DotFree wants to give away .free domains

A Czech company has become the latest to say it will apply for a new top-level domain, but it’s got a unique twist – domain registration will be free.
The dotFree Group, based near Prague, says it will apply for .free and offer the domains free of charge.

.FREE is going to be a generic Top Level Domain, which is going to be available for free, as the name itself says. Individuals, companies, organizations, groups, etc. are going to be able to register their .FREE website under a desirable name.

Can: open. Worms: everywhere.

• How many registrars will actually want to carry this TLD?
• How will dotFree fund its ICANN application fee and ongoing running costs?
• Will there be a landrush? How will that work?
• Will there be an after-market? With a no-risk investment, .free would be a domainer’s paradise.
• How will the registry prevent rampant abuse by spammers?
• Are these guys serious?

I’ve got a call in, so maybe we’ll find out more soon.
The dotFree Group already offers free domain names at the third level under cz.cc, and sells a pricey script so anyone can become a “registrar”.
The company sounds like it already has the infrastructure to support a small TLD.There are apparently 50,000 .cz.cc domains registered today, which already makes it bigger than some gTLDs.
(Hat tip: @dotRadio)

16 Comments Tagged: .free, dotfree group, ICANN, new TLDs

Iron Mountain beds another registry

Iron Mountain puts itself about a bit, doesn’t it?
The company has signed a co-referral deal with wannabe new top-level domain registry operator UrbanBrain. The deal appears identical to one it inked with Central Registry Solutions in May.
Under these deals, Iron Mountain will refer potential TLD applicants to UrbanBrain (or CRS) and the registries will refer their clients to Iron Mountain for data escrow services.
The press releases don’t make it clear under what circumstances clients will be referred to UrbanBrain versus CRS, but given UrbanBrain is Japanese it could be along geographical lines.
Again, I ask: who benefits most?
My guess is still Iron Mountain, which has already got a pretty tight grip on the ICANN-mandated data escrow market. I can’t see it sending as much traffic to the registries as it receives.

1 Comment Tagged: central registry solutions, iron mountain, new TLDs, urbanbran

Domainers get love, but no refunds for .co cybersquatters

.CO Internet has ramped up its anti-cybersquatter messaging, promising no refunds for trademark-infringing .co registrants, no matter how much they paid for their domains.
An “Open Letter to .co Domain Registrants”, published by the company yesterday, also contains a shout-out to domainers, which I think may be a first from a domain registry.
The letter points out, as I have previously, that .co is subject to the UDRP on the same terms as other TLDs including .com.

The outcome of a UDRP proceeding is binding, and no refunds will be given under any circumstances — regardless of how much money you may have paid to secure the domain; whether the domain was acquired directly via a domain registrar or through a domain auction venue; and whether you were unaware that you had infringed on someone else’s rights.

There’s similar text on the front page of COauctions.com, where the registry is currently auctioning off contested landrush applications.
Is this just a matter of legal ass-covering? Or are there some gray-area domains in the landrush auction?
Despite all the promotional work the registry performed in the run-up to general availability, there are still plenty of people who seemed to believe .co represented new, lawless territory.
The letter ends with the statement that “.CO Internet is committed to protecting the rights of brand owners, domain investors, and end users.”
Domainers getting some love in the same breath as brand owners is not something you hear every day, particularly from registries.

7 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, auction, cybersquatting, landrush, udrp

.CO landrush auctions kick off today

.CO Internet has today started auctioning off domain names that had multiple applicants during the .co landrush earlier this summer.
According to the company, over 2,500 names will be auctioned over the next four weeks. The top three most-contested names were Slots.co, Insure.co and Denver.co.

Other notable .CO domain names up for auction include Mexi.co, America.co, Betting.co, Vitamins.co, UsedCars.co, Happy.co, Ebook.co and Jackpot.co.

Registrants who applied for one of the contested domains need to sign up at www.COauctions.co.
There have been almost 410,000 .co registrations since the Colombian country-code domain was opened up to international registrants last month.
So far, the biggest seller has been o.co, sold to Overstock for $350,000.
Given that slots.com sold for $5.5 million, it seems likely that slots.co could fetch something in five figures or beyond.

6 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, auctions, landrush

McAfee calls for ICANN spam crackdown

The security company McAfee has claimed that ICANN needs to try harder in the fight against spam by cracking down on rogue registrars.
In a report released today, the company makes the bold assertion that ICANN “holds the trump card to the spam problem” and that it should step up its compliance efforts.

Although ICANN cannot stop spam itself and does not link spammers to the Internet, it does accredit the registrars that sell the domains that cybercriminals use to fill our inboxes with advertisements and malware

McAfee notes that ICANN has previously de-accredited spammer-friendly registrars such as the notorious EstDomains, but that it needs to do more.

ICANN needs to continue this trend against registrars that knowingly provide domain services to cybercriminals. The organization also needs to harden its policies that define under what circumstances an accreditation can be revoked, so that it can take quicker action against rogue registrars.

The claims come in a report entitled “Security Takes The Offensive”, available here.
The report does not lay all the blame for spam at ICANN’s door, of course. The author also goes after ISPs and the SMTP protocol itself.
The report does not point out that there are 250-odd TLDs over which ICANN has no registrar accreditation powers whatsoever.
Despite my best efforts with Google, I’ve been unable to find a single instance of McAfee publicly participating in ICANN policy-making, so I have to wonder how serious it is.
At least guys like KnuJon are not afraid to show up at meetings and stir things up a bit.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, knujon, mcafee, spam

Domain name hijacker gets jail time

A man who hijacked Comcast’s domain name, causing hours of outages for the ISP’s customers, has been sentenced to four months in jail.
James Black, who went by the handle “Defiant”, will also have to serve 150 hours of community service, three years of supervised release, and pay Comcast $128,557 in restitution.
Assistant United States Attorney Kathryn Warma told the court:

Mr. Black and his Kryogenicks crew created risks to all of these millions of e-mail customers for the simple sake of boosting their own childish egos.

The attack took place over two years ago. Kryogenicks reportedly used a combination of social engineering and technical tricks to take over Comcast’s account at Network Solutions.
During the period of the hijacking, comcast.net redirected to the hacker’s page of choice. All Comcast webmail was unavailable for at least five hours.

Comment Tagged: comcast, hijacking, james black, network solutions, security

DNS Made Easy whacked with 50Gbps attack

The managed DNS service provider DNS Made Easy was knocked offline for 90 minutes on Saturday by a distributed denial of service attack estimated at 50Gbps.
This could be the largest DDoS attack ever. The largest I’ve previous heard reported was 49Gbps.
The company, which promises 100% uptime, tweeted that the attack lasted eight hours, but only saw one and a half hours of downtime.
Here are some tweets from the company, starting on Saturday afternoon:

Out of China. Over 20 Gbps…. Don’t really know how big actually. But it’s big. We know it’s over 20 Gbps
Update…. Over 50 Gbps… we think. Since core Tier1 routers are being flooded in multiple cities…..
Trying to organize emergency meeting with all Tier1 providers. We probably have over 50 senior network admins looking into this.
This is flooding the provider’s backbones. By far the largest attack we have had to fight in history.

And, post-attack:

The good: Not everyone was down, not all locations were down at once. The bad: There were temporary regional outages.
Almost back to normal in all locations. Full explanation, details, and SLA credits will be given to all users as soon as possible.
We did not see a 6.5 hour long outage. That would be ultra-long. DDOS attack was 8 hours. Less than 1.5 hours of actual downtime.

It will prove costly. The company’s service level agreement promises to credit all accounts for 500% of any downtime its customers experience.
Quite often in these cases the target of the attack is a single domain. Twitter and Facebook have both suffered performance problems in the past after attackers went after a single user for political reasons.
For a DNS provider, any single domain they host could be such a target. I’d be interested to know if that was the case in this incident.

2 Comments Tagged: ddos, denial-of-service, dns made easy, security

Digging for dirt in the Demand Media IPO – roundup

Demand Media, parent of second-largest domain name registrar eNom, has filed to go public, and the publication of its S-1 registration document has given an unprecedented glimpse inside the company.
Unsurprisingly, the “content mill” part of Demand’s operation, which accounts for more than half of its revenue, has garnered the most media coverage over the weekend.
Demand says that the fact that is “transforming traditional content creation models” and is “frequently the subject of unflattering reports in the media about our business and our model.”
Reports of its IPO are no exception.
This report in DailyFinance.com observes that the key difference between Demand and traditional media is that Demand does it “at scale”, with some 10,000 writers producing 5,700 articles per day.
DaniWeb notes that Demand’s freelancers are “working for wages often well below industry standard to churn out content” and said the company is subject to “redundancies, inefficiencies and the reliance on trying to game Google”.
Others are more direct: “wtf: this is why the Internet is full of unreadable junk”
CNNMoney.com reports that Demand is “notorious” for paying as little as $15 per article, and that it can make a 58% return on a month’s articles over seven quarters.
As a freelancer reporter, I don’t like Demand’s model either. I think it devalues the profession. The S-1 reveals that the company is well aware that it’s also quite exploitative:

We believe that over the past two years our ability to attract and retain freelance content creators has benefited from the weak overall labor market and from the difficulties and resulting layoffs occurring in traditional media, particularly newspapers. We believe that this combination of circumstances is unlikely to continue and any change to the economy or the media jobs market may make it more difficult for us to attract and retain freelance content creators.

On the domain name side of the business, DomainNameWire was quickest off the mark, digging out the fact that eNom uses look-ups by prospective registrants to decide what articles might be profitable and what web sites it could develop.
The S-1 says:

These queries and look-ups provide insight into what consumers may be seeking online and represent a proprietary and valuable source of relevant information for our platform’s title generation algorithms and the algorithms we use to acquire undeveloped websites for our portfolio.

eNom has already said that this should NOT be interpreted as “front-running”. (apologies, the first version of this article accidentally omitted the word “not”)
Also found in the S-1, and already known from eNom’s registration agreement Ts & Cs, the company keeps some customers’ expired domain names for itself, if they have value.
I can remember a time not too many years ago when this kind of behavior was frowned upon.
DNW also points to the list of Demand’s subsidiaries. There are 146 of them, at least 100 of which are shells for ICANN registrar accreditations.
Others, such as Acquire This Name, which KnuJon had beef with (pdf) a year ago, act as eNom resellers.
Looking at the financials, All Things Digital gently mocks the company’s reliance on non-standard “Adjusted OIBDA” numbers in its S-1 to make the company appear profitable.
Meanwhile, Mike Berkens at TheDomains is incredulous looking at the amount of money Demand has lost since its inception: some $52 million.

2 Comments Tagged: demand media, enom, ipo

Cash-for-gold firm aims UDRP at “sucks” site

An Arizona cash-for-gold company has filed a UDRP claim against a gripe site that says it “sucks”.
HBT Investments, which does business at valleygoldmine.com, has filed its claim with WIPO against the owner of valleygoldminesucks.com.
The gripe site isn’t particularly exciting. It’s a blog with two entries, both dating from May 2009 and both primarily questioning the objectivity of an ABC news report.
The registrant probably has a strong defense.
There’s oodles of UDRP precedent protecting “sucks” sites, mainly on the grounds that there’s nothing “confusingly similar” about a domain that treats the trademark owner with contempt.
Valley Goldmine has a Better Business Bureau A+ rating displayed prominently on its web site, so it obviously values its reputation, which is fair enough.
But filing a UDRP against a gripe site does have the unfortunate effect of making it look like you’re trying to stifle free speech.
Valleygoldminesucks.com is, however, the second domain name that appears when one Googles for “valley goldmine”, which is probably more of a concern.

2 Comments Tagged: sucks, udrp, valley goldmine, wipo

Governments want morality veto on new TLDs

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee wants to be able to kill off new top-level domain applications on cultural and religious grounds.
The GAC has finally broken its radio silence on the “morality and public order” or “MOPO” issue that was such a hot topic at the Brussels meeting in June.
A letter to ICANN (pdf), sent by Canadian GAC chair Heather Dryden, leaves little room for doubt where the GAC stands.

The GAC firmly believes that the absence of any controversial strings in the current universe of top-level domains (TLDs) to date contributes directly to the security and stability of the domain name and addressing system (DNS) and the universal resolvability of the system.
As a matter of principle… the GAC believes that the object of stability, security, and universal resolvability must be preserved in the course of expanding the DNS with the addition of new top-level domains.

This is actually quite powerful stuff.
The GAC is basically saying that no new TLDs should be introduced that would be unacceptable to the lowest common denominator world government.
Think Uganda, asked to make a call on .gay.
Think about any oppressed ethnic group without a territory that wants to apply for its own TLD.
The GAC wants ICANN to create a process for governments and others to object to TLD applications on religious, cultural, linguistic, national and geographical grounds.
It could even result in .xxx being objected to, even though it’s technically part of the 2005 round of new TLDs – the GAC wants the objection process to apply to “all pending and future TLDs”.

10 Comments Tagged: .gay, gac, governmental advisory committee, heather dryden, ICANN, mopo, morality and public order, xxx