IP lawyers call for halt to new TLDs

Some trademark interests are ratcheting up the rhetoric in opposition to ICANN’s new top-level domains program, with one company calling for it to be scrapped altogether.
While ICANN’s extended public comment period on the proposed final Applicant Guidebook does not end until the weekend, a Danish bloc of companies has already made its objections known.
The most vociferous views so far this week have come from Lundbeck, a drug company that researches treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Lundbeck trademark counsel Søren Ingemann Larsen accused ICANN of operating “fake” comment periods that ignore feedback from the trademark lobby.
In a cap-happy missive, he said the program should be “HALTED” until ICANN can prove the domain market lacks competition, then “cancelled” if such proof is not forthcoming.

The fact of the matter is that the only entities that are in favour of the Program are the ones who can make money out of it, and that is ICANN and the Registrars. The “internet community”, including private users and brand owners, are NOT interested.

Lundbeck, which has brands such as “Cipralex” and “Xenazine”, does not appear to be a major target for cybersquatters, judging by how many UDRP complaints it has filed (none).
It did however join CADNA, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, at the same time as prolific UDRP user Lego Juris, last November.
Lego, and a few other companies submitting virtually identical comments to ICANN this week, have reiterated criticisms of the program’s trademark protections expressed in previous months.
But they have now also seized upon elements of the latest independent economic report into the costs and benefits of new TLDs, which ICANN published last month.
One extract Lego and the others quote questions whether new TLDs are needed to provide some of the services proposed by community TLD wannabes:

Are there other ways to achieve the primary objectives of the proposed gTLD, such as: (a) second-level domain names; (b) certificates; (c) software tags; and (d) filters that look at content beyond the URL and any tags? How do the alternatives, if any, compare in terms of their likely effectiveness in achieving the primary objectives of the gTLD and the costs they would impose on different members of the Internet community?

It’s an interesting argument – that a community TLD could just as well operate as a second-level domain – not one I recall reading in a long while. I don’t think it has legs.

Comment Tagged: ICANN, lego juris, lundbeck, new TLDs, trademarks

eNom named “worst” for badware

Demand Media-owned eNom has been fingered as the worst company when it comes to hosting “badware”, according to the latest quarterly report from HostExploit.
The report puts eNom at number three in its overall league table of hosts involved (albeit generally unwittingly) in supporting malicious activity online, up from seven in the third quarter.
HostExploit conducts meta-research, looking at a number of factors (such as phishing and spam) normalizing and weighting data provided by a wide variety of sources.
eNom’s position on the list is based almost entirely on its ranking under the “badware” metric, which uses data supplied by StopBadware.org members Google, Sunbelt Software and Team Cymru.
Broken down by category, eNom scored 944 out of 1,000 in the fourth quarter, using HostExploit’s scoring system for badware. The network ranked second scored only 594.
What is badware? The report says:

Badware fundamentally disregards how users might choose to employ their own computer. Examples of such software include spyware, malware, rogues, and deceptive adware. It commonly appears in the form of free screensavers that surreptitiously generate advertisements, malicious web browser toolbars that take browsers to unexpected web pages and keylogger programs that transmit personal data to malicious third parties.

Other major domain name companies also rank in the top 50 worst hosts; 1&1, Oversee.net and Go Daddy occupy positions #35, #36 and #37. Google is at #28.
The HostExploit report appears to have been funded by the Nominet Trust.

4 Comments Tagged: badware, demand media, enom, hostexploit

TucsonShooting.com crashes after Tucson shooting

A gun blogger had his web site crash shortly after Saturday’s bloodbath in Tucson, Arizona, because he owns the domain name TucsonShooting.com.
To be clear, the domain has nothing to do with the failed assassination attempt on Rep Giffords. The blogger just likes shooting and he’s based in Tucson. He’s owned the domain since 2002.
In this video, he explains what happened to his site after the massacre, which killed six people.

The domain TucsonShooting.com is the first hit in Google when you search for [tucson shooting], testifying to the power of a good SEO domain. It redirects to GunWebsites.net.
The blogger notes:

Who in their right mind would think there’d be someone so opportunistic to capitalize on a tragedy like this by putting up a domain either ahead of time or so quickly?

Clearly, he hasn’t met many domainers.

1 Comment Tagged: google, tucson shooting, tucsonshooting.com

Google and Facebook to cut off thousands for World IPv6 Day

Some of the internet’s biggest companies are going to deliberately break their web sites for a day, for hundreds of thousands of users, in order to raise awareness of IPv6.
Google, Facebook and Yahoo are among the companies that will go into production with the protocol for 24 hours, starting at midnight UTC, June 8, for World IPv6 Day.
For the day, the companies will make their sites accessible using a dual stack of IPv4 and IPv6. Most users will be unaffected and will be able to access the services as normal.
But Google predicted on its blog that 0.05% of users may “experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”
Facebook purportedly has 500 million users, so presumably it’s expecting 250,000 of them to be cut off from its site for the day, with a corresponding dip in ad impressions and revenue.
World IPv6 Day is being overseen by the Internet Society. ICANN/IANA does not appear to have a role, despite it having global responsibility over IP address allocations.
ISOC’s site says:

The goal of the Test Drive Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

The IPv4 pool is estimated to be exhausted next month, when IANA allocates the final five /8 blocks to the Regional Internet Registries. The RIRs are expected to run out of addresses in November.
Not too long after that, IPv6 will be the only choice if you want to obtain IP addresses through official channels. If you want IPv4, you’ll have to head to the gray market.

3 Comments Tagged: facebook, google, internet society, isoc, world ipv6 day, yahoo

Native Americans want new TLD protection

The National Congress of American Indians, a Native American rights group, has asked ICANN for special protection for tribal names under the new top-level domains program.
In comments filed with ICANN today, the NCAI asks for the same level of protection given to countries and territories found on various UN lists, such as the ISO 3166-1 list of country names.
NCAI president Jefferson Keel wrote:

Allowing the approval of top level tribal domain names (such as .navajo or .seneca) without considering the protection of tribal governments would cause confusion, attributing certain information or views to a tribal government which would lack control while its name is being used. In our view, only tribal government websites should be authorized to use a tribal name gTLD, unless express consent is granted by the tribal government.

The letter appears to request that these protections are extended both to TLD strings and to names registered at the second level, although it’s not entirely clear on that point.
In other words, the NCAI appears to want not only “.navajo” reserved, but also to have “navajo” placed on the list of reserved strings that all TLD registries will have to abide by.
The latest list of tribes officially recognized by the US government has several hundred entries. If ICANN were to make the requested changes, more tribes would be protected than UN members.
Most of the push for protection of geographic terms has come from ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which does not have any Native American tribal representatives.
Keel’s comments were filed in response to the ongoing ICANN public comment period on the latest version of the Applicant Guidebook, which ends this Saturday.

2 Comments Tagged: applicant guidebook, ICANN, national congress of american indians, ncai, new TLDs

Ready to apply for a gTLD? No, you’re not. Not even remotely

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kieren McCarthy.
So, yes, it’s been a long, drawn-out and dispiriting exercise to get to the point where the structure of the internet will be radically changed forever.
But even if the US government invades ICANN’s offices in Los Angeles, trademark lawyers kidnap Rod Beckstrom, and Marilyn Cade clones herself 100 times, nothing can stop the raw reality that 2011 is the year of the gTLD. It’s happening. So stop sulking and start getting excited about it.
It’s been a long 30 months since Paris in June 2008. Plenty of time to talk and plan and consider the future. The biggest negative impact of this delay however has not been on the process but on the gTLD applicants themselves who have started to persuade themselves they know what they’re doing.
We don’t need a four-month communication period, they cry, we are ready to go. We have been ready to go for two years!
The sad truth however is that you’re not. You’re not even remotely ready to face a brave new world of internet extensions that fit around its users, rather than the other way around.
Sure, you know the rules in the Applicant Guidebook. Well, most of them. And you know how the application process will work (but you don’t though, do you?). But that’s all just paperwork, as soon as you get through the doors of bureaucracy there standing in the brilliant light will be hundreds of thousands of internet users clamoring to hear what you have to tell them, basking in the glory of a new dawn.
Except they won’t.
Instead you are more likely to find yourself coming out of a cinema in a bad part of town just as the sun sets, looking for a taxi and realizing you haven’t got enough cash left to get home.
Make no mistake: new internet extensions are the future of this extraordinary global network. VeriSign doesn’t drop half a million dollars for a one-hour session at an ICANN meeting if it’s doesn’t think it’s critical to its future. But there was a long gap between the invention of the steam engine and the Japanese bullet train. The Wright Brothers took off in 1903 but it took 32 years for the DC-3 to bring air travel to commercial travelers.
The big boys will be fine of course; they have the money and resources to flex and change. But if you are not VeriSign or GoDaddy, how are you going to ensure that your internet dream isn’t just a pipe-dream or, worse still, a nightmare?
The answer is terrifying simple: talk to people.
The fact is that no one knows how the domain name market will pan out in the next few years. There are plenty of ideas, some new, some radical. Some of these will take root; others will fade or fail. The only way to get a sense of what will be a rapidly changing market is to find out what everyone else thinks. You need to talk to everyone, and they need to talk to you.
The other side of this coin is learning from the past. We have had two previous extensions of the internet namespace, albeit much smaller. But those that started up the dot-infos and dot-names were once in the same place as new applicants will be in six months’ time: full of ideas and staring at an uncertain path forward.
The domain name industry, though still maturing, is also not an empty space anymore. There are enough established companies and there have been enough conferences and meetings about that market for relationships to be formed. A status quo of sorts is in place, and a collective sense of how things work has emerged.
Even so, was it only me that listened to person after person in 2010 call ICANN’s economic studies inaccurate and incomplete and thought: “Not one of you has the same idea about the industry you live within.”
How much do new gTLD applicants know or even understanding the different sides of this industry?
If you go to ICANN meetings, you may know some of the politics of it. You may even have grasped some of the multitude of processes that accompany internet infrastructure. But you won’t have got a feel for the sheer business of the internet.
If you come from the domainer industry, chances are you have a sense of the intrinsic value of domains and what makes them move or not move. But even the CEO of Oversee.net, Jeff Kupietsky, said this time last year there needs to be some kind of organized effort to turn what is an ad hoc market into something more stable. Domainers know how auctions work – but not how to build the factory to make the products that are sold.
If you have run a registry in the past, you may have a leg up. But how do you differentiate between useful lessons from the past, and old ways of thinking that will put you at a competitive disadvantage?
How many of those wonderful, market-tested systems have in fact been dangerously patched and cobbled together over the past decade? How will you recognize the market-changing products when they appear?
And, of course, the biggest, the most unknown and yet the most crucially important aspect of new gTLDs: marketing.
In an industry where the epitome of marketing prowess is a woman making double entendres in a tight T-shirt, we all have much to learn from the marketing crowd. When you enter the market alongside 499 other new extensions, you better be damn sure you have a plan to persuade people why they should choose yours.
So what is the solution? Well a big part of one solution is to attend the first ever conference that is dedicated to figuring out this new market.
The .nxt conference on 9-10 February in San Francisco will feature everyone from ICANN’s CEO and the ICANN staff in charge of running the process, to the established players, the visionaries as well as the heretics, the observers and the advisers.
Over two days, you will get a masterclass in what we all collectively know, and are still figuring out, about new internet extensions. It’s the one place where you can check your assumptions and learn about others’. Miss that opportunity and in 12 months’ time you’ll be wondering how you managed to get it all so wrong.
Kieren McCarthy is an author and consultant, formerly ICANN’s general manager of public participation. He is a founder of the Global Internet Business Coalition and general manager of the .nxt conference.

6 Comments Tagged: .nxt, guest post, ICANN, new TLDs

Coalition complains to ICANN about Universe.jobs

The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition thinks Employ Media is violating its own policies by allowing Universe.jobs to be launched, and has complained to ICANN.
Coalition chief John Bell said the group, which comprises jobs sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, “filed a formal notice” with ICANN’s compliance department December 17.
That was just one week after ICANN’s board of directors, at the Cartagena meeting, passed a resolution calling for ICANN staff to “closely monitor” the registry for charter violations.
“We are confident that ICANN is taking our claims seriously and we are looking forward to a favorable decision,” Bell said.
Universe.jobs was turned on by the DirectEmployers Association last week, using hundreds of generic domains, after ICANN give the registry the all-clear to start selling non-company-name domains.
The issue is whether this independent jobs board, which is fed traffic from domains such as usa.jobs, texas.jobs and marketing.jobs, is a permissible use of .jobs domains.
The Coalition thinks it isn’t. Employ Media thinks it is.
The Coalition has also apparently complained about NativeAmerican.jobs, another employer-independent jobs site, on behalf of NativeAmericanJobs.com.

1 Comment Tagged: .jobs, .jobs charter compliance coalition, directemployers association, employ media

Three new ccTLDs (including .sx) up for grabs

IANA quietly created three new country-code top-level domains shortly before Christmas, to represent the new nations created by the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles last year.
The new ccTLDs are: .bq for Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba, .cw for Curacao and .sx for Sint Maarten (Dutch part). All three appeared in IANA’s database December 20.
None of the strings are currently delegated. The governments of the respective nations will have to apply to IANA if they want to start using their TLDs on the internet.
The days of chancers moving in to colonize island ccTLDs (eg .nu) may have passed, but there are still opportunities for domain name businesses to make a buck here.
The most recent new ccTLD, .me, was assigned to Montenegro in 2007. The registry’s partners include Go Daddy and Afilias.
I’m sure overseas domain name companies are already sniffing around the newly minted countries.
But these nations are small, and they don’t seem to have lucked out by being assigned strings with much secondary semantic value, so I can’t imagine we’re looking at high-volume TLDs.
Sint Maarten’s .sx may be an exception, due to its resemblance to “.sex”, which is quite likely, I think, to be created as a gTLD under ICANN’s upcoming new TLDs program.
If and when .sx is delegated, the country will have to bear this potential for confusion in mind when it’s designing its registration policies.
Will it want to keep its national brand respectable, or will it cash in on possible future typosquatting?
The Netherlands Antilles officially split in October. It took about three months for the three strings to be added to the ISO 3166 list (pdf), and another week for IANA to add the ccTLDs to its database.
The string AN, for the dissolved country, has also been deleted from the 3166 list. What happens to .an the ccTLD is a whole other story.

9 Comments Tagged: .bq, .cw, .sex, .sx, cctlds, iana

Vixie takes on ISC chief scientist role

Internet Systems Consortium president Paul Vixie plans to address a “perfect storm” of internet addressing “crises” by becoming the organization’s chairman and chief scientist.
Vixie founded the not-for-profit ISC, which provides BIND – the software that runs most of the domain name system – in 1994. He will be replaced as president by Barry Greene.
Not known for mincing words, Vixie said in brief ISC statement today:

There are two huge technical crises arising simultaneously. The Internet is running out of address space and at the same time the level of criminal activity is increasing sharply. It’s the perfect storm. We need to deploy IPv6 and DNSSEC more or less simultaneously, and we need to develop and deploy, quickly, new technologies and new methodologies to measure and understand what is happening out there. I need to turn my full attention to these pressing and difficult problems, and I know that ISC will be in good hands with Barry as president.

Comment Tagged: DNSSEC, internet systems consortium, ipv6, isc, paul vixie

Will Bill Clinton keynote at ICANN San Francisco?

There’s been a rumor going around for at least a month that Bill Clinton is being lined up to provide the keynote address for the next ICANN meeting, to be held in San Francisco in March.
I’m not going to pretend to have any inside information, but I’ve heard it from so many people recently that I thought it was worthy of a post.
One reason the rumor may have been reinvigorated this week is the revelation of the hefty sums ICANN is charging its top sponsors for the San Francisco meeting.
As I reported earlier in the week, VeriSign appears to have paid up $500,000 to get one of two top-tier Diamond-level sponsorship deals for the meeting.
Clinton, like many former world leaders, can command powerful sums for public speaking engagements, reportedly up to $350,000 a gig a few years ago.
ICANN, of course, was the brainchild of the Clinton administration in 1998.
While the US government’s attitude to ICANN’s activities has changed over the years, the organization was formed largely to introduce competition in the registrar and registry markets.
Since these are two likely results of the approval of the new TLDs program, Clinton’s appearance at the meeting where it will possibly happen would be appropriate.

1 Comment Tagged: bill clinton, ICANN, san francisco, silicon valley