How not to upgrade to a .com – ask ICANN

The domain name world can be confusing, and there’s no shortage of timewasters ready to bother ICANN with their relatively minor problems and disputes.
The latest is violin maker Zeta Music Systems, which went to the extraordinary lengths of initiating an ICANN Reconsideration Request to get its hands on a domain name it does not own.
Zeta currently hosts its web site at zetamusic.net. The equivalent .com – which Zeta wants – is owned by a now-defunct company that went by the same name.
Even though the company is apparently bust and the Whois is no longer accurate, it had a long-term registration that is not due to expire until November 2012.
In his Reconsideration Request (pdf), filed in June, Zeta president Michael Gende wrote:

ICANN would be doing no harm to the former Zeta by reassigning the domain to us now. However, ICANN’s inaction with regard to this issue is doing harm to our company as potential customers naturally go to the zetamusic.com domain, and find nothing.

Individually handling second-level domain disputes is obviously none of ICANN’s business, and that’s exactly what Gende has been told (pdf) by its Board Governance Committee.
Reconsideration Requests are a rarely used, rarely successful review mechanism whereby ICANN’s decisions can be challenged if new information comes to light.
Gende’s is the first of 2011 and one of only four filed in the last five years.

Hannibal Lecter wants his domain back

The actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, best known for playing serial killer Hannibal Lecter, seems to have filed a UDRP complaint over the domain name siranthonyhopkins.com.
Hopkins, via the trust that controls his name and likeness, won anthonyhopkins.com (currently parked) in a similar case last year.
He was knighted in 1993, and siranthonyhopkins.com was registered in 2003, so it’s not clear why the UDRP complaint took so long to file.
He’s the third celebrity in the last decade to win his “Sir” domain at UDRP, after Sir Paul McCartney and Manchester United coach Sir Alex Ferguson.
The case got me wondering – if you’re a British celebrity and you want to protect your personal brand, when do you start to think about defensively registering your “Sir” or “Dame” domain?
What kind of ego would you need to have to preemptively registered such a domain, before you’ve even received your letter from the Queen?
I wonder if any such registrations exist.
And is there a need for them?
Popular octogenarian TV personality Sir Bruce Forsyth was knighted in June this year, and yet sirbruceforsyth.com has been registered (to somebody else) since 2008.

Google acquires StreetView.com

Google has got its hands on the domain name StreetView.com, four years after first launching its occasionally controversial street-level maps service.
The domain switched to Google’s contact information and name servers this week, according to Whois records.
It was first acquired quite recently from its original owner, who registered it in 2001, by an outfit called Brand Certified Inc, ostensibly based at a strip mall in Nevada.
A bit of digging shows that Brand Certified appears to be a front, a shell company operated by MarkMonitor for the purpose of quietly obtaining domain names for its clients.
There’s no UDRP record for the name – it would have been a far from straightforward case – so I guess it was acquired either by being purchased or through some other means.
The domain does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

The first .xxx porn site has gone live

Casting.xxx tonight has become officially the first live porn site to use a .xxx domain name.
It’s very not safe for work, of course, but if you head over there right now you can watch a handful of streaming videos, according to sources.
Casting.xxx is the first site to use a domain granted under ICM Registry’s Founders Program, which let the registry sell off or basically give away premium names to publishers.
ICM says it’s allocating about 1,500 domains to about 35 Founders, which is quite a lot more domains than I was expecting.
The .xxx top-level domain has been active in the domain name system for a few months now, but to date the only resolving domains have been those belonging to registry manager ICM.
Casting.xxx is registered to a Really Useful Ltd, which appears to have been set up purely to build sites on .xxx domains, of which casting.xxx is the first of several.
The .xxx sunrise period begins next month, with landrush in November and general availability slated for December.

Fight over gb.com claims thousands of victims

Thousands of companies that use the pseudo-top-level-domain .gb.com have gone offline due to a legal fight between the registry and its founder.
CentralNIC sells third-level gb.com domains as a “Great Britain” alternative to .co.uk. A Google search reveals a great many small businesses use the extension for their web sites.
They’re all out of luck today. Anybody attempting to access any .gb.com domain is now welcomed by a placeholder page, which states:

You may be here because you have been sold a domain or email service using the gb.com domain that has ceased to work.
You can restore that service swiftly by registering with GB.COM Ltd.
GB.COM Ltd will not provide a service that you have paid others for, unless they have an arrangement with GB.COM Ltd.
If you have already paid for future service and it has ceased then you should contact your supplier.

GB.com appears to be owned by Stephen Dyer, who founded CentralNIC in 2000, but left the company following a buyout several years ago.
“This interruption relates to a longstanding legal dispute regarding the domain name gb.com, dating back to when the current shareholders acquired the business in 2004,” CentralNIC said.
Historical Whois records show that the email address associated with gb.com switched from CentralNIC to a webmail account at some point in September that year.
It’s currently registered to steve@enovi.com, which appears to be a Dyer-owned domain.
CentralNIC evidently has been selling domains under an extension it was not in control of for the last seven years, and now whatever leasing agreement it had arranged has broken down.
The company said: “We are currently taking legal advice about this and will be taking urgent steps to restore the service, but we cannot achieve that instantly.”
Until a solution can be found, it recommends that affected registrants sign up with GB.com to (hopefully) quickly restore DNS service to their sites.
However, the new GB.com site is so painfully amateurish that some customers seem to have mistaken it for a phishing attack.
I have some additional advice – after your gb.com domain is resolving again, register a new domain in a proper TLD (.uk, .com) and redirect all your traffic to it until your users know where to find you.
Then cancel the gb.com domain.
GB.com Ltd has already demonstrated pretty comprehensively that it doesn’t give a damn about your business, so I think you’ll agree it doesn’t deserve your money.
There are ways to go about a registry transition seamlessly, and this most certainly is not one of them.
Quite how GB.com hopes to match newly signed-up customers with the true previous registrants is not entirely clear – there’s potential for abuse unless it has full access to CentralNIC’s thick Whois.
Also worth pondering — where’s all the email to .gb.com domains going?
While this is a commercial dispute, rather than a technical stability problem, it still Looks Bad for CentralNIC, which recently has been heavily marketing itself as a “.brand” back-end provider.
It shouldn’t harm the company’s ability to pass an ICANN technical evaluation, but it may give potential clients pause for thought.
Of the 20 pseudo-TLDs listed on CentralNIC’s site, at least three others – us.com, us.org and gr.com – appear to be registered in the names of third parties, according to Whois records.
There’s no reason to believe these domains are in any immediate danger, however. They don’t appear to have any connection to GB.com or Dyer.
CentralNIC said: “We can confirm, with absolute certainty, that no other CentralNic domain extensions are subject to any such disputes.”
That will come as little comfort to the thousands of small businesses that find themselves offline today.
One such customer has set up a LinkedIn group to discuss the situation, and Twitter traffic from customers seems to be increasing as British users wake up to the news.
UPDATE: It seems that Stephen Dyer has form.
He was also director of Snappy Designs Ltd, owner of the photo-hosting site Fotopic.net, which went into liquidation earlier this year, leaving thousands of photographers stranded.
Amateur Photographer reported in March that potentially millions of images could have been lost due to the business’s failure.
The site currently says the images are safe. Users do not have access to them, however.
(spotted by @whois_search)

FarmVille domain seized from Chinese squatter

Zynga has claimed control of the domain name farmville.co.uk from a Chinese cyberquatter.
The summary decision under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service was made July 14, and posted to the Nominet web site today, but the Whois still shows the previous owner.
According to Whois records, the domain was registered July 1, 2009, just a couple of weeks after the popular FarmVille game launched on Facebook.
The domain currently resolves to a Sedo placeholder page.
If this proves anything, it’s that owners of rapidly growing web applications need to keep an eye on their brands in non-core TLDs, because cybersquatters are too.

Legal fight breaks out over .pr domains

The University of Puerto Rico has accused the manager of the .pr top-level domain of hoodwinking ICANN in order to “illegally” take over the registry.
It recently filed a lawsuit seeking to regain control of .pr, saying that the current registry operator has made an estimated $2 million from domain registrations since it somehow took over the ccTLD.
The lawsuit and other documents tell a remarkable story, one in which a University department quietly spun itself out as a private for-profit company and took .pr with it.
If the claims are true, ICANN may have made a huge screw-up by inadvertantly allowing the ccTLD to be transferred from the University into private hands.
According to an archived copy of the IANA delegation record for .pr, the ccTLD was from 1988 until about 2007 delegated to:

University of Puerto Rico
Gauss Laboratory
Facundo Bueso Building
Office 265
Rio Piedras 00931
Puerto Rico

That’s the Sponsoring Organization. The administrative and technical contacts also stated that UPR was in charge of the domain. The contact email address was @uprr.pr, the University’s domain.
Today, the IANA record is quite different:

Gauss Research Laboratory Inc.
Calle Vesta 801
San Juan 00923
Puerto Rico

The University is no longer listed. The contact email addresses are now @nic.pr. These new details have been in effect apparently since some time in 2007.
To my eye, this looks like the stewardship of .pr was transferred from one organization, the University of Puerto Rico, to another, Gauss Research Laboratory Inc.
But IANA never produced a redelegation report – as it must when a registry changes hands – and the ICANN board never voted to redelegate.
According to a July 2007 letter (pdf) circulating this week from David Conrad, who was then IANA general manager at ICANN, the changes merely reflected a “structural reorganization” of the registry:

Since the underlying organization performing registry services for .PR did not change (it was Gauss Laboratory before and after the change), this is not considered a full redelegation, and therefore does not result in a public report with board approval.

But the University claims that long-time manager Oscar Moreno set up Gauss as a non-profit organization to handle .pr when he retired from UPR, then in 2007 changed it to the for-profit corporation that is now the designated registry manager.
A 2009 letter from UPR to ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey (pdf), which emerged on mailing lists last week, said Moreno was trying to sell his company, and the ccTLD, to a third party.
IANA, according to the letter, was fooled into thinking the University backed the transfer of control due to a letter from a faculty member who did not have the authority to authorize the changes.
The University sued Moreno in late May (pdf), seeking an injunction ordering him to transfer .pr back to UPR and to return the $2 million it believes .pr domain sales have raised since 2007.
IANA redelegations are rarely straightforward.
A recent report from the Country Code Names Supporting Organization found that ccTLD redelegations have been basically a bloody mess – unpredictable, opaque and poorly documented.
ICANN does not discuss IANA requests, but I’m currently aware of a handful of ongoing redelegation battles, such as those over Niue’s .nu and Rwanda’s .rw.
It is suspected that Irish operator IEDR is currently trying to have .ie taken away from its nominal sponsor, University College Ireland, which has put the fear into at least one registrar.

Victoria’s Secret seizes swimsuit domain, again

The lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret has won a cybersquatting complaint over the domain name victoriasecretswimsuit.com for the second time in as many years.
Judging by the Whois history, it appears that the company lost the domain following the demise of rogue registrar Lead Networks, which lost its accreditation last year.
Victoria’s Secret first secured the domain with an easily won UDRP complaint in May 2009.
An attorney from its outside law firm was subsequently listed as the admin contact, but the registrar of record remained the same – the Indian outfit Lead Networks.
At some time between August and October last year, the Whois contact changed to the current registrant, who’s hiding behind a privacy service.
Probably not coincidentally, that was about the same time as ICANN, having terminated Lead Networks’ accreditation, bulk-transferred all of its domains to Answerable.com.
Lead Networks was placed into receivership in March 2010 following a cybersquatting lawsuit filed by Verizon.
Answerable.com, a Directi business also based in India, was the registrar’s designated successor under ICANN’s policies. It has subsequently changed its name to BigRock.com.
The latest UDRP decision does not explain how Victoria’s Secret managed to lose its registration, but I’d speculate the inter-registrar transfer may have had something to do with it.
When a registrar loses its accreditation the names are transferred to a new registrar but the term of the registration is not extended. If a registrant ignores or does not receive the notifications sent by the gaining registar, they may find they lose their domains.

Hot topics for ICANN Singapore

ICANN’s 41st public meeting kicks off in Singapore on Monday, and as usual there are a whole array of controversial topics set to be debated.
As is becoming customary, the US government has filed its eleventh-hour saber-rattling surprises, undermining ICANN’s authority before its delegates’ feet have even touched the tarmac.
Here’s a high-level overview of what’s going down.
The new gTLD program
ICANN and the Governmental Advisory Committee are meeting on Sunday to see if they can reach some kind of agreement on the stickiest parts of the Applicant Guidebook.
They will fail to do so, and ICANN’s board will be forced into discussing an unfinished Guidebook, which does not have full GAC backing, during its Monday-morning special meeting.
It’s Peter Dengate Thrush’s final meeting as chairman, and many observers believe he will push through some kind of new gTLDs resolution to act as his “legacy”, as well as to fulfill the promise he made in San Francisco of a big party in Singapore.
My guess is that the resolution will approve the program in general, lay down some kind of timetable for its launch, and acknowledge that the Guidebook needs more work before it is rubber-stamped.
I think it’s likely that the days of seemingly endless cycles of redrafting and comment are over for good, however, which will come as a relief to many.
Developing nations
A big sticking point for the GAC is the price that new gTLD applicants from developing nations will have to pay – it wants eligible, needy applicants to get a 76% discount, from $185,000 to $44,000.
The GAC has called this issue something that needs sorting out “as a matter of urgency”, but ICANN’s policy is currently a flimsy draft in desperate need of work.
The so-called JAS working group, tasked with creating the policy, currently wants governmental entities excluded from the support program, which has made the GAC, predictably, unhappy.
The JAS has proven controversial in other quarters too, particularly the GNSO Council.
Most recently, ICANN director Katim Touray, who’s from Gambia, said the Council had been “rather slow” to approve the JAS’s latest milestone report, which, he said:

might well be construed by many as an effort by the GNSO to scuttle the entire process of seeking ways and means to provide support to needy new gTLD applicants

This irked Council chair Stephane Van Gelder, who rattled off a response pointing out that the GNSO had painstakingly followed its procedures as required under the ICANN bylaws.
Watch out for friction there.
Simply, there’s no way this matter can be put to bed in Singapore, but it will be the topic of intense discussions because the new gTLD program cannot sensibly launch without it.
The IANA contract
The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration wants to beef up the IANA contract to make ICANN more accountable to the NTIA and, implicitly, the GAC.
Basically, IANA is being leveraged as a way to make sure that .porn and .gay (and any other TLD not acceptable to the world’s most miserable regimes) never make it onto the internet.
If at least one person does not stand up during the public forum on Thursday to complain that ICANN is nothing more than a lackey of the United States, I’d be surprised. My money’s on Khaled Fattal.
Vertical integration
The eleventh hour surprise I referred to earlier.
The US Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, informed ICANN this week that its plan to allow gTLD registries such as VeriSign, Neustar and Afilias to own affiliated registrars was “misguided”.
I found the letter (pdf) utterly baffling. It seems to say that the DoJ would not be able to advise ICANN on competition matters, despite the fact that the letter itself contains a whole bunch of such advice.
The letter has basically scuppered VeriSign’s chances of ever buying a registrar, but I don’t think anybody thought that would happen anyway.
Neustar is likely to be the most publicly annoyed by this, given how vocally it has pursued its vertical integration plans, but I expect Afilias and others will be bugged by this development too.
The DoJ’s position is likely to be backed up by Europe, now that the NTIA’s Larry Strickling and European Commissioner Neelie Kroes are BFFs.
Cybercrime
Cybercrime is huge at the moment, what with governments arming themselves with legions of hackers and groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous knocking down sites like dominoes.
The DNS abuse forum during ICANN meetings, slated for Monday, is usually populated by pissed-off cops demanding stricter enforcement of Whois accuracy.
They’ve been getting louder during recent meetings, a trend I expect to continue until somebody listens.
This is known as “engaging”.
Geek stuff
IPv6, DNSSEC and Internationalized Domain Names, in other words. There are sessions on all three of these important topics, but they rarely gather much attention from the policy wonks.
With IPv6 and DNSSEC, we’re basically looking at problems of adoption. With IDNs, there’s impenetrably technical stuff to discuss relating to code tables and variant strings.
The DNSSEC session is usually worth a listen if you’re into that kind of thing.
The board meeting
Unusually, the board’s discussion of the Guidebook has been bounced to Monday, leading to a Friday board meeting with not very much to excite.
VeriSign will get its .net contract renewed, no doubt.
The report from the GAC-board joint working group, which may reveal how the two can work together less painfully in future, also could be interesting.
Anyway…
Enough of this blather, I’ve got a plane to catch.

Salesforce.com pays over $1.5m for data.com

Salesforce.com has bought the domain name data.com for “an amount that significantly exceeds the $1.5 million reserve”, according to Oversee.net.
The domain had been due to be auctioned during the company’s DOMAINFest in Barcelona tomorrow, but was taken out of contention early with the private sale.
While Oversee did not disclose the buyer or final sales price, the Whois record already shows Salesforce.com as the new owner. It was previously owned by United Business Media.
Oversee said the deal brings its year-to-date sales to $11 million.