ICANN chair expects more new TLDs delay

ICANN’s new top-level domains program is unlikely to be approved at its San Francisco meeting next month, according to chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.
“We don’t think we’ll be able to approve the final applicant guidebook in March,” he said in a new interview with World Trademark Review.
This confirms my suspicion that changes to the Guidebook made following the upcoming meeting between ICANN and its Governmental Advisory Committee may be too extensive for ICANN to rubber-stamp without first consulting the community.
The ICANN board and the GAC are due to meet in Brussels, February 28 and March 1, to discuss the GAC’s outstanding concerns.
Chief among these concerns is trademark protection, where the GAC is pretty much aligned with the interests of the intellectual property constituency.
Brussels will also cover matters such as geographic names protection and procedures for dealing with controversial strings that governments may want to object to.
While ICANN is under no obligation to adopt the GAC’s suggestions wholesale, if it makes substantial concessions its bylaws will likely demand more public comment on the changes.
ICANN’s board indicated last week that it plans to tell the GAC where it disagrees with its advice at a consultation March 17, one day before its San Francisco meeting.
It also said that it plans to approve a Guidebook “as close as practically possible to the form as set out in the Proposed Final Applicant Guidebook” published in November.
UPDATE: I had an opportunity to put Dengate Thrush’s comments to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom this afternoon. He said: “I’m not going to forecast when the final Applicant Guidebook will be approved.”

11 Comments Tagged: brussels, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, new TLDs, peter dengate thrush, san francisco, trademarks

Renew a domain, lose a UDRP?

Renewing a domain name could land you in hot water if you’re hit with a UDRP complaint, if some current thinking at the National Arbitration Forum gains traction.
In the recent NAF decision over FreeGeek.com, panelists argued that if a domain was not originally registered in bad faith (because no trademark existed at the time) renewing the domain after a trademark had been obtained could nevertheless be used to demonstrate bad faith.
Showing that a disputed domain was registered and used in bad faith is of course one of the three pillars of UDRP.
Free Geek Inc runs its web site at freegeek.org. It wanted the .com equivalent, which was registered in 2001, six years before the company acquired a US trademark on its brand.
FreeGeek.com is owned by by Kevin Ham’s company, Vertical Axis. The registration has been renewed every year since 2001.
The three NAF panelists were split on whether renewals post-2007 should be considered evidence of bad faith.

Two of the panelists agree that Respondent should be charged with exercising some diligence at renewal to determine if there are outstanding marks which conflict; one does not.

That’s a disturbing statement, if you’re interested in registrant rights – two panelists basically want domain investors to relinquish their domains if somebody else subsequently acquires a trademark.
What’s more, the panelists’ position appears to be based on a dodgy interpretation of recent UDRP precedent. The decision goes on to say:

The Chair of the Panel is concerned that the Respondent renewed its registration after the trademark was applied for and the USPTO registered the mark. In RapidShare AG and Christian Schmid v. Fantastic Investment Limited… a panel in which the Chair participated, found that “bad faith” could include renewal of a domain name after the issuance of the mark.

It’s a dodgy interpretation because the referenced case, rapidshare.net, does not in fact discuss renewals at all.
In that case, bad faith was actually shown to have arisen due to the domain (which had survived a UDRP just a few months earlier) being bought by a new registrant, not due to a renewal.
What we seem to have here is a case of a couple of NAF panelists thinking about trying to expand the scope of the UDRP. There’s a ton of precedent concluding that renewals are not relevant when establishing whether a domain was registered in bad faith.
With that in mind, you’d think the case would have been a slam-dunk win for the complainant. Not so.
In fact, Ham prevailed on the basis that he had acquired rights to the domain by simply parking it, which constituted a legitimate commercial use.

This panel, in contrast to other panels, finds that the use of this model and evidence of the use is enough to justify a factual finding that Respondent has used the name for commercial purposes
…
Respondent has clearly demonstrated that it acquired rights in the name by usage even if the usage has been limited to a “pay-per-click” links page. Such usage does not itself signal a lack of rights and legitimate interests and can constitute a bona fide offering of goods or services according to Policy

If there are any recent UDRP cases that show just how random a process it is, this is the one.

8 Comments Tagged: freegeek.com, naf, national arbitration forum, rapidshare.net, udrp

IPv4 addresses to run out Thursday

ICANN will announce the final depletion of its pool of IPv4 addresses this Thursday.
The Number Resource Organization will hold a “ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses”.
The NRO is ICANN’s supporting organization representing Regional Internet Registries, the outfits responsible for handing out IP addresses to network operators.
ICANN, the Internet Society and the Internet Architecture Board will also participate in the event, scheduled for Thursday February 3 at 1430 UTC. It will be webcast here.
Today, APNIC, the Asia-Pacific RIR, said that it has been assigned two /8 blocks of addresses, meaning IANA is down to its Final Five chunks.
Thursday’s ceremony will presumably entail ICANN/IANA officially handing out these last five blocks to the five RIRs, one each, as called for by its allocation policy.
After that, it’s all gone. No more IPv4. The age of IPv6 is upon us.
It is currently estimated that the RIRs will themselves run out of IPv4 in September. After that, if they need IP addresses they’ll receive IPv6.
IPv4 is rapidly becoming a scarce commodity.
Many people, including ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, have predicted a “gray market” for addresses to appear, with address blocks changing hands for less than the cost of upgrading to IPv6.
The focus on Thursday, however, will be all about the measures network operators need to implement in order to remain viable on an internet increasingly running IPv6 equipment.

4 Comments Tagged: apnic, arin, iab, iana, ipv4, ipv6, isoc, nro

Details of ICANN’s government showdown emerge

Eight governments will face off against nine ICANN directors and an outside lawyer at the Governmental Advisory Committee showdown in Brussels at the end of the month.
That’s according to a draft agenda for the two-day bilateral meeting on new top-level domains, posted to an ICANN mailing list over the weekend.
The GAC’s 12 remaining concerns appear to have lumped together into eight thematic sessions, each of which is assigned one or more GAC reps, ICANN directors and staffers to “lead” the discussions.
The lead governments are: the US, UK, European Commission, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sri Lanka and Kenya. The US will lead or jointly lead three of the eight sessions.
Bruce Tonkin of Melbourne IT has been assigned the unenviable task of representing the ICANN board on the “morality and public order objections” issue, which the US government is currently trying to recast as a governmental right of veto over new TLDs.
Tonkin recently told ICANN’s GNSO Council that he believes Brussels will be focused on trying to understand the GAC’s current objections to new TLDs and help the GAC understand where ICANN has tried to take its previous advice into account.

If the GAC still does not believe that their advice has been heeded, the Board and GAC may discuss how the GAC advice could be taken into account in such a way that the interests of the overall ICANN community continue to be balanced.

He added that any “significant changes” proposed post-Brussels will likely be taken to the rest of the ICANN community for discussion at the San Francisco meeting, March 13.
Any changes proposed by the GAC would have to be “mutually agreeable between the GAC and the rest of the ICANN community”, he wrote.
The trademark protection discussion, likely to be one of the livelier sessions, will be led by the US, UK and Sri Lanka, with Rita Rodin Johnston, Ram Mohan and Gonzalo Navarro representing the board.
ICANN also plans to lawyer up. According to the document, the sole board lead on registry-registrar separation is Joe Sims, ICANN’s long-time outside counsel, a partner with the law firm Jones Day.

3 Comments Tagged: brussels, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, new TLDs, san francisco

Gratuitous Go Daddy girl chest shot

I know, I know, I’m an utter hypocrite.
Complaining about the journalistic standards of The Sun in the morning and posting a photo that’s little better than a Page 3 shot in the evening.
I do so only in the spirit of crowd-sourced investigative journalism. And traffic, obviously.

In case you’re wondering, it’s the latest in the series of teaser shots Go Daddy has been releasing ahead of its Super Bowl 2011 commercial.
Note the strategic positioning of “.CO” on the T-shirt.
We’re supposed to start guessing who it is now.
Knock yourselves out.

6 Comments Tagged: .co, go daddy, go daddy girl, super bowl 2011

Noel Gallagher buys domain name with gig tickets

Former Oasis lead guitarist Noel Gallagher reportedly bought the domain name noelgallagher.com from a squatter in exchange for band memorabilia and free gig tickets.
According to British tabloid The Sun:

The former OASIS star found out recently that a cunning punter in Barcelona had snapped up the domain name noelgallagher.com ten years ago.
And The Chief’s plans to get things in order for his solo career were being held up by the Barca Bandit – because he was demanding a small fortune to hand it back.
Noel took matters into his own hands last week. He paid for the Spaniard to fly to London, put him up in a plush hotel and met him in person to thunder out a deal.
And after some serious haggling, and a few Oasis anecdotes, the chancer changed his demands from tens of thousands of pounds – to some signed memorabilia and guest list action at Noel’s next solo gigs.

I’m not sure how much success Oasis ever had outside of the UK. If you’ve never heard of them: briefly here in the 1990s they were regarded by some (mainly themselves) as the second coming of The Beatles.
I’ve never before seen a domain name story reported in The Sun, a notoriously unreliable but hugely popular Murdoch-owned daily rag, so I did a bit of fact-checking.
Whois history shows that the original registrant was from Madrid, not Barcelona, and that the domain was initially registered in 2002.
While the report claims Gallagher flew the squattter to London to negotiate the deal “last week”, the domain actually seems to have been owned by someone at Oasis’s record label since March 2010.
So either the cybersquatter got a free city break, or The Sun is — shockingly — reporting unreliable celebrity news.
The domain name does not currently resolve.

3 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, noel gallagher, noelgallagher.com, oasis, udrp

US wants veto power over new TLDs

The United States is backing a governmental power grab over ICANN’s new top-level domains program.
In a startling submission to the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee, a copy of which I have obtained, the US says that governments should get veto power over TLDs they are uncomfortable with:

Any GAC member may raise an objection to a proposed string for any reason. If it is the consensus position of the GAC not to oppose objection raised by a GAC member or members, ICANN shall reject the application.

In other words, if Uganda objected to .gay, Iran objected to .jewish, or Egypt objected to .twitter, and no other governments opposed those objections, the TLD applications would be killed off.
The fate of TLDs representing marginal communities or controversial brands could well end up subject to back-room governmental horse-trading, rather than the objective, transparent, predictable process the ICANN community has been trying to create for the last few years.
The amendments the US is calling for would also limit the right to object to a TLD on “morality” grounds to members of the GAC, while the current Applicant Guidebook is much broader.
The rationale for these rather Draconian proposals is stability and “universal resolvability”.
The worry seems to be that if some nations start blocking TLDs, they may well also decide to start up their own rival DNS root, fragmenting the internet (and damaging the special role the US has in internet governance today).
The US also wants TLDs such as “.bank” or “.pharmacy” more closely regulated (or blocked altogether) and wants “community” applications more strictly defined.
In the current ICANN Applicant Guidebook, any applicant can designate their application “community-based”, in order to potentially strengthen its chances against rival bids.
But the US wants the Guidebook amended to contain the following provisions:

“Community-based strings” include those that purport to represent or that embody a particular group of people or interests based on historical components of identity (such as nationality, race or ethnicity, religion or religious affiliation, culture or particular social group, and/or a language or linguistic group). In addition, those strings that refer to particular sectors, in particular those subject to national regulation (such as .bank, .pharmacy) are also “community-based” strings.
…
In the event the proposed string is either too broad to effectively identify a single entity as the relevant authority or appropriate manager, or is sufficiently contentious that an appropriate manager cannot be identified and/or agreed, the application should be rejected.

In practice, this could potentially kill off pretty much every vertical TLD you can think of, such as .bank, .music and .hotel. How many industries have a “single entity” overseeing them globally?
While the goal appears to be noble – nobody wants a .bank or .pharma managed by hucksters – the Community Objection procedure in the Guidebook arguably already provides protection here.
The US also wants the policy allowing the vertical integration of registries and registrars reining in, for TLD applicants to justify the costs their domains will incur on others, and a dramatic overhaul of the trademark protection mechanisms in the Guidebook.
In short, the US wants the new TLDs program substantially overhauled, in ways that are certain to draw howls of protest from many in the ICANN community.
The document does not appear to be official GAC policy yet. It could well be watered down before the GAC meets the ICANN board in Brussels at the end of February.
ICANN said earlier this week that it plans to approve a Guidebook “as close as practically possible” to the current draft, and heavily hinted that it wants to do so at its San Francisco meeting in March.
But if many of the US recommendations were to make it through Brussels, that’s a deadline that could be safely kissed goodbye.

15 Comments Tagged: gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, mopo, morality and public order, new TLDs, suzanne sene, trademarks

DNS not to blame for Egypt blackout

Egypt got disconnected from the internet last night, but it does not appear that DNS is to blame.
It what appears to be an unprecedented move, internet traffic to and from Egypt dried up to a trickle, apparently as a result of a government effort to crack down on anti-presidential protests.
While a number of reports have blamed DNS for the outage, the currently available data suggests the problem is much more deeply rooted.
Traffic monitoring firm Renesys seems to be one of the best sources of primary data so far. The company’s James Cowie blogged today:

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

BGP is the Border Gateway Protocol. It’s used where networks interconnect, enabling ISPs to “announce” what IP addresses they are responsible for and exchange traffic accordingly.
With no BGP routes into or out of Egypt, whether the DNS works or not is pretty much moot.
Blocking individual domain names, such as twitter.com, is one way to stifle communication. Another way is to instruct local ISPs to turn off DNS altogether.
But in both cases users can route around the blockade by choosing overseas DNS servers, such as the services Google and OpenDNS make available for free.
Even without DNS, users can still access web resources using IP addresses, if they know what they are.
But when ISPs stop announcing their IP addresses, even that becomes impossible. Even if you know how to find a web site, it has no way of finding you.
In this case, it seems likely that Egypt has physically unplugged itself from the global internet, which means its traffic is going nowhere, no matter what protocol you’re talking about.
But even this is not foolproof. According to experts interviewed on BBC news in the last hour, ISPs outside of the country are offering free dial-up access to Egyptians.
Egyptians with access to a dial-up modem, phone jack, compatible computer and long-distance service will presumably be able to use these services to reach the outside world, albeit at 1990s speeds.
With all the inter-governmental debate about the management of domain names over the last several years, the Egypt crisis is a useful reminder that DNS is not the quintessential element of internet governance it is often made out to be.

3 Comments Tagged: bgp, dns, egypt, internet governance

Porn set to steal the show in San Francisco

ICM Registry’s .xxx top-level domain looks set to grab the headlines at ICANN’s meeting in San Francisco, due to government-forced delays.
While ICANN is hoping to approve its new top-level domains program in March, that decision may wind up receiving less media attention than the final approval of the porn-only domain.
ICANN last month said that it wanted to hold a final consultation to resolve its differences with the Governmental Advisory Committee – which broadly objects to .xxx – in February 2011.
This referred to a proposed meeting between the GAC and the board, which has now been officially scheduled for February 28 in Brussels.
But a resolution carried by ICANN this week has pushed the consultation back to “no later than Thursday 17 March, 2011”, the day before its San Francisco meeting.
That would put the sign-off of ICM’s contract on the same billing as the planned final approval of the new top-level domains Applicant Guidebook and the launch of the new TLDs program.
San Francisco is set to be the focus of unprecedented media attention, due to its location and the likely presence of Bill Clinton. We’re probably looking at tighter stage management than usual.
With that in mind, I expect ICANN bosses won’t be too happy that porn-friendly .xxx is likely to steal away many column inches they would prefer devoted to new TLDs.
Porn in headlines gets clicks. Readers understand it, and you generally don’t need to explain to an editor what a TLD is. I know which story would be easier for me to sell.
Had ICANN put .xxx on the agenda for Brussels – which does not appear to have been ruled out yet – it could have wrapped up the ICM saga with a resolution quite quickly afterward.
That would have given ICM a week or so of undiluted media coverage, and the new TLDs program would not have had to share the spotlight with porn come San Francisco.
The question is: why is .xxx apparently not on the agenda for Brussels? Given ICANN’s previous decision to hold the meeting in February, responsibility seems to lie with the GAC.
Rumor has it that there’s a bit of a power struggle going on behind the scenes, with some elements of the GAC resistant to make Brussels the official final .xxx consultation.
Time will tell whether this position is firm or flexible.

2 Comments Tagged: brussels, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, icm registry, san francisco, xxx

ICANN sets March deadline for new TLDs

ICANN appears determined to put debates about its new top-level domains program to bed at its San Francisco meeting in March.
The resolutions from Tuesday’s ICANN board meeting, published this evening, give every indication that ICANN wants an end to the delays.
This seems to mean it will take a hard line with its Governmental Advisory Committee, with which it is due to meet in Brussels at the end of February.
The board resolved that it “intends to progress toward launching the New gTLD Program, as close as practically possible to the form as set out in the Proposed Final Applicant Guidebook.”
It remains open, however, to take action on the GAC’s concerns, which include trademark protection and the treatment of geographic strings.
It wants the final GAC consultation, which is mandated by its bylaws, to take place March 17, the day before the board meets in San Francisco.
This is encouraging news for anybody who wants to apply for a new TLD, as it means ICANN would be able to launch the program shortly thereafter.
If that happens, it could be able to start accepting applications possibly as early as mid-July (although a late-August/early September window may be more likely).
More on this tomorrow.

4 Comments Tagged: brussels, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, new TLDs, san francisco