AOL loses ICANN accreditation

AOL, one of the first five companies to become an ICANN-accredited registrar, appears to have let its accreditation expire.
The former internet giant is no longer listed on ICANN’s Internic registrar page, and DotAndCo.net’s data shows it lost its .com, .net and .org accreditations on April 27.
It’s hardly surprising. AOL’s profits are falling and it has been reorganizing itself ever since Time Warner returned it to life as an independent company last year.
It’s noteworthy because AOL was one of the first five registrars to challenge Network Solutions’ monopoly, when ICANN introduced competition to the domain name market in 1999.
In April 1999, the company participated in ICANN’s limited registrar “test-bed” experiment, alongside CORE, France Telecom, Melbourne IT and Register.com.
But domain names were never a big deal at the company.
AOL peaked at about 150,000 domains a few years ago and tailed off to a little more than a dozen at the end of 2009. Apparently, the company has decided to let its accreditation simply expire.

The top ten dumbest .xxx public comment subject lines

The American Family Association is now responsible for something approaching 10,000 emails urging ICANN to can ICM Registry’s .xxx proposal.
On Thursday, the AFA asked its membership to email ICANN’s public comment forum in support of “Option #3”, which would allow it to ignore the Independent Review Panel ruling and kill .xxx for good.
It thoughtfully included suggested text for the body of the email, but encouraged its members to “(Please enter your own subject line)”.
I don’t doubt that plenty of AFA members know what it was they were commenting on, but it’s clear from their chosen subject lines that plenty more had absolutely no idea.
Here’s a Letterman-style rundown of the top-ten least-clueful subject lines I’ve come across so far.

10. How much more sin will God allow?????????????
9. Judgment day is coming
8. Dear Sir!
7. stop the cause of all of the sex crimes commited today!
6. Registered Sex Offenders — You may be next, Please proceed with caution!
5. Don’t let an ADULT bookstore enter my computer! Support option #3.
4. P*rn Channel Explosion – Option #3
3. XXX.com
2. No more porn on TV!
1. (Please enter your own subject line.)

Have you seen any better/crazier ones? Let me know.
The public comment period ends, thankfully, tomorrow.

ICANN accused of Twitter faux pas over Arabic domains

The registry behind one of the new Arabic-script ccTLDs has sharply criticised ICANN for the way it introduced internationalized domain names to the root this week.
Adrian Kinderis, CEO of AusRegistry, accused ICANN, specifically those responsible for the IANA function, of “embarrassing incompetency” and cultural insensitivity.
Kinderis’ beef is that IANA added the three new Arabic IDNs to the root without giving their local managers so much as a headsup.
AusRegistry is the back-end provider for امارات. the United Arab Emirates’ new IDN ccTLD, as well as its ASCII original.
“I was alarmed to discover that the relevant ccTLD Managers were only notified many hours after the fact, long after the same IANA staff member had broadcast the news on a personal Twitter account,” he blogged.
While Kinderis was diplomatic enough not to name names, he’s talking about IANA registry manager Kim Davies, who broke the web-changing news on Wednesday with a tweet.
“This was an inappropriate manner in which to announce an event of this importance,” Kinderis wrote. “It displays a disturbing lack of understanding and a complete disregard of the cultural and political significance of this event within the Arabic world.”
He goes on to point out that the announcement was made during Saudi Arabia’s weekend, leaving ccTLD managers scrambling to get their marketing in place on their day off.
I could keep quoting. It’s a fairly extraordinary attack on aspects of ICANN’s culture. Go have a read.

Christians try new strategy in anti-.xxx campaign

(UPDATED) Anti-porn protesters have changed tack in their campaign to get ICANN to kill the .xxx top-level domain.
The followers of crusading PornHarms.com founder Pat Trueman are currently lobbying ICANN’s public comment forums with messages that make them look a little like the pornographers themselves:

The .XXX sponsor, ICM, never satisfied the sponsorship requirements and criteria for a sponsored Top Level Domain. The ICANN Board denied ICM’s application for the .XXX sTLD on the merits in an open and transparent forum.

The copy-paste letter paraphrases text from ICANN’s process options report in much the same way as the pro-porn Free Speech Coalition’s Diane Duke did.
Trueman’s previous effort centered on the charge that pornography is intrinsically harmful, a subject well outside ICANN’s remit.
The fact that the new campaign is orchestrated by Trueman is revealed by Trueman himself and this comment from a supporter.
So… a vehemently anti-porn group is demanding ICANN rejects .xxx on the basis that it is not supported by the porn industry?
You’ve got to admire the chutzpah.
UPDATE: Another Christian group, the American Family Association, has opened the anti-.xxx floodgates, adding hundreds of new comments to ICANN’s forums in the last couple of hours.
The American Family Association is an unabashed “champion of Christian activism” whose mantra is “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”
Not really the kind of people you’d want to be stuck in an elevator with, never mind dictating internet policy.

Did Michael Dell just back ICANN’s DNS-CERT?

Michael Dell may have just backed ICANN’s call for a global DNS Computer Emergency Response Center, in a speech at a security conference.
Techworld is reporting that Dell and/or his CIO, Jim Stikeleather, referred to ICANN’s role in security during an address at the EastWest Institute Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit.
It’s not entirely clear whether the following quote is attributable to Stikeleather or Dell himself; my guess is Stikeleather:

ICANN manages the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, headquartered in California, is heavily US centric. There is a need to have more global participation on domain management as well as the future planning and next generation infrastructure needed to address the changes that will affect the Internet usage in years to come.

On the surface, it looks like a criticism of ICANN, but it could quite easily be interpreted as backing ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom’s recent call for the establishment of a global DNS-CERT to coordinate threats to the domain name system.
The quote immediately preceding it in the Techworld article is starkly reminiscent of Hot Rod’s controversial comments at the Governmental Advisory Committee at the Nairobi meeting in March.
“There is a preponderance of evidence that indicates cybercriminals could inflict major outages to portions of our critical infrastructure with minimal effort,” Jim Stikeleather reportedly said.
He was speaking at a session entitled “How do we build international cybersecurity consensus?”, which is a question Beckstrom has been asking in relation to the DNS-CERT idea.
A public comment forum on the DNS-CERT business case ICANN had presented ended a couple of weeks ago.
If I were to go out on a limb, I would say that a rough consensus emerged that such an entity was probably a good idea, and that ICANN could play a role, but that other bodies, such as DNS-OARC, might do a better job of coordinating it.

The internet is polyglot as full IDNs go live

Click this: http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/
It’s the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, owner of one of the world’s first fully non-ASCII internet domain names.
If you hover over the link, you might see the Punycode translation appear in your browser’s bottom bar, even though the href itself is in Arabic script.
Thanks to ICANN, from today the Latin script no longer has a stranglehold on the domain name system.
I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell you what the three newly created internationalized domain name ccTLDs are, because none of the software on my machine wants to let me use them in a sentence without switching my cursor to right-to-left editing mid-way through the word or changing the characters entirely, and after ten minutes of beating my head against the keyboard I gave up.
Anyway, the new domains represent Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
They were all recently approved by ICANN as part of its “fast-track” IDN ccTLD process, which promises to give countries the equivalent of their ASCII ccTLD in their native script.
After 25 years, the English language no longer has exclusive rights on the DNS. Not what I’d call a “fast” track, but we got there eventually.
ICANN has more here.

Iron Mountain gets into bed with CRS

Iron Mountain and Central Registry Solutions have made a deal to referrer prospective new gTLD applicants to each other’s services.
The companies said that Iron Mountain will refer wannabe registries to CRS for registry services and CRS will refer them to Iron Mountain for data escrow services.
It strikes me that the deal is probably better news for Iron Mountain, given that CRS is actively engaged in seeking out new TLD applicants to partner with whereas Iron Mountain, presumably, is not.
Iron Mountain already does a lot of work with registries and registrars that have to escrow their Whois information under the terms of their ICANN contracts.
Some of these contracts specify the company as the only escrow agent allowed, whereas the current Draft Applicant Guidebook for new gTLD applicants is less prescriptive.
CRS is a partnership of Network Solutions and CentralNIC, manager of the .la ccTLD and a handful of geographical second-level domains such as uk.com and us.com.

China connection to Go Daddy WordPress attacks

Go Daddy’s hosting customers are under attack again, and this time it looks like it’s more serious.
Reports are surfacing that WordPress sites hosted at Go Daddy, and possibly also Joomla and plain PHP pages there, are being hacked to add drive-by malware downloads to them.
Go Daddy has acknowledged the attacks, blaming outdated WordPress installations and weak FTP passwords, and has put up a page with instructions for cleaning the infection.
Last week, I was told that the first round of attacks was very limited. Today, the attackers seem to have stepped it up a notch.
As a result, Go Daddy could find itself in a similar situation to Network Solutions, which had a couple of thousand customer sites hacked a few weeks back.
The attacks appear to be linked to a well-known crime gang with a Chinese connection.
According to Sucuri, when a Go Daddy-hosted WordPress page is hacked, JavaScript is injected that attempts to redirect surfers to a drive-by attack from the domain kdjkfjskdfjlskdjf.com (don’t go there).
This domain was registered with BizCN.com, an ICANN-accredited Chinese registrar, but its name servers appear to have been created purely for the attack.
The registrant’s email address is hilarykneber@yahoo.com. This connects the attack to the “Kneber” botnet, a successful criminal enterprise that has been operating since at least December 2009.
A Netwitness study revealed the network comprised at least 74,000 hacked computers, and that the bulk of Kneber’s command and control infrastructure is based in China.
Since Kneber is known to be operated by a financially motivated gang, and it’s by no means certain that they’re Chinese, it’s probably inaccurate to suggest there’s something political going on.
However, I will note that Go Daddy was quite vocal about its withdrawal from the .cn Chinese domain name registration market.
Network Solutions, while it was quieter, also stopped selling .cn domains around the same time as the Chinese government started enforcing strict registrant ID rules last December.

Twenty registrars canned in 2009

ICANN shut down 20 domain name registrars in 2009, and is on course to do the same this year, according to numbers released today.
That’s up from seven de-accreditations in 2008, and twice as many as the previous record year, 2003.
ICANN can withdraw accreditation from a registrar, stopping its ability to register domains, if the registrar fails to escrow Whois information or pay its ICANN dues.
It looks like 2010 could well see a similar level of de-accreditations.
Five registrars were shuttered in the first quarter, and ICANN has sent warnings to five more this month.

Remember CFIT? Buy its domain for $250

Remember CFIT? The Coalition For ICANN Transparency is an ironically opaque organization created and backed by Momentous.ca, owner of Pool.com.
It emerged in 2005 to sue ICANN and VeriSign on antitrust grounds, around the same time as they were negotiating .com price increases.
I’d almost forgotten CFIT existed, until CEO Mark McLaughlin mentioned it on VeriSign’s Q1 earnings conference call last night.
The antitrust lawsuit is still pending, after CFIT won an appeal last June. Tenacious organization indeed.
Its domain name did not have the same longevity, however.
CFIT.info now belongs to a domainer, who appears to have picked it up last December. I offered him twenty bucks for it today and he countered with a $250 offer, which is a bit rich for me.
Whatever PageRank it accrued from all its press coverage appears to have dried up, and its parking page is not especially inspiring.
Any takers?