Porn group threatens lawsuits over new TLDs

Porn trade group the Free Speech Coalition has added its name to the list of organizations saying that ICANN could be sued over its new top-level domains program.
In her latest letter to ICANN, FSC executive director Diane Duke has made a last-ditch attempt to get the proposed .xxx TLD rejected, and not-so-subtly raises the threat of court action:

ICM Registry promises millions of dollars of income for ICANN, assuming that income is not consumed by the inevitable litigation which ICANN will find itself a party to if the proposal is adopted

But she also writes about lawsuits targeting the new TLD program itself.
ICM’s .xxx application is being handled under the rules established for “sponsored” TLDs in 2003, rather than the rules for gTLDs in the Applicant Guidebook that will be enforced in future.
As such, .xxx is not subject to challenges such as the “morality and public order objections” envisioned by the AGB, unlike potential future applications such as .porn. Duke wrote:

What about those in the adult community who wish to apply for a gTLD? With ICANN’s policy development in regards to “Morality and Public Order” will gTLDs be held to a higher standard than the sTLD? Does ICANN believe that it is not liable for this inequity? Any company prepared to invest the substantial moneys necessary to manage a gTLD will surely take ICANN to court to demand equitable standards for their TLD application.

She goes on to suggest that ICM itself may sue to block such applicants.

Does ICANN really believe that the litigious ICM will sit idly by while a .SEX or .PORN gTLD is introduced? Is ICANN so naive to believe that the purveyor of the “sponsored” TLD, who spent in excess of $10 million to bully its way through ICANN’s processes, will stop its threats of litigation with a mere approval of the sTLD?

Is the FSC privy to the TLD aspirations of others in the adult business? Or is this just a lot of hot air born out of desperation? I guess time will tell.
The FSC becomes the third organization to publicly threaten litigation in order to get what it wants out of ICANN.
As I’ve previously reported, the International Olympic Committee and the BITS financial trade group have already made similar noises.
ICANN expects to set aside $60,000 from every $185,000 TLD application fee to deal with “risks” including the expense of defending itself from lawsuits.
The ICANN board is expected to vote on the .xxx application and the new TLD program next Friday. I expect the number of organizations threatening lawsuits will be in double figures by then.

Porn industry “ready for war” with .xxx

The Free Speech Coalition and ICM Registry are poised to do battle over the .xxx top-level domain at next week’s ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia.
The FSC, which has opposed the porn-only domain for years, is trying to rally its troops with a flyer declaring it’s “Ready For War”, illustrated with a photograph apparently of Cartagena’s battlements.
(Apropos, really, given the city’s history fighting off the British and ICM’s habit of recruiting Brits for key positions.)
The FSC said on its blog:

the majority of adult Internet business owners and webmasters do not support being categorized in an Internet ghetto that will cost them millions in extra fees annually and also make it easier for anti-adult entities to censor and block their sites.

The trade group will be represented at the meeting by executive director Diane Duke and chair Jeffrey Douglas.
But ICM will have them out-gunned almost 10-to-1. President Stuart Lawley tells me the company is sending 19 people to the meeting.
Discussion of the .xxx TLD is on the ICANN board’s agenda for its meeting Friday December 10. I think it’s quite likely to be approved at that time.
The main stumbling block for ICM is ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which has expressed reservations about the domain over the years and is firmly opposed to “controversial” TLDs.
Which way the vote swings will depend greatly on what the GAC has to say, and how the power struggle it’s currently engaged in with ICANN pans out.
Here’s part of the FSC’s flyer.

File-sharers try to create .p2p domain

A move to create a .p2p top-level domain outside of the regular DNS root is under way.
Following the outcry over the US government’s seizure of 82 .com domain names this weekend, a group of coders have decided to create a namespace not overseen by ICANN (which had nothing to do with it).
It’s not entirely clear to me how many projects have launched.
There’s a blog over here that talks about a “distributed DNS” that would be “decentralized”, but this new wiki seems to be limited to the idea of launching .p2p as a TLD.
(Interestingly, dot-p2p.org appears to have been registered several days prior to the weekend’s domain name seizures)
The .p2p project plans to create an application that would intercept all DNS requests for .p2p domains and route them via a peer-to-peer network rather than the user’s regular DNS servers.
This presumably means that the entire .p2p zone file could wind up being stored on endpoints, which sounds like a scalability challenge to me.
More problematic is the the issue of “decentralization”, which is of course critical when you’re talking about trustworthy DNS. It can be summed up in this sentence:

“Hello, I’m bankofamerica.com.”

If anybody can claim to own any domain name, you need to be able to figure out who’s telling the truth.
The .p2p initiative seems to be dealing with this by, um, centralizing control over .p2p domain assignments to a free “registrar” at nic.p2p.
To prevent warehousing, registrants would need to prove they already own the string in another TLD in order to register the equivalent .p2p domain.
The project is obviously in its very early stages, as demonstrated by this wiki page, which tries to figure out the problem of decentralization using some kind of trust/voting system.
Here’s an example of the lack of thought that seems to have gone into it so far:

A small conflict, not malicious
1. Alice assigns fbi.p2p -> 1.1.1.1.
2. Bob propagates the assignment to his node, because he trusts Alice.
3. Dave assigns fbi.p2p -> 2.2.2.2. Conflict created.
4. Carol sees the conflict and:
– Decides to just follow the decision of her trustees and assigns fbi.p2p -> 2.2.2.2, or
– Does not create any assignment. There will be a warning and she will try to work out the problem with others.
5. Everyone will try to agree on a solution.

The page also currently includes this beauty:

Botnet-driven attack
1. Chuck owns a botnet and uses 10^6+ zombies to game the system.
2. Shitload of fake request need to be disproved
3. …
4. Problem? :U

The project seems like a heck of a lot of wheel-reinventing in order to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Domain universe breaks through 200 million

VeriSign is reporting that the number of registered domain names worldwide broke through the 200 million mark in the third quarter.
There were 202 million domains at the end of September, according to the company’s Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published today.
Over half of those domains, 103 million names in total, can be found in the .com and .net namespaces that VeriSign manages.
In a not-so-subtle plug for VeriSign’s 2011 growth strategy, the company also declared that the next ten years will be “The Decade of the International Internet”.

In the coming decade, the Internet will continue to become a ubiquitous, multi-cultural tool, fueled in part by the adoption of IDNs. By enabling online content and businesses to be represented in local scripts and languages, IDNs help the Internet to expand the power of technology to regions and cultures, and connect the world in new ways. Over the past year, several new IDNs for ccTLDs have been approved. The next step will be approval of IDNs for generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

The company, of course, plans to apply to ICANN to operate IDN versions of .com and .net, although it has not to date discussed openly which languages or strings it wants.
The VeriSign report also says that ccTLD registrations grew 2.4%, compared to the same quarter last year, to 79.2 million domains.
I expect this growth would have been tempered had it not been for the relaunch of .co, which occurred during the quarter, but it does not merit a mention in the report.
The report also reveals that .info has overtaken .cn in the biggest-TLD charts, although this is due primarily to the plummeting number of registrations in the Chinese ccTLD.

Rejected Bulgarians want ICANN appeal

A handful of Bulgarian internet users have asked ICANN for the right to appeal the rejection of .бг, the proposed Cyrillic country-code top-level domain.
ICANN has received five emails from from the country in the last week, all expressing frustration that .бг (.bg) was turned down with no public explanation and no right to reply.
The string was rejected in May due to what ICANN determined was its confusing visual similarity with Brazil’s ccTLD, .br.
Polls of the Bulgarian people have been unable to find consensus on a suitable alternative, and the government has repeatedly said it would like to apply again or appeal.
Whether to introduce a right of appeal for rejected applicants is one of the topics ICANN is currently soliciting comments on as part of the review of its IDN ccTLD Fast Track program.
Bulgarian freelance developer Stoyan Danev wrote in his comment:

The Bulgarian community has clearly demonstrated that selecting another string is unacceptable and if the proposed one is not approved, Bulgaria will remain WITHOUT an IDN ccTLD. This is really against the ICANN policy of making Internet accessible to everyone.

He questioned whether .бг really is confusable with .br, linking to the Unicode web site, which suggests that б can be confused with 6 but not b, to prove his point.
Another commenter suggested that that the .бг registry could make it a matter of policy to only accept registrations at the second level that include at least one uniquely Cyrillic character.

Olympics tells ICANN to abandon new TLD launch or get sued

The International Olympic Committee has threatened to sue ICANN unless it gives IOC trademarks special protection in its new top-level domains program.
The IOC’s critique of ICANN’s new Applicant Guidebook is the first to be filed by a major organization in the current public comment period.
The organization has accused ICANN of ignoring it, preferring instead to take its policy cues from the domain name industry, and said it should “abandon its current timeline” for the launch.
ICANN currently plans to start accepting TLD applications May 30, 2011.
Calling the guidebook “inherently flawed”, the IOC’s director general Urs Lacotte wrote:

If these critical issues are not fully resolved and ICANN chooses not to place the Olympic trademarks on the reserved names list, then the IOC and its National Olympic Committees are prepared to employ all available legislative, regulatory, administrative and judicial mechanisms to hold ICANN accountable for damage caused to the Olympic movement.

(That language looks like it could have been cut-n-paste from a separate letter from the financial services industry, which I reported on last week).
The IOC said that it has opposed the new TLD program 11 times – asking for its trademarks to be placed on the AGB’s reserved strings lists, but received no response.
Special pleading? Perhaps, but the IOC’s trademarks are already specifically protected by legislation in numerous countries, including the US, UK, Canada and China.
The IOC also wants stronger trademark protection mechanisms, such as mandatory typosquatting protections in sunrise periods and extending dispute proceedings to registrars.
Expect many more such missives to start showing up on the ICANN web site over the next 11 days before the ICANN board of directors meets to approve the AGB in Cartagena.
This may be the last chance many organizations get to ask for the changes they want in the AGB before the first round of new TLD applications opens, and I expect them to seize it with both hands.

Minds + Machines to raise $4.7m for new TLDs

Top Level Domain Holdings plans to raise £3 million ($4.7 million) in a stock sale to help finance the TLD aspirations of its main business, Minds + Machines.
The funds would almost double the cash reserves TLDH has on tap, which currently amount to $5.5 million, according to StockMarketWire.com.
Recently appointed CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a statement that ICANN’s recent decision to allow registries and registrars to vertically integrate had a bearing on the decision to raise funds:

Having reviewed ICANN’s Final Proposed Applicant Guidebook, and in view of the ICANN Board’s historic decision to do away with cross-ownership restrictions between registries and registrars, we believe that the timing is right for additional investment by TLDH. ICANN’s registry-registrar decision means that additional gTLD business models are now viable, and we have already seen a marked increase in interest from prospective new clients. We intend to make sure we have the resources to take advantage of this opportunity.

M+M is already associated with new TLD applications including .gay and .eco, both of which are expected to be contested by other applicants.
TLDH is listed on London’s small-cap Alternative Investment Market. The announcement of the placement can be found here.

Three registrars face the ICANN chop

ICANN has told three registrars they are in breach of their registrar contracts and will lose their accreditation next month unless they rectify the problems.
These registrars, all of which appear to have negligible numbers of gTLD domains under management, are affected:
Mister Name will be shut down if it does not pay its ICANN fees and escrow its Whois data.
Open System Ltd is accused of not having a functioning Whois service.
Best Bulk Domains Inc also doesn’t have a functioning Whois, ICANN said. It also has not been paying its dues and hasn’t maintained accurate contact information for itself.
All three have dates in mid-December to clean up their acts or lose their right to sell gTLD domains.
You can find ICANN’s compliance letters here.

Governments still want new TLD morality veto

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee still wants to block “controversial” new top-level domains on morality grounds.
In a letter to ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, a copy of which I have obtained, the GAC makes it clearer than ever that it wants national laws to play a part in approving new TLDs.
It also suggests that national governments should be able to pre-screen strings before applications are filed, to give applicants “early warning” that they are stepping into controversial waters.
The letter draws the battle lines for what could be some heated debate at ICANN’s meeting in Cartagena next month.
Given that the letter does not appear to have been published by ICANN yet, I will quote liberally.
Under the heading “Universal Resolvability of the DNS”, GAC interim chair Heather Dryden, the Canadian representative on the committee, wrote:

Due to uncertainties regarding the effectiveness of ICANN’s review and objections procedures, a country may feel compelled to block a new gTLD at the national level that it considers either objectionable or that raises national sensitivities.
To date, there do not appear to be controversial top level domains that have resulted in significant or sustained blocking by countries.
The GAC believes it is imperative that the impact on the continued security, stability and universal resolvability of the domain name systems of the potential blocking at the national level of the new gTLD strings that are considered to be objectionable or that raise national sensitivities be assessed prior to introducing new gTLDs.

The letter carries on to say that the GAC will “seek advice from the technical community” on the issue.
Dryden wrote that there should be a “prior review” process that would be able to identify strings that are “contrary to national law, policy or regulation” or “refer to religions, ethnicity, languages or other cultural identifiers that might raise national sensitivities”.
It sounds like the GAC envisions a pre-screening process, before new TLD applications are officially filed, similar to the “expressions of interest” concept that ICANN abandoned in March.
What TLDs this process would capture is unclear. The GAC letter notes by way of example that “several governments restrict the registration of certain terms in their ccTLDs”.
In practical terms, this would raise question marks over TLDs such as “.gay”, which would quite clearly run contrary to the policies of many national governments.
(As I reported earlier this month, the recently relaunched .so registry currently bans “gay”, “lesbian” and related terms at the second level.)
There’s more to be reported on the the implications of this letter, particularly with regards the work of ICANN’s “morality and public order” policy working group and the GAC’s relationship with ICANN in general.
Watch this space.

Afilias to raise .info prices

Afilias has notified ICANN that it plans to raise the maximum annual registration fee for a .info domain next year.
The new price, which will come into effect July 1, 2011, will be $7.42. It’s been $6.75 since November 2008, although the registry often offers deep discounts on new registrations.
Afilias’ contract with ICANN allows it to raise prices by up to 10%, which it appears to be doing in this case.
At least two other other gTLDs have already said they plan to up their maximum prices next year.
NeuStar’s .biz fee will rise by $0.45 to $7.30 in April. PIR’s .org will start costing registrars a maximum of $7.21 at the same time.