NRF director joins .shop applicant

Commercial Connect, one of the companies planning to apply to ICANN for the new top-level domain .shop, has appointed a US National Retail Federation Foundation director to its board.
Richard Last is also chairman emeritus of Shop.org and has a long history in retail, according to a Commercial Connect press release.
The NRF has been one of the more outspoken critics of the new gTLD program recently. While the organization does not oppose it outright, it does believe the program needs to be delayed.
GMO Registry also intends to apply for .shop, and has arguably been the higher-profile of the two public applicants, going so far as to sponsor ICANN events under the .shop brand.

GMO wins .tokyo deal

GMO Registry says it has won local government backing to apply to ICANN for the city top-level domain .tokyo.
The company revealed the news on its Twitter feed today, linking to this Tokyo metropolitan government announcement confirming the story.
While perhaps best-known for its planned .shop application, GMO is probably the registry services company with the most announced new gTLD back-end contract wins to date.
It is also on board to provide the registry for the Japanese regional gTLDs .okinawa and .ryukyu, as well as the brand gTLDs .hitachi and .canon. It already runs Somalia’s .so and Indonesia’s .id ccTLDs.
GMO Registry parent GMO Internet is a pretty big deal in its native Japan. Publicly listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, it has annual revenue of well over half a billion dollars.

Hitachi to apply for .hitachi

Japanese electronics giant Hitachi has emerged as the second big consumer brand to officially announce it will apply for a “.brand” top-level domain.
GMO Registry, also based in Japan, is the company’s back-end provider of choice, according to this news release (pdf).
GMO is also working with Canon, which was the first company to announce its .brand TLD bid, .canon.
As I noted yesterday, IBM is also a likely candidate for a .brand domain, but it has not officially announced its intentions yet.
Nokia, Deloitte and Unicef are also known to be considering their options.
(via UrbanBrain)

Sunrise for .so domains starts tonight

.SO Registry, manager of the internet’s newest open-doors top-level domain, will open its systems for sunrise registrations in a few hours, at midnight UTC.
The TLD is the country code for the Republic of Somalia, the mostly lawless east-African nation that is broadly recognized as a failed state.
For that reason, among others, the .so namespace is not likely to be as attractive to registrants as, say, the recent relaunch of Colombia’s .co.
Another reason, perhaps coupled to the fact that .so doesn’t really have a comparable English semantic value to .co, is that the registry appears to have done a rather poor job of publicizing the launch.
There has been no media activity as far as I can tell, and its web site does not currently list its approved registrars.
Key-Systems has press-released its involvement, and a quick Twitter poll earlier today revealed that EuroDNS, Blacknight and NetNames are also among the signed-up.
The back-end for the registry is being handled by Japanese operator GMO Registry.
During the trademarks-only sunrise period, which runs until November 30, companies have to commit to a minimum three-year registration, with a registry fee of $90, cheaper than most sunrise phases.
The .so registry has taken on most of the same sunrise policies as .co – its rules were written by the same people – with the noteworthy exception of the Protected Marks List.
.SO Registry is also the first to require trademark holders use CHIP, the new Clearing House for Intellectual Property, a venture launched earlier this month by sunrise specialist Bart Lieben, who recently joined the law firm Crowell & Moring.
After contested sunrise applications are wound up with a Pool.com auction, a landrush will follow, from December 16 to February 9, 2011. General availability is scheduled to kick off March 1.
.SO Registry recently published its restricted names list (pdf), which appears to be made up mostly of English-language profanities, as well as religiously and sexually oriented terms.
The term “gay” is among the restricted terms.
The registry also appears to have “wildcarded” about 20 strings on its restricted list, including %vagina%, %penis% and %lesbian%.

NeuStar wins UrbanBrain .brand contract

NeuStar has become the preferred provider of registry services to UrbanBrain, a consultancy that hopes to launch “.brand” top-level domains with major Japanese companies.
The companies said in a press release:

Under the alliance, Neustar and UrbanBrain will provide brand owners with the expertise and support required to prepare and submit their applications to ICANN, and will provide all of the registry services necessary for brands to launch and operate their own Internet extensions.

NeuStar already operates the .biz and .us registries under contract with ICANN and the US government respectively, as well as providing back-end services for a number of other TLDs.
UrbanBrain is currently associated with a proposed bid for .site.
The only formally announced commercial .brand to date is .canon. Canon is working with GMO Registry, another Japanese firm.

.SO Registry copies .co launch policies

Somalia’s .SO Registry, which hopes to mimic a little of the success of .co when it starts accepting registrations in November, has adopted virtually identical launch policies.
The registry’s policy document (pdf), which appeared on its web site last week, does in fact appear to copy large chunks of text wholesale from .CO Internet’s equivalent paper (pdf).
(UPDATE: I’ve reason to believe this is because both documents share an author/editor)
For this reason, you can pretty much expect the same policies regarding the sunrise, landrush and general availability phases of the launch, which kicks off November 1.
It also means that .so domain names will be subject to the UDRP. The registry has evidently partnered with WIPO to administer these proceedings.
There are some differences between .co and .so, however.
Notably, .SO Registry has added a policy of allowing sunrise registrations for trademark typos, provided that the typo under another TLD has been won at UDRP or in court.
This basically appears to open the doors for any company that has won a .com domain in a UDRP case to register the equivalent .so, no matter how lunatic the UDRP decision was.
This is how the document describes the exception to the trademarks-only rule:

the Domain Name must be identical to a domain name which has been recovered by the Applicant or its authorized licensee in the context of a court, UDRP or other alternative dispute resolution procedure relating to that domain name in another top-level domain.

It’s followed by a comment, one of several apparently made by one of the document’s editors, that probably shouldn’t have been published on a public web site:

Comment Bart: we need to look at the allocation model here (rather hypothetical, but you never know): will they also go into auction if there are two applicants for the same domain name: one having the identical mark, and the other having the variant?)

Other differences include the fact that, unlike their Columbian counterparts, Somalians do not appear to get any special privileges, such as grandfathering or a priority sunrise phase.
There also does not to be a provision for a Specially Protected Marks list like the one .CO Internet used.
The registry’s policies will be governed by the laws of Japan, rather than Somalia (which, let’s face it, doesn’t have much in the way of a functional legal infrastructure).
.SO’s back-end is being handled by GMO Registry, the Japanese company that plans to apply for .shop and is working with Canon on its proposed .canon application.
I’ve previously reported on the roll-out time-line and pricing for the .so domain, here.

.SO launch date is November 1

.SO Registry, the manager of Somalia’s .so country-code top-level domain, has named November 1 as the opening date for sunrise registrations.
The launch plan has been published here. Until the weekend, the organization has just said that it would open in autumn.
The ccTLD is to be unrestricted, along the same lines as .co, but the launch schedule is a little different to the one offered by .CO Internet, with no phases running in parallel.
Trademark holders can file sunrise applications, which will cost a minimum of $90 for a three-year registration, for the month of November. Domains with multiple applications will be auctioned in the first half of December.
Landrush applications will run from December 16 to February 9 at $10 per year. Contested domains will be auctioned February 10 to 28. General availability is slated for March 1, 2011, also with a registry fee of $10.
Other than that, there’s scant information currently available on the .SO Registry web site. Notably, there’s currently nothing about UDRP or other dispute resolution procedures.
The ccTLD has been delegated to Somalia’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications since April 2009, but the registry is reportedly being handled by GMO Registry, the Japanese company already tapped to handle Canon’s .canon and its own .shop application.