VeriSign poised to sell SSL business to Symantec

Reliable news sources including the Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting that VeriSign is on the verge of offloading its market-leading SSL certificate business to Symantec for over $1 billion.
The sale would be the latest in a series of spin-offs that started in 2007, highlighting the company’s renewed focus on domain names.
VeriSign spent many years acquiring a bunch of companies in tenuously related markets – deals that never really made any sense to me – and the last few years selling them off again.
But SSL is not really in the same category as VeriSign’s bizarre forays into, for example, the Crazy Frog ringtone company. It’s the business the company was founded on when it was spun out of RSA Security 15 years ago.
It’s called VeriSign for a reason.
But offloading the SSL business would make sense. One of the reasons VeriSign bought Network Solutions ten years ago was the obvious retail synergies between domain names and SSL certificates – customers could buy both at the same time.
That synergy was diluted when VeriSign spun the NSI registrar business out as a separate company three years later, creating the vertically separated domain name market we know today.
Symantec, with its fingers in the enterprise and home/small business pies, might be able to make a better crack at the SSL game.
So is this bad news for SSL’s current silver medal holder, Go Daddy?
Possibly. Symantec is a force to be reckoned with – only marketing prowess could explain why so many people use Norton.
Of course, these news stories could be nonsense.
But my guts say they’re probably based on the same kind of leaks that companies often float to the press, to see what the markets do, when they’re in the final stages of negotiations.

1 Comment Tagged: acquisition, go daddy, network solutions, ssl, symantec, verisign

Porn domain firm urges ICANN to ignore the haters

ICM Registry has asked ICANN to set aside the views of thousands of naysayers and approve the porn-only .xxx top-level domain as soon as possible.
The company has sent three documents to ICANN today, two of which set out ICM’s position in the same firm tone that has characterized its previous missives.
Basically: no more delays, your only option here is to get back into contract talks now.
I would say ICM is drawing a line in the sand, but ICM has drawn so many lines in the sand recently it’s beginning to look like a game of beach tic-tac-toe (which, visualizing it, is kinda appropriate).
The third document is a post-game summary of ICANN’s recently closed comment period on the .xxx application, which attracted record comments. That’s written by former ICANN public participation wonk Kieren McCarthy and is more measured in tone.
ICM president Stuart Lawley believes that the thousands of copy-paste comments from US-based anti-porn Christian groups can be safely ignored. I get the impression ICANN will probably agree.

The volume of comments on an entirely irrelevant issue – that is, the content of websites on the Internet – was one of the original reasons this process went off the rails. ICANN should not repeat its earlier mistakes and pander to those interests.

Given that a substantial number of comments came from the porn industry itself, notably the Free Speech Coalition, Lawley wrote that “debate about community support is no longer appropriate”.
ICM’s on shakier ground here than with the Christians. A TLD for a sponsored community that is unequivocally hated (NSFW) by a vocal part of that community can’t look good.
But the FSC, along with the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, one of its members, “represent only a small fraction of the adult industry”, Lawley claimed.
Over 100,000 .xxx domains have been pre-registered over the last five years and several hundred of these people sent ICM’s copy-paste letter to ICANN. ICM says this indicates adult industry support, though I think that’s a less than watertight argument.
ICANN’s board will undoubtedly have a good old chinwag about their current predicament at their retreat this weekend, but they’re not due to make any decisions until the Brussels meeting a little over a month from now.

Comment Tagged: adult entertainment broadcast network, brussels, free speech coalition, ICANN, icm registry, new gTLDs, stuart lawly, xxx

Root DNSSEC push delayed two weeks

The final rollout of DNSSEC to the internet’s root servers, a major security upgrade for the domain name system, has been pushed back two weeks to July 15.
ICANN’s DNS director Joe Abley said in an update on root-dnssec.org and in email to the dns-ops mailing list:

The schedule change is intended to allow ICANN and VeriSign an additional two weeks for further analysis of the DURZ rollout, to finalise testing and best ensure the secure, stable and resilient implementation of the root DNSSEC production processes and systems.

The Deliberately-Unvalidatable Root Zone is a way for the root operators to test how normal DNS resolution copes with fatter DNSSEC responses coming from the root, before worrying about issues concerning DNSSEC validation itself.
The DURZ has been cautiously rolled out over the last few months and has been operational across all 13 root servers since May 5.
The original plan called for the roots to become validatable following a key signing ceremony on July 1
The schedule change from ICANN also comes with a notice that the US government will be asking for public comment before the decision is made to properly sign the root.

Prior to 2010-07-15 the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) will issue a public notice announcing the publication of the joint ICANN-VeriSign testing and evaluation report as well as the intent to proceed with the final stage of DNSSEC deployment. As part of this notice the DoC will include a public review and comment period prior to taking any action.

I may be just a little forgetful, but I can’t remember hearing about this Commerce involvement before.
Still, DNSSEC is a big change, so there’s nothing wrong with more of the softly-softly approach.

Comment Tagged: department of commerce, DNSSEC, durz, ICANN, joe abley, ntai, root servers, verisign

Mail-order wife site silences critic with UDRP

A dating service has failed in a second attempt to hijack a domain name on the basis that the corresponding web site uses its “hot Russian brides” trademark in its directory structure.
Romantic Tours, which runs hotrussianbrides.com, filed a UDRP claim against agencyscams.com, claiming its URL agencyscams.com/why/hotrussianbrides infringed its trademark.
It lost the case, with the National Arbitration Forum arbitrator quite reasonably noting that “proceedings under the UDRP may be applied only to domain names”.
As noted over at Domain Name Wire, Romantic Tours tried the same ballsy tactic with jimslists.com, and was similarly unsuccessful.
Jimslists.com and and agencyscams.com are run by the same person. They’re basically gripe sites naming and shaming allegedly dodgy dating agencies and the allegedly dodgy women who use them.
While Romantic Tours may have lost its UDRP case, it appears to have got what it wanted anyway.
The offending URLs are no longer active on either site, and detailed references to hotrussianbrides.com appear to have been yanked, resulting in 404s.

Comment Tagged: agencyscams.com, cybersquatting, hotrussianbrides.com, jimslists.com, national arbitration forum, udrp

Sex.com writer Kieren McCarthy buys sexdotcom.com

If you’ve written a book called Sex.Com, what domain name do you use to promote it?
For former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy, the answer to that question is now sexdotcom.com, which he has just picked up for a bargain $360 in a Sedo auction.
He has previously promoted Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet’s Crown on sexdotcom.info, but says it makes more sense to use the .com.
The book, which is very entertaining, chronicles the fight for control of sex.com between original registrant Gary Kremen and the conman Stephen Cohen, who stole it in the mid-1990s.
McCarthy tells me he’s had some Hollywood interest in his story, so his new domain could turn out to be a worthwhile investment.

Comment Tagged: gary kremen, kieren mccarthy, sex.com, sexdotcom.com, stephen cohen

ICANN switches off .mobi land-rush flipper

ICANN has terminated a domain name registrar that seems to have been made its business flipping land-rush domains, especially in .mobi.
Mobiline, doing business as DomainBonus.com, is an Israeli outfit that received its registrar accreditations about five years ago.
While it seems to have registered a very small number of domains, domainbonus.com did provide DNS for a few thousand dictionary .mobi domains, registered during the September 2006 land-rush.
A lot of these domains appeared to have been originally registered in the name of Mobiline’s owner, Alex Tesler.
Many have been since been flipped and archives of the DomainBonus front page show the firm was mainly preoccupied with aftermarket sales rather than fresh registrations.
ICANN has revoked its accreditation (pdf) for failure to pay its dues and escrow Whois data with Iron Mountain, as all registrars must.
ICANN is also switching off Western United Domains, a Spanish outfit that appears to have no web presence whatsoever, for the same reasons.

Comment Tagged: .mobi, alex tesler, compliance, domainbonus.com, ICANN, mobiline, western united domains

Cheaters’ dating site wins 101 typo domains

You’d think a web site that enables married people to cheat on their partners would have difficulty taking the moral high ground on any issue. Apparently not.
AshleyMadison.com, which offers an “Affairs Guaranteed” promise, has just won 101 typo domain names under a mass UDRP claim against a single respondent.
The disputed domains included everything from zashleymadison.com to aeshleymadison.com. Two were PPC pages, the remainder apparently remained unused.
Judging from the National Arbitration Forum decision, this was an open-and-shut case of typosquatting.
The registrant was hiding behind a Bahamas-based privacy service that declined to close his true identity.
He did not respond to the UDRP filing.

1 Comment Tagged: ashleymadison.com, cybersquatting, national arbitration forum, udrp

Crypto legend Diffie joins ICANN

Whitfield Diffie, one of the fathers of modern cryptography, has been hired by ICANN as its new vice president for information security and cryptography.
ICANN said Diffie, who was Sun Microsystems’ chief security officer until last November, will advise ICANN “in the design, development and implementation of security methods” for its networks.
Diffie, along with his colleague Martin Hellman, basically invented the first method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over insecure networks, in the 1970s.
The coup comes at an appropriate time for ICANN, which intends to start signing the internet’s DNS root servers with DNSSEC security keys on July 1.
Diffie will no doubt be pushed front-and-center for the photo ops during the first signing ceremony.

Comment Tagged: cryptography, DNSSEC, ICANN, sun microsystems, whitfield diffie

Registrars responsible for proxy cybersquatters

Domain name registrars can be liable when their customers break the law, if those customers use a privacy service, according to new ICANN guidance.
The ICANN advisory clarifies the most recent Registrar Accreditation Agreement, and seems primarily pertinent to UDRP cases where the registrar refuses to cooperate with the arbitrator’s request for proper Whois records.
The advisory says:

a Registered Name Holder licensing the use of a domain is liable for harm caused by the wrongful use of the domain unless the Registered Name Holder promptly identifies the licensee to a party providing the Registered Name Holder with reasonable evidence of actionable harm

In other words, if a domain gets hit with a UDRP claim or trademark infringement lawsuit, as far as the RAA is concerned the proxy service is the legal registrant unless the registrar quickly hands over its customer’s details.
Law enforcement and intellectual property interests have been complaining about registrars refusing to do so for years, most recently in comments on ICANN’s Whois accuracy study.
ICANN offers a definition of the word “promptly” as “within five business days” and “reasonable evidence” as trademark ownership and evidence of infringement.
I don’t think this ICANN guidance will have much of an impact on privacy services offered by the big registrars, which generally seem quite happy to hand over customer identities on demand.
Instead, this looks like it could be the start of a broader ICANN crackdown on certain non-US registrars offering “bulletproof” registrations to cybersquatters and other ne’er-do-wells.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the number of ICANN de-accreditations citing refusal to cooperate with UDRP claims increasing in future.
The new ICANN document is a draft, and you can comment on it here.

3 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, ICANN, raa, udrp, whois

ICANN closes .xxx forum after 14,000 comments

ICANN has finally shut down the latest public comment period on the proposed .xxx TLD, and now faces the task of finding the few dozen grains of wheat in about 14,000 pieces of chaff.
It’s general counsel John Jeffrey’s task to provide the round-up on this, possibly record-breaking, public comment period, although I understand ICM Registry may also provide its own, alternative, summary document.
I had a quick chat with Jeffrey yesterday. He told me comments were kept open beyond the advertized Monday shutdown because ICANN staffers are allowed to use their discretion when forums are seeing a lot of activity.
He also noted that the comment period was not a referendum on the merits of .xxx; ICANN had solicited feedback on a specific set of process options on how to handle .xxx.
It’s my impression that the 10,000+ identical form emails from the American Family Association may, rightly, wind up being considered as a single comment.

5 Comments Tagged: american family association, ICANN, icm registry, john jeffrey, xxx