Crocker to speak at second gTLD collisions summit

ICANN chair Steve Crocker is among a packed line-up of speakers for an event on Tuesday that will address the potential security risks of name collisions in the new gTLD program.
It’s the second TLD Security Forum, which are organized by new gTLD applicants unhappy with ICANN’s proposal to delay hundreds of “uncalculated risk” applied-for gTLDs.
The first event, held in August, was notable for statements playing down the risk from the likes of Google and Digicert.
While Crocker is scheduled to speak on Tuesday, anyone expecting insight into the ICANN board’s thinking on name collisions is likely to be disappointed.
The title of his talk is “The Current State of DNSSEC Deployment”, which isn’t directly relevant to the issue.
Crocker, due to conflicts of interest protections, is also not a member of ICANN’s New gTLD Program Committee, which is tasked with making decisions about the collision problem.
While Crocker’s views may wind up remaining private, we can’t say the same for Amy Mushahwar and Dan Jaffe, representing the Association of National Advertisers, both of whom are also speaking.
The ANA is firmly in the Verisign camp on this issue, claiming that gTLD name collisions create unacceptable security risks for organizations on the internet.
Also on the line-up for Tuesday are Laureen Kapin of the US Federal Trade Commission and Gabriel Rottman of the American Civil Liberties Union, both of whom could bring new perspectives to the debate.
The TLD Security Forum begins at 9am at the Washington Hilton and Heights Meeting Center in Washington, DC. It’s free to attend and will be webcast for those unable to show up in person.

Samsung signs the first dot-brand gTLD contract

Samsung has become the first company to sign a Registry Agreement for a dot-brand gTLD.
As of yesterday, the electronics giant is now officially contracted with ICANN to run .삼성, its name in its native Korean.
It’s surprising that Samsung would be the first; while its application has priority number 18, its application also makes it pretty obvious it’s a primarily defensive move, reading:

The new gTLD proposed by SAMSUNG SDS has purpose in protecting online brand of SAMSUNG Group including SAMSUNG by defending abusive registration by third parties and further raising global awareness by domain usage utilizing company name.

The contract has not yet been published in full — expect that over the next few days — so it’s not yet clear whether Samsung has managed to negotiate any special dot-brand-specific amendments.
The base Registry Agreement contains lots of obligations, such as Sunrise periods, that really aren’t applicable to single-registrant spaces.
I understand the new Brand Registry Group is currently trying to negotiate a baseline set of dot-brand amendments with ICANN, so it’s possible that Samsung has jumped the gun by signing so soon.
But it could also mean that .삼성 will be the first-ever dot-brand TLD to go live on the internet, which is likely to benefit from substantial media coverage compared to subsequent delegations.
ICANN has signed 48 new gTLD contracts since July, way behind its originally target of 40 per week.
.삼성 will have its back-end registry managed by .kr ccTLD operator KISA.

ICANN to publish new gTLD contract changes

ICANN has decided to start publishing red-lined versions of its new gTLD Registry Agreements, so applicants can see what special terms ICANN is willing to accept.
It’s a reversal of its previous position, and follows complaints from applicants and back-end providers.
So far ICANN has signed almost 50 new gTLD contracts, all of which have been published, but it’s not easy to compare them all to the baseline Registry Agreement found in the Applicant Guidebook.
By publishing versions with the changes highlighted, applicants will be able to go into contract negotiations with a better idea of how far ICANN is willing to bend.
ICANN said today:

Upon further consideration, ICANN has concluded that publishing redlined versions of Registry Agreements would be helpful to the entire ICANN community, and would also support ICANN’s efforts to provide operational transparency.

It added that so far there have been no substantial changes in the contracts it’s signed, apart from gTLD-specific Public Interest Commitments and approved Registry Services.
It will start publishing the redlines next month.

Donuts’ trademark block list goes live, pricing revealed

Donuts’ Domain Protected Marks List, which gives trademark owners the ability to defensively block their marks across the company’s whole portfolio of gTLDs, has gone live.
The service goes above and beyond what new gTLD registries are obliged to offer by ICANN.
As a “block” service, in which names will not resolve, it’s reminiscent of the Sunrise B service offered by ICM Registry at .xxx’s launch, which was praised and cursed in equal measure.
But with DPML, trademark owners also have the ability to block “trademark+keyword” names, for example, so Pepsi could block “drinkpepsi” or “pepsisucks”.
It’s not a wildcard, however. Companies would have to pay for each trademark+keyword string they wanted blocking.
DPML covers all of the gTLDs that Donuts plans to launch, which could be as many as 300. It currently has 28 registry agreements with ICANN and 272 applications remaining in various stages of evaluation.
Trademark owners will only be able to sign up to DPML if their marks are registered with the Trademark Clearinghouse under the “use” standard required to participate in Sunrise periods.
Donuts is also excluding an unspecified number of strings it regards as “premium”, so the owners of marks matching those strings will be out of luck, it seems.
Blocks will be available for a minimum of five years an maximum of 10 years. After expiration, they can be renewed with minimum terms of one year.
The company has not disclose its wholesale pricing, but registrars we’ve found listing the service on their web sites so far (101domain and EnCirca) price it between $2,895 and $2,995 for a five-year registration.
It looks pricey, but it’s likely to be extraordinarily good value compared to the alternative of Sunrise periods.
If Donuts winds up with 200 gTLDs in its portfolio, a $3,000 price tag ($600 per year) works out to a defensive registration cost of $3 per domain per gTLD per year.
If it winds up with all 300, the price would be $2.
That’s in line (if we’re assuming non-budget pricing comparisons and registrars’ DPML markup), with Donuts co-founder Richard Tindal’s statement earlier this year: that DPML would be 5% to 10% the cost of a regular registration.
Tindal also spoke then about a way for rival trademark owners to “unblock” matching names, so Apple the record company could unblock a DPML on apple.music obtained by Apple the computer company, for example.
Donuts is encouraging trademark owners to participate before its first gTLDs goes live, which it expects to happen later this year.

Nine more new gTLD contracts signed

ICANN signed nine more new gTLD Registry Agreements yesterday.
The contracts cover .kiwi, .futbol, .kitchen, .directory, .diamonds, .tips, .today, .enterprises, and .photography.
All but .kiwi, which will be run by Dot Kiwi Ltd, were Donuts’ applications.
ICANN now has Registry Agreements with registries to manage 45 new gTLDs.

One IE pass, one fail this week

ICANN is down to 18 new gTLD applications in Initial Evaluation now, after one pass and one failure this week.
The pass is the dot-brand .lplfinancial, applied for by LPL Financial, a US-based broker. The company already owns the arguably better domain lpl.com.
The failure, which is eligible for Extended Evaluation, is Top Level Domain Holdings’ geographic bid for .roma, a city TLD for Rome, Italy.
The application failed on geographic grounds, meaning TLDH seems to have failed to provide sufficient evidence of government support or non-objection.
It’s TLDH’s final IE result and the only one of its 70 applications to fail to achieve a passing score.

New gTLD plans November 30 sunrise

I-Registry, which signed an ICANN Registry Agreement for the new gTLD .onl this week, plans to launch its Sunrise period on November 30, according to the company.
It’s the first date for a new gTLD Sunrise period I’ve come across to date, though it is of course an informal target rather than a firm commitment.
ICANN has signed contracts covering a few dozen gTLDs but as yet none have been delegated. As anyone who has been following dotShabaka’s diary on DI will know, there’s still a lot of uncertainty
.onl, which is short for “online”, is expected to be an open gTLD with no registration restrictions.
I-Registry plans to donate a portion of its profits to charity.

Google signs first new gTLD contract

Google has signed its first Registry Agreement with ICANN, covering the new gTLD .みんな.
The string means “everyone” in Japanese. It had priority number 34.
Google proposes to use it as an open TLD, available for anyone to register names in.
Signed by Google subsidiary Charleston Road Registry, it’s the 34th new gTLD contract ICANN has executed.
Google has 96 new gTLD applications remaining. One of them, for .search, is still Initial Evaluation.

ICANN looking into string confusion confusion

ICANN is looking at “consistency issues” in new gTLD String Confusion Objections, program manager Christine Willett said in an ICANN interview published last night.
The nature of the probe is not clear, but ICANN does appear to be working with the dispute resolution provider, the International Centre For Dispute Resolution, on the issue.
In the interview, Willett said:

Staff is working diligently with dispute resolution service providers to ensure that all procedures have been followed and to look at the expert determinations — we’re looking at these consistency issues.

The SCO has come in for tonnes of criticism due to the conflicting and downright ludicrous decisions made by panelists.
I would hope that ICANN is looking beyond just whether “all procedures have been followed”, given that the root cause of the consistency problems appears to be the lack of guidance for panelists in the policy itself.
Also in the interview, Willett said that she expects the first new gTLDs to be “in production” before the end of the year, and guessed that the second round of applications “is a couple of years down the road”.
Watch it here:

.CLUB offers solution to name collision risks

.CLUB Domains has come up with a simple workaround for its applied-for .club gTLD being categorized as risky by ICANN.
The company wants to reserve the top 50 .club domains that currently see DNS root traffic, so that if and when .club goes live the impact on organizations that use .club internally will be greatly reduced.
It’s not a wholly original idea, but .CLUB seems to be unique at the moment in that it actually knows what those 50 strings are, having commissioned an Interisle Consulting report of its proposed gTLD.
You’ll recall that Interisle is the company that ICANN commissioned to quantify the name collisions problem in the first place.
Its report is what ICANN used to categorize all applied-for gTLD strings into low, high and “uncalculated” risks, putting .club into the uncalculated category, delaying it by months.
(Interisle was at pains to point out in its report for .CLUB that it is not making any recommendations, interpreting the data, or advocating any solutions. Still, nice work if you can get it.)
By reserving the top 50 clashes — presumably in such a way that they will continue to return error responses after .club is delegated — .CLUB says .club would slip into ICANN’s definition of a low-risk string.
In a letter to ICANN (pdf) sent today, .CLUB chief technology officer Dirk Bhagat wrote:

blocking the 50 SLD strings from registration would prevent 52,647 out of the 89,533 queries from a potential collision (58.88%). After blocking the top 50 strings as SLD strings, only 36,886 (41.12%) queries remain, which is 12,114 fewer invalid queries at the root than .engineering, which ICANN classified as a low risk gTLD.

He adds that a further chunk of remaining SLDs are random strings that appear to have been created by Google’s Chrome browser and, many say, pose no risk of name collisions, reducing the risk further.
It’s hard to argue with the logic there, other than to say that ICANN’s categorization system itself has already come in for heavy criticism for drawing unjustified, arbitrary lines.
The list of domains .CLUB proposes to block is pretty interesting, including some strings that appear to be trademarks, the names of likely .club registrants, or potentially premium names.