Google eliminating domains from search results

Google has made another move to make domain names less relevant to internet users.
The company will no longer display URLs in search results pages for any web site that adopts a certain technical standard.
Instead, the name of the web site will be given. So instead of a DI post showing up with “domainincite.com” in results, it would be “Domain Incite”.
Google explained the change in a blog post incorrectly titled “Better presentation of URLs in search results”.
Webmasters wishing to present a company name or brand instead of a domain name need to publish metadata on their home pages. It’s just a few lines of code.
Google will make a determination whether to make the change based on whether the name meets these criteria:

Be reasonbly [sic] similar to your domain name
Be a natural name used to refer to the site, such as “Google,” rather than “Google, Inc.”
Be unique to your site—not used by some other site
Not be a misleading description of your site

Code samples and the rules are published here.
It strikes me that Google, by demanding naming uniqueness, is opening itself up for a world of hurt.
Could there be a landrush among non-unique brands? How will disputes be handled?
Right now the change has been made only to mobile search results and only in the US, but Google hinted that it could roll out elsewhere too.

Google launches com.google

Google has launched com.google, one of its batch of 2015 April Fool’s Day jokes.
Visiting the domain today will reveal a reversed perspective on the usual Google home page.

Even the results pages are reversed.

It’s probably the most inventive use of a dot-brand new gTLD to date.

Google leaks 282,000 private Whois records

Google has accidentally revealed registrant contact information for 282,867 domain names that were supposed to be protected by a privacy service.
The bug reportedly affected 94% of the 305,925 domains registered via Google Apps, an eNom reseller.
The glitch was discovered by Cisco and reported to Google February 19. It has since been fixed and customers were notified yesterday.
Google acknowledged in an email to customers that the problem was caused by a “software defect in the Google Apps domain renewal system”.
It seems that anyone who acquired a domain with privacy through Google Apps since mid-2013 and has since renewed the registration will have had their identities unmasked in Whois upon renewal.
Names, addresses, emails and phone numbers were revealed.
Due to services such as DomainTools, which cache Whois records, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The information is out there for good now.
It’s a pretty major embarrassment for Google, which recently launched its own registrar.

Google buys .app for over $25 million

The fiercely competed new gTLD .app has sold to Google for a record-breaking $25 million.
The company’s Charleston Road Registry subsidiary beat out 12 other applicants for the string, including Donuts, Amazon, Famous Four Media, Radix and Afilias.
The auction lasted two days and fetched a winning bid of $25,001,000, more than any other new gTLD to date.
The previous high is believed to be .blog, which I estimate sold for less than $20 million.
Because it was an ICANN-run “last resort” auction, all of the money goes into ICANN’s special auction proceeds fund, which previously stood at just shy of $35 million.
Previous ICANN auctions have fetched prices between $600,000 and $6,760,000.
Google originally proposed .app as a closed registry in which only Google and its partners could register names.
However, after the Governmental Advisory Committee pressured ICANN to disallow “closed generics”, Google changed its application to enable anyone to register.

Generics versus brands as two more gTLDs are sold

Two more new gTLD contention sets have been settled by auction, one a case of a portfolio applicant prevailing over a closed generic applicant, the other a case of a brand owner paying off a portfolio applicant.
Donuts has won the right to .jewelry over $10 billion-a-year jewelry firm Richemont, owner of brands including Cartier.
Richemont applied for several TLDs, some of which were generic terms. It was awarded .watches uncontested, but apparently didn’t want to fork out as much as Donuts for the matching .jewelry.
Google, meanwhile, won the two-horse race for .moto against Rightside. This one’s interesting because it’s basically a case of Rightside forcing Google to pay up to own one of its own brands.
Google owns a trademark on “Moto” due to its acquisition of Motorola Mobility a few years ago, but Rightside applied for it in its generic sense as an abbreviation of “motorcycle” or “motorbike”.
Google had filed a legal rights objection against its rival for .moto, but lost. Now it’s been forced to cough up at auction instead.
Prices, as usual, have not been disclosed.

Schilling laughing as Uniregistry beats Google to .lol

Uniregistry’s portfolio of quirky new gTLDs grew today. The company seems to have beaten Google to .lol in a private deal.
The two companies were the only ones to apply for .lol, and Google’s application was formally withdrawn today.
As usual for private contention set settlements, the winning price has not been disclosed.
Uniregistry has 18 delegated gTLDs in its stable, with five more currently uncontested applications (.lol makes six) waiting in the wings.
I like .lol as a gTLD. It’s a punchy, short, meaningful string that certainly belongs to the right of the dot.
I can see it being deployed in the near term by the incessant sewer of BuzzFeed clones that are increasingly stinking up social media, which could give increased visibility and helpful viral marketing.
Longer term, there may be a worry if in future the kidz stop using “lol” and start viewing it as something their parents say, but we’re probably a ways from that yet.

Private auction settles controversial plural gTLD fight

A private auction has been used to settle a new gTLD contention set containing two different strings for the first time.
Afilias has won the right to run .pet after Google withdrew its application for .pet and Donuts withdrew its bid for .pets.
The two strings, one the plural of the other, had been placed into indirect contention by ICANN after a String Confusion Objection panel controversially ruled in August 2013 that .pet and .pets were too confusingly similar to be allowed to coexist.
This means that Donuts has been forced to withdraw an uncontested application.
Notably, it was Google that filed, fought and won the SCO complaint, and it didn’t even wind up with the TLD it wanted.
The final settlement of the contention set reflects ICANN’s inconsistent policy on plurals. Several plural/singular combinations — such as .career(s) and .photo(s) — already coexist in the DNS.

Google beaten to .dot for a paltry $700k

Dish DBS, a US satellite TV company, has beaten Google to the .dot new gTLD in an ICANN auction that fetched just $700,000.
It’s further proof, if any were needed, that you don’t need to have the big bucks to beat Google at auction.
Dish plans to use .dot as a single-registrant space, but unusually it’s not a dot-brand. According to its application, the company:

intends to utilize the .dot gTLD to create a restricted, exclusively-controlled online environment for customers and other business partners with the goal of further securing the collection and transmission of personal and other confidential data required for contracted services and other product-related activities.

Google had planned an open, anything-goes space.
.dot was the only new gTLD contention set to be resolved by ICANN last-resort auction this month. The other applicants scheduled for the November auctions all settled their contests privately.

Second last-resort gTLD auction raises $14.3m

ICANN has raised $14.3 million auctioning off three new gTLDs — .buy, .tech and .vip.
It was the second batch of “last resort” auctions, managed by ICANN and Power Auctions, in which the winning bids are placed in a special ICANN fund.
Notably, while Google participated in all three auctions, it failed to win any, setting a reassuring precedent for any smaller applicants that are set to face the deep-pocketed giant in future auctions.
.tech was the biggest-seller, fetching $6,760,000 after nine rounds of bidding.
The winner was Dot Tech LLC, which beat Google, Minds + Machines, Donuts, NU DOT CO, and Uniregistry.
.buy went to Amazon for $4,588,888, beating Google, Donuts and Famous Four Media. The bidding lasted seven rounds.
Finally, .vip sold to Minds + Machines for $3,000,888 after Google, Donuts, I-Registry and VIP Registry dropped out.
The prices are in the same ball-park as we’ve inferred from previous, private auctions managed by Applicant Auction (a company affiliated with Power Auctions).
That’s notable because the first last resort auction, for .信息, fetched just $600,000 when it sold to Amazon back in June.
As far as we can tell, last-resort auctions do not necessarily keep prices low, even though the losing bidders in this week’s auctions will have walked away empty-handed.
In private auctions, losers leave holding a share of the winner’s bid.
This week, most of the $14.3 million raised will go into a special ICANN fund.
Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division said in a statement:

The proceeds from these Auctions will be separated and reserved until the Board determines a plan for the appropriate use of the funds through consultation with the community. We continue to encourage parties to reach agreements amongst themselves to resolve contention.

The ICANN community has been chatting about possible uses for auction funds for years.
Ideas such as subsidizing new gTLD applicants from poorer nations in future rounds and investing in internet infrastructure in the developing world have been floated.

Victims of first confirmed new gTLD collision respond: “Fuck Google”

A number of companies have experienced errors on their networks due to collisions with a newly introduced gTLD.
The initial outcry from victims can be characterized as a storm of profanity, which it could be argued is a good thing for security but not great for ICANN’s reputation.
The collisions, which I believe are the first to be publicly and widely reported, are due to Google’s new gTLD .prod, which was delegated September 1.
Google intends to use the TLD as a shorthand for “product”, but it seems some companies use it internally to mean “production”, meaning production servers rather than testing or development servers.
Issues started being reported on online fora on September 3, with Google unfairly bearing the brunt of the initial blame. Here are a few of the earliest examples from Twitter:

Hey Google, fuck you for making .prod a valid TLD, what the fuck is wrong with you

— eesperan (@eesperan) September 3, 2014

anyone else having fun name resolution issues because of the new .prod tld google just put online? http://t.co/jq104uAym0

— Chris Johnson (@point9repeating) September 3, 2014

.prod is now a TLD & basically broke the internet. (http://t.co/kB5JIZl1HE). This is why I didn't use prod as subdomain, @Drew_Stokes

— Allan Parsons (@allanparsons) September 3, 2014

Well .prod is now a TLD. Found out the fun way. #google #icann http://t.co/rbt4JIASgn

— jeremy avnet (@brainsik) September 3, 2014

A day later, Reddit user “cunttard”, under a post entitled “Fuck Google”, wrote:

Google recently activated prod. TLD.
They also decided to wildcard DNS all entries to 127.0.53.53 to resolve name collisions for internal organisations. All because they wanted .prod for product? Why not fucking request .product?
The implications have been fucking horrendous. I am in the process of helping a mate unfuck his organisations DNS, which heavily relied on resolver search $FQDN to map xyz.prod to xyz.prod.$FQDN. Note this wasn’t even used as an internal TLD. Now they’re all resolving short names to 127.0.53.53. Lesson learnt; always use FQDN everywhere.
I’m just fucking sick of ICANN / Google continuing to fuck DNS.

LinuxQuestions user “fantasygoat” started a thread entitled “New tLD .prod is messing with my configs”, in which he wrote:

I used to be able to refer to just the subdomain in a DNS lookup, like “www1.prod” and it would know I meant “www1.prod.example.com”, my local domain. I’ve been using prod.example.com for decades as the production subdomain for various things.
Now it resolves to 127.0.53.53, which I believe is ICANN’s hack DNS answer for tLDs.
So, I have a bunch of config files without the domain name and it’s messing stuff up. Does anyone have a workaround so I can have my DNS respond to .prod requests as a subdomain of my domain?

I’ve found a couple of other examples on various mailing lists and web forums with systems administrators experiencing similar issues over the last week.
This, it seems to me, shows that ICANN’s hack for mitigating the risks of name collisions, developed by JAS Advisors, is working as expected.
In each reported case of a .prod collision I’ve been able to find, the admin either had already worked out that he needed to use a fully-qualified domain name (eg www.prod.example.com instead of www.prod) or was swiftly advised to do so by those responding to his post.
Most seem to have spotted that instead of returning NXDOMAIN errors, Google is returning the IP address 127.0.53.53, which was chosen because it’s an internal IP and because 53 is the TCP/IP port number for DNS.
Diverting to 127.0.53.53 is designed to catch the eye, alerting admins to the need to correctly configure their networks.
It certainly seems to be doing that, but it’s not winning ICANN or new gTLD registries any new friends.
Nobody has yet reported death or injury due to a collision.
Update: There has been one previously reported collision, concerning .guru.