Gripe sites and PPC banned in new gTLD

New gTLD registry Plan Bee expects to ban gripe sites in its forthcoming .build registry.
Its Acceptable Use and Takedown Policy (pdf), published this week, is among the strictest I’ve seen.
The gTLD was delegated last weekend. It’s going to be an open space targeted at the construction industry, but its AUP bans a lot of stuff.
As might be expected, any form of malicious hacking or spamming behavior is verboten, as is child abuse material.
Activities more often regulated today by registrar user agreements — such as piracy and counterfeiting — are also prohibited.
But the policy goes on to ban activities that are typically permitted in other TLDs, including “gripe sites” and “pay-per-click”. The AUP reads (I’ve emphasized some oddities):

Further abusive behaviors include, but are not limited to: cybersquatting, front-running, gripe sites, deceptive and⁄or offensive domain names, fake renewal notices, cross-gTLD registration scam, name spinning, pay-per-click, traffic diversion, false affiliation, domain kiting⁄tasting, fast-flux, 419 scams or if the domain name is being used in a manner that appears to threaten the stability, integrity or security of the Registry, or any of its Registrar partners and ⁄or that may put the safety and security of any registrant or user at risk.

Domains deemed abusive can be suspended or deleted by Plan Bee, under the policy.
I can see why a niche gTLD might want to build up loyalty in its associated industry by suspending gripe sites targeting construction companies, but banning “pay-per-click” is a baffling decision.
Will .build registrants be prohibited from using Google Adsense to support their sites?
The .build launch dates have not yet been revealed but it’s likely to be a matter of weeks.

Ten more new gTLDs go live

Donuts, Afilias and Atgron were the beneficiaries of 10 new gTLD delegations yesterday.
Various Donuts subsidiaries had .boutique, .bargains, .cool, .expert, .tienda (“shop” in Spanish), .tools, .watch, .works delegated, bringing the company’s total portfolio to 70 gTLDs.
Afilias had its fourth new gTLD of this round go live in the DNS root: .kim, which is expected to serve people who have the first or last name Kim.
I think it’s the first personal-name gTLD to hit the internet.
Finally, Atgron had .wed delegated. It’s going to be an unrestricted gTLD aimed at marrying couples. It will eventually compete with the currently contested string .wedding.
I have to ponder what the renewal rates are going to be like for what seems to be the first event-focused TLD.
How long before their big day will registrants register their names, and for how long afterwards will they keep the registration alive for sentimental reasons? Atgron reckons such sites stay live for about 18 months.
There are also reportedly twice half as many divorces as marriages in the US at the moment. One wonders why nobody applied for .divorce.

DotConnectAfrica files for ICANN independent review

Failed .africa gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica has filed an Independent Review Process appeal against ICANN, it emerged today.
The nature of the complaint is not entirely clear, but in a press release DCA said it’s related to “ICANN Board decisions and actions taken with regard to DCA Trust’s application for the .africa new gTLD”.
It’s only the third time an IRP has been filed. The first two were related to .xxx; ICM Registry won its pioneering case in 2009 and Manwin Licensing settled its followup case last year.
DCA said that it’s an “amended” complaint. It turns out the first notice of IRP was sent October 23. ICANN published it December 12, but I missed it at the time.
I’d guess that the original needed to be amended due to a lack of detail. The “Nature of Dispute” section of the form, filed with the International Center for Dispute Resolution, is just a sentence long, whereas ICM and Manwin attached 30 to 60-page legal complaints to theirs.
The revised notice, which has not yet been published, was filed January 10, according to DCA.
DCA applied for .africa in the current new gTLD round, but lacked the government support required by the Applicant Guidebook for strings matching the names of important geographic regions.
Its rival applicant, South African ccTLD registry Uniforum, which does have government backing, looks set to wind up delegated, whereas ICANN has designated DCA’s bid as officially “Not Approved”.
DCA has been alleging a conspiracy — often involving DI — at almost every juncture of the process, even before it filed its application. Read more here, here and here.
To win an IRP, it’s going to have to show that it suffered “injury or harm that is directly and causally connected to the Board’s alleged violation of the Bylaws or the Articles of Incorporation”.

New gTLDs top 100 as first dot-brands hit the root

There are now 107 new gTLDs live on the internet, following the latest batch of delegations.
Sixteen strings were entered into the DNS root today, including the first two dot-brands, which are Monash University’s .monash and CITIC Group’s .中信 (“.citic” in Chinese).
.CLUB Domains, Luxury Partners and Plan Bee became freshly-minted registries with the delegations of .club, .luxury and .build while legacy gTLD registry Afiias added .red, .pink and .shiksha to its roster.
Uniregistry added five new gTLDs to the two it had delegated in an earlier batch: .gift, .guitars, .link, .photo and .pics.
The delegation of .photo means the root now has its first singular/plural clash; Donuts already owns .photos.
Finally, I-REGISTRY added .rich to its .onl and China’s CNNIC had .网络 (“.network”) and .公司 (“.company”) delegated.
UPDATE (Jan 22): This post originally overlooked the delegation of .公司. It has been updated accordingly.

Eight more new gTLDs delegated

Donuts and United TLD had a combined total of eight new gTLDs added to the DNS root zone today.
Donuts subsidiaries saw .zone, .agency, .cheap and .marketing go live, while United TLD (Demand Media/Rightside) got .dance, .democrat, .moda (Spanish for “fashion/style”) and .social.
The nic.[tld] domains all appear to be resolving, albeit to the registries’ web sites in other TLDs.
There are now 91 new gTLDs live in the root, more than five times the number of legacy gTLDs. It seems likely that we’re going to pass 100 this week.

Cops can’t block domain transfers without court order, NAF rules

Law enforcement and IP owners were dealt a setback last week when the National Arbitration Forum ruled that they cannot block domain transfers unless they have a court order.
The ruling could make it more difficult for registrars to acquiesce to requests from police trying to shut down piracy sites, as they might technically be in breach of their ICANN contracts.
NAF panelist Bruce Meyerson made the call in a Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy ruling after a complaint filed by EasyDNS against Directi (PublicDomainRegistry.com).
You’re probably asking right about now: “The what policy?”
I had to look it up, too.
TDRP, it turns out, has been part of the ICANN rulebook since the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy was adopted in 2004.
It’s designed for disputes where one registrar refuses to transfer a domain to another. As part of the IRTP, it’s a binding part of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
It seems to have been rarely used in full over the last decade, possibly because the first point of complaint is the registry for the TLD in question, with only appeals going to a professional arbitrator.
Only NAF and the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre are approved to handle such cases, and their respective records show that only one TDRP appeal has previously filed, and that was in 2013.
In the latest case, Directi had refused to allow the transfer of three domains to EasyDNS after receiving a suspension request from the Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the City of London Police.
The IPCU had sent suspension requests, targeting music download sites “suspected” of criminal activity, to several registrars.
The three sites — maxalbums.com, emp3world.com, and full-albums.net — are all primarily concerned with hosting links to pirated music while trying to install as much adware as possible on visitors’ PCs.
The registrants of the names had tried to move from India-based Directi to Canada-based EasyDNS, but found the transfers denied by Directi.
EasyDNS, which I think it’s fair to say is becoming something of an activist when it come to this kind of thing, filed the TDRP first with Verisign then appealed its “No Decision” ruling to NAF.
NAF’s Meyerson delivered a blunt, if reluctant-sounding, win to EasyDNS:

Although there are compelling reasons why the request from a recognized law enforcement agency such as the City of London Police should be honored, the Transfer Policy is unambiguous in requiring a court order before a Registrar of Record may deny a request to transfer a domain name… The term “court order” is unambiguous and cannot be interpreted to be the equivalent of suspicion of wrong doing by a policy agency.
To permit a registrar of record to withhold the transfer of a domain based on the suspicion of a law enforcement agency, without the intervention of a judicial body, opens the possibility for abuse by agencies far less reputable than the City of London Police.

That’s a pretty unambiguous statement, as far as ICANN policy is concerned: no court order, no transfer block.
It’s probably not going to stop British cops trying to have domains suspended based on suspicion alone — the Metropolitan Police has a track record of getting Nominet to suspend thousands of .uk domains in this way — but it will give registrars an excuse to decline such requests when they receive them, if they want the hassle.

Two new gTLD apps pass EE

While the industry’s attention may be focused — rightly — on new gTLD sunrise periods and launch plans, a handful of applicants are still slogging their way through ICANN evaluation.
Two more applications passed Extended Evaluation this week — Locus Analytics’ dot-brand .locus and DotPlace’s .place.
Both had failed Initial Evaluation in 2013 due to a lack of provided financial statements.
While .locus is uncontested and can now proceed to contracting, testing and delegation, .place has also been applied for by Donuts so will presumably be auctioned off.

You snooze, you lose new gTLD sunrise coming soon

Trademark attorneys and brand management executives take note: January 21 will see the launch of the first first-come, first-served sunrise period we’ve seen in a new TLD in a long time.
FCFS means that domain names will be allocated to participants immediately, rather than at the end of the sunrise period.
For those responsible for acquiring domain names for mark owners — many of whom are accustomed to waiting to the last minute before submitting sunrise applications — this is a change of pace.
You snooze, you lose.
To date only Regiodot’s German geographic gTLD, .ruhr, has officially confirmed (pdf) that it intends to use a FCFS policy during its mandatory sunrise period.
That’s due to kick off on January 21.
The precise time that the sunrise will begin — important when you’re looking at a FCFS policy — does not appear to have been published yet.
UPDATE: the time has been published (see comments below this post) and it’s 1000 UTC.
Under ICANN rules, to use FCFS registries need a “Start Date” sunrise, which runs for 30 days but requires a 30-day notice period before it begins. Regiodot told ICANN about its sunrise dates December 18.
The alternative “End Date” sunrises run for 60 days, have no notice period, and domains are only allocated to mark owners — usually using auctions to settle contention — after the 60 days are over.
Other than .ruhr, only PeopleBrowsr’s .ceo has said it wants to run a Start Date sunrise. However, PeopleBrowsr will not run its sunrise on a FCFS basis, preferring the end-date allocation/auction method instead.

Controlled interruption as a means to prevent name collisions [Guest Post]

This is a guest post written by Jeff Schmidt, CEO of JAS Global Advisors LLC. JAS is currently authoring a “Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework” for the new gTLD program under contract with ICANN.
One of JAS’ commitments during this process was to “float” ideas and solicit feedback. This set of thoughts poses an alternative to the “trial delegation” proposals in SAC062. The idea springs from past DNS-related experiences and has an effect we have named “controlled interruption.”
Learning from the Expired Registration Recovery Policy
Many are familiar with the infamous Microsoft Hotmail domain expiration in 1999. In short, a Microsoft registration for passport.com (Microsoft’s then-unified identity service) expired Christmas Eve 1999, denying millions of users access to the Hotmail email service (and several other Microsoft services) for roughly 20 hours.
Fortunately, a well-intended technology consultant recognized the problem and renewed the registration on Microsoft’s behalf, yielding a nice “thank you” from Microsoft and Network Solutions. Had a bad actor realized the situation, the outcome could have been far different.
The Microsoft Hotmail case and others like it lead to the current Expired Registration Recovery Policy.
More recently, Regions Bank made news when its domains expired, and countless others go unreported. In the case of Regions Bank, the Expired Registration Recovery Policy seemed to work exactly as intended – the interruption inspired immediate action and the problem was solved, resulting in only a bit of embarrassment.
Importantly, there was no opportunity for malicious activity.
For the most part, the Expired Registration Recovery Policy is effective at preventing unintended expirations. Why? We call it the application of “controlled interruption.”
The Expired Registration Recovery Policy calls for extensive notification before the expiration, then a period when “the existing DNS resolution path specified by the Registrant at Expiration (“RAE”) must be interrupted” – as a last-ditch effort to inspire the registrant to take action.
Nothing inspires urgent action more effectively than service interruption.
But critically, in the case of the Expired Registration Recovery Policy, the interruption is immediately corrected if the registrant takes the required action — renewing the registration.
It’s nothing more than another notification attempt – just a more aggressive round after all of the passive notifications failed. In the case of a registration in active use, the interruption will be recognized immediately, inspiring urgent action. Problem solved.
What does this have to do with collisions?
A Trial Delegation Implementing Controlled Interruption
There has been a lot of talk about various “trial delegations” as a technical mechanism to gather additional data regarding collisions and/or attempt to notify offending parties and provide self-help information. SAC062 touched on the technical models for trial delegations and the related issues.
Ideally, the approach should achieve these objectives:

• Notifies systems administrators of possible improper use of the global DNS;
• Protects these systems from malicious actors during a “cure period”;
• Doesn’t direct potentially sensitive traffic to Registries, Registrars, or other third parties;
• Inspires urgent remediation action; and
• Is easy to implement and deterministic for all parties.

Like unintended expirations, collisions are largely a notification problem. The offending system administrator must be notified and take action to preserve the security and stability of their system.
One approach to consider as an alternative trial delegation concept would be an application of controlled interruption to help solve this notification problem. The approach draws on the effectiveness of the Expired Registration Recovery Policy with the implementation looking like a modified “Application and Service Testing and Notification (Type II)” trial delegation as proposed in SAC62.
But instead of responding with pointers to application layer listeners, the authoritative nameserver would respond with an address inside 127/8 — the range reserved for localhost. This approach could be applied to A queries directly and MX queries via an intermediary A record (the vast majority of collision behavior observed in DITL data stems from A and MX queries).
Responding with an address inside 127/8 will likely break any application depending on a NXDOMAIN or some other response, but importantly also prevents traffic from leaving the requestor’s network and blocks a malicious actor’s ability to intercede.
In the same way as the Expired Registration Recovery Policy calls for “the existing DNS resolution path specified by the RAE [to] be interrupted”, responding with localhost will hopefully inspire immediate action by the offending party while not exposing them to new malicious activity.
If legacy/unintended use of a DNS name is present, one could think of controlled interruption as a “buffer” prior to use by a legitimate new registrant. This is similar to the CA Revocation Period as proposed in the New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan which “buffers” the legacy use of certificates in internal namespaces from new use in the global DNS. Like the CA Revocation Period approach, a set period of controlled interruption is deterministic for all parties.
Moreover, instead of using the typical 127.0.0.1 address for localhost, we could use a “flag” IP like 127.0.53.53.
Why? While troubleshooting the problem, the administrator will likely at some point notice the strange IP address and search the Internet for assistance. Making it known that new TLDs may behave in this fashion and publicizing the “flag” IP (along with self-help materials) may help administrators isolate the problem more quickly than just using the common 127.0.0.1.
We could also suggest that systems administrators proactively search their logs for this flag IP as a possible indicator of problems.
Why the repeated 53? Preserving the 127.0/16 seems prudent to make sure the IP is treated as localhost by a wide range of systems; the repeated 53 will hopefully draw attention to the IP and provide another hint that the issue is DNS related.
Two controlled interruption periods could even be used — one phase returning 127.0.53.53 for some period of time, and a second slightly more aggressive phase returning 127.0.0.1. Such an approach may cover more failure modes of a wide variety of requestors while still providing helpful hints for troubleshooting.
A period of controlled interruption could be implemented before individual registrations are activated, or for an entire TLD zone using a wildcard. In the case of the latter, this could occur simultaneously with the CA Revocation Period as described in the New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan.
The ability to “schedule” the controlled interruption would further mitigate possible effects.
One concern in dealing with collisions is the reality that a potentially harmful collision may not be identified until months or years after a TLD goes live — when a particular second level string is registered.
A key advantage to applying controlled interruption to all second level strings in a given TLD in advance and at once via wildcard is that most failure modes will be identified during a scheduled time and before a registration takes place.
This has many positive features, including easier troubleshooting and the ability to execute a far less intrusive rollback if a problem does occur. From a practical perspective, avoiding a complex string-by-string approach is also valuable.
If there were to be a catastrophic impact, a rollback could be implemented relatively quickly, easily, and with low risk while the impacted parties worked on a long-term solution. A new registrant and associated new dependencies would likely not be adding complexity at this point.
Request for Feedback
As stated above, one of JAS’ commitments during this process was to “float” ideas and solicit feedback early in the process. Please consider these questions:

• What unintended consequences may surface if localhost IPs are served in this fashion?
• Will serving localhost IPs cause the kind of visibility required to inspire action?
• What are the pros and cons of a “TLD-at-once” wildcard approach running simultaneously with the CA Revocation Period?
• Is there a better IP (or set of IPs) to use?
• Should the controlled interruption plan described here be included as part of the mitigation plan? Why or why not?
• To what extent would this methodology effectively address the perceived problem?
• Other feedback?

We anxiously await your feedback — in comments to this blog, on the DNS-OARC Collisions list, or directly. Thank you and Happy New Year!

New gTLD launches: registrar coverage at less than 40% of the market

Registrars representing less than 40% of the gTLD market are ready to offer new gTLDs during their launch phases, according to the latest stats from ICANN.
ICANN released yesterday a list (pdf) of the just 21 registrars that have signed the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement and have been certified by IBM to use the Trademark Clearinghouse database.
Signing the 2013 RAA is a requirement for registrars that want to sell new gTLDs. Almost 150 registrars are currently on the new contract.
But being certified for the TMCH is also a requirement to sell names during the first 90 days of each new gTLD’s general availability, when the Trademark Claims service is running.
Together, the 21 registrars that have done both accounted for 59 million registered gTLD domain names (using August’s official numbers), which translated to 39.5% of the gTLD market.
It’s a high percentage due to the presence of Go Daddy, with its 48.2 million gTLD names. The only other top-10 registrar on the list is 1&1.
Twelve of the 21 registrars on the list had fewer than 40,000 names under management. A couple have fewer than 100.
Only one new gTLD, dotShabaka Registry’s شبكة., is currently in its Trademark Claims period.
The second batch, comprising Donuts’ first seven launches, isn’t due to hit until January 27, giving just a few weeks for the certified list to swell.
There’ll be 33 new gTLD in Claims by the end of February.
The rate at which new registrars are being certified by IBM is not especially encouraging either. Only four have been added in the last month.
Some registrars may of course choose to work via other registrars, as a reseller, rather than getting certified and doing the TMCH integration work themselves.