“Just give up!” ICANN tells its most stubborn new gTLD applicant

ICANN has urged the company that wants to run .internet as new gTLD to just give up and go away.
The India-based company, Nameshop, actually applied for .idn — to stand for “internationalized domain name” — back in the 2012 application round.
It failed the Geographic Names Review portion of the application process because IDN is the International Standards Organization’s 3166-1 three-letter code for Indonesia, and those were all banned.
While one might question the logic of applying for a Latin-script string to represent IDNs, overlooking the ISO banned list was not an incredibly stupid move.
Even a company with Google’s brainpower resources overlooked this paragraph of the Applicant Guidebook and applied for three 3166-1 restricted strings: .and, .are and .est.
But rather than withdraw its .idn bid, like Google did with its failed applications, Nameshop decided to ask ICANN to change its applied-for string to .internet.
There was a small amount of precedent for this. ICANN had permitted a few applicants to correct typos in their applied-for strings, enabling DotConnectAfrica for example to correct its nutty application for “.dotafrica” to its intended “.africa”.
But swapping out .idn for .internet was obviously not a simple correction but rather looked a complete upgrade of its addressable market. Nobody else had applied for .internet, and Nameshop was well aware of this, so Nameshop’s bid would have been a shoo-in.
To allow the change would have opened the floodgates for every applicant that found itself in a tricky contention set to completely change their desired strings to something cheaper or more achievable.
But Nameshop principal Sivasubramanian Muthusamy did not take no for an answer. He’s been nagging ICANN to change its mind ever since.
There’s a lengthy, rather slick timeline of his lobbying efforts published on the Nameshop web site.
He filed a Request for Reconsideration back in 2013, which was swiftly rejected by the ICANN board of directors.
In July 2017, he wrote to ICANN to complain that Nameshop’s string change request should be treated the same as any other:

It seems that if ICANN can allow string changes from a relatively undesirable name to a more desireable name based on misspelling, then ICANN should allow a change from a desireable name in three characters(IDN) to longer name in eight characters (Internet) based on confusion with geographical names

Meetings with ICANN staff, the Ombudsman, the Governmental Advisory Committee and others to discuss his predicament several times over the last several years have proved fruitless.
Finally, today ICANN has published a letter (pdf) it sent to Muthusamy on Friday, urging him to ditch his Quixotic quest and get his money back. Christine Willett, VP of gTLD operations, wrote:

Given we are unable to take further action on Nameshop’s application, we encourage you to withdraw the application for a full refund of Nameshop’s application fee.

I doubt this is the first time ICANN has urged Nameshop to take its money and run, but it seems ICANN is now finally sick of talking about the issue.
Willett added that ICANN staff and directors “politely decline” his request for further in-person meetings to discuss the application, and encouraged him to apply for his desired string in the next application round, whenever that may be.

Did Roussos pull off the impossible? Google, Donuts, Radix all drop out of .music race

Google won’t be the registry for the .music gTLD.
The company, along with pure-play registries Donuts and Radix, late last week withdrew their respective applications from the .music contention set, leaving just three possible winners in the running.
Those are Amazon, MMX, and DotMusic, the company run by long-time .music fanboy Constantinos Roussos.
As I blogged last week, applications from Domain Venture Partners and Far Further have also been withdrawn.
I suspect, but do not know for a fact, that the contention was settled with a private deal, likely an auction, recently.
The logical guess for a winner would be Amazon, if only because of the nexus of its business to the music industry and the amount of money it could throw at an auction.
But I’m beginning to suspect that DotMusic might have prevailed.
The company appears to have recently revamped its web site, almost as if it’s gearing up for a launch.
Comparing the current version of music.us to versions in Google’s cache, it appears that the site has been recently given a new look, new copy and even a new logo.
It’s even added a prominent header link inviting prospective resellers to sign up, using a form that also appears to have been added in the last few weeks.
These changes all seem to have been made after the crucial ICANN vote that threw out the last of DotMusic’s appeals, March 14.
Are those the actions of an applicant resigned to defeat, or has Roussos pulled off the apparently impossible, defeating two of the internet’s biggest companies to one of the industry’s most coveted and controversial strings?
Participants in gTLD auctions typically sign NDAs, so we’re going to have to wait a bit longer (probably no more than a few days) to find out which of the remaining three applicants actually won.

Looks like .music is finally on its way

The hard-fought battle for .music appears to be over.
I’m not yet in a position to tell you which of the eight applicants for the new gTLD has been successful, but I can tell you some of those who were not.
Two applicants have this week withdrawn their bids, an almost certain sign that the contention set has been privately settled.
The first applicant to ditch its bid was dot Music Ltd, an application vehicle of Domain Venture Partners (we used to call this outfit Famous Four Media, but that’s changed).
The other is .music LLC, also known as Far Further.
We can almost certainly expect all but one of the remaining applicants to withdraw their applications over the coming days.
Applicants typically sign NDAs when they settle contention privately, usually via an auction.
Far Further was one of two unsuccessful “community” applicants for .music. It had the backing of dozens of music trade groups, including the influential Recording Industry Association of America. Even Radiohead’s guitarist chipped in with his support.
Evidently, none of these groups were prepared to fund Far Further to the extent it could win the .music contention set.
The .music contention set has been held up by the continuing protestations of the other community applicant, DotMusic Limited, the company run by long-time .music cheerleader Constantinos Roussos.
After DotMusic lost its Community Priority Evaluation in 2016, on the basis that the “community” was pretty much illusory under ICANN rules, it started to complain that the process was unfair.
The applicant immediately filed a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN.
.music then found itself one of several proposed gTLDs frozen while ICANN conducted an outside review of alleged irregularities in the CPE process.
That review found no impropriety in early 2018, a verdict DotMusic’s lawyer dismissed as a “whitewash”.
It has since stalled the process several times with requests for information under ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy, and more RfRs when those requests were denied.
But this series of appeals finally came to an end March 14, when ICANN’s board of directors finally ruled against DotMusic’s 2016 RfR.
That appears to have opened up the .music set for private resolution.
So who won? I don’t know yet, but the remaining applicants are: DotMusic itself, Google, Amazon, MMX, Donuts and Radix.
There are certainly two very deep-pocketed companies on that list. Could we be looking at Google or Amazon as the new proprietors of .music?
If either of those companies has won, prospective registrants might find they have a long wait before they can pick up a .music domain. Neither of these giants has a track record of rushing its new gTLDs to market.
If the victor is a conventional gTLD registry, we’d very probably be looking at a launch in 2019.

ICANN waves goodbye to Adobe Connect over security, pricing

ICANN has decided to dump its longstanding web conferencing service provider, Adobe Connect, in favor of rival Zoom.
The organization reckons it could save as much as $100,000 a year, and mitigate some security fears, by making the switch.
Adobe has been the standard remote participation tool for not only ICANN’s public meetings, but also its policy-development working groups, for at least seven or eight years.
It enables video, audio, screen-sharing, public and private chat, voting and so on. ICANN says that Zoom has “nearly all of the same features”.
But some of ICANN’s more secretive bodies — including the Security and Stability Advisory Committee and Board Operations — have been using Zoom for a little over a year, after an SSAC member discovered a vulnerability in Adobe that allowed potentially sensitive information to be stolen.
A clincher appears to be Zoom’s voice over IP functionality, which ICANN says will enable it to drop Premiere Global Services Inc (PGi), its current, $500,000-a-year teleconferencing provider, which participants use if they dial in from on the road.
“Based on feedback, Zoom’s voice connectivity and overall experience seem to be superior to equivalent Adobe Connect experiences,” ICANN said.
As somebody who has lurked on more than his fair share of Adobe Connect rooms, I’ve noticed that people losing their voice connection is a very common occurrence, which can delay and break the flow of discussions, though it’s not usually clear where the blame lies.
According to a Zoom feature list (pdf) provided by ICANN, Zoom currently lacks many features on its web client, but updates are expected to bring the feature set in line with the mobile apps and PC/Mac executables by the end of the year.
ICANN expects to use Zoom exclusively by ICANN 65, in Marrakech this June. In the meantime, it will provide training to community members.
The cynic in me wants to say “expect teething troubles”, but the ICANN meetings team runs a pretty tight ship. The switch might be surprisingly smooth.

CentralNic gets 680,000 AlpNames domains for free, kinda

CentralNic has emerged as the gaining registrar for AlpNames’ entire portfolio of gTLD domains.
The company announced late last week that three registrars in its stable — Moniker, Key-Systems LLC and Key-Systems GmbH — will take over roughly 680,000 domains that were left stranded when AlpNames management went AWOL.
US-based Key-Systems LLC appears to be the biggest gainer. It will be taking over domains in every gTLD except .biz, .com, .info, .net, .org, which are going to Moniker, and .pro, which are going to the German Key-Systems division.
While most registrars see their domains under management concentrated in these legacy gTLDs, by volume AlpNames had far more registrations in new 2012-round gTLDs.
It had just 19,000 .com DUM at the last count, compared to hundreds of thousands in new gTLDs such as .top and .gdn.
CentralNic said in a press release that ICANN selected its registrars after a competitive bidding process, which I’ve previously outlined here, but that it did not pay for the names. So AlpNames, presumably, won’t be getting the payday it could have received under the rules.
The transfer won’t be entirely cost-free, of course. CentralNic is going to have to provide support to its incoming customers — who will all be emailed with the details of their new Moniker accounts — for starters.
There’s also the issue of abuse. AlpNames was notorious as a haven for spammers and the like, due to its cheap prices and bulk-registration tools, so CentralNic may find itself having to deal with this legacy.
But CentralNic said it expects these incidental costs to be “minimal”.
The transfers are a big boost for CentralNic’s registrar volume, at least in the short term. The three selected registrars had a combined total of roughly two million gTLD domains at the last count. CentralNic says it acts as registrar for over seven million domains across its 13 accreditations.
For every AlpNames domain that gets renewed, CentralNic gets paid. But if AlpNames’ own track record is any guide, I suspect there’s going to be a lot of drops over the coming year.
UPDATE August 12 2020: AlpNames former CEO Iain Roache recently wrote to DI and stated the following:

Alpnames itself worked closely with ICANN for months to arrange for its exit from the Registrar business and with a number of Registrars to arrange for the transfer of the customers. Your article does not reflect the detail of what transpired and is inaccurate.

Root servers whacked after crypto change

The DNS root servers came under accidental attack from name servers across the internet following ICANN’s recent changes to their cryptographic master keys, according to Verisign.
The company, which runs the A and J root servers, said it saw requests for DNSSEC data at the root increase from 15 million a day in October to 1.15 billion a day a week ago.
The cause was the October 11 root Key Signing Key rollover, the first change ICANN had made to the “trust anchor” of DNSSEC since it came online at the root in 2010.
The KSK rollover saw ICANN change the cryptographic keys that rest at the very top of the DNSSEC hierarchy.
The move was controversial. ICANN delayed it for a year after learning about possible disruption at internet endpoints. Its Security and Stability Advisory Committee and even its own board were not unanimous that the roll should go ahead.
But the warnings were largely about the impact on internet users, rather than on the root servers themselves, and the impact was minimal.
Verisign is now saying that requests to its roots for DNSSEC key data increased from 15 million per day to 75 million per day, a five-fold increase, almost overnight.
It was not until January, when the old KSK was marked as “revoked”, did the seriously mahooosive traffic growth begin, however. Verisign’s distinguished engineer Duane Wessels wrote:

Everyone involved expected this to be a non-event. However, we instead saw an even bigger increase in DNSKEY queries coming from a population of root server clients. As of March 21, 2019, Verisign’s root name servers receive about 1.15 billion DNSKEY queries per day, which is 75 times higher than pre-rollover levels and nearly 7 percent of our total steady state query traffic.

Worryingly, the traffic only seemed to be increasing, until March 22, when the revoked key was removed from the root entirely.
Wessels wrote that while the root operators are still investigating, “it would seem that the presence of the revoked key in the zone triggered some unexpected behavior in a population of validating resolvers.”
The root operators hope to have answers in the coming weeks, he wrote.
The next KSK rollover is not expected for years, and the root traffic is now returning to normal levels, so there’s no urgency.

Another dot-brand bites the dust

Honeywell International, a $40-billion-a-year US conglomerate, has become the last major company to dump its dot-brand gTLD.
The company informed ICANN in February that it no longer wishes to run .honeywell, and ICANN yesterday published its preliminary decision not to transition the TLD to a new owner.
Honeywell never used .honeywell, which has been in the DNS root since June 2016, beyond the contractually mandated placeholder at nic.honeywell.
It becomes the 46th new gTLD registry to request a termination since 2015. Almost all have been dot-brands.
The company’s request is open for public comment until April 14. To date, there have been no public comments on any voluntary registry termination.
Honeywell is involved in the aerospace, building and consumer goods sectors. It has 130,000 employees and reported revenue of $40.5 billion for 2018.
It’s the first new gTLD termination request of 2019.

The DNS’s former overseer now has its own domain name

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which for many years was the instrument of the US government’s oversight of the DNS root zone, has got its first proper domain name.
It’s been operating at ntia.doc.gov forever, but today announced that it’s upgrading to the second-level ntia.gov.
The agency said the switch “will make NTIA’s site consistent with most other Department of Commerce websites”.
Staff there will also get new ntia.gov email addresses, starting from today. Their old addresses will continue to forward.
NTIA was part of the DNS root management triumvirate, along with ICANN/IANA and Verisign, until the IANA transition in 2016.
The agency still has a contractual relationship with Verisign concerning the operation of .com.

UDRP complaints hit new high at WIPO

The World Intellectual Property Organization handled 3,447 UDRP cases in 2018, a new high for the 20-year-old anti-cybersquatting policy.
The filings represent an increase of over 12% compared to the 3,074 UDRP cases filed with WIPO in 2017. There were 3,036 cases in 2016
But the number of unique domains complained about decreased over the same period, from 6,370 in 2017 to 5,655 domains in 2018, WIPO said today.
The numbers cover only cases handled by WIPO, which is one of several UDRP providers. They may represent increases or decreases in cybersquatting, or simply WIPO’s market share fluctuating.
The numbers seem to indicate that the new policy of redacting Whois information due to GDPR, which came into effect mid-year, has had little impact on trademark owners’ ability to file UDRP claims.
UPDATE: This post was updated a few hours after publication to remove references to the respective shares of the UDRP caseload of .com compared to new gTLDs. WIPO appears to have published some wonky math, as OnlineDomain noticed.

.vu to relaunch under mystery new registry

Vanuatu is to attempt to broaden the appeal of its .vu domain globally by switching to a new shared registry system.
The changes were initiated last week in Kobe, when the ICANN board of directors gave the final stamp of approval on the redelegation of the ccTLD.
.vu is now delegated to country’s Telecommunications Radiocommunications and Broadcasting Regulator (TRBR), having been managed since 1995 by Telecom Vanuatu Limited (TVL). The government passed a law in 2016 calling for the redelegation.
Under its new management, the market for .vu domains will be opened up at the registrar level. To date, TVL has operated as a sole source for .vu domains. From now on, it will just be one registrar among (presumably) many.
A registry back-end has already been selected, after tenders were received from nine companies, but it’s still in contract talks and TRBR is not ready to name the successful party just yet.
The Vanuatu government wants to encourage local ISPs and web developers to consider signing up as registrars or resellers, but the SRS will also be open to established international players.
Brand protection registrars and TLD completionists will no doubt begin to carry .vu directly as soon as they’re able to plug in to the new system.
But off the top of my head, I’m struggling to think of a strong global sales pitch for the string, other than a phonetic similarity to “view”.
It doesn’t stand for much as an acronym, doesn’t seem to work well in English as a domain hack, and doesn’t seem to mean much in other widely spoken languages (other than French, where it means “seen”, as in “déjà-vu”).
We can only hope the new management doesn’t attempt to market it with some kind of pathetic backronym.
Domains in .vu currently cost $50 (USD) per year when bought from TVL. I have no current data on how many .vu domains are registered.
InternetNZ’s Keith Davidson assisted in the redelegation and is handling comms during the handover.
Vanuatu is a Pacific archipelago nation, previously known as the New Hebrides, that gained independence from the UK and France in 1980. It had roughly 272,000 inhabitants at the last count.