publicly discuss redelegation requests, which it apparently chose to exercise when Neylon inquired about the IEDR situation.
Neylon believes that any redelegation should be subject to public consultation in Ireland, which would be difficult if the talks all happen behind closed doors.
Blacknight is the registrar of record for 20% of .ie names. It’s also the only Irish registrar with an ICANN accreditation.

5 Comments Tagged: .ie, blacknight, iedr

ICANN threatens to shut down .jobs

In an unprecedented move, ICANN has threatened to cancel a top-level domain registry operator’s contract.
Employ Media, the .jobs registry, faces losing its TLD if it does not shut down Universe.jobs, the controversial jobs board operated by its partner, the DirectEmployers Association.
In a letter to the company (pdf), ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey wrote:

By not establishing any meaningful restrictions on who may register second level registrations in the .JOBS TLD, Employ Media put in operation a TLD where anyone can register names, thus defeating the purpose for which the sponsored TLD came into existence.
…
We are calling on Employ Media to take immediate actions to implement restricted registration policies that support the purpose for which the .JOBS top-level domain was established, and to cancel registrations and/or disavow themselves of the benefits of any registrations that are owned by related parties, if any.

The move comes following a complaint filed by the so-called .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, made up of jobs board such as Monster.com and CollegeRecruiter.com.
They’re annoyed that the registry licensed 40,000 premium geographic and vocational .jobs domains to DirectEmployers for Universe.jobs, which has started to compete with them.
Jeffrey wrote:

It appears that Employ Media and SHRM, through the Direct Employers Association, intend to use the .JOBS TLD primarily to compete with other internet job boards. Such use is inconsistent with the purpose stated in the .JOBS Charter and represented to the ICANN community.

The deal came as a result of a change to the .jobs registry contract, made through ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process, that allowed Employ Media to lift a rule that restricted registered domain names only to the names of companies.
What the RSEP didn’t do was change the .jobs Charter, which restricts “who” may register .jobs domains. Yet, weirdly, the Charter is partly the basis for ICANN’s threat.
Jeffrey refers to the Charter restrictions, which are easily circumvented, as “specious” and “do not serve the international human resource management community”.
This is the Charter that ICANN approved back in 2005, and which hasn’t changed since, remember.
To come back into compliance, ICANN wants Employ Media to shut down Universe.jobs and get back to selling company-name registrations.
I think it’s likely Employ Media will appeal, possibly by taking the case to arbitration, as its contract allows.

12 Comments Tagged: .jobs, .jobs charter compliance coalition, directemployers association, employ media, ICANN, monster.com, rsep, universe.jobs

DomainIncite is one year old today

It was one year ago today that I registered the domain name domainincite.com and made my first blog post here.
Since that day, I’ve published well over 500 articles, approved over 1,300 comments, and currently receive roughly 10,000 unique readers per month, growing all the time.
Not bad for a part-time gig, but I hope to do much better in year two.
My goal in the first year of running DI was not to reach vast numbers of readers, but to reach the right readers with timely, useful information.
Judging from the feedback I’ve received from the industry’s movers and shakers over the last several months, both in person and online, I think I have achieved that goal.
I’d like to thank you all for reading. I hope you continue to do so.
I’d also like to thank my advertisers past and present for making DI feel like less of a money-sucking time vampire and for generously indulging my psychological Chinese wall.
I’ve got some potentially cool announcements to make in the not-too-distant future, so stay tuned.

20 Comments Tagged: domainincite

US may break up ICANN powers

The US government is considering taking away some of ICANN’s powers.
The Department of Commerce today kicked off the process of reviewing the so-called IANA contract, from which ICANN currently derives its control over the domain name system root zone.
As I predicted yesterday, Commerce has published a Notice of Inquiry in the Federal Register. It wants input from the public before it officially opens the contract for rebidding.
ICANN has operated the IANA functions, often regarded as intrinsic to and inseparable from its mission, for the last decade. But the contract expires September 30 this year.
Significantly, Commerce now wants to know whether the three IANA functions – IP address allocation, protocol number assignments, and DNS root zone management – should be split up.
The NOI says:

The IANA functions have been viewed historically as a set of interdependent technical functions and accordingly performed together by a single entity. In light of technology changes and market developments, should the IANA functions continue to be treated as interdependent? For example, does the coordination of the assignment of technical protocol parameters need to be done by the same entity that administers certain responsibilities associated with root zone management?

I’m speculating here, but assuming ICANN is a shoo-in for the domain names part of the IANA deal, this suggests that Commerce is thinking about breaking out the IP address and protocol pieces and possibly assigning them to a third party.
The NOI also asks for comments about ways to improve the security, stability and reportable metrics of the IANA functions, and whether relationships with other entities such as regional internet registries and the IETF should be baked into the contract.
The timing of the announcement is, as I noted yesterday, interesting. It could be a coincidence, coming almost exactly five years after the IANA contract last came up for review.
But ICANN’s board of directors and its Governmental Advisory Committee will meet in Brussels on Monday to figure out where they agree and disagree on the new top-level domains program.
While it’s an ICANN-GAC meeting, the US has taken a prominent lead in drafting the GAC’s position papers, tempered somewhat, I suspect, by other governments, and will take a key role in next week’s talks.
Hat tip: @RodBeckstrom.

7 Comments Tagged: department of commerce, iana, ICANN, lawrence strickling, ntia, rod beckstrom

Xvid founder tries to seize $55k sale Xvid.com

The founder of Xvid.org, a popular if legally dubious video codec, is trying to get his hands on the domain name Xvid.com.
Michael Militzer, who launched the Xvid project in 2001, has filed a UDRP complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Xvid.com was registered in 2000, and spent much of the last decade as a placeholder site, but changed hands early last year. It’s now developed, with links to video software.
In a thread on DigitalPoint, it is claimed that the current registrant paid $55,000 for the domain. It may prove to have been a poor investment.
There’s plenty of UDRP precedent suggesting that buying a domain name corresponding to a trademark can be considered bad faith, even when the original registration preceded the trademark filing.
Millitzer obtained his US trademark on the word “Xvid” in 2008. Historical Whois records show the domain has only been registered to its current owner since 2010.
There’s an irony here: Xvid has been accused in the past of infringing intellectual property rights in the form of MPEG’s patents.

1 Comment Tagged: udrp, wipo, xvid, xvid.com

Demand Media says Google change no big deal, yet

Demand Media has said that recent changes to Google’s search engine algorithm does not appear to have had a material impact on its business.
Google said yesterday that it has changed its code to demote “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”.
This was widely interpreted as being designed to hit “content farms”, which make up one of Demand’s major revenue streams. The company also owns number two domain registrar eNom.
In a blog post, published less than four hours after Google announced the change, Demand executive vice president Larry Fitzgibbon wrote:

As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results… It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business.

It remains to be seen if the changes will have any impact on traffic and revenue at Demand, which recently executed an IPO, but Fitzgibbon played down the company’s focus on search traffic.
Demand also measures success based on metrics such as direct navigation, repeat visits and traffic from social media, he wrote.

6 Comments Tagged: demand media, enom, google, ipo, search