Has .sucks abandoned its Sunrise Premium program?

Vox Populi Registry has done away with the “Sunrise Premium” part of its .sucks launch strategy, if only in name.
The pricing page of the company’s web site no longer makes any reference to Sunrise Premium, the controversial, trademark-heavy list of .sucks domains that would cost over $2,000 a year to register and renew.
Instead, there are two new categories of names: Registry Premium and Market Premium.
Registry Premium appears to be what it was previously just calling “Premium” — individually priced high-value domains such as divorce.sucks and life.sucks. That’s in tune with standard registry practice.
The new Market Premium category appears to be the replacement for Sunrise Premium. The web site describes it like this:

In General Availability, dotSucks has created a list of domains called Market Premium names. These are names that the market over time have designated as having a high value.

Previously, Vox Pop CEO John Berard told DI and other reporters that the Sunrise Premium list had been compiled from names registered or blocked in previous sunrise periods in other TLDs.
It was characterized as an additional protection against cybersquatting, but intellectual property interests saw it as a shakedown.
It’s not obvious from the updated Vox Pop web site whether Market Premium is a ground-up rethink of the Sunrise Premium concept, or is merely an empty re-branding.
The name “Sunrise Premium” was confusing, given that such domains are not actually available during the formal sunrise period. Also, the name inextricably suggested that it was a list of trademarks.
Market Premium names are priced exactly the same as Sunrise Premium — that is, $1,999 at the registry level, with a suggested retail price of $2,499.
Market Premium names will also not be eligible for the discounted “Block” service but will “likely” be eligible for the Consumer Subsidy program. That’s no change from the policies governing the Sunrise Premium incarnation.
The registry web site now also states that purchasers of the Block service, which carries a $149 registry fee, will be able to unblock their domains if they wish to actively use them, but doing so will convert the domain into a $1,999 Market Premium name.
Defensive blocking could therefore have the eventual effect of stuffing the Market Premium list with trademarks anyway (assuming any trademark holders with blocks wish to activate their .sucks names, which seems unlikely).
I’ve put in a request for clarification about Market Premium with the registry and will provide updates when I get them.
Other updates on the .sucks price list include a removal of the $9.95 suggested retail price for Consumer Subsidy names.
Consumer Subsidy names are supposedly going to be run by a third party consumer advocacy group from Everything.sucks, but that group has not been identified by Vox Pop yet.
The fact that the registry seemingly had no deal in place but already knew the price suggested to many that Everything.sucks would just be another shell company managed by Vox Pop owner Momentous. Berard reportedly denied this publicly at the INTA 2015 conference last week.
The Vox Pop web site now states “dotSucks is hopeful that this will bring the individual consumer price below 10 dollars.”

.sucks and ICANN not invited to Congressional hearing on .sucks and ICANN

The witness list in next week’s US Congressional hearing into .sucks and ICANN accountability does not feature .sucks or ICANN.
The eight witnesses are largely drawn from outspoken critics of both ICANN and Vox Populi, either companies or trade associations and lobby groups. It’s stacked heavily in favor of intellectual property interests.
The hearing is titled “Stakeholder Perspectives on ICANN: The .sucks Domain and Essential Steps to Guarantee Trust and Accountability in the Internet’s Operation”.
With hindsight, the “Stakeholder Perspectives” bit gives away the fact that the judiciary subcommittee holding the hearing is more concerned with listening to ICANN’s critics than ICANN itself.
Mei-lan Stark, a senior intellectual property lawyer from Fox and 2014 president of the International Trademark Association, tops the list.
A critic of the new gTLD program, in 2011 Stark told Congress that the first round of new gTLDs would cost Fox “conservatively” $12 million in defensive registration fees.
It will be interesting to see if any Congresspeople confront Stark about that claim, which appeared like a gross overstatement even at the time.
One company that has been enthusiastically embracing new gTLDs — as an applicant, registry, defensive and non-defensive registrant — is Amazon, which has VP of global public policy Paul Misener on the panel.
Amazon has beef with ICANN for siding with the Governmental Advisory Committee over the battle for .amazon, which Amazon has been banned from obtaining, so it’s difficult to see the company as an overly friendly witness.
Next up is John Horton, president of LegitScript, the company that certifies legitimate online pharmacies and backs the .pharmacy new gTLD.
LegitScript is in favor of greater regulation of the domain name industry in order to make it easier to shut down potentially dangerous web sites (though opponents say it’s more often more interested in protecting Big Pharma’s profit margins). This month it called for a ban on Whois privacy for e-commerce sites.
Steve Metalitz, counsel for the Coalition for Online Accountability (a lobbyist for the movie and music industries) and six-term president of the ICANN Intellectual Property Constituency, is also on the list.
Jonathan Zuck, president of ACT The App Association (aka the Association for Competitive Technology, backed by Verisign and other tech firms) is on the list.
NetChoice director Steve DelBianco is also showing up again. He’s an ICANN hearing mainstay and I gather with this appearance he’ll be getting the final stamp on his Rayburn Building Starbucks loyalty card. That means a free latte, which is always nice.
Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin is a surprise invitee. ICA represents big domainers and is not a natural ally of the IP side of the house.
Bill Woodcock, executive director of Packet Clearing House, rounds off the list. PCH might not have instant name recognition but it provides Anycast DNS infrastructure services for scores of ccTLDs and gTLDs.
The committee hearing will take place at 10am local time next Wednesday.
A second hearing, entitled “Stakeholder Perspectives on the IANA Transition” will be held four hours later by a subcommittee of the House Energy & Commerce committee. The witnesses for that one have not yet been announced.
It’s going to be a busy day for ICANN bods on Capitol Hill.

Congress to put .sucks on trial

The US Congress is to hold a hearing to look into the .sucks gTLD and ICANN accountability.
A hearing entitled “Stakeholder Perspectives on ICANN: The .sucks Domain and Essential Steps to Guarantee Trust and Accountability in the Internet’s Operation” has been scheduled by the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet
It will take place in Washington DC next Wednesday, May 13.
The list of witnesses does not yet appear to have been published.
I would guess we’d be looking at, at the very least, somebody senior from ICANN, somebody senior from .sucks registry Vox Populi, and an intellectual property lawyer.
It was ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency that complained about .sucks’ sunrise policies and fees, causing ICANN to refer the matter to US and Canadian trade regulators.
The title of the House hearing suggests that the .sucks controversy will be inextricably tied to the broader issue of ICANN accountability, which is currently undergoing a significant review as ICANN seeks to split permanently from US government oversight.
That’s not great optics for ICANN; I’m sure the organization would rather not have its performance judged on what is quite an unusual edge case emerging from the new gTLD program.

Whois privacy reforms incoming

Whois privacy services will become regulated by ICANN under proposals published today, but there’s a big disagreement about whether all companies should be allowed to use them.
A working group has released the first draft of its recommendations covering privacy and proxy services, which mask the identity and contact details of domain registrants.
The report says that P/P services should be accredited by ICANN much like registrars are today.
Registrars should be obliged to disclose which such services they operate or are affilated with, presumably at the risk of their Registrar Accreditation Agreement if they do not comply, the report recommends.
A highlight of the paper is a set of proposed rules governing the release of private Whois data when it is requested by intellectual property interests.
Under the proposed rules, privacy services would not be allowed to reject such requests purely because the alleged infringement deals with the content of a web site rather than just the domain.
So the identity of a private registrant of a non-infringing domain would be vulnerable to disclosure if, for example, the domain hosted bootleg content.
Registrars would be able to charge IP owners a nominal “cost recovery” fee in order to process requests and would be able to ignore spammy automated requests that did not appear to have been manually vetted.
There’d be a new arbitration process that would kick in to resolve disputes between IP interests and P/P service providers.
The 98 pages of recommendations (pdf) were drafted by the Generic Names Supporting Organization’s Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group (PPSAI) and opened for public comment today.
There are a lot of gaps in the report. Work, it seems, still needs to be done.
For example, it acknowledges that the working group didn’t reach any conclusions about what should happen when law enforcement agencies ask for private data.
The group was dominated by registrars and IP interests. There was only one LEA representative and only one governmental representative, and they participated in a very small number of teleconferences.
There was also a sharp division on the issue of who should be able to use privacy services, with two dissenting opinions attached to the report.
One faction, led by MarkMonitor and including Facebook, Domain Tools and fake pharmacy watchdog LegitScript, said that any company that engages in e-commerce transactions should be ineligible for privacy, saying: “Transparent information helps prevent malicious activity”.
Another group, comprising a handful of non-commercial stakeholders, said that no kind of activity should prevent you from registering a domain privately, pointing to the example of persecuted political groups using web sites to raise funds.
There was a general consensus, however, than merely being a commercial entity should not alone exclude you from using a P/P service.
Currently, registrar signatories to the 2013 RAA are bound by a temporary P/P policy that is set to expire January 2017 or whenever the P/P accreditation process starts.
There are a lot of recommendations in the report, and I’ve only touched on a handful here. The public comment period closes July 7.

Most ICANN new gTLD breaches were over a year ago

Almost three quarters of the security breaches logged against ICANN’s new gTLD portal occurred over a three-month period in early 2014, DI can reveal.
Almost every incident of a new gTLD applicant coming across data they weren’t supposed to see — 322 of the 330 total — happened before the end of October last year, ICANN told DI.
Most — 244 of the 330 — happened before April 30 last year.
The first breach, discovered by an independent audit of the portal, was January 22 2014.
ICANN says it was first notified of there being a problem on February 27, 2015.
The improper data disclosures were announced by ICANN last week.
As we reported, a simple configuration error by ICANN in third-party software allowed users of the Global Domains Division portal — all new gTLD applicants — to view confidential data belonging to other applicants.
Documents revealed could have included sensitive financial projections and registry technical details.
My first assumption was that the majority of the incidents — which have been deliberate or accidental — were relatively recent, but that turns out not to be the case.
In fact, if anyone did download data they weren’t supposed to see, most of them did it over a year ago.
ICANN has been notifying applicants and registries about whether their own data was compromised and expects to have told each affected applicant which other applicants could have seen their data before May 27.
Ninety-six applicants and 21 registries were affected.

Dumb ICANN bug revealed secret financial data to new gTLD applicants

Secret financial projections were among 330 pieces of confidential data revealed by an ICANN security bug.
Over the last two years, a total of 19 new gTLD applicants used the bug to access data belonging to 96 applicants and 21 registry operators.
That’s according to ICANN, which released the results of a third-party audit this afternoon.
Ashwin Rangan, ICANN’s new chief information and innovation officer, confirmed to DI this afternoon that the data revealed to unauthorized users included private financial and technical documents that gTLD applicants attached to their applications.
It would have included, for example, documents that dot-brand applicants reluctantly submitted to demonstrate their financial health.
But Rangan said it was not clear whether the glitch had been exploited deliberately or accidentally.
While saying the situation was “very deeply regrettable”, he added that applicant data deemed confidential when it was submitted back in 2012 may not be considered as such today.
The vulnerability was in ICANN’s Global Domains Division Portal, which was taken offline for three days at the end of February and early March after the bug was reported by a user.
Two outside consulting firms were brought in to scan access logs going back to the launch of the new gTLD portal back in April 2013.
What they found was that any user of the portal could access any attachment to any application, whether it belonged to them or a third-party applicant, simply by checking a radio button in the advanced search feature.
It was a misconfiguration by ICANN of the Salesforce.com software used by GDD, rather than a coding error, Rangan said.
“The public/private data sharing setting can be On or Off and here it was set to On,” he said.
On 330 occasions, starting “in earliest part of when the portal first became available” two years ago, these 19 users would have been exposed to data they were not supposed to be able to see.
The audit has been unable to determine whether the users actually downloaded confidential data on those occasions.
What’s confirmed is that only new gTLD applicants were able to use the glitch. No third-party hackers were involved.
The 19 users who, whether they meant to or not, exploited this vulnerability are now going to be sent letters asking them to explain themselves. They’ll also be asked to delete anything they downloaded and to not share it with third parties.
Before May 27, ICANN will also contact those applicants whose secret data was exposed, telling them which rival applicants could have seen it.
Rangan said that there have been almost 600,000 GDD sessions in the last two years, and that only 36 of them revealed data to unauthorized users.
“It’s a small fraction,” he said. “The question is whether they just stumbled across something they were not even aware of… Looking at the log files it is not clear what is the case.”
ICANN seems to be giving the 19 users the benefit of the doubt so far, but still wants them to explain their actions.
As CIO, Rangan was not able to comment on whether the breach exposes ICANN or applicants to any kind of legal liability.
It’s not the first time sensitive applicant data has been exposed. Back in 2012, DI discovered that the home addresses of the directors of applicants had been published, despite promises that they would remain private.
At the time of the original GDD portal misconfiguration, ICANN had noted security expert Jeff “The Dark Tangent” Moss as its chief security officer.
Earlier this week, ICANN’s board of directors authorized expenses of over $500,000 to carry out security audits of ICANN’s code.

New gTLD zones top five million names

There are now more than five million new gTLD domain names live in the DNS.
That’s according to zone files collated by ICANN, which I’m told show 5,002,252 names across the 597 new gTLD registries providing data.
That works out to a mean of 8,378 domains per TLD, a median of 1,254.
The largest zone file is .xyz, with 877,450 names. There’s at least 100 new gTLDs with only one domain in their zones.
Due to the way ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service works (or doesn’t work) with access rights expiring on a pretty much daily basis, it’s virtually impossible for a third party such as DI to count up zone file numbers across every new gTLD with 100% daily accuracy.
Today, DI PRO reports a count of 4,999,024 names.
The total number of zone file domains in this post was provided by ICANN, which does not have the same CZDS restrictions as the rest of us.

As .stream is won, ICANN’s auction list empties

.stream has become the latest new gTLD contention set to be settled prior to its ICANN auction, leaving ICANN’s auction schedule looking barren.
Famous Four Media beat Hughes Satellite Systems to the string, which was due to auction May 27.
The four strings scheduled for bidding April 29 — .living, .fun, .map and .search — were also recently settled.
All that remains on ICANN’s schedule is the controversial .game/.games contention set, which will employ a unique process designed for contention sets created by inconsistent singular/plural string confusion rulings.
The five .game applicants and one .games applicant (Donuts) are still due to hit the block May 20.
A couple dozen other gTLDs are still pending ICANN auction but do not have set dates due to various challenges and disputes.

Dirty tricks claimed in .music fight

A .music hopeful has tried to add over 300 pages of documents to its new gTLD application, apparently in an effort to leapfrog competitors, and its rival community applicant is far from happy.
DotMusic Limited submitted the change request (pdf) in order to add some Public Interest Commitments to its .music bid.
Rival .Music LLC now claims that it is “outrageous and unfair for ICANN to allow this applicant to abuse the PIC process in this way” and has filed a Request for Reconsideration.
Of the eight .music bidders, these two companies are the only formal “community” applicants.
Under the rules of the new gTLD program, community applicants can avoid having to fight an auction if they win a strict Community Priority Evaluation.
To avoid confusion: DotMusic Limited is the applicant led by Constantine Roussos; .Music LLC (aka Far Further) is led by John Styll.
Far Further fought a CPE last year but lost in spectacular fashion, scoring just 3 out of the 16 available points, a long way shy of the 14 points required for a pass.
The Roussos applicant has now submitted eight new proposed Public Interest Commitments — things it promises to do to protect registrants and rights holders — as an addendum to its application.
That’s pretty standard stuff.
What’s unusual are the 308 pages of additional “clarifications” that seek to explain how the proposed PICs relate to its original application.
They’re not changes to the application, technically speaking, but they are a way to get hundreds of extra pages of content into the public record ahead of DotMusic’s own CPE.
According to Styll, this latest gambit is nothing more than an attempt to score more CPE points. He told ICANN:

the 308 additional pages of “clarifications” contain wording that clearly utilizes learnings from previous CPE results (including our own), in violation of ICANN policy

Complicating matters, it turns out that Far Further tried to make some substantive changes to its application back in May 2014, but had the request declined by ICANN “in order to be fair to other applicants”.
That was prior to ICANN’s publication of guidelines governing change request, Styll says.
Because of this alleged discrepancy between how the two competing change requests were handled, Far Further wants a second crack at the CPE for its own application.
Its RfR (pdf) asks ICANN to reverse its May 2014 decision, allow its change request, throw out the original results of its CPE and refer the CPE to a new Economist Intelligence Unit panel for a full reevaluation.
Failing that, it wants ICANN to throw out the 308 pages of “clarifications” submitted by DotMusic.
Both applicants have the written support of dozens of music industry groups.
There’s some crossover, but Far Further’s backers appear to me to be a little more “establishment” than DotMusic’s, including the likes of the Recording Industry Association of America.
The other, non-community applicants are Amazon, Google, Donuts, Radix, Famous Four Media and Entertainment Names.
With Google and Amazon in the mix, if it goes to auction, .music could easily be an eight-figure auction along the lines of .app, which sold to Google for $25 million.
In my view, winning a CPE is the only way DotMusic has a chance of getting its hands on .music, short of combining with another applicant.

Warren Buffett party firm beats Google to .fun

An 80-year-old seller of party supplies, owned by Warren Buffett, has won the rights to the new gTLD .fun, after the other two applicants withdrew.
Oriental Trading Company plans to operate the gTLD as a “restricted” space where only the company and its partners can register, according to its application.
Quite why this isn’t on hold as a “closed generic”, I don’t know.
The application states .fun will be:

an authoritative Internet space for OTC, its affiliates and partners where OTC can develop an unlimited number of domain names dedicated and relevant to “fun” and to provide Internet users with content, services and products they need, while being assured of brand authenticity.

The other two applicants were Google and Dot Strategy. Both applications have now been withdrawn.
OTC sells balloons, party hats, banners and such. It was acquired by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2012 after filing for bankruptcy protection.
In other withdrawal news, games maker Konami today became the latest company to dump its plans for a dot-brand, in this case .konami.