ICANN to reconsider .jobs auction deal

ICANN will take a second look at its decision to allow the .jobs registry to allocate premium domain names to its partners, following an outcry from jobs boards including Monster.com.
The Board Governance Committee posted a brief note yesterday confirming that it will process the Reconsideration Request filed by the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition a month earlier.
This does not mean that the .jobs decision will be reversed. The BGC has the power to make recommendations to the ICANN board, which the board is free to accept or reject.
The Coalition is annoyed that ICANN has given Employ Media, the .jobs registry, a carte blanche to allocate premium dictionary and geographic domain names via an RFP process.
Many expect the registry to allocate substantial chunks of real estate to the DirectEmployers Association, under previously announced plans to create a free listings site at universe.jobs.
Under ICANN bylaws, the BGC now has 90 days to reach a decision.
The deadline for submissions in response to Employ Media’s RFP is this Friday.

6 Comments Tagged: .jobs charter compliance coalition, board governance committee, employ media, ICANN, monster.com, reconsideration request

US seeks powers to shut down domains

COICA is the new acronym we’ll all soon be talking about — it’s the law that could give the US its very own Great Firewall of China.
A bipartisan group of US senators today introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, legislation that would enable the government to quickly turn off domain names involved in piracy.
The bill would enable the Department of Justice to seek a court order against a domain name it believes is involved in piracy or selling counterfeit goods.
If the sponsoring registrar or registry is located in the US, the order would force it to stop the domain from resolving and lock it down.
The likely effect of this would be to force piracy sites out of .com and into offshore registrars. But the bill has thought about that too.
If it’s a non-US registrar and registry, injunctions could be sought to block the domain at the ISP level.
That’s right folks – if this bill passes, the US would get its very own Chinese-style national firewall.
The bill would allow the domain registrant to petition the court to lift the order.
“By cracking down on online piracy of television shows and movies, we hope this bill will encourage copyright owners to develop innovative and competitive new choices for consumers to watch video over the internet,” said Sen. Herb Kohl.
Which is about as disingenuous a statement as it gets, when you think about it, given that it essentially eliminates a major incentive for business model innovation.

4 Comments Tagged: coica, combating online infringement and counterfeits act, herb kohl, patrick leahy, us senate

Man asks ICANN for “list of all domains”

A man has used ICANN’s freedom of information procedure to ask for “a list of all registered domains”, forcing the organization to politely decline.
Barry Carter wrote (pdf):

Per http://www.icann.org/en/transparency/didp-en.htm please provide me a list of all registered domains (including all public registrant information). If you are unable to provide this information, please let me know why.

As you might imagine, with the number of registered domains in the gTLDs and ccTLDs numbering in the hundreds of millions, that’s what you might call a Big Ask.
ICANN’s response (pdf) patiently explains that it doesn’t have such a list and that assembling one would constitute an unreasonable request under its Documentary Information Disclosure Policy.
Still, worth a shot, eh?

6 Comments Tagged: didp, ICANN

.SO Registry copies .co launch policies

Somalia’s .SO Registry, which hopes to mimic a little of the success of .co when it starts accepting registrations in November, has adopted virtually identical launch policies.
The registry’s policy document (pdf), which appeared on its web site last week, does in fact appear to copy large chunks of text wholesale from .CO Internet’s equivalent paper (pdf).
(UPDATE: I’ve reason to believe this is because both documents share an author/editor)
For this reason, you can pretty much expect the same policies regarding the sunrise, landrush and general availability phases of the launch, which kicks off November 1.
It also means that .so domain names will be subject to the UDRP. The registry has evidently partnered with WIPO to administer these proceedings.
There are some differences between .co and .so, however.
Notably, .SO Registry has added a policy of allowing sunrise registrations for trademark typos, provided that the typo under another TLD has been won at UDRP or in court.
This basically appears to open the doors for any company that has won a .com domain in a UDRP case to register the equivalent .so, no matter how lunatic the UDRP decision was.
This is how the document describes the exception to the trademarks-only rule:

the Domain Name must be identical to a domain name which has been recovered by the Applicant or its authorized licensee in the context of a court, UDRP or other alternative dispute resolution procedure relating to that domain name in another top-level domain.

It’s followed by a comment, one of several apparently made by one of the document’s editors, that probably shouldn’t have been published on a public web site:

Comment Bart: we need to look at the allocation model here (rather hypothetical, but you never know): will they also go into auction if there are two applicants for the same domain name: one having the identical mark, and the other having the variant?)

Other differences include the fact that, unlike their Columbian counterparts, Somalians do not appear to get any special privileges, such as grandfathering or a priority sunrise phase.
There also does not to be a provision for a Specially Protected Marks list like the one .CO Internet used.
The registry’s policies will be governed by the laws of Japan, rather than Somalia (which, let’s face it, doesn’t have much in the way of a functional legal infrastructure).
.SO’s back-end is being handled by GMO Registry, the Japanese company that plans to apply for .shop and is working with Canon on its proposed .canon application.
I’ve previously reported on the roll-out time-line and pricing for the .so domain, here.

2 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, .so, .so registry, cctlds, colombia, gmo registry, landrush, somalia, sunrise

Monster.com slams .jobs plan

Monster.com and the US Chamber of Commerce have ripped into Employ Media’s plans to liberalize the .jobs top-level domain, with Monster calling the plan “anti-competitive”.
Both organizations have over the last two days said they support the ICANN Reconsideration Request I reported on here.
Essentially, they want ICANN’s board to reverse the decision that would allow Employ Media, the .jobs registry, to start leasing thousands of .jobs domains to whichever company offers it the best deal.
Monster said (pdf) this:

The Board has, without proper consideration and deliberation, consented to the privatization and capture of a sponsored top-level domain (“sTLD”) by a single registrant or small group of registrants.

The jobs boards market is pissed that Employ Media has already made it pretty obvious that it plans to lease thousands of premium domains to the DirectEmployers Association.
Monster claims that the ICANN decision to allow the registry to start accepting “non-company-name” registrations violates the original .JOBS Charter, which limited the registrant pool to companies that wanted to advertise their own vacancies at “company.jobs” URLs.
The company says that the move could create “serious consequences for ICANN’s credibility” as it rolls out new TLDs, on the basis that it sets a bad precedent for ostensibly restricted “community” TLDs:

ICANN will be viewed as willing to tolerate sweeping, unauthorized changes to community based TLDs with no regard for the representations made during the application process.

Monster also says that the board’s decision “has broad anti-competitive implications that were not examined by staff”.
The US Chamber of Commerce, which has previously opposed TLD expansion in principle, has also chipped in (pdf) with its opposition, echoing Monster’s thoughts and adding that the proposed .jobs expansion fails to protect IP rights.

Comment Tagged: .jobs, dea, directemployers association, draft applicant guidebook, employ media, monster.com, new TLDs, us chamber of commerce

eNom to crack down on fake pharma sites

Demand Media is to tighten security at its domain registrar arm, eNom, after bad press blighted its recent IPO announcement.
The company has signed a deal with fake pharmacy watchdog LegitScript, following allegations that eNom sometimes turns a blind eye to illegal activity on its customers’ domains.
The news emerged in the company’s amended S-1 registration statement (large HTML file), filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. New text reads:

We recently entered into an agreement with LegitScript, LLC, an Internet pharmacy verification and monitoring service recognized by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, to assist us in identifying customers who are violating our terms of service by operating online pharmacies in violation of U.S. state or federal law.

LegitScript will provide eNom with a regularly updated list of domain names selling fake pharma, so the registrar can more efficiently turn them off. The companies have also agreed to work together on research into illegal online pharmacies.
Surrounding text has also been modified to clarify that eNom is not required, under ICANN rules, to turn off domains that are being used to conduct illegal activity.
This is a bit of a PR win for the small security outfits KnuJon and HostExploit, firms which had used the occasion of Demand’s S-1 filing to give eNom a good kicking in the tech and financial press.
HostExploit reported last month that eNom was statistically the “worst” registrar as far as illegal content goes.
ICANN executives are reportedly going to be hauled to Washington DC at the end of the month to explain the problem of fake pharma to the White House.
Registries and registrars have also been invited, and I’d be surprised if eNom is not among them.

4 Comments Tagged: demand media, enom, fake pharma, hostexploit, ipo, knujon, security

ICANN urged to kill new TLD morality veto

ICANN has been asked to eliminate references to “morality and public order” objections from its new top-level domain application process.
A cross-constituency working group has advised ICANN’s board of directors to scrap the term and to ensure that whatever replaces it does not enable individual governments to veto new TLDs based on their own local laws.
The so-called “MOPO” or “MAPO” part of the Draft Applicant Guidebook attracted criticism because ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee seemed to want to use it to grant themselves the right to block any TLD application they deemed too controversial.
The fear from the GAC was that if nations started blocking whole TLDs at their borders, it could ultimately lead to the fragmentation of the DNS root.
The fear elsewhere was that some edgy TLD applications, such as .gay or .sex, could be rejected due to the unilateral objections of backward regimes, harming freedom of speech.
But if ICANN incorporates the working group’s new recommendations into the next version of the DAG, that probably won’t be allowed to happen.
The group this week forwarded an interim report to the ICANN board for its consideration. While incomplete, it already carries a few recommendations that managed to find consensus.
Notably, the report recommends that, “National law not based on international principles should not be a valid ground for an objection”, which would seem to scupper any chances of Uganda or the Holy See blocking .gay, for example.
The working group has so far failed to reach consensus on how governmental objections should be registered and processed, but one option is:

The Applicant Guidebook should allow individual governments to file a notification (not an objection) that a proposed TLD string is contrary to their national law. The intention is that an “objection” indicates an intent to block, but a “notification” is not an attempt to block, but a notification to the applicant and the public that the proposed string is contrary to the government’s perceived national interest. However, a national law objection by itself should not provide sufficient basis for a decision to deny a TLD application.

The working group, which counted a few GAC members among its number, has managed to unanimously agree that the awkward term “morality and public order” should be dumped.
One possible contender to replace it is “Objections Based on General Principles of International Law”.
The group has also discussed the idea that a supermajority vote could be required if the board decides to reject a TLD application based on a MOPO objection.
The report is a work in progress. The working group expects to send an updated document to the ICANN board shortly before its retreat later this month.
Whether any of this will be acceptable to the GAC as a whole is up for debate.

3 Comments Tagged: .gay, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, mopo, morality

RapidShare’s UDRP campaign seizes 44 domains

The final results are in. RapidShare’s recent campaign to reclaim its brand from the pirates using the UDRP appears to be over, and it had about a 90% success rate.
Over the last few months the file-hosting company filed 46 UDRP complaints, covering a total of 49 domains, and it managed to win all but five of them.
The vast majority of the contested domains, 43 in total, contained the word “rapidshare”, which RapidShare has trademarked.
The company won all of them with one notable exception: rapidshare.net. The panelist in that case found that the domain had been registered before RapidShare had acquired its rights.
The remaining six domains just contained the term “rapid”. In these cases, the company had a harder time proving its case and therefore had mixed results.
It lost its complaints over rapiddownload.net, rapidbay.net, rapid4me.com and rapid.org largely on the grounds that “rapid” is not sufficiently confusingly similar to “rapidshare”.
However, it managed to win rapidpiracy.com on the dubious basis that “piracy” and “share” are conceptually similar, as I blogged earlier this month.
It also managed to secure rapidpedia.com, on the even more dubious (and barely discussed) grounds that the domain “replicates the first and dominant element of the trademark”.
All of the complaints were handled by WIPO.

Comment Tagged: rapidshare, udrp, wipo

.xxx bigger than .asia

It has not and may never be delegated, but the .xxx top-level domain now has more pre-registrations than .asia, the last big gTLD launch, has live domains.
The ICM Registry web site currently counts 180,352 pre-regs. ICM tells me this number counts the unique strings that have been applied for, excluding duplicate applications.
By contrast, DotAsia’s two-year-old namespace had shrunk to 177,872 by the start of September, according to HosterStats.
ICM reported 110,000 pre-registrations at the time it re-entered contract talks with ICANN in late June; media coverage increased that to 162,000 within a couple of weeks.
The company has previously said that only 6,435 pre-regs were self-identified as defensive in nature, although this is disputed by its opponents at the Free Speech Coalition.

Comment Tagged: .asia, free speech coalition, ICANN, icm registry, xxx

.CO fastest-growing new TLD in years

.CO Internet today announced that it has taken over 500,000 .co domain name registrations in the less than two months since the names went into general availability.
By my reckoning, that makes .co the fastest-growing new TLD launch since .eu, back in 2006. EurID managed to take 1,691,069 .eu registrations in its first month of availability, a hard act to follow.
But .co easily beats .mobi, which took about eight months to reach the 500,000 registrations landmark after it launched in September 2005.
Fellow 2005-round launch DotAsia never (or has yet to) hit the 500k mark. It peaked at 245,196 in March 2009 and has been on the slide ever since, according to HosterStats.com.
If you go back as far as the 2000 round, you’ll find Afilias’ .info TLD took almost three months to hit 500,000 names. Three months after that, it had added another quarter-million.
But it only took Neustar (then Neulevel) a measly 30 days to pass the same milestone with .biz. Ten years on, it has over two million names on its books.

6 Comments Tagged: .asia, .co, .co internet, .mobi, afilias, landrush, neustar