GoDaddy has a secret weapon in its push into corporate domains

While GoDaddy has been focused for the last two decades on small and microbusiness customers, its entry this year into the corporate domains management space should not be dismissed — the company has one huge advantage.

Earlier this week, the company announced the launch of GoDaddy Corporate Domains, really just a rebranding of the company Brandsight, which it acquired back in February.

The move pits GoDaddy against industry leaders such as MarkMonitor, CSC, Com Laude, Safenames et al.

But the company has one huge advantage that its new competitors do not have: cybersquatters and criminals.

Buried at the bottom of this week’s press release is the announcement of a new service, the Verified Intellectual Property program, which “provides pre-vetted, well-known and famous brands an escalation path to address IP abuse”.

It sounds basically like a trusted notifier service not unlike those offered at the registry level by the likes of Donuts and Radix.

VIP clients will be able to get sites and domains hosted on GoDaddy taken down much quicker, via a special escalation email address, a spokesperson said. Takedown requests will still be subject to manual review, he said.

VIP is currently invitation-only, but I assume being a Corporate Domains customer would help expedite an invitation.

This kind of service is something GoDaddy’s new rivals cannot offer — they generally have no retail channel or hosting, so have no cyberquatters, pirates or counterfeiters as customers. If they want to take down a domain or web site, it’s not a simple matter of flipping a switch.

They also don’t have tens of millions of domains under management, many of which, through no fault of GoDaddy, will be maliciously registered.

This is potentially a pretty cool USP for GoDaddy, which could have rivals worried.

Free speech, or bad faith? UDRP panels split on Everything.sucks domains

The first wave of UDPR cases targeting domains used by Everything.suck have seen split decisions by the panels.

At least four .sucks domains, all owned by the same Turks and Caicos company, have been hit by UDRP complaints recently, and two have already been decided.

One case, over the domain miraplex.sucks, resulted in victory for the registrant while the other, over bioderma.sucks, led to defeat and a transfer.

Both domains are owned by Honey Salt Ltd, and both redirect to a page on Everything.sucks, a Wikipedia-style site that uses content scraped from third-party sites and social media to present a scrappy form of gripe microsite.

In both UDRP cases, Honey Salt chose to mount a “free speech” defense, claiming that it had rights to the names because they were being used to publish criticism of the brands in question.

As I noted last week, UDRP panels have historically been divided on when this defense should be successful. WIPO guidance suggests that gripe sites should be permitted as long as the criticism is genuine and non-commercial.

But Everything.sucks was decidedly commercial at the time these two complaints were filed. Each site featured a banner leading to a page on Sedo or Uniregistry where the domain could be purchased (usually at registry wholesale prices).

Miraplex is a brand of Parkinson’s disease medicine. In this case, the panel decided that the complainant, a pharmaceuticals company, failed to make the case that Honey Salt had no legitimate interests in the domain, writing:

the Complainant argues that the website linked to the disputed domain name displays information about the Complainant and its MIRAPEX medicines, but failed to explain (let alone substantiate) why this should be regarded as a lack of rights or legitimate interests in the disputed domain name (which seems to have a criticism purpose). Also, the Panel finds that the offering for sale of a domain name is not by itself a proof of lack of rights or legitimate interests.

The panel seems to have given special consideration to the fact that it’s a .sucks domain, where one might expect to see criticism.

Given the nature of the “.sucks” domain name gTLD, and given the evidence (or lack of evidence) submitted by the parties, the Panel finds that the Complainant did not prove that the Respondent lacks rights or legitimate interests in the disputed domain name. In particular, the Panel would have expected the Complainant to target its arguments and evidence to the specific criticism-nature of “.sucks” domain names (which the Complainant failed to do).

The decision is written in such a way as to suggest that it is the complainant’s lack of substantiating evidence, rather than the panel’s gullibility, that is to blame for the complaint failing.

The Panel finds that the Respondent’s claim that the website available through the disputed domain name has a criticism purpose is not devoid of credibility. The Panel would have expected the Complainant to argue (and corroborate) why it considers this “.sucks” domain name and its purported free expression character as a “smoke screen” and why it is of the opinion that the predominant purpose of the Respondent is to sell this domain name rather than to provide a forum for discussion and criticism. The Complainant did not explain nor substantiate why it considers the criticism character of this website as a pretext. The Panel also finds that the offering of a domain name for sale is not by itself evidence of bad faith.

The bioderma.sucks case is an entirely different story, with the panel writing that Honey Salt’s “entire endeavour seems to the Panel to be a pretext for commercial activity”.

Honey Salt’s “pretext” is that it registers domain names on behalf of a non-profit entity called Everything Sucks Inc, which appears to have been formed in Delaware this April. It told the Miraplex panel that whenever a wiki page is created at Everything.sucks, it registers the corresponding domain name.

Given that over two thousand .sucks domains were registered in June in the space of a couple days, that seems unlikely to me.

The Bioderma panel wasn’t buying it either.

The process by which the disputed domain name was registered seems to be automatic and, importantly, took place before any criticism whatsoever was even present on the website (as may be inferred from the Parties’ evidence, namely the Complainant’s screenshot of June 24, 2020). The alleged criticism seems to have been added as an afterthought between that date and the date when the Response was filed, further calling its genuineness into question.

It also noted that the content of the site comes from third parties, rather than the registrant, again calling its genuineness into question. The panel added:

Even assuming a third party generated the page on the Respondent’s website in order to engage in non-commercial criticism, rather than the Respondent itself, the Respondent immediately proceeds to exploit the position commercially by registering and offering the disputed domain name for sale.

This blatant commercial use was important to the panel in establishing a lack of legitimate interests and also bad faith.

Respondent’s approach was to take unfair commercial advantage of the Complainant’s name and trademark while having no actual criticism or free speech of its own in which to engage. It looked to sell the disputed domain name on the open market before any criticism had even been published. The fact that the disputed domain name is used for a web page not containing genuine criticism content but only automatically generated links loosely related to the Complainant’s product (as demonstrated by the Complainant’s screenshot dating from before the filing of the present Complaint) constitutes further evidence of bad faith. The fact that the disputed domain name is used in a page containing links to other companies and where the relevant domain names (to which the links point) are systematically put on sale by the Respondent is additional evidence of cybersquatting.

The panel ordered bioderma.sucks transferred.

Two cases, two very different outcomes.

Both complaints were filed at the Czech Arbitration Court by the same lawyer within a few days of each other, and were decided within a week of each other, but by different three-person panels.

With this in mind, it seems likely that both panels were presented with a very similar set of facts and evidence, and that the make-up of the panel was important to which party emerged victorious.

Two additional cases, bfgoodrich.sucks and mandmdirect.sucks, both Honey Salt domains, are currently active at WIPO. It’s unclear whether they were filed before or after Everything.sucks removed its banner ads, which happened about a week ago.

That .sucks weirdness? Worse than I thought

A business plan to turn .sucks into a massive Wikipedia-style gripe site, described by trademark lawyers five years ago as a “shakedown”, has reared it ugly head again.

You may recall that earlier this week I reported how somebody had registered many hundreds of .sucks domain names and listed them for sale on secondary market web sites at cost price. It looked weird, almost as if the registry or an affiliate was the registrant, which the registry denied.

It turns out I only told you half the story, for which I can only apologize.

At the time, the domains in question were not resolving for me, probably due to my terrible, block-happy ISP. But now they are resolving, and they reveal the return of Everything.sucks, a plan first floated by the .sucks registry in 2015.

It’s a network of hundreds of .sucks micro gripe-sites, each targeted to a specific brand and each each populated with content scraped, usually without citation, from Wikipedia, social media, and consumer-review aggregator web sites.

Here’s where jackdaniels.sucks takes you, for example (click to enlarge).

The description of the company is taken from Wikipedia. The customer comments below are taken from reviews of an apparently unrelated company called The Whisky Exchange published by TrustPilot, and the social media posts have been pulled from Instagram users deploying the hashtag #jackdanielssucks.

Other pages on the site seem to scrape content from GlassDoor, a site where employees review their employers.

While there’s nothing wrong with gripe sites, automating their creation over hundreds or even thousands of brands that you don’t genuinely have gripes with seems, charitably, churlish.

And these gripe sites are — or at least were — being monetized.

You’ll see a banner ad in the top-right corner of the above screen-grab, offering jackdaniels.sucks for sale. The link took you to a page on Sedo that offers the domain for sale with a buy-now price of $199 (the same as the registry’s wholesale fee).

Banners on other pages led to landers on GoDaddy-owned Uniregistry.com with prices of $599.

These banners, which appeared on every brand’s page that I checked, seem to have disappeared at some point over the last two days. I’m sure the change is unrelated to the fact that I started asking .sucks registry Vox Populi and parent Momentous difficult questions about these trademark-match domains on Wednesday.

While UDRP panels have disagreed over the years, there’s precedent dating back two decades that “trademarksucks.tld” domains with sites that contain genuine, non-commercial criticism can confer legitimate rights to the registrant and are therefore NOT cybersquatting.

I doubt a site that actively tries to sell the domain name in question for above out-of-pocket costs could be considered non-commercial.

Still, it looks like those banners are gone now, and I can’t find any other examples of obvious monetization.

I use jackdaniels.sucks as an example here as it’s the site I took a screenshot of before the changes, but there are many hundreds of similar trademark-match domains being used to feed traffic to Everything.sucks.

I note that unitedinternet.sucks, named after the parent company of Sedo, is for sale for $199 on Sedo and leads to a gripe site on Everything.sucks containing less-than-complimentary remarks. It’s for sale at $599 on Uniregistry.

But who is Everything.sucks?

The concept itself originates with the .sucks registry itself. Before the TLD launched in 2015, it floated the idea to a tsunami of criticism from trademark owners.

The plan back then was to sell .sucks domains for .com prices — a discount of a couple hundred dollars — but only to registrants unaffiliated with the trademark owner. These registrants would have had to forward their domains to an Everything.sucks-branded discussion forum.

Back then, Vox Pop said it planned to work with a non-for-profit third party on this initiative.

That third party never materialized, and later in 2015 appeared to mutate into a system called This.sucks, operated by a company called This.sucks Ltd, which took over the Everything.sucks domain name.

This.sucks sold .sucks domains for $12 a year, with the domains pointing to a forum/blogging platform that the company hoped to monetize.

Both This.sucks and Vox Pop denied there was any link between the two companies, but I later uncovered a lot of compelling circumstantial evidence linking the two companies, including the fact that Rob Hall, CEO of Vox Pop parent Momentous, paid for This.sucks’ web site design.

This.sucks appears to have fizzled out in the intervening years, but now Everything.sucks is back with a mystery registrant snapping up thousands of domains, at a cost of at least half a million bucks, under the Everything.sucks brand.

Public Whois is useless nowadays, of course.

But the front page of Everything.sucks describes it as “a non-profit organization and communications forum for social activism”.

Many of the domains that redirect to its site appear to be registered to a Turks and Caicos company called Honey Salt Ltd, a name that does not naturally suggest a non-profit entity.

Others use Momentous’ domain privacy service. All appear to be registered via Momentous-owned registrar Rebel, which sells .sucks domains at cost and is therefore one of the cheapest registrars on the market.

Back in 2015, intellectual property interests expressed doubt that the proposed Everything.sucks third party and the This.sucks third party were not in fact just smokescreens, fronts for the registry itself.

Vox Pop CEO John Berard on Wednesday denied to DI that the company had any involvement in the recent spurt of trademark-match registrations being used by Everything.sucks and expressed a lack of knowledge about the registrant’s intent.

I’ve not yet received comment from Momentous, but I’d be very surprised if the company does not know who is behind Everything.sucks.

At the very least, Vox Pop and Rebel are both privy to the unexpurgated Whois and/or customer records for whoever is running Everything.sucks and whoever it is that has grown the .sucks zone file by about 50% since June.

Floodgates, open! Trademark Clearinghouse now supports .com

The Trademark Clearinghouse has added .com to the roster of TLDs supported by its infringement notification service.

The Deloitte-managed service recently announced the change to its Ongoing Notification Service, which came into effect late last month.

The update means TMCH subscribers will receive alerts whenever a .com domain is registered that contains their trademark, helping them to decide whether to pursue enforcement actions such as UDRP.

Unlike the ICANN-mandated 90-day Trademark Claims period that accompanies the launch of each new gTLD, the registrant herself does not receive an alert of possible infringement at point of registration.

The service, which is not regulated by ICANN, is still free to companies that have their marks registered in the TMCH, which charges an extra dollar for every variation of a mark the holder wishes to monitor.

Such services have been commercially available from the likes of MarkMonitor for 20 years or more. The TMCH has been offering it for new gTLDs since they started launching at the end of 2013.

With the .com-shaped gaping hole now plugged, two things could happen.

First, clients may find a steep increase in the number of alerts they receive — .com is still the biggest-selling and in volume terms the most-abused TLD.

Second, commercial providers of similar services now find themselves competing against a free rival with an ICANN-enabled captive audience.

The upgrade comes at the tail end of the current wave of the new gTLD program. With the .gay launch out of the way and other desirable open TLDs tied up in litigation, there won’t be much call for TMCH’s core services for the next few years.

It also comes just a couple months after the .com zone file started being published on ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service, but I expect that’s just a coincidence.

It’s a CONSPIRACY! Canadian registrant “sues” pretty much everybody

Canadian domain registrant and noted industry troll Graham Schreiber has sued, or at least claims to have sued, just about every notable figure in the ICANN community.

A document purporting to be a lawsuit is being circulated today among some of the dozens of named defendants, which include several people who’ve not been involved with ICANN for many years.

It names 27 volunteers from ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency, 21 current and former senior executives of registries and registrars, several members of the US and UK governments, an FBI agent, an unnamed “White House Conspirator”, as well as lawyers for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ICANN, Google and the UK Intellectual Property Office.

It’s my job to tell you in simple terms what the alleged lawsuit alleges, but I’m afraid I’m at an utter loss with this one. It reads like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist that would make the average Qanon believer appear the model of reason and clarity.

Schreiber variously refers to his defendants as “Kingpins” involved in a “Cartel” or “Conspiracy”, the factual details of which he never quite gets to.

Here’s a representative sample paragraph, unedited:

If and when, the “Defensive Registrations” obliged by ICANN’s R[r]egistry & R[r]egistrar “Stakeholders” = “Kingpins” and specifically CentralNic [ weren’t purchased ] assailants would strike; and Infringe, Dilute, Blur and Pass-Off as our online business, individually with identical and confusingly similar domain name, faking to be appointed or an authorized agent of the primary Registrant, in a country’s entrepreneurs Intellectual Property may or may not have been protectable at Common Law Trademark, under Madrid Protocol Rules, as it / they fulfilled the obligations of local National laws, to become a Registered Trademark, as I secured in the USA with USPTO, after the CIPO did their work.

At one point, he admits to trolling the defendants on social media since 2012, and points to their failure to sue him as evidence of a conspiracy:

I’ve made statements via those Social Media resources which would, if they were untrue, subject me to a singular lawsuit or multiple lawsuits from the Defendants listed, for: Defamation, Slander and Libel.

As yet, these well taunted Defendants have all conspired together, in collective silence, anticipating that their grandeur and my insignificance would, maintain safe passage, for them to continue.

As the vast majority of the Defendants are well schooled, powerful U.S. Attorneys, it’s my expectation that the Court oblige them to address the charges here stated, or collectively for their defence, they must File a lawsuit with this Court, charging me for what could be [ but aren’t ] remarks constituting Defamation, Slander & Libel against them, which again, I’ve posted on some of the Defendants own clients, Social Media Platforms

Schreiber was once a regular fixture in DI’s comments section too. Thankfully, we’ve not heard from him in years.

The root cause of the “lawsuit” appears to be an old beef Schreiber has with CentralNic.

He says he owns what he calls a “common law trademark” on the term “Landcruise” and he once used the matching .com domain to operate a motor-home rental business.

At some point in 2011, he became aware that a British registrant had registered landcruise.co.uk and landcruise.uk.com.

At the time, CentralNic was primarily in the business of selling domains at the third level in pseudo-gTLDs such as uk.com, gb.com and us.com.

Schreiber tried and failed (twice) to get the .uk domain transferred under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, and then he took his beef to the courts.

In 2012, he sued CentralNic, ICANN, Verisign, eNom, and Network Solutions in a complaint that barely made much more sense than the “lawsuit” being circulated today.

That case was thrown out of court in 2013.

I expect the same fate to befall the current lawsuit, if indeed it has even been filed in a court.

Schreiber wants $5 million from every defendant.

If you want to check whether you’re one of them, read the PDF “complaint” here.

ICANN throws out “Ugly Houses” UDRP appeal

ICANN has rejected an unprecedented attempt to get a UDRP decision overturned using the Reconsideration process.

The Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee late last week summarily dismissed a Request for Reconsideration filed by a group called the Emily Rose Trust.

Emily Rose had lost a UDRP case in May concerning the domain name uglyhousesri.com, which it had been using for the last couple of years to run a home renovation-and-resale service in Rhode Island.

The complainant was a company called HomeVestors, which has been running a near-identical service called We Buy Ugly Houses (a phrase it has trademarked) for substantially longer.

The National Arbitration Forum panelist had decided that the domain was confusingly similar to the mark, and that the similarity of the services constituted bad faith use.

In filing the rather poorly-written RfR, Emily Rose argued among other things that “Ugly Houses” is a generic term not protected by the mark.

But ICANN did not consider the merits of its request, instead rejecting the RfR for being outside the scope of the process.

The BAMC said that UDRP decisions do not involved the action or inaction of the ICANN board or staff, and are therefore not subject to board Reconsideration.

While UDRP decisions are often contested in court, this RfR makes it clear that ICANN is not an avenue for appeal in individual cases.

Facebook WILL sue more registrars for cybersquatting

Facebook has already sued two domain name registrars for alleged cybersquatting and said yesterday that it will sue again.
Last week, Namecheap became the second registrar in Facebook’s legal crosshairs, sued in in its native Arizona after allegedly failing to take down or reveal contact info for 45 domains that very much seem to infringe on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trademarks.
In the complaint (pdf), which also names Namecheap’s Panama-based proxy service Whoisguard as a defendant, the social media juggernaut claims that Whoisguard and therefore Namecheap is the legal registrant for dozens of clear-cut cases of cybersquatting including facebo0k-login.com, facebok-securty.com, facebokloginpage.site and facebooksupport.email.
In a brief statement, Facebook said these domains “aim to deceive people by pretending to be affiliated with Facebook apps” and “can trick people into believing they are legitimate and are often used for phishing, fraud and scams”.
Namecheap was asked to reveal the true registrants behind these Whoisguard domains between October 2018 and February 2020 but decline to do so, according to Facebook.
The complaint is very similar to one filed against OnlineNIC (pdf) in October.
And, according to Margie Milam, IP enforcement and DNS policy lead at Facebook, it won’t be the last such lawsuit.
Speaking at the second public forum at ICANN 67 yesterday, she said:

This is the second in a series of lawsuits Facebook will file to protect people from the harm caused by DNS abuse… While Facebook will continue to file lawsuits to protect people from harm, lawsuits are not the answer. Our preference is instead to have ICANN enforce and fully implement new policies, such as the proxy policy, and establish better rules for Whois.

Make no mistake, this is an open threat to fence-sitting registrars to either play ball with Facebook’s regular, often voluminous requests for private Whois data, or get taken to court. All the major registrars will have heard her comments.
Namecheap responded to its lawsuit by characterizing it as “just another attack on privacy and due process in order to strong-arm companies that have services like WhoisGuard”, according to a statement from CEO Richard Kirkendall.
The registrar has not yet had time to file its formal reply to the legal complaint, but its position appears to be that the domains in question were investigated, found to not be engaging in nefarious activity, and were therefore vanilla cases of trademark infringement best dealt with using the UDRP anti-cybersquatting process. Kirkendall said:

We actively remove any evidence-based abuse of our services on a daily basis. Where there is no clear evidence of abuse, or when it is purely a trademark claim, Namecheap will direct complainants, such as Facebook, to follow industry-standard protocol. Outside of said protocol, a legal court order is always required to provide private user information.

UDRP complaints usually take several weeks to process, which is not much of a tool to be used against phishing attacks, which emerge quickly and usually wind down in a matter of a few days.
Facebook’s legal campaign comes in the context of an ongoing fight about access to Whois data. The company has been complaining about registrars failing to hand over customer data ever since Europe’s GDPR privacy regulation came into effect, closely followed by a new, temporary ICANN Whois policy, in May 2018.
Back then, its requests showed clear signs of over-reach, though the company claims to have scaled-back its requests in the meantime.
The lawsuits also come in the context of renewed attacks at ICANN 67 on ICANN and the domain industry for failing to tackle so-called “DNS abuse”, which I will get to in a follow-up article.

Verisign pays ICANN $20 million and gets to raise .com prices again

Verisign is to get the right to raise the price of .com domains by 7% per year, under a new contract with ICANN.
The deal, announced this hour, will also see Verisign pay ICANN $20 million over five years, starting in 2021, “to support ICANN’s initiatives to preserve and enhance the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS”.
According to ICANN, the pricing changes mean that the maximum price of a .com domain could go as high as $10.26 by October 2026.
Verisign getting the right to once more increase its fees — which is likely to be worth close to a billion dollars to the company’s top line over the life of the contract — was not unexpected.
Pricing has been stuck at $7.85 for years, due to a price freeze imposed by the Obama-era US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, but this policy was reversed by the Trump administration in late 2018.
The amendment to the .com registry agreement announced today essentially takes on the terms of the Trump appeasement, so Verisign gets to up .com prices by 7% in the last four years of the six-year duration of the contract.
ICANN said:

ICANN org is not a price regulator and will defer to the expertise of relevant competition authorities. As such, ICANN has long-deferred to the [US Department of Commerce] and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) for the regulation of pricing for .COM registry services.

But ICANN will also financially benefit from the deal over and above what it receives from Verisign under the current .com contract.
First, the two parties have said they will sign a binding letter of intent (pdf) committing Verisign to give ICANN $4 million a year, starting one year from now, to help fund ICANN’s activities:

conducting, facilitating or supporting activities that preserve and enhance the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS, which may include, without limitation, active measures to promote and/or facilitate DNSSEC deployment, Security Threat mitigation, name collision mitigation, root server system governance and research into the operation of the DNS

That’s basically describing one of ICANN’s core missions, which is already funded to a great extent by .com fees, so quite why it’s being spun out into a separate agreement is a little bit of a mystery to me at this early stage.
Don’t be surprised if you hear the words “bung” or “quid pro quo” being slung around in the coming hours and days by ICANN critics.
The second financial benefit to ICANN comes from additional payments Verisign will have to make when it sells its ConsoliDate service.
This is the service that allows .com registrants, via their registrars, to synchronize the renewal dates of all of the domains in their portfolio, so they only have to worry about renewals on a single day of the year. It’s basically a partial-year renewal.
Under the amended .com contract, ICANN will get a piece of that action too. Verisign has agreed to pay ICANN a pro-rated fee, based on the $0.25 per-domain annual renewal fee, for the number of days any given registration is extended using ConsoliDate.
I’m afraid to say I don’t know how much money this could add to ICANN’s coffers, but another amendment to the contract means that Verisign will start to report ConsoliDate usage in its published monthly transaction reports, so we should get a pretty good idea of the $$$$ value in the second half of the year.
The amended contract — still in draft form (pdf) and open for public comment — also brings on a slew of new obligations for Verisign that bring .com more into line with other gTLDs.
There’s no Uniform Rapid Suspension policy, so domain investors and cybersquatters can breath a sigh of relief there.
But Verisign has also agreed to a new Registry-Registrar Agreement that contains substantial new provisions aimed at combating abuse, fraud and intellectual property infringement — including trademark infringement.
It has also agreed to a series of Public Interest Commitments, along the same lines as all the 2012-round new gTLDs, covering the same kinds of dodgy activities. The texts of the RRA addition and PICs are virtually identical, requiring:

a provision prohibiting the Registered Name Holder from distributing malware, abusively operating botnets, phishing, pharming, piracy, trademark or copyright infringement, fraudulent or deceptive practices, counterfeiting or otherwise engaging in activity contrary to applicable law and providing (consistent with applicable law and any related procedures) consequences for such activities, including suspension of the registration of the Registered Name;

There are also many changes related to how Verisign handles data escrow, Whois/RDAP and zone file access. It looks rather like users of ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service, including yours truly, will soon have access to the humongous .com zone file on a daily basis. Yum.
The proposed amendments to the .com contract are now open for public comment here. You have until February 14. Off you go.

ICANN throws out second .org appeal, so URS stays

The Uniform Rapid Suspension process is to stay in .org, after the ICANN board of directors rejected an appeal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The EFF had challenged the inclusion of URS in the recently renegotiated .org Registry Agreement, on the basis that the anti-cybersquatting system was designed for post-2012 new gTLDs and was never supposed to be deployed in legacy gTLDs such as .org.
In a Request for Reconsideration, the EFF had argued that ICANN had ignored the many commenters opposed to its inclusion in the contract, and that the board had shirked its duties by delegating the renegotiation to ICANN’s executive leadership.
But the board disagreed on both of these counts, saying in its resolution and accompanying 36-page analysis (pdf) that at no point had the organization broken its bylaws.
ICANN did not ignore the anti-URS comments, the board said, it simply decided that on balance the public interest was better served by having URS in the contract.

The Requestor has not demonstrated that ICANN Staff failed to seek or support broad participation, ascertain the global public interest, or act for the public benefit. To the contrary, ICANN org’s transparent processes reflect the Staff’s continuous efforts to ascertain and pursue the global public interest by migrating the legacy gTLDs to the Base RA.

Additionally, the board was well within its rights to delegate negotiation and approval of the RA to the CEO, the board decided. The fact that the EFF disagrees with that position does not amount to a basis of reconsideration, it found.
Since the EFF filed its RfR back in August, we’ve had the news of the $1.135 billion acquisition of .org manager Public Interest Registry by Ethos Capital, which will see it convert from a non-profit to a for-profit concern.
The EFF has since had the chance to put allegations to ICANN that its staff was aware of the deal before it was announced, and that the acquisition should have factored into its consideration of the RA renewal.
But ICANN flatly denies that it knew about the deal, which was announced four months after the renewal:

Since neither the Board nor ICANN Staff were aware of the PIR acquisition when the decision to renew the .ORG RA was made, there was no material information not considered, and therefore this is not a proper basis for reconsideration.
…
The Ethos Capital acquisition of PIR, which was announced more than four months after the execution of the .ORG Renewed RA, did not impact ICANN Staff’s determination that ICANN’s Mission and Core Values were best served by migrating the .ORG RA to the Base RA.

In conclusion, like almost all filers of RfRs, the EFF is SOL.
Another RfR, filed by the registrar NameCheap and related primary to .org pricing, was similarly rejected by ICANN’s board a few weeks ago.
ICANN is, however, currently quizzing Ethos and PIR seller ISOC for more details about the acquisition before it approves the change of contractor.

Porn-block retail prices revealed. Wow.

The first retail prices for MMX’s porn-blocking AdultBlock services have been revealed, and they ain’t cheap.
The registrar 101domain yesterday announced that it has started offering AdultBlock and sister service AdultBlock+, and published its pricing.
Trademark owners wanting to block a single string across .sex, .porn, .adult and .xxx will pay $349 per year with the vanilla, renew-annually service.
If they want the AdultBlock+ service, which also blocks homographs, they’ll pay $799 a year or $7,495 for the maximum 10-year term.
Compare this to the Sunrise B offer that ICM Registry made to trademark owners in 2011, where a string in .xxx cost roughly $200 to $300 for a 10-year block.
The two services are not directly comparable, of course. AdultBlock covers three additional TLDs and the AdultBlock+ service covers confusingly similar variants.
But trademark owners are buying peace of mind that their brands won’t be registered as porn sites, and the cost of that peace of mind just increased tenfold.
AdultBlock domains don’t resolve, and are a lot cheaper than domain registrations.
Renewing a single string in all four gTLDs at 101domain prices would cost around $480 a year, so customers will pay about 27% less buying a block instead.
The cost of the first year for those four domains would be $360, just $11 more than the AdultBlock price, according to 101domain’s price list.
MMX, which acquired the gTLD portfolio from ICM last year, is offering a discount on the AdultBlock+ service for customers buying before the end of 2019.
101domain is offering 10 years of AdultBlock+ for $3,999, a saving of $3,500.
101domain is not known as a particularly expensive registrar, so prices elsewhere in the industry could go higher.