English beats Portuguese in $2.2m .hotels auction

Booking.com has won the right to operate .hotels after an auction concluded a protracted fight over the gTLD.
In an ICANN-run auction yesterday, Booking.com prevailed with a winning bid of $2.2 million.
Its sole competitors was Travel Reservations (formerly Despegar Online), which had applied for the Portuguese word .hoteis.
In 2012, a String Similarity Review panel concluded that .hotels and .hoteis look too similar to coexist, due to the likelihood of confusion between I and l in sans-serif fonts.
Neither applicant agreed with that decision, knowing that it would result in a expensive auction, and Booking.com filed a Request for Reconsideration and then, in March 2013, an Independent Review Process complaint.
After two years, it lost the IRP. But the panel said it had “legitimate concerns” about the fairness of the SSR process and ordered ICANN to pay half of its costs.
Now, Booking.com has had to fork out another $2.2 million for the string.
That’s not particularly expensive as ICANN-auctioned gTLDs go. Eight of the 13 other strings ICANN has auctioned have sold for more.
ICANN’s auction proceeds to date now stands at $63,489,127, which is being held in a separate bank account for purposes yet to be determined.

How one registrar allegedly dodges ICANN Compliance

A Chinese registrar has been accused by ICANN of playing games to avoid complying with Whois policy.
In a breach notice from ICANN Compliance last week, Beijing-based 35 Technology is told that it has failed to verify Whois records as required by its accreditation agreement.
The domain in question was shoesbbalweb.com, which DomainTools’ archived screenshots show was once used to sell branded running shoes.
I understand that 35 is believed to have suspended the domain when ICANN first referred a Whois accuracy complaint to it.
It is then said to have un-suspended the domain, without any change to the Whois record, as soon as ICANN closed the complaint.
The breach notice (pdf) instructs 35 to:

Provide records and information demonstrating that 35 Technology took steps to verify and validate the Whois information of the domain name since 23 March 2015, or provide ICANN with an explanation why the domain name suspension was removed without verifying and validation Whois information

The switcheroo appears to have been brief enough that its suspended state was not recorded by DomainTools.
ICANN has a monitoring program, however, that randomly spot-checks previously complained-about domains for ongoing compliance.
The registrar, which does business at 35.com, is not tiny. It had over 450,000 domains under management, in legacy gTLDs and a handful of Chinese-script new gTLDs, at the last count.
It has until the end of the month to explain itself or risk termination.

.feedback regs Fox trademark to itself during sunrise

Top Level Spectrum, the new .feedback registry, has painted a second gigantic target on itself by registering to itself a .feedback domain matching one of the world’s largest media brands.
The company has registered fox.feedback and put up a web site soliciting comment on Fox Broadcasting Company.
This has happened whilst .feedback is still in its sunrise period.
The intellectual property community is, I gather, not particularly happy about the move.
The domain fox.feedback points to a web site that uses TLS’ standard feedback platform, enabling visitors to rate and comment on Fox.
The site has a footnote: “Disclaimer: This site is provided to facilitate free speech regarding fox. No direct endorsement or association should be conferred.”
Fox had no involvement with the registration, which Whois records show is registered to Top Level Spectrum itself.
Registry CEO Jay Westerdal said that the domain is one of the 100 “promotional” domains that new gTLD registries are allowed to set aside for their own use under the terms of their ICANN contracts.
Registries usually register names like “buy.example” or “go.example”, along with the names of early adopter anchor tenant registrants, using this mechanism.
I’m not aware of any case where a registry has consciously registered a famous brand, without permission, as part of its promotional allotment.
“The website is hosted automatically by the Feedback platform,” Westerdal said. “Fox Television Network has raised no concerns and has not applied for the domain during sunrise. We are testing out promotion of the TLD with the domain as per our ICANN contract.”
Fox may still be able to buy the domain during sunrise, he said.
“This is a Registry Operation name. During sunrise, If we receive an application from a sunrise-eligible rights holders during sunrise for a Registry Operations name we may release the name for registration,” he said.
Fox’s usual registrar is MarkMonitor. Matt Serlin, VP there, said in an email that the TLS move could be raised with ICANN Compliance:

I find it curious that this branded domain name would have been registered to the registry prior to the sunrise period which is restricted to the 100 registry promotional names. The fact that the domain is actually resolving to a live site soliciting feedback for The Fox Broadcasting Company is even more troubling. MarkMonitor may look to raise this to ICANN Compliance once the registry is able to confirm how this domain was registered seemingly outside of the required process.

The IP community originally fought the introduction of the 100-domain pre-sunrise exception, saying unscrupulous registries would use it to stop trademark owners registering their brands.
While there have been some grumblings about registries reserving dictionary terms that match trademarks, this may be the first case of a registry unambiguously targeting a brand.
Top Level Spectrum courted controversy with the trademark community last week when it told DI that it plans to sell 5,000-brand match domains to a third party company after .feedback goes into general availability in January.
Westerdal told us this is not “cybersquatting”, as the sites contain disclaimers and are there to facilitate free speech.
What do you think about this use of brands as “promotional” domains?
It’s indisputably pushing the envelope of what is acceptable, but is it fair? Should registries be allowed to do this?

Web.com just gave itself another reason to bid high for .web gTLD

Registrar group Web.com is changing its stock market ticker symbol to WEB tomorrow, in another sign that it really, really wants to be identified with the string.
The switch from WWWW may indicate that the NASDAQ-listed company’s six rivals for the new gTLD .web have a fight — and a possible big payday — on their hands when .web finally goes to auction.
Web.com is competing with Nu Dot Co, Radix, Google, Donuts, Afilias and Schlund for the gTLD.
The company has already fiercely defended its “right” to .web, filing successful String Confusion Objections against .webs applicant Vistaprint.
Vistaprint subsequently filed an ICANN Independent Review Process complaint to appeal its SCO loss.
Last month, the IRP was won by ICANN, but the panel left the door open for ICANN to reconsider its decision.
The .web auction is not likely to go ahead until the Vistaprint issue is resolved.
If ICANN decides the two strings can be delegated separately, what I think is the last barrier to the .web auction going ahead disappears.
If not, then Vistaprint finds itself as the seventh contender in the auction, which may give it the impetus to carry on challenging the ruling.
ICANN’s board plans to discuss the issue at its next meeting, December 10.
Which way it leans will give an indication of how long it will be before .web goes to auction.

Most US presidential hopefuls use Whois privacy despite begging for cash

More than half of the remaining US presidential candidates could have risked losing their official campaign web sites under proposed Whois privacy rules.
Today I carried out Whois queries on all 18 candidates to discover that 10, or over 55%, use a Whois privacy service.
Of the three remaining Democrat candidates, only Bernie Sanders uses privacy. Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton do not.
Here’s a table of the Republican candidates and their chosen privacy services. N/A means their campaigns are using what appears to be genuine contact information.
[table id=38 /]
The results are interesting because rules under discussion at ICANN earlier this year — which are apparently still on the table in other international fora — would have banned the use of privacy services for commercial web sites that allow financial transactions.
All 18 candidates — even Trump — solicit donations on their campaign sites, and many sell T-shirts, bumper stickers and such.
Back in May, a minority of ICANN’s Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group (PPSAI) were in favor of banning privacy for such registrants.
The rationale was that criminals, such as those selling counterfeit drugs, should not be allowed to mask their Whois details.
Judging by a working group report at the ICANN meeting in Dublin last month, the proposed new rules have been killed off by the PPSAI after a deluge of comments — around 22,000 — that were solicited by registrars and civil rights groups.
However, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at the exact same time as the PPSAI was revealing its change of heart, the US government was pushing for virtually identical policy at a meeting of the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The EFF says the proposed OECD Recommendation “would require domain name registration information to be made publicly available for websites that are promoting or engaged in commercial transactions with consumers.”
It’s remarkable that the US government is apparently pushing for rules that are being violated by most of its own hopeful commanders-in-chief as part of the democratic process.
Clearly, fake pharmacies are not the only class of crook to find value in privacy.

ICANN opens blog to comments, immediately trolled

Welcome to my world, ICANN.
The organization on Friday opened its blog to commenters for the first time in years, allowing any registered user of the ICANN site to submit comments on its posts.
The switch appears to be retroactive on all previous posts on the platform.
The post announcing the move was immediately commented on by habitual, single-issue commenter Graham Schreiber, a name familiar to anyone who regularly reads the comments sections of industry blogs.
He’s the guy who unsuccessfully sued ICANN — for some reason — back in 2012 and has continued his tirade against the organization in social media ever since.
Trolling aside, it’s a good move by ICANN, something it should have done a long time ago.
While ICANN obviously accepts comments on pretty much everything it does, the usual format of emailed PDFs perhaps lacks some of the brevity, openness and immediacy of a two-way blog.

European privacy ruling could add to registrars’ costs

European domain registrars say they are facing increased costs of doing business due to a recent court ruling on privacy protection.
As a result, US data escrow giant Iron Mountain is likely to lose a lot of its ICANN business, as EU registrars defect to local alternatives such as UK-based NCC Group.
The ruling in question deals with the so-called “safe harbor” principles, under which European companies were able to transfer customers’ private data to US companies as long as the recipient promised to abide by EU privacy protection rules.
However, former spy Edward Snowden’s revelations of widespread privacy violations by the US government seemed to show that many US tech giants were complicit in handing over such data to US spooks.
And now the European Court of Justice has ruled the safe habor principles invalid.
This affects registrars because, under their ICANN contracts, they have to escrow registrant data on a weekly basis. That’s to prevent registrants losing their domains when registrars go out of business or turn out to be crooks.
While registrars have a choice of escrow agents, pretty much all of them use Iron Mountain, because ICANN subsidizes the service down to $0.
However, with the ECJ ruling, Euro-registrars have told ICANN that it would now be “illegal” to continue to use Iron Mountain.
In a recent letter (pdf) to ICANN, about 20 EU-based registrars said that non-European registrars would get a competitive advantage unless ICANN does something about it.
They want ICANN to start subsidizing one or more EU-based escrow agents, enabling them to switch without adding to costs.

the service fees of those [alternative] providers are not being supported by ICANN. Thus, the only solution for EU based registrars to comply with their local laws is to support this extra cost.
We are sure, you will agree this clearly constitutes an unfair disadvantage to a given category of a registrars.
This is why we ask ICANN to offer the same terms as it currently does to Iron Mountain to other RDE [Registrar Data Escrow] providers established in the European Economical Area to ensure a level playing field for registrars globally.

According to the registrars, they have until January to switch, so ICANN may have to move quickly to avoid unrest.

XYZ says it won’t block censored Chinese domains

New gTLD registry XYZ.com has said it will not preemptively censor domain names based on the wishes of the Chinese government.
Over the last couple of days, CEO Daniel Negari has sought to “clarify” its plans to block and suspend domain names based on Chinese government requests.
It follows XYZ’s Registry Services Evaluation Request for a gateway service in the country, first reported by DI and subsequently picked up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Wall Street Journal columnist, Fortune magazine and others.
The clarifications offered up by XYZ probably did more to confuse matters.
A blog post on Wednesday said that XYZ will not reserve any .xyz domain names from being registered, except those ICANN makes all new gTLD registries reserve.
Subsequent comments from Negari stated that XYZ will, as the RSEP stated, prevent names that have been banned in China from being registered.
However, there’s one significant difference.
Now, the registry is saying that it will only put those bans in place for domain names that have been specifically banned by the Chinese government when the name had already been registered by a Chinese registrant.
So, if I understand correctly, it would not preemptively ban anyone anywhere from registering [banned term].xyz.
However, if [banned term].xyz was registered to a Chinese resident and the Chinese government told the registry to suspend it, it would be suspended and nobody would be able to re-register it anywhere in the world.
Negari said in a blog comment yesterday:

if we receive a Chinese legal order tomorrow (before the gateway has launched) which requires disabling a domain name registered in China and properly under Chinese jurisdiction, then it will be disabled at the registry level, and not by the gateway. When the gateway launches the name will continue to be unavailable, and the gateway will not implement the action on a localized basis only in China. The normal registry system would continue to be the only system used to resolve the name globally. Again — the specific stability concern ICANN had was that we would use the Chinese gateway to make .xyz names resolve differently, depending on what country you are in. I completely agree that our [RSEP] re-draft to address that concern came out in a way that can be read in a way that we sincerely did not intend.

So there is a list of preemptively banned .xyz, .college, .rent, .security and .protection domains, compiled by XYZ from individual Chinese government requests targeting names registered to Chinese registrants.
Negari said in an email to DI yesterday:

To clarify the statement “XYZ will reserve domains,” we meant that XYZ will takedown domains in order to comply with “applicable law.” Unfortunately, the inaccuracies in your post caused people to believe that we were allowing the Chinese government to control what names could be registered or how they could be used by people outside of China. The idea that XYZ is going to impose Chinese law and prevent people outside of China from registering certain domain names is simply incorrect and not true. To be 100% clear, there is no “banned list.”

That was the first time anyone connected with XYZ had complained about the October 12 post, other than since-deleted tweets that corrected the size of the list from 40,000 domains to 12,000.
The RSEP (pdf) that causes all this kerfuffle has not been amended. It still says:

XYZ will reserve names prohibited for registration by the Chinese government at the registry level internationally, so the Gateway itself will not need to be used to block the registration of of any names. Therefore, a registrant in China will be able to register the same domain names as anyone else in the world.

This fairly unambiguous statement is what XYZ says was “misinterpreted” by DI (and everyone else who read it).
However, it’s not just a couple of sentences taken out of context. The context also suggests preemptive banning of domains.
The very next sentence states:

When the Gateway is initially implemented we will not run into a problem whereby a Chinese registrant has already registered a name prohibited for registration by the Chinese government because Chinese registrars are already enforcing a prohibition on the registration of names that are in violation of Chinese law.

This states that Chinese residents are already being preemptively banned, by Chinese registrars, from registering domains deemed illegal in China.
The next few paragraphs of the RSEP deal with post-registration scenarios of domains being banned, clearly delineated from the paragraph dealing with pre-registration scenarios.
In his blog post, Negari said the RSEP “addressed the proactive abuse mitigation we will take to shut down phishing, pharming, malware, and other abuse in China”.
I can’t believe this is true. The consequence would be that if China sent XYZ a take-down notice about a malware or phishing site registered to a non-Chinese registrant, XYZ would simply ignore it.
Regardless, the takeaway today is that XYZ is now saying that it will not ban a domain before it has been registered, unless that domain has previously been registered by a Chinese resident and subsequently specifically banned by the Chinese government.
The registry says this is no different to how it would treat take-down notices issued by, for example, a US court. It’s part of its contractual obligation to abide by “applicable law”, it says.
Whether this is a policy U-turn or a case of an erroneous RSEP being submitted… frankly I don’t want to get into that debate.
Disclosure: during the course of researching this story, I registered .xyz domains matching (as far as this monoglot can tell) the Chinese words for “democracy”, “human rights”, “porn” and possibly “Tiananmen Square”. I have no idea if they have value and have no plans to develop them into web sites.

Forget .sucks, .feedback will drive trademark owners nuts all over again

Top Level Spectrum, the new gTLD registry behind .feedback, plans to give sell domains matching 5,000 of the world’s top brands to a third party that does not own the trademarks.
That’s one novel element of a .feedback business model that is guaranteed to drive the intellectual property community crazy in much the same way as .sucks did earlier this year.
The other piece of ‘innovation’ will see all .feedback domains — including the 5,000 brands — point by default to a hosted service that facilitates comment and criticism.
An example of such a site can be seen at www.eggsample.feedback. The registry’s CEO, Jay Westerdal, has a .feedback site at www.jay.feedback
If you agree to use the hosted service with your domain, the domain and service combined will cost a minimum of just $20 per year.
However, if you want to turn off the hosted service and use your .feedback like a regular domain, pointing to the web site of your choice, the price will ratchet up to $50 a month, or $620 a year.
Those are the wholesale prices. Both services will be offered through registrars, where some markup is to be expected.
The hosted service is being offered by Feedback SAAS LLC, a company that, judging by its web site, appears to share ownership with Top Level Spectrum, though Westerdal says the two firms have different employees.
It’s not dissimilar to the model employed by .tel, where name servers by default point to a registry-hosted service.
Unlike .tel, .feedback registrants will be able to opt out of using the SAAS service and point their domains to whatever name servers they want.
Westerdal told DI that .feedback is in the process of making a deal with a “third party” he could not yet name to have 5,000 branded .feedback domains deployed during the Early Access Period of the .feedback launch. That’s scheduled to start January 6.
“We are striking a deal to get feedback sites out there. We want everything to have feedback,” he said. “We are signing an agreement to get the ball rolling by doing a founders program to get names out there. Your favorite shoe, your pizza place, your everything.”
“The sites are all geared towards free speech and giving reviews,” he said. He said:

No trademark infringement will occur though, the sites are all geared towards free speech and giving reviews. Confusing the public that the brand is running the site will not happen, each site has a disclaimer and makes it clear the brand is not running the site.

Asked whether we were talking about a genuine third party or a shell set up by the registry, he said: “A real third party. I am not playing games.”
He said the higher pricing for the naked domain registration is intended to discourage companies from turning off the domains matching their brands.
The whole point of .feedback is to solicit feedback.
The as-yet unspecified third-party taking possession of the 5,000 brand names would not be prevented from selling the domains to the matching brand owner, or to any third parties, he said, though he would not be in favor of such a move.
He said that $20 a year to run a configurable .feedback site, with moderator privileges, is a “great deal” compared to the $300-a-month service he said consumer review site Yelp offers.
The SAAS service will make additional revenue by selling added features, suitable for enterprises, he said.
.feedback went into its sunrise period last week with a $2,000 wholesale fee — the same high price that attracted criticism for .sucks.
The original Registry Service Evaluation Process for the .feedback service hit ICANN over a year ago (pdf).
I missed it then. Sorry.
I noticed it today after corporate registrar MarkMonitor blogged about it.
Matt Serlin, VP of MarkMonitor, who blogged his opinion on .feedback’s strategy earlier today, said in an email that the .feedback strategy was “more objectionable” than he had thought, and that “[W]e would most likely look to raise to ICANN if that is his stated intent.”

.apple goes live

Apple’s .apple new gTLD was delegated today.
It’s going to be a strict dot-brand gTLD, in which only Apple can register domain names, but could wind up being highly influential.
While .apple now appears in the DNS root zone, no second-level names (not even nic.apple) are yet resolving.
Should Apple actually use its new TLD in a prominent way, it would be good news for the visibility of new gTLDs internationally.
The company has sold hundreds of millions of devices over the last decade or so.
But the company has a spotty history of paying attention to domain names, regularly launching products without first securing matching domain names.
It did recently adopt a .news domain name for one of its apps, however.
.apple could wind up being purely defensive, at least in the near term.
Apple’s 2012 application to ICANN describes its plans in literally one sentence, repeated five times:

Apple seeks to obtain the new .apple gTLD in order to provide consumers with another opportunity to learn about Apple, and its products and services.

Apple division Beats Electronics, which makes headphones, also had its dot-brand, .beats, delegated today.