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.

Iron Mountain gets into bed with CRS

Iron Mountain and Central Registry Solutions have made a deal to referrer prospective new gTLD applicants to each other’s services.
The companies said that Iron Mountain will refer wannabe registries to CRS for registry services and CRS will refer them to Iron Mountain for data escrow services.
It strikes me that the deal is probably better news for Iron Mountain, given that CRS is actively engaged in seeking out new TLD applicants to partner with whereas Iron Mountain, presumably, is not.
Iron Mountain already does a lot of work with registries and registrars that have to escrow their Whois information under the terms of their ICANN contracts.
Some of these contracts specify the company as the only escrow agent allowed, whereas the current Draft Applicant Guidebook for new gTLD applicants is less prescriptive.
CRS is a partnership of Network Solutions and CentralNIC, manager of the .la ccTLD and a handful of geographical second-level domains such as uk.com and us.com.

Twenty registrars canned in 2009

ICANN shut down 20 domain name registrars in 2009, and is on course to do the same this year, according to numbers released today.
That’s up from seven de-accreditations in 2008, and twice as many as the previous record year, 2003.
ICANN can withdraw accreditation from a registrar, stopping its ability to register domains, if the registrar fails to escrow Whois information or pay its ICANN dues.
It looks like 2010 could well see a similar level of de-accreditations.
Five registrars were shuttered in the first quarter, and ICANN has sent warnings to five more this month.

Bigotgate woman gets cybersquatted

Gillian Duffy, an unknown Rochdale pensioner five hours ago, has become the latest victim of celebrity cybersquatting.
Duffy is the voter Gordon Brown described as “bigoted” after she buttonholed him during an election walkabout this morning.
Brown thought he was having a private conversation as his car sped away, unaware that his radio mic was still on. Oops.
As a result, he’s been forced to apologize publicly at least four times in the last four hours, by my count.
The news in the UK has talked about nothing else this afternoon, so it’s hardly surprising that the domain name gillianduffy.co.uk has just been registered.
It’s currently parked with 1&1.
I’ll be fascinated to see what the registrant plans to do with the domain once Mrs Duffy’s 15 minutes are up.

UDRP of the day: how-to-roll-a-blunt-with-a-swisher-sweet.info

This is mildly amusing. Somebody, presumably the cigar company, has filed a UDRP claim against the owner of how-to-roll-a-blunt-with-a-swisher-sweet.info.
The domain name was registered last month and, sadly, does not appear to have any content yet. It’s registered to “Gregory Bong”.
In the US, a “Swisher Sweet” is your basic bog-standard convenience store panatela cigar.
A “blunt” is what the registrant was probably smoking.
The .com version of the domain is, unsurprisingly, available, so I can only assume price was a big factor in Bong’s choice of TLD.

Band loses domain, gets $300k anyway

A British pub band forgot to renew its domain name, but wound up £200,000 richer anyway, courtesy of an original work from the popular graffiti artist Banksy.
According to the Bristol Evening Post, Exit Through The Gift Shop was gifted a painting valued by Sotheby’s at £200,000 ($307,000) after it agreed to change its name to avoid a clash with the title of Banksy’s new film.
But was there also another benefactor, the person who caught exitthroughthegiftshop.com when it dropped and sold it to Banksy?
The band’s drummer said:

“We had lost the domain name as we had forgotten to renew it, and when we phoned up to ask to buy it back, the man said no, that we wouldn’t be able to afford it, and that he was the agent for the person who had the domain name.”

Whois records show that exitthroughthegiftshop.com dropped in March 2008, when it was promptly re-registered by somebody who hid behind an eNom privacy service.
The domain was transferred to its present owner (no, it’s not Banksy, I checked) two days before it was due to expire in March last year. Presumably, it was sold.
Did a domainer make a killing in artwork?

Comwired buys DNS.com for relaunch

Comwired has acquired the domain name DNS.com in order to relaunch as a provider of managed enterprise DNS services.
The company announced this morning that it bought the domain, first registered in 1991 and previously parked, for an undisclosed amount.
The transaction appears to have happened at the end of last month and the site is already live.
With the acquisition, Comwired looks like it’s targeting the market for high-availability DNS resolution currently occupied by the likes of Neustar, Afilias and Dynamic Network Services.
The company was perhaps previously best-known for the geographic traffic-splitting service it offered to domainers and others.
The Whois record for DNS.com still shows a Moniker private registration, which I speculate would not be an exactly comforting sight for would-be enterprise customers.

Go Daddy feature tallies Whois queries on your domain

I may be a bit late off the blocks, but I just learned about a rather nifty little feature buried within Go Daddy that lets you see when somebody has done a Whois lookup on one of your domains.
Log in to your Domain Manager, click Tools, click Exportable Lists, click Add New Export, then check the relevant boxes in the wizard.
The feature exports a .csv file telling you how many Whois searches have been run against each of your domain names in the last day, week, month and year.
I imagine this could provide a few useful data points when deciding how much interest there is in a domain you’re planning to sell.
I also found it quite interesting that more people executed Whois queries on domainincite.com in March than bothered to click the About tab at the top of the page.
Domain people are an odd bunch.

IP address privacy policy killed

A proposal that would have brought the equivalent of domain name proxy registrations to IP addresses in North America has been dropped after its author had a chat with the FBI.
The policy would have allowed ISPs that take their IP addresses from ARIN, the American Regional Internet Registry, to substitute their own contact information in place of their customers’ details.
Proposing the policy, Aaron Wendel of WholesaleInternet.com initially said that the requirement to publish customer lists into a Referral Whois (RWHOIS) database “runs contrary to good business practices” and allows ISPs to poach each other’s customers.
Wendel publicly withdrew his proposal an hour ago at the ARIN meeting in Toronto, shocking some attendees.
He said he was doing so after a late-night session hearing the concerns of an FBI agent who is at the meeting, as well as conversations with members of ARIN staff.
The proposed policy had also been criticized by companies including Paypal, and many security experts.
RWHOIS allows any internet user to identify the user of an IP address in much the same way as Whois allows domain name registrants to be identified.
It is regularly used by law enforcement to track down spammers and other online crooks.
Unlike Whois, RWHOIS has a carve-out protecting residential users.

$10 billion disk-maker wins domain name

Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest hard disk drive maker, has won seagatetechnology.com – the exact match of its company name – at UDRP.
The squatter, identified as Standard Bearer Enterprises, registered the name in 2004. That’s six years of squeezing click revenue from an exact-match name of a multi-billion dollar firm.
Standard Bearer has a track record of losing famous names at UDRP, and was named in a cybersquatting lawsuit filed by Andre Agassi and Steffi Graff last year.
Seagate is a huge company, reporting revenue approaching $10 billion last year. It has been using the Seagate Technology trademark since 1983.
It’s not exactly naive about domain names, either.
Its primary domain, seagate.com, was first registered in 1992 – the Neolithic by internet standards. It beggars belief that its taken 18 years to secure its long-form company name.