Porn industry “ready for war” with .xxx

The Free Speech Coalition and ICM Registry are poised to do battle over the .xxx top-level domain at next week’s ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia.
The FSC, which has opposed the porn-only domain for years, is trying to rally its troops with a flyer declaring it’s “Ready For War”, illustrated with a photograph apparently of Cartagena’s battlements.
(Apropos, really, given the city’s history fighting off the British and ICM’s habit of recruiting Brits for key positions.)
The FSC said on its blog:

the majority of adult Internet business owners and webmasters do not support being categorized in an Internet ghetto that will cost them millions in extra fees annually and also make it easier for anti-adult entities to censor and block their sites.

The trade group will be represented at the meeting by executive director Diane Duke and chair Jeffrey Douglas.
But ICM will have them out-gunned almost 10-to-1. President Stuart Lawley tells me the company is sending 19 people to the meeting.
Discussion of the .xxx TLD is on the ICANN board’s agenda for its meeting Friday December 10. I think it’s quite likely to be approved at that time.
The main stumbling block for ICM is ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which has expressed reservations about the domain over the years and is firmly opposed to “controversial” TLDs.
Which way the vote swings will depend greatly on what the GAC has to say, and how the power struggle it’s currently engaged in with ICANN pans out.
Here’s part of the FSC’s flyer.

Comment Tagged: cartagena, free speech coaltion, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, icm registry

.SO extends sunrise, delays landrush

.SO Registry, the company behind the newly launched Somalian top-level domain, has added an extra month to its sunrise period and delayed its landrush accordingly.
The trademark-holders-only sunrise was due to run for the month of November. Instead, it will now end December 31.
The registry said on Thursday that the changes were made “due to the high demand” for sunrise registrations.
The landrush, which will be open to all, is now scheduled to launch January 11.

10 Comments Tagged: .so, .so registry, landrush, sunrise

File-sharers try to create .p2p domain

A move to create a .p2p top-level domain outside of the regular DNS root is under way.
Following the outcry over the US government’s seizure of 82 .com domain names this weekend, a group of coders have decided to create a namespace not overseen by ICANN (which had nothing to do with it).
It’s not entirely clear to me how many projects have launched.
There’s a blog over here that talks about a “distributed DNS” that would be “decentralized”, but this new wiki seems to be limited to the idea of launching .p2p as a TLD.
(Interestingly, dot-p2p.org appears to have been registered several days prior to the weekend’s domain name seizures)
The .p2p project plans to create an application that would intercept all DNS requests for .p2p domains and route them via a peer-to-peer network rather than the user’s regular DNS servers.
This presumably means that the entire .p2p zone file could wind up being stored on endpoints, which sounds like a scalability challenge to me.
More problematic is the the issue of “decentralization”, which is of course critical when you’re talking about trustworthy DNS. It can be summed up in this sentence:

“Hello, I’m bankofamerica.com.”

If anybody can claim to own any domain name, you need to be able to figure out who’s telling the truth.
The .p2p initiative seems to be dealing with this by, um, centralizing control over .p2p domain assignments to a free “registrar” at nic.p2p.
To prevent warehousing, registrants would need to prove they already own the string in another TLD in order to register the equivalent .p2p domain.
The project is obviously in its very early stages, as demonstrated by this wiki page, which tries to figure out the problem of decentralization using some kind of trust/voting system.
Here’s an example of the lack of thought that seems to have gone into it so far:

A small conflict, not malicious
1. Alice assigns fbi.p2p -> 1.1.1.1.
2. Bob propagates the assignment to his node, because he trusts Alice.
3. Dave assigns fbi.p2p -> 2.2.2.2. Conflict created.
4. Carol sees the conflict and:
– Decides to just follow the decision of her trustees and assigns fbi.p2p -> 2.2.2.2, or
– Does not create any assignment. There will be a warning and she will try to work out the problem with others.
5. Everyone will try to agree on a solution.

The page also currently includes this beauty:

Botnet-driven attack
1. Chuck owns a botnet and uses 10^6+ zombies to game the system.
2. Shitload of fake request need to be disproved
3. …
4. Problem? :U

The project seems like a heck of a lot of wheel-reinventing in order to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

1 Comment Tagged: .p2p, department of homeland security, dhs, ICANN, new TLDs, peer-to-peer

Is this the domain name industry’s first music video?

DotAfricaConnect is pretty serious about its plan for .africa.
The company yesterday released this music video to promote its top-level domain bid. Unlike most corporate anthems, this one is actually not terrible, despite the dodgy editing.

The singer, Patricia Kihoro, appears to be the former winner of an African TV talent show. It mystifies me how few people in the room seem to be paying her, and her dancers, any attention.

Comment Tagged: africa, dotafricaconnect

Domain universe breaks through 200 million

VeriSign is reporting that the number of registered domain names worldwide broke through the 200 million mark in the third quarter.
There were 202 million domains at the end of September, according to the company’s Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published today.
Over half of those domains, 103 million names in total, can be found in the .com and .net namespaces that VeriSign manages.
In a not-so-subtle plug for VeriSign’s 2011 growth strategy, the company also declared that the next ten years will be “The Decade of the International Internet”.

In the coming decade, the Internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fueled in part by the adoption of IDNs. By enabling online content and businesses to be represented in local scripts and languages, IDNs help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures, and connect the world in new ways. Over the past year, several new IDNs for ccTLDs have been approved. The next step will be approval of IDNs for generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

The company, of course, plans to apply to ICANN to operate IDN versions of .com and .net, although it has not to date discussed openly which languages or strings it wants.
The VeriSign report also says that ccTLD registrations grew 2.4%, compared to the same quarter last year, to 79.2 million domains.
I expect this growth would have been tempered had it not been for the relaunch of .co, which occurred during the quarter, but it does not merit a mention in the report.
The report also reveals that .info has overtaken .cn in the biggest-TLD charts, although this is due primarily to the plummeting number of registrations in the Chinese ccTLD.

1 Comment Tagged: .cn, .co, .info, domain name industry brief, ICANN, idns, new TLDs, verisign

ICANN had no role in seizing torrent domains

Okay, this is getting a bit silly now.
As you may have read, the US government “seized” a bunch of domain names that were hosting sites allegedly involved in piracy and counterfeit goods over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Over 80 domains, all of them in the .com namespace, had their DNS settings reconfigured to point them to a scary-looking notice from the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE division.
Somehow, in several reports over the last few days, this has been pinned on ICANN, and now some pro-piracy advocates are talking about setting up alternate DNS roots as a result.
Claims that ICANN colluded with the DHS on the seizures seem to have first appeared in TorrentFreak, which broke the news on Friday.
The site quoted the owner of torrent-finder.com:

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN.”

For anyone involved in the domain name industry and the ICANN community, this allegation screams bogosity, but just to be on the safe side I checked with ICANN.
A spokesperson told me he’s checked with ICANN’s legal, security and compliance departments and they all had this to say:

ICANN had nothing to do with the ICE investigation… nobody knew anything about this and did not take part in the investigation.

All of the seized domains were .coms, and obviously ICANN has no technical authority or control over second-level .com domains. It’s not in the position to do what the reports allege.
If anybody were to ask ICANN to yank a domain, all it could do would be to politely forward the request to the registrar (in the case of torrent-finder.com, apparently Go Daddy) or the registry operator, which in the case of .com is of course VeriSign.
It would make more sense, save more time, and be less likely to create an international political incident, for the DHS to simply go directly to Go Daddy or VeriSign.
Both are US companies, and the DHS did have legal warrants, after all.
That’s almost certainly what happened here. I have requests for comment in with both companies and will provide updates when I have more clarity.
In the meantime, I suggest that any would-be pirates might be better served by switching their web sites to non-US domains, rather than trying to build an alternate root system from the ground up.
UPDATE: Ben Butler, Go Daddy’s director of network abuse, has just provided me with the following statement, via a spokesperson:

It appears the domain names were locked directly by VeriSign. Go Daddy has not received any law enforcement inquiries or court orders concerning the suspension of the domains in question.
Go Daddy has not been contacted by ICE or DHS on the domain names in question.

The statement goes on to say that Go Daddy believes that it should be the registrar’s responsibility to handle such takedown notices.

With regard to the registry taking action against the domain names in question, Go Daddy believes the proper process lies with the registrar and not the registry. This gives the registrar the ability to communicate with their customer about what has happened and why. When the registry acts, Go Daddy is unable to provide any information to our customers regarding the seizure of their domain names.
Go Daddy routinely cooperates with government and law enforcement officials to enforce and comply with the law.

I’ll post any statement I receive from VeriSign when I have it.
UPDATE: VeriSign sent this statement:

VeriSign received sealed court orders directing certain actions to be taken with respect to specific domain names, and took appropriate actions. Because the orders are sealed, further questions should be directed to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

39 Comments Tagged: department of homeland security, dhs, icann go daddy, ice, piracy, pirate bay, torrent-finder.com, verisign

Rejected Bulgarians want ICANN appeal

A handful of Bulgarian internet users have asked ICANN for the right to appeal the rejection of .бг, the proposed Cyrillic country-code top-level domain.
ICANN has received five emails from from the country in the last week, all expressing frustration that .бг (.bg) was turned down with no public explanation and no right to reply.
The string was rejected in May due to what ICANN determined was its confusing visual similarity with Brazil’s ccTLD, .br.
Polls of the Bulgarian people have been unable to find consensus on a suitable alternative, and the government has repeatedly said it would like to apply again or appeal.
Whether to introduce a right of appeal for rejected applicants is one of the topics ICANN is currently soliciting comments on as part of the review of its IDN ccTLD Fast Track program.
Bulgarian freelance developer Stoyan Danev wrote in his comment:

The Bulgarian community has clearly demonstrated that selecting another string is unacceptable and if the proposed one is not approved, Bulgaria will remain WITHOUT an IDN ccTLD. This is really against the ICANN policy of making Internet accessible to everyone.

He questioned whether .бг really is confusable with .br, linking to the Unicode web site, which suggests that б can be confused with 6 but not b, to prove his point.
Another commenter suggested that that the .бг registry could make it a matter of policy to only accept registrations at the second level that include at least one uniquely Cyrillic character.

2 Comments Tagged: .bg, .br, .бг, bulgaria, cctlds, ICANN, idns

Olympics tells ICANN to abandon new TLD launch or get sued

The International Olympic Committee has threatened to sue ICANN unless it gives IOC trademarks special protection in its new top-level domains program.
The IOC’s critique of ICANN’s new Applicant Guidebook is the first to be filed by a major organization in the current public comment period.
The organization has accused ICANN of ignoring it, preferring instead to take its policy cues from the domain name industry, and said it should “abandon its current timeline” for the launch.
ICANN currently plans to start accepting TLD applications May 30, 2011.
Calling the guidebook “inherently flawed”, the IOC’s director general Urs Lacotte wrote:

If these critical issues are not fully resolved and ICANN chooses not to place the Olympic trademarks on the reserved names list, then the IOC and its National Olympic Committees are prepared to employ all available legislative, regulatory, administrative and judicial mechanisms to hold ICANN accountable for damage caused to the Olympic movement.

(That language looks like it could have been cut-n-paste from a separate letter from the financial services industry, which I reported on last week).
The IOC said that it has opposed the new TLD program 11 times – asking for its trademarks to be placed on the AGB’s reserved strings lists, but received no response.
Special pleading? Perhaps, but the IOC’s trademarks are already specifically protected by legislation in numerous countries, including the US, UK, Canada and China.
The IOC also wants stronger trademark protection mechanisms, such as mandatory typosquatting protections in sunrise periods and extending dispute proceedings to registrars.
Expect many more such missives to start showing up on the ICANN web site over the next 11 days before the ICANN board of directors meets to approve the AGB in Cartagena.
This may be the last chance many organizations get to ask for the changes they want in the AGB before the first round of new TLD applications opens, and I expect them to seize it with both hands.

3 Comments Tagged: agb, applicant guidebook, cybersquatting, ICANN, international olympic committee, ioc, new TLDs

Register.com settles Baidu domain hijacking lawsuit

Register.com has apologised to Chinese portal company Baidu for allowing its domain, baidu.com, to be hijacked by the Iranian Cyber Army hacker group.
The two companies have announced that the lawsuit, which alleged gross negligence among other things, has now been settled. Terms were not disclosed.
If Baidu’s complaint was to be believed, the hackers took over baidu.com with a trivial social engineering attack that relied upon a Register.com tech support employee being asleep at the wheel.
The company is one of China’s largest internet firms, employing over 6,000 people and turning over well over $600 million a year. But for the period of the hijack, visitors to baidu.com instead just saw the hackers’ defacement message instead.
The registrar had argued in court that its terms and conditions released it from liability, but the judge didn’t buy it.
Register.com, which was acquired by Web.com for $135 million in June, said yesterday:

After an internal investigation, we found that the breach occurred because Register’s security protocols had been compromised. We have worked with United States law enforcement officials and Baidu to address the issue. We sincerely apologize to Baidu for the disruption that occurred to its services as a result of this incident.

Baidu said it accepted the apology. And the check, I imagine.

4 Comments Tagged: baidu, hijacking, register.com

Minds + Machines to raise $4.7m for new TLDs

Top Level Domain Holdings plans to raise £3 million ($4.7 million) in a stock sale to help finance the TLD aspirations of its main business, Minds + Machines.
The funds would almost double the cash reserves TLDH has on tap, which currently amount to $5.5 million, according to StockMarketWire.com.
Recently appointed CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a statement that ICANN’s recent decision to allow registries and registrars to vertically integrate had a bearing on the decision to raise funds:

Having reviewed ICANN’s Final Proposed Applicant Guidebook, and in view of the ICANN Board’s historic decision to do away with cross-ownership restrictions between registries and registrars, we believe that the timing is right for additional investment by TLDH. ICANN’s registry-registrar decision means that additional gTLD business models are now viable, and we have already seen a marked increase in interest from prospective new clients. We intend to make sure we have the resources to take advantage of this opportunity.

M+M is already associated with new TLD applications including .gay and .eco, both of which are expected to be contested by other applicants.
TLDH is listed on London’s small-cap Alternative Investment Market. The announcement of the placement can be found here.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, Minds + Machines, new TLDs, tldh, top level domain holdings, vertical integration