ICANN cans broke registrar

4Domains.com has lost its registrar accreditation after ICANN decided it had gone insolvent.
ICANN has alleged numerous other violations of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, but told the registrar that its insolvency allows it terminate the accreditation with immediate effect.
ICANN’s letter to 4Domains (pdf) describes a company unable not only to pay its roughly $6,110 in due ICANN fees, but also to fund its registry accounts, service its customers and pay its staff.
From this, ICANN has concluded that the registrar is insolvent, and has terminated its accreditation.

4Domains is acting in manner that endangers the stability and operational integrity of the Internet, which is a separate grounds to support ICANN’s termination of the 4Domains RAA.

ICANN said 4Domains was also failing to escrow its registrant data, “due to an inability of the 4Domains programmer to resolve the escrow deposit issues”.
But it has this week supplied ICANN with an electronic copy of its customer database, so it appears that most registrants will be protected should their domains be transferred to another registrar.
The company has been told it may now nominate another registrar to take over its accounts in bulk.
4Domains was accredited in 2000, making it one of the first registrars to go live. According to DotAndCo.net, it has about 25,000 active registrations in five gTLDs.

6 Comments Tagged: 4domains, accreditation, compliance, ICANN

Now .mobi wants to auction ultra-short domains

Afilias-owned dotMobi has applied to ICANN to auction off one and two-letter .mobi domain names, following in the footsteps on other top-level domain registries.
The company had a plan to selectively allocate some such domains based on a Request For Proposals approved by ICANN almost two years ago, now it wants to be able to auction off whatever domains remain.
dotMobi said (pdf):

Once the previously approved RFP round has concluded, dotMobi will conduct an auction of any remaining domains according to a schedule determined by dotMobi. For any domains not allocated during either the RFP or auction rounds, dotMobi will announce a release date and will invite open, first-come-first-served registrations.

Requests to allocate one and two-character domains have previously been submitted and approved by Neustar (.biz), Afilias (.info), puntCAT (.cat), Tralliance (.travel) and RegistryPro (.pro).
Telnic (.tel) has a similar proposal still under board review.
Such auctions offer a one-time windfall for the registry operator. NeuStar’s .biz auction raised a reported $360,000 last year.
As DomainNameWire reported yesterday VeriSign has withdrawn its application for one-letter auctions in .net. Its proposal would have seen expired one-character domains returned to registry control, allowing them to be re-auctioned.

1 Comment Tagged: afilias, auctions, dotmobi, ICANN

Arab League asks ICANN for recognition

The League of Arab States has called on ICANN to formally recognize the Arab region.
UPDATED: Read this correction.

Comment Tagged: cctlds, ICANN, idns, league of arab states, regions

Price increase on the cards for .biz

NeuStar is to raise its registry fee on .biz domain names by $0.45, to $7.30 year, according to a letter sent to ICANN by the company’s vice president of registry services.
The changes will come into effect April 1, 2011, following the mandatory notice period registries have to give their registrar partners.
NeuStar has just seen a monthly decrease in total .biz registrations, from 2,070,343 to 2,065,389 at the start of the month, according to HosterStats.com.

Comment Tagged: .biz, ICANN, neustar

New TLD competition group throws in the towel

The ICANN working group tasked with deciding whether registrars should be allowed to apply for new top-level domains has failed to reach agreement after over six months of talks.
This means it will be down to the ICANN board of directors to decide, possibly at its next meeting, what the rules should be on vertical integration and cross ownership in new TLDs.
It’s been pretty clear from the Vertical Integration Working Group’s recent discussions that there would be no chance of the group reaching a consensus on the headline topics in the remaining time allotted to it.
Within the last two hours, the GNSO Council has been notified that the group has failed to reach consensus.
Should ICANN-accredited registrars be allowed to apply for new TLDs? Should registries be allow to sell direct to consumers? Should registrars be able to own stakes in registries? Vice versa? How much? Whither the .brand?
All these questions will now have to be resolved by the ICANN staff and board.
Currently, the Draft Applicant Guidebook limits registry/registrar cross-ownership to 2%, effectively barring existing registrars from applying to run new TLD registries.
While the VI working group has been working on the problem since February, positions quickly became entrenched based on the commercial interests of many participants. There has been no substantial progress towards compromise or consensus in months.
But the group did manage to reach rough agreement on a number of peripheral problems that will have a lesser economic impact on the incumbent registries and registrars.
For example, the board will likely be told that “single registrant, single user” TLDs, a variant of the .brand where the registry is the only registrant, should be looked into further.
On the core issue of cross ownership, three proposals are on the table.
One, the Free Trade Proposal, would eliminate such restrictions entirely. Two others, RACK+ and JN2+, would increase the limits to 15%.
The RACK+ proposal is the closest to the status quo in terms of barring vertical integration, while JN2+ contains explicit exceptions for .brand TLDs and smaller community registries.
Given the lack of consensus, it’s quite feasible that the ICANN board may decide to cherry pick from two or more proposals, or come up with something entirely novel. We’ll have to wait and see.

1 Comment Tagged: draft applicant guidebook, gnso, ICANN, new TLDs, vertical integration

New TLDs get their own conference

Former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy is organizing a conference dedicated to new top-level domains, set to run in San Francisco for two days next February.
The .nxt conference will be hosted by the Internet Society’s SF Bay Area chapter. Pricing is expected to be in the $300 to $500 range.
The organizers are currently looking for speakers, exhibitors and attendees from registries, registrars, potential TLD applicants, consultants and marketers.
McCarthy told me that the idea is to focus more on the business opportunity side of things, rather than the policy-making that dominates ICANN meetings.
“Once all the argument is over and the rules are set, I thought it would be great to have a conference focused on what we were all going to do with the Internet,” he said in an email.
The agenda is expected to be split into four tracks: policy, implementation, models and marketing, tackling subjects such as how to run a registry and how to effectively market a TLD.

4 Comments Tagged: .nxt conference, internet society, isoc, new TLDs

Delhi Commonwealth Games wins UDRP

With five days to go before the Commonwealth Games kicks off in Delhi, the organizers may be under fire for expecting athletes to live like squatters, but they have managed to beat off one cybersquatter.
(Do you see what I did there?)
The Organising Committee of the games has been handed delhi-commonwealth-games.com in a UDRP proceeding against an anonymous registrant handled by WIPO
It looks like a fairly straightforward case. The web site, which has content, appears on the first page of Google for [delhi commonwealth games]. The WIPO panelist said its use of commercial links showed bad faith.
The official domain of the games is the rather less SEO-friendly cwgdelhi2010.org.
Interestingly, the Committee became aware of the domain in April 2009 and its first move was to ask the registrar, Directi, to block it, which it refused. It was well over a year later when the UDRP claim was filed.
Delhi was awarded the Commonwealth Games in 2003. The domain was registered in 2006.
The city has recently come under fire for its apparent lack of preparation, offering arriving athletes accommodation well below par from a health and safety perspective.

2 Comments Tagged: delhi commonwealth games, directi, udrp, wipo

ICANN will not attend White House drugs meeting

ICANN has declined an invitation from the Obama administration to attend a meeting tomorrow to discuss ways to crack down on counterfeit drugs web sites.
The meeting, first reported by Brian Krebs, was called with an August 13 invitation to “registries, registrars and ICANN” to meet at the White House to talk about “voluntary protocols to address the illegal sale of counterfeit non-controlled prescription medications on-line.”
The meeting is reportedly part of the administration’s Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft, which was announced in June.
It also follows a series of reports from security firms that called into question domain name registrars’ willingness to block domains that are used to sell fake pharma.
ICANN tells me that, following talks with White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, it was agreed that it would “not be appropriate” for ICANN to attend.
The decision was based on the fact that ICANN’s job is to make policy covering internet names and addresses, and not to regulate the content of web sites.
ICANN’s vice president of government affairs for the Americas, Jamie Hedlund, said the meeting was “outside the scope of our role as the technical coordinator of the Internet’s unique identifiers.”
I suspect it also would not have looked great on the global stage if ICANN appeared to be taking its policy cues directly from the US government rather than through its Governmental Advisory Committee.
Demand Media-owned registrar eNom, which has took the brunt of the recent criticism of registrars, recently signed up to a service that will help it more easily identify and terminate domains used to sell counterfeit medicines.

13 Comments Tagged: counterfeiting, enom, ICANN, knujon, obama, white house

Saudi IDN landrush begins

SaudiNIC has kicked off the landrush phase for its recently approved Arabic-script country-code top-level domain, السعودية.
The registry is using the term “landrush” to describe what other registries would call general availability. As of yesterday, it’s first-come-first-served.
Registrants must be Saudi citizens or owners of Saudi trademarks, and the registration process requires the necessary documents to be filed. It’s Arabic-script only.
There won’t be much of an aftermarket; flipping domains is frowned upon and each registrant has to show a “reasonable relationship” to the domain they want to register.
UPDATE: I’ve been told that the launch may have been delayed, which I am attempting to confirm. The registry web site is still announcing yesterday as the launch date.

Comment Tagged: idns, saudi arabia, saudinic, السعودية.

New TLD guidebook could be finalized in Cartagena

I’ve got the official line from ICANN — it’s possible that the final Applicant Guidebook for new top-level domain applications could be approved as early as December.
I reported late last night that, following its weekend board retreat, the final version of ICANN’s new TLD rulebook would be published before its public meeting in Cartagena, Colombia.
This morning, based on some reader comments and a closer reading of the board’s latest resolutions, I concluded that there was a pretty good chance I was wrong, so I asked ICANN for clarification.
I essentially asked whether we were looking at another six months of pondering Draft Applicant Guidebook version 5, or whether the next iteration would be the final one.
This is the official ICANN spokesperson line:

The next guidebook to be posted for public comment will be called the “next version” of the applicant guidebook – depending on public comment, the Board will decide whether to approve it as final (with changes) or request another iteration.
…
As stated above, the Board could consider approving the next version of the Guidebook as early as the Cartagena meeting or set a timeline for approval sometime thereafter.

So, there’s the answer: it depends.
Frankly, given the number and gravity of the unresolved issues on the table, I think Cartagena may be optimistic. But it’s not impossible.
(Cheers to @mneylon and @dot_scot for the constructive criticism.)

3 Comments Tagged: draft applicant guidebook, ICANN, new TLDs