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Barclays probably not breaching contract, says ICANN compliance chief

Kevin Murphy, June 16, 2015, Domain Registries

Barclays doesn’t seem to have violated its new gTLD registry agreements, despite admitting to criminal charges related to currency manipulation, according to ICANN’s top compliance executive.
Allen Grogan, chief contract compliance officer, told DI today that a “literal” reading of the Registry Agreements for .barclays and .barclaycard would not see the bank in breach.
“As far as I know we haven’t received a formal compliance complaint about it. If we received a complaint we would investigate it,” Grogan said.
“At first blush I wouldn’t see a clear-cut violation of the literal language of the agreement,” he said.
Barclays’ suitability to be a new gTLD registry has come under the spotlight in CircleID blog posts recently, first by domainer George Kirikos and then Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin.
All RAs contain a provision that allows ICANN to terminate the contract if any officer or director of the registry is convicted of a financially-related misdemeanor or any felony.
Barclays was one of five banks that recently fessed up to felony currency market fixing charges in the US, paying a combined $2.5 billion fine.
However, as Kirikos, Corwin and now Grogan have pointed out, the RA only talks about crimes committed by officers and directors, not the companies themselves.
Grogran pointed out that to hold a corporation accountable for its crimes long after the fact might be a bit excessive.
Criminal employees and directors can be fired, but a company cannot fire itself.
“Does that means for the next hundred years ICANN or no other corporation should do business with them?” he said.

Barclays confirms move away from .com to new gTLD

Kevin Murphy, May 18, 2015, Domain Registries

Barclays has become one of the first major companies to explicitly confirm it will dump traditional gTLDs and ccTLDs in favor of its new dot-brands.
The $25 billion-a-year bank said it will “transfer its online assets to proprietary domain names — .barclays and .barclaycard — away from the traditional location-specific .com and .co.uk web addresses.”
The transition is a “long-term” play, but it’s started already, with “non-transactional” parts of its web site already using the two new gTLDs.
Basically, we’ve entered the brochureware phase of the dot-brand evolution.
home.barclays already mirrors barclays.com — both are simultaneously live right now — but the online banking service remains at barclays.co.uk.
In a May 11 press release that seems to have slipped under everyone’s radar last week, Barclays chief security officer Troels Oerting, until a few months ago cyber-crime chief at Europol, said:

The launch of the .barclays and .barclaycard domain names creates a simplified online user experience, making it crystal clear to our customers that they are engaging with a genuine Barclays site.
This clarity, along with the advantages of controlling our own online environment, enables us to provide an even more secure service, which we know is of utmost importance to our customers, and ultimately serves to increase trust and confidence in Barclays’ online entities.

This is precisely what advocates of dot-brands pitched as the benefits of the new gTLD program.
While many applicants stated similar plans in their gTLD applications, I think there’s been a degree of skepticism about whether they would follow through.
Barclays’ moves are happening faster than I expected — the .barclays gTLD was delegated in January — showing a degree of enthusiasm.
The charitable Australian Cancer Research Foundation in February launched sites under its .cancerresearch (not technically a dot-brand), while Hong Kong conglomerate CITIC Group has already experimented with a shift from .com to .citic.
In related news, the non-branded .bank gTLD opened for its sunrise period today.