Rugby board tries for .rugby with TLDH

The International Rugby Board has applied to ICANN for the generic top-level domain .rugby with Top Level Domain Holdings, the IRB announced today.
It appears to be a defensive as well as offensive move, judging by the press release.
It’s about “protecting and promoting Rugby’s values and ethos” and ensuring .rugby “resides within the sport”, according to IRB chairman Bernard Lapasset.
The application will be filed in partnership with TLDH, as well as a new company called ROAR Domains, which appears to be a part of a Kiwi sports marketing agency.
If the bid is successful, TLDH subsidiary Minds + Machines will provide the registry back-end.
The IRB is the international body for rugby associations which organizes the Rugby World Cup.
There are already a few .sport bids, and the Australian Football League has applied for a .afl dot-brand, but I think .rugby may be the first sport-specific gTLD application to be announced.

TAS down for at least another week

If you’re just joining us, welcome to the ICANN community.
The TLD Application System will be offline for another week, possibly more, as ICANN struggles to deal with the fallout from its embarrassing data leakage bug.
ICANN had promised an update today on the timing of the reopening of TAS, which was taken offline April 12 just 12 hours before the new gTLD application filing deadline arrived.
But what applicants got instead was a promise to provide another timing update a week from now.
Chief operating officer Akram Atallah said in a statement:

identifying which applicants may have been affected by the technical glitch, and determining who may have been able to see someone else’s data, require extensive analysis of a very large data set. This is a time-consuming task, but it is essential to ensure that all potentially affected applicants are accurately identified and notified.
Until that process is complete, we are unable to provide a specific date for reopening the application system.
In order to give all applicants notice and an opportunity to review and complete their applications, upon reopening the system we will keep it open for at least five business days.
No later than 27 April 2012 we will provide an update on the reopening of the system and the publication of the applied-for new domain names.

So the best-case scenario, if these dates hold up, would see TAS coming back online Monday, April 30 and closing Friday, May 4.
The April 30 target date for the Big Reveal is clearly no longer possible.
ICANN has stated previously that it expects to take two weeks between the closing of the application window and the revelation of the list of gTLDs being applied for.
The Big Reveal could therefore be postponed until mid-May, almost a month from now.
Any applicant who has already booked flights and hotels in order to attend one of the various reveal events currently being planned by third parties may find themselves out of pocket.
Regular ICANN participants are of course accustomed to delay.
ICANN’s image problem now is rather with the hundreds of companies interfacing with the organization for the first time, applying for new gTLDs, which may be wondering whether this kind of thing is par for the course.
Well, yes, frankly, it is.
That said, the time to avoid this problem was during testing, before the application window opened in January.
Now that the bug has manifested, it’s probably in most people’s best interests for ICANN to fully understand went wrong and what impact it could have had on which applicants. This takes time.

ICANN vows to fight TAS bug “monkey business”

ICANN chief security officer Jeff Moss has pledged to fully disclose what new gTLD application data was leaked to which users via the TLD Application System security bug.
Talking to ICANN media chief Brad White in a video interview, Moss said:

We’re putting everyone on notice: we know what file names and user names were displayed to what people who were logged in and when. We want to do this very publicly because we want to prevent any monkey business. We are able to reconstruct what file names and user names were displayed.

ICANN has been going through its logs and will know “very specifically” what data was visible to which TAS users, he said.
The bug, he confirmed, was related to file deletions:

Under certain circumstances that were hard to replicate users that had previously deleted files could end up seeing file names of users that had uploaded a file… Certain data was being revealed to users that were not seeking data, it was just showing up on their screen.

The actual contents of the files uploaded to TAS were not visible to unauthorized users, he confirmed. There are also no reasons to believe any outside attacks occurred, he said.
He refused to reveal how many applicants were affected by the vulnerability, saying that ICANN has to first double-check its data in order to verify the full extent of the problem.
The interview reveals that the bug could manifest itself in a number of different ways. Moss said:

The problem has several ways it can express itself… we would solve it one way and it would appear another way, we would solve it another way and it would appear a third way. At some point we were just uncomfortable that we understood the core issue and that’s when we took the system offline.

TAS was taken down April 12, just 12 hours before the new gTLD application window closed.
ICANN has been providing daily updates ever since, and has promised to reveal tonight when TAS will reopen for business, for how long, and whether April 30 Big Reveal day has been postponed.
Applicants first reported the bug March 19, but ICANN did not realize the extent of the problem until later, Moss said.

In hindsight now we realized the 19th was the first expression of this problem, but at the time the information displayed made no sense to the applicant, it was just random numbers… at that point there were no dots to connect.

Here’s the video:

How the world’s biggest brands use new gTLDs

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As well as confirming the long-held belief that brand owners see little value in defensive registrations — many not even choosing to benefit from residual traffic — the survey also revealed which brands are more likely to develop their sites, which are most vulnerable to cybersquatting, and which appear to care the least about enforcing their brands.
We also examined how “cybersquatters” use the domain names they register, with some surprising results.
Privacy/proxy registration is not nearly as prevalent as many believe, our study found, and a significant portion of registrants have made no effort to monetize the domains they own that match famous brand names.
This extensive, fully illustrated report includes:
A comparison of defensive registration trends across 100 brands in six new gTLDs. How many domains are owned by the respective brands and how many are owned by third parties? How many are reserved by the registry and how many are still available for registration?

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Full survey results. Subscribers have full access to the survey results, which include details of which brand-domains belong to third parties, which exhibit potentially damaging behavior, and which are currently available for registration.
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First TAS security bug details revealed

The data leakage bug in ICANN’s TLD Application System was caused when applicants attempted to delete files they had uploaded, the organization has revealed.
In his latest daily update into the six-day-old TAS downtime, chief operating officer Akram Atallah wrote this morning:

ICANN’s review of the technical glitch that resulted in the TLD application system being taken offline indicates that the issue stems from a problem in the way the system handled interrupted deletions of file attachments. This resulted in some applicants being able to see some other applicants’ file names and user names.

This sounds rather like an applicant’s file names may have become visible to others if the applicant attempted to delete the file (perhaps in order to upload a revised version) and the deletion process was cut off.
Speculating further, this also sounds like exactly the kind of problem that would have been exacerbated by the heavy load TAS was under on April 12, as lots of applicants simultaneously scrambled to get their gTLD bids finalized to deadline.
Rather than being a straightforward web app, TAS is accessed via Citrix XenApp virtual machine software, which provides users with an encrypted tunnel into a Windows box running the application itself.
As you might expect with this set-up, performance issues have been observed for weeks. Every applicant logged into TAS last Thursday reported that it was running even more slowly than usual.
A security bug that only emerged under user load would have been relatively tricky to test for, compared to regular penetration testing.
But ICANN had some good news for applicants this morning: it thinks it will be able to figure out not only whose file names were leaked, but also who they were leaked to. Atallah wrote:

We are also conducting research to determine which applicants’ file names and user names were potentially viewable, as well as which applicants had the ability to see them.

This kind of disclosure would obviously be beneficial to applicants whose data was compromised.
It may also prove surprising and discomfiting to some applicants who were unwittingly on the receiving end of this confidential data but didn’t notice the rogue files on their screens at the time.
ICANN still plans to provide an update on when TAS will reopen for business this Friday. It will also confirm at the time whether it is still targeting April 30 for the Big Reveal.

US reopens IANA contract re-bid

ICANN’s key contract with the US government is open for proposals again, a month after ICANN was told its first bid wasn’t up to the expected standards.
The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration yesterday posted a revised request for proposals, looking for a new IANA contractor.
The IANA contract is what gives ICANN its operational powers over the domain name system root database.
Based on a quick comparison of the new RFP with the old, there have been few notable, substantial changes, giving little indication of why ICANN’s previous response fell short.
The RFP has a strong emphasis on accountability, transparency, separation of ICANN/IANA powers, conflicts of interest and the “global public interest”, as before.
While many of the requirements have been edited, clarified or shifted around, I haven’t been able to spot any major additions or subtractions.
The RFP now envisages a contract running from October 1, 2012 until September 30, 2015, with two two-year renewal options, bringing the expiry date to September 30, 2019.
The deadline for responses is May 31.
The current contract had been due to expire at the end of March but the NTIA unexpected extended it by six months just before ICANN’s meeting in Costa Rica kicked off last month.
The NTIA said it canceled the first RFP “because we received no proposals that met the requirements” but neither it nor ICANN has yet provided any specifics.
Over a month ago, at an ICANN press conference in Costa Rica, CEO Rod Beckstrom said: “We were invited to have a debriefing with [the NTIA] to learn more about this. Following that discussion we will share any information we are allowed to share.”
Since then, no additional information has been forthcoming.
The new RFP can be read here. For comparison, the old version can be downloaded here.

New gTLD filing deadline delayed again

It looks like new gTLD applicants are in for more delays after ICANN announced that it will not reopen its TLD Application System tomorrow as planned.
In a statement tonight, chief operating officer Akram Atallah said that the recently discovered data leakage vulnerability has been fixed, but the fix is still being tested.

We believe that we have fixed the glitch, and we are testing it to make sure.
ICANN is committed to reopening the application system as soon as we can confirm that the problem has been resolved and we have had proper time for testing.
We also want to inform all applicants, before we reopen, whether they have been affected by the glitch. We are still gathering information so we can do that.
Accordingly, the application system will not reopen tomorrow.

ICANN shut down TAS last Thursday, just 12 hours before the new gTLD application filing deadline, after discovering a persistent bug that allowed some applicants to see the names of files uploaded by other applicants.
It had planned to open TAS again tomorrow and close it on Friday. However, that’s looking increasingly unlikely.
Atallah said that ICANN “will provide an update on the timing of the reopening no later than Friday, 20 April at 23.59 UTC.”
While ICANN said yesterday that it was still targeting April 30 for its Big Reveal event, subject to change, that’s now looking like an ambitious goal.

ICANN will alert gTLD security bug victims

ICANN plans to inform each new top-level domain applicant whether they were affected by the security vulnerability in its TLD Application System, according to its latest update.
The organization has also confirmed that it is still targeting April 30 for the Big Reveal day, when it publishes (deliberately) the gTLDs being applied for and the names of the applicants.
This morning’s TAS status update, penned by chief operating officer Akram Atallah, does not add much that we did not already know about the data leakage bug. It states:

An intensive review has produced no evidence that any data beyond the file names and user names could be accessed by other users.
We are currently reviewing the data to confirm which applicants were affected. As soon as the data is confirmed, we will inform all applicants whether they were affected.

ICANN staff and outside consultants have been working all weekend to figure out what went wrong, who it affected, and how it can be fixed.
The organization still intends to announce tonight whether it has fixed the problem to the point where it’s happy to reopen TAS to registered users tomorrow. It’s also sticking to is Friday extended submission deadline.

MyTLD has spare TAS accounts for new gTLDs

The new gTLD consultancy MyTLD has some ICANN TLD Application System slots going begging.
If for some reason you need to file a gTLD application and you haven’t already registered in TAS, this is what MyTLD says it is now offering:

(i) gTLD application writing and submission (ii) TAS account for the gTLD application (iii) Newly formed company corresponding to the TAS account

The company is marketing it as a bundled service.
MyTLD is most closely associated with the most prominent .music application. It’s run by Music.us owner Constantine Roussos and former ICANN internationalized domain name expert Tina Dam.
The offer is fleshed out a bit more on MyTLD’s blog.
I hear the company was shopping these TAS slots around privately prior to April 12 too, so I don’t think that it is an effort to capitalize on the security-related delays ICANN is currently experiencing.
However, one has to ask why the offer is only being publicized after the original official deadline for new gTLD applications has already passed.
TAS is expected to re-open for business on Tuesday, and close on Friday.

ICANN reopens defensive registration debate

ICANN’s board of directors wants more policy work done on the problem of defensive domain name registrations.
In a resolution passed at a meeting on Tuesday, the board’s newly created New gTLD Program Committee, made up exclusively of non-conflicted directors, said it:

directs staff to provide a briefing paper on the topic of defensive registrations at the second level and requests the GNSO to consider whether additional work on defensive registrations at the second level should be undertaken

The decision was made following the debate about “defensive” gTLD applications ICANN opened up in February, prompted by a letter from US Department of Commerce assistant secretary Larry Strickling.
That in turn followed the two Congressional hearings in December, lobbied for and won by the Association of National Advertisers and its Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight.
So this week’s decision is a pretty big win for the intellectual property lobby. It’s managed to keep the issue of stronger second-level trademark protection in new gTLDs alive despite ICANN essentially putting it to bed when it approved the new gTLD program last June.
The GNSO could of course decide that no further work needs to be done, so the champagne corks should probably stay in place for the time being.
At the same meeting on Tuesday, the ICANN board committee voted to disregard the GNSO Council’s recent decision to grand extra protections to the International Olympic Committee, Red Cross and Red Crescent movements. The rationale for this decision has not yet been published.