Recent Posts
- Com Laude buys Fairwinds
- Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end
- Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad
- Registry to release one-letter domains tomorrow
- New ICANN funding rules will cost smaller ccTLDs more
- .ai rival lines up gTLD bid
- Team Internet lays off 200
- Sixteen more orgs vie for cheap gTLDs, but…
- So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?
- Cloud gTLD gets launch dates
- Governments say new gTLD program “credibility” at stake
- NIXI planning doomed new gTLD bids
- AI experts replace Chapman on ICANN board
- RDRS may not be dead
- Single-letter .com lawsuit thrown out of court
- Golding challenges McCarthy for Nominet board seat
- Three applicants qualify for cheapo gTLDs
- Blockchain crisis looming for new gTLD next round
- Two more dot-brands leave Verisign for GoDaddy
- ICANN looking at new bulk reg rules
- Reseller loss hits Tucows’ DUM but not revenue
- GoDaddy counts cost of losing .co deal
- Wine producers worried about new gTLDs
- Goodyear tires of its dot-brand
- Team Internet loses Radix to Tucows
- ICANN’s “review of reviews” kicks off
- Huge registrars flee from RDRS
- Namecheap loses attempt to bring back .org price caps
- Registrar shamed for alleged crypto abuse neglect
- Poblete’s ICANN board seat safe
- .com off to strong start in Q3
- .my is growing like crazy
- ICANN settles $77 million sexual harassment suit
- Chinese domain spikiness ends in first half
- Registrars agree to higher ICANN fees
- ICANN to review reviews after review review request fails
- Got junk? June’s biggest gTLD growers do
- ICANN ditches Oman due to Middle-East conflicts
- ICANN’s mighty overlord flexes on transparency
- ICANN faces first pushback over DEI U-turn
- Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program
- presidenttrump.xxx among thousands of dead .xxx domains suddenly springing to life
- One of the dumbest gTLDs just switched back-ends
- GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet
- Governments erect bulk-reg barrier to new gTLD next round
- Little interest in cheapo gTLD program
- US government opposes most new gTLDs
- GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital
- Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed
- .TOP promises to play nice on DNS abuse
- Court denies ICANN’s #MeToo “cover up” attempt
- Launch dates for two more Amazon gTLDs revealed
- An end to “Club Med for geeks” ICANN?
- Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks
- .io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty
- Big .gdn registrar at risk
- ICANN “reaffirms its commitment to diversity and inclusion”
- ICANN kills off diversity and inclusion
- Kaufmann picked for ICANN board
- Conflicted? STFU under new ICANN rules
- .hot is for hookers? Amazon’s first premium regs revealed
- Gname adds another 200 registrars
- New Pope’s .com domain was registered the day Francis died
- Two deadbeat registrars get their ICANN marching orders
- DotMusic has sold a lot of names, but not many are turned on
- .med is a deeply weird gTLD, but it wants to be more normal
- ICANN cuts off money to UASG
- Web.com getting dumped
- .es and .pt riding out massive power outage
- .com is back as Verisign discounts bear fruit
- Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted
- Verisign gave Trump $100,000
- Private Whois requests hit new low after Tucows quits RDRS
- Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours
- The Soviet Union might be safe after all
- Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”
- Facebook thinks ICANN is a bit rubbish
- ICANN spending $365,000 a year on coffee and booze
- Regulator going after suicide site that even Epik banned
- .ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month
- Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio
- UK’s Nigel Hickson has died
- .blog registry ordered to change name to Knock Knock RDAP There
- WordPress buys Canadian, swaps CentralNic for CIRA
- Latest ICANN salary porn ruins my terrible pun
- .co deal worth $77 million up for grabs
- I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan
- Sales and profits dip at Team Internet
- Four deadbeat registrars get terminated
- “No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS
- ICANN to kill off 60-day domain transfer lock
- Lancaster bags up its dot-brand
- Google readying its next batch of gTLD launches?
- NomCom confirms Americans rejected from ICANN board
- Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications
- Registry makes .ai an option for Koreans
- it.com now bigger than Guatemala
- ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program
- Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board
- Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD
- Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot
- Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand
- Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning
- .ai channel doubles under new management
- Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io
- As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains
- Second new gTLD contention set revealed
- UK intros global domain takedown law
- No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat
- Registries have started shutting down Whois
- ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist
- .com could return to growth this quarter
- Could Musk’s DOGE kill off D3’s .doge?
- $2 million Christmas bonus for ICANN
- Another VW car dot-brand crashes out
- Largest back-end switch EVER as GoDaddy loses deal
- Yeah, we got phished, ICANN admits after crypto hack
- ICANN hacked to promote crypto scam
- Super Bowl a bit of a dud for .com?
- More gloom predicted for .com
- These are the .gov domains Trump has deleted so far
- Did Trump just create the world’s next ccTLD?
- $3,000 to do a Whois lookup?
- PIR to join GlobalBlock, but its crown jewel won’t
- LA wildfire victims get domain deletes delay
Hostway wants non-existent domain patent
Hostway, the large web hosting company, has applied for a US patent on a system of intercepting and redirecting requests for non-existent domains names.
The application describes “A system and method for controlling internet traffic controls internet traffic directed to a non-existing domain in a centralized manner.”
It appears to cover a service that could be offered to local ISPs, enabling them to show their users monetized search pages rather than domain-not-found error messages.
Under the system, ISPs would intercept NXDOMAIN responses to their users’ DNS lookups.
Instead of passing the error on to the browser, the ISP would consult a centralized controller for the IP address of a context-appropriate landing page to redirect the user to.
It’s not at all clear to me whether Hostway is using the technology or has plans to do so. The application was filed in October 2008.
ISPs using NXDOMAIN substitution to monetize error traffic is widespread but controversial.
ICANN president Rod Beckstrom strongly complained about the practice, which also has security implications, during a rant at the Nairobi meeting last month.
VeriSign’s Site Finder, and later Cameroon’s .cm, both controversially did similar things when they “wildcarded” non-existent domains at the TLD registry level.
Other interesting US patent applications published today include:
20100106650 – covering Go Daddy’s auction services.
20100106793 and 20100106794 – covering email forwarding under Go Daddy’s private registration services.
20100106731 – assigned to VeriSign, covering a method of offering alternative domain names for registration when a buyer’s first choice is unavailable.
AusRegistry scores Japanese .brand deal
AusRegistry, the .au registry, has inked a deal with Brights Consulting, a company offering .brand domain services to the Japanese corporate market.
The company said the deal will mean AusRegistry will provide the technical back-end for any successful new gTLD applications that Brights manages to secure.
Other companies competing for new gTLD business include old hands VeriSign, Neustar and Afilias, as well as hungry newcomers such as Minds + Machines.
AusRegistry currently manages Australia’s .au, .qa for Qatar and .ae for the United Arab Emirates.
Brights is a corporate, rather than retail, ICANN registrar. I may be wrong, but it looks like the company counts Sony among its clients.
Could there be a .sony on the horizon?
.co enters pricey global sunrise
Trademark holders can from today apply for their brands as .co domain names, even if they do not do business in Colombia.
The second stage of .CO Internet’s sunrise period allows owners of non-Colombian trademarks to apply for their domains through one of 10 chosen launch registrars.
Prices vary from $225 with OpenSRS to $335 through Dotster, with most deals comprising non-refundable application fees plus first-year registration. Go Daddy is charging $299.99 and Network Solutions is charging $279.99.
With the possible exception of .xxx, I’ve got a suspicion that this could be one of the last “generic” TLD launches with such expensive sunrise periods.
It’s quite possible there could be pricing pressure if ICANN quickly approves a few hundred new gTLDs next year. If each charges ~$300 for a pre-launch, it could cause some some registrants to rethink their defensive registration strategies.
The .co sunrise ends June 10. General availability begins July 20.
Kurds seek new cultural gTLD
A Kurdish company will apply to ICANN for a .kurd or .kur top-level domain to represent cultural Kurds.
The application will join the likes of .cat, and expected gTLD applications including .scot, .cym, .bzh, and .gal, which promise representation to “cultural”, but non-geographic, user bases.
The potential community for .kurd is around 35 million people, according to Wikipedia, over three times the size of the international Catalan community represented by .cat.
While many Kurds live in middle-eastern nations such as Iran and Iraq, there are almost 14 million living in Turkey, likely soon to be part of the European Union, according to the CIA World Factbook.
I’ve been told that a non-profit cultural gTLD needs only about 10,000 registrations to stay afloat; this seems easily achievable.
The dotKurd application has a web site and a Twitter feed.
The brains behind the TLD is a German-resident software developer called Aras Noori. He recently wrote to ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom, outlining his plan.
Two-letter .info auctions get go-ahead
ICANN has approved Afilias’ request to auction off its reserve of one and two-letter .info domain names.
The company seems to be planning to allocate the names both at auction and through a request-for-proposals process that would see registrants promise to develop and market their .info sites.
Any big partnerships could provide a welcome profile boost to .info, which has been around for a decade but still only grows about as much in a year as .com does in a month.
While auctions could also bring a nice windfall to the company, Afilias can expect to come under pressure from certain trademark holders to keep their brands off the market.
Volkswagen’s lawyers apparently “threatened every action in the book” to keep vw.biz out of Neustar’s allocation process for two-letter .biz names last year.
ICM launches .xxx letter-writing campaign
ICM Registry looks like it has taken a leaf from its opponents’ playbook, and is encouraging supporters of the proposed .xxx top-level domain to send form letters to ICANN.
The company has revamped its web site this week, to make it look a little less 2005, and part of the revamp is this page, which allows users to quickly send emails supporting the TLD to ICANN’s public comment forum, which ends May 10.
The letter addresses the substantial concerns of the comment period — namely, how ICANN should process the .xxx application in the light of February’s IRP decision, which says ICANN was wrong to reject .xxx in 2007.
In recent weeks, Christian groups and the pro-porn Free Speech Coalition have organized campaigns aimed at protesting .xxx. Both campaigns have resulted in large numbers of emails flooding ICANN.
The Christian letters are way off-topic, basically just anti-porn rants.
While the FSC letters do address ICANN’s question, they largely challenge the idea that .xxx has community support. This may end up not being a consideration for the Board.
By contrast, ICM’s letters go directly to ICANN’s core mantras of accountability and equality.
Its letter says: “Picking and choosing elements of the Panel’s declaration, or adding unnecessary procedural steps in adopting the review’s findings, would be a clear sign to the global Internet community that the organization cannot be relied upon to do its job fairly and objectively.”
The new ICM web site does, however, bear the new slogan “It’s time for adult websites to self label”.
It seems to me that this could be quite easily interpreted as a call for all adult web sites to use .xxx, which I’m pretty sure is not ICM’s intention.
ICANN picks Colombia for December meeting
ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom has just confirmed via Twitter that Cartagena, Colombia has been picked for the organization’s December meeting.
Judging from US State Department reports, the country is nowadays not nearly as scary as it was when Joan Wilder made a flying visit to rescue her sister in 1984.
Still, I’m guessing we’ll still see a little bit of that nervousness and paranoia that usually rears its head when ICANN heads for cities with a reputation for violent crime.
Terrorism concerns in Kenya caused many US stakeholders to stay at home and brave unreasonably early mornings participating remotely.
Even the choice of Mexico City caused a bit of a stir last year.
Personally, I’d love to see ICANN hold a meeting in Oakland or Baltimore, just to see what the security advisory looks like.
Porn group starts anti-XXX campaign
Now that the Christians appear to have quietened down, the adult entertainment industry has unleashed its own letter-writing campaign aimed at crippling ICM Registry’s bid for the .xxx TLD.
The Free Speech Coalition has started urging its members to lobby ICANN with emails demanding that the .xxx proposal is rejected.
The front page of its web site started carrying the call to action earlier today, already resulting in over a dozen form complaints.
The anti-porn complaints that have flooded ICANN’s forums for the last week focussed largely on the alleged harmful effects of porn, and will probably be politely ignored.
But unlike the Christians, the FSC has read the background documents – which request comments on how ICANN should process ICM’s application – and its letters are therefore on-topic
They urge ICANN to “Adopt Option #3” by agreeing with the dissenting minority view of the Independent Review Panel that recently ruled ICANN was unfair to reject ICM back in 2007.
“Regardless of the option chosen, I ask that ICANN continue to consider the widespread opposition of the sponsored community in any further decisions concerning a .XXX sTLD,” the letters add.
The campaign is not unexpected, but it won’t make ICANN’s board of directors’ decision any easier. After all, .xxx is ostensibly a “sponsored” TLD, and a significant voice within its potential customer base does not appear to want it.
There may also be other power games at play.
ICM president Stuart Lawley claimed during his IRP cross-examination in September that the FSC had offered to support ICM in 2003, but only if it could control the sponsoring organization and collect the associated $10 per domain per year.
The ICANN comment period runs until May 10. The FSC’s own comments, from boss Diane Duke, are here.
ICANN publishes Whois reform wish-list
ICANN’s latest stab at reforming Whois could lead to lots of useful new features, from more comprehensive search to more uniform privacy services.
The organization has released a staff report, “Inventory of WHOIS Service Requirements”, outlining 12 technical areas where Whois could be improved.
If the ideas were implemented, Whois records could one day contain your Twitter address or instant messaging screen name, as well as the current set of data.
The proposals could also lead to registrant search features in Whois as standard, allowing users to pull up a list of all the domains registered by any given individual.
That kind of service is only currently available at a premium price from the likes of DomainTools. The ICANN proposals could bake it into the spec.
The new paper, apparently released yesterday, was designed to outline technical requirements that might be needed to support future policies on Whois.
So while it’s not policy, it’s a good indicator of where ICANN thinks policy may head.
It concludes with a list of 12 “possible requirements” for the GNSO and other stakeholders to consider over the next couple of months before the Brussels meeting.
Here are the highlights: (continue reading)
.xxx jumps on social media bandwagon
ICM Registry, the firm behind the proposed .xxx TLD, has belatedly joined the social media revolution, setting up a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account to expound the benefits of pornographic domain names.
I’d hazard a guess that this is in response to the deluge of negative opinion currently directed at it in ICANN’s public comment forum.
If you can wade through the Christian spam there, you’ll find only a handful of people backing ICM.
Some of these comments come from policy wonks, urging ICANN to show it can be as accountable as it says it is.
Others come from random individuals, suspiciously based in ICM’s home state of Florida.
If this woman, for example, is not British ICM president Stuart Lawley’s green card lawyer, I’ll eat my beanie.
Hat tip: @mneylon
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