EnCirca partners with PandoraBots to push .bot names to brands

Specialist registrar EnCirca has partnered with bot development framework vendor PandoraBots to market .bot domains at big brands.
The two companies are pushing their wares jointly at this week’s International Trademark Association annual meeting in Seattle.
In a press release, the companies said that PandoraBots is offering bot-creation “starter kits” for brand owners that tie in with .bot registration via EnCirca.
Bots are rudimentary artificial intelligences that can be tailored to answer customer support questions over social media. Because who wants to pay a human to answer the phones?
Amazon Registry’s .bot gTLD is a tightly restricted space with strict preregistration verification rules.
Basically, you have to have a live, functioning bot before you can even request a domain there.
Only bots created using Amazon Lex, Botkit Studio, Dialogflow, Gupshup, Microsoft Bot Framework, and Pandorabots are currently eligible, though Amazon occasionally updates its list of approved frameworks.
The .bot space has been in a limited registration period all year, but on May 31 it will enter a six-month sunrise period.
Despite not hitting general availability until November, it already has about close to 1,800 domains in its zone — most of which were registered via EnCirca — and hundreds of live sites.
EnCirca currently offers a $200 registration service for brand owners, in which the registrar handles eligibility for $125 and the first year reg for $75.

“Naked aggression” or genius? .sucks trolls trademark event

.sucks registry Vox Populi has annoyed intellectual property interests by trolling a trademark conference with a .sucks mobile billboard.
As tweeted by corporate registrar Marksmen, which described the move as “naked aggression”, attendees to the International Trademark Association conference in San Diego, California saw this roaming the streets this weekend.

Spotted on the streets of San Diego… naked aggression. #dotsucks #INTA15 pic.twitter.com/bm33UIZWRe

— Marksmen (@MarksmenTweets) May 3, 2015

Vox Pop also has a booth at INTA 2015.
The company says .sucks is an opportunity for brands to engage more effectively with their customers, but most IP interests think it looks more like extortion.
The high annual $2,000+ sunrise fee has a lot to do with that, as does the special “Sunrise Premium” list of trademarks that will always incur similarly high prices.
Update: According to a reader, who submitted this photo, Vox Pop is also giving out free .sucks-branded condoms.

Trademark lobby makes final new gTLD demands

With ICANN’s latest and potentially last call for comment on its new top-level domains program just hours away from closing, the arguments are shaping up along familiar lines.
Trademark protection is unsurprisingly still center stage, with loud calls for the Applicant Guidebook’s rights protection mechanisms to be amended more favorably to brand owners
Meanwhile, many of those strongly in favor of the new gTLD program launching soon have submitted more subdued, concise comments, merely urging ICANN to get a move on.
While there are still some fringe opinions, many within the intellectual property community are on the same page when it comes to rights protection mechanisms.
URS
The Uniform Rapid Suspension policy, which enables trademark holders to relatively quickly shut down obvious cases of cybersquatting, comes in for particular attention.
In the latest draft of the URS, as well as its sister policy, the Trademark Clearinghouse, brand owners have to present “proof of use” for the trademarks which they want to enforce.
The International Trademark Association, the Intellectual Property Constituency and others want this provision eliminated, saying it is inconsistent with many national trademark laws.
The also want the burden of proof lowered from the “clear and convincing evidence” standard, and want to expand the “loser pays” model, to provide an economic disincentive to cybersquatting.
In the latest version of the Applicant Guidebook, ICANN introduced a system whereby a cybersquatter has to pay the cost of a URS they lose, but only if the case comprises over 25 domains.
INTA, the IPC and others want this reduced to something like five domains, on the grounds that 25 is too high a bar and may actually encourage larger-scale squatting.
IP Claims
They also want the Clearinghouse’s IP Claims service, which serves a warning to registrants when they try to register potentially infringing domains, expanded beyond exact-match strings.
Currently, you’ll receive a warning about possible infringement if you try to register lego.tld or foxnews.tld, but not if you try to register legostarwars.tld or foxnewssucks.tld.
Many commenters want this changed to also include brand+keyword domains (fairly easy to implement in software, I imagine), or even typos (not nearly so easy).
This makes sense if you assume that cybersquatting patterns in new TLDs mirror those in .com, where brand+keyword squatting comprise the majority of UDRP cases.
But if you look at the about 100 UDRP cases to be filed so far in .co, it seems that brand-only cybersquatting is clearly the order of the day.
Depending on how this was implemented, it could also create a “chilling effect” whereby IP Claims notices are sent to legitimate registrants.
It seems likely that with a brand+keyword approach, if someone tried to register legourmetchef.tld, they could wind up with a notice that the domain infringes the Lego trademark.
The trademark lobby also wants this IP Claims service extended beyond the first 60 days of a new TLD’s life, on the grounds that the cybersquatting risk does not disappear after a TLD launches.
According to submissions from existing TLD registries and potential applicants, this could add to the costs of running a TLD, increasing prices for registrants.
GAC
Most of these demands are not new. But in many cases, the IP lobby now has the support of the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee.
The GAC and ICANN are due to meet by teleconference this Friday, ostensibly for their “final” consultation before ICANN approves the Guidebook a little over a month from now.
But with the US and Europe now strategically aligned, it seems likely that ICANN will find itself under more pressure than ever before to concede to the demands of trademark holders.

Trademark lobby keeps up pressure on ICANN

The International Trademark Association is continuing to press ICANN into commissioning a study of the potential economic “harms” its new top-level domain program could cause.
INTA executive director Alan Drewsen earlier this month sent ICANN a quick reminder (pdf) that it expects to see the study carried out before the new TLD application round launches.
The trademark lobby believes that new TLDs will increase costs to brand-conscious businesses through an increase in the number of defensive registrations and dispute proceedings they have to pay for.
ICANN hired some third-party analysts to look into the issue, and published a preliminary report in July that basically just speculated about studies that could be carried out in future.
The plan was to carry out a second-phase study, which was to begin after public comments on the first report had been analyzed and summarized by ICANN staff.
Three months after the public comment period closed, this analysis has not been published and there’s no news on phase two.
INTA’s latest missive also notes that the ICANN board does not appear to have discussed the economic study at its Trondheim meeting in September.
Drewson also refers back to previous correspondence, sent in early September by INTA president Heather Steinmeyer, in which she wrote:

trademark owners believe that such a study is not only a sensible recommendation, but an essential prerequisite before any rollout of new gTLDs.

It’s not clear to me whether ICANN also thinks the study needs to be completed before the new TLD program launches.
Such a study would presumably take some considerable time to compile, and noises from ICANN currently point to the program becoming finalized at some point in the next six months.
If the study were to conclude that new TLDs would be hugely financially damaging, after three years of work… well, red faces would be the very least concern.

Crunch day for new TLDs

The ICANN board has kicked off a two-day retreat during which it will attempt to finalize the rules for applying for new top-level domains.
The big question for many is this: are more delays or the cards, or will ICANN finally put a firm timeline on the first new TLD application round?
One constituency that seems bent on more delays is the intellectual property community.
Dozens of organizations, including Microsoft, AT&T, Time Warner, Adobe and Coca-Cola, told ICANN in late July that the current IP protections in version 4 of the Draft Applicant Guidebook are not good enough.
The proposed Uniform Rapid Suspension process has become bloated and burdensome and the Trademark Clearinghouse does not go far enough to proactively protect trademarks, they say.
Just this week, it emerged that the International Trademark Association has called for further studies into the potential economic harms of new TLDs, which could easily add a couple of quarters of delay.
But there are good reasons to believe ICANN is done with being pushed around by IP interests.
As I reported earlier this week, chairman Peter Dengate Thrush has recently publicly stated that the current state of intellectual property protection in the DAG is a compromise position reflecting the views of all stakeholders and that IP lawyers “have had their chance”.
It’s not just IP interests that will be affected by the ICANN board’s discussions this weekend. The board’s decisions on “vertical integration” will make or break business models.
The VI issue, which governs whether registrars can apply for new TLDs and whether registrars can act as registrars, is perhaps the most difficult problem in the DAG. The working group tasked with sorting it out failed to reach consensus after six months of debate.
The DAGv4 currently says, as an explicit placeholder, that there can be no more than 2% cross-ownership of a registry by a registrar and vice versa.
This would mean that registrars that want to get into the TLD game, such as Demand Media’s eNom, would not be allowed to apply.
It may also cause problems for publicly listed registries such as VeriSign and Neustar, or registries that already have registrar shareholders, such as Afilias.
The proposals on the table include raising the ownership cap to 15% to eliminating it altogether.
A move by ICANN to restrict ownership will certainly attract allegations of anti-competitive behavior by those companies excluded, while a move too far in the opposite direction could lead to accusations that the rules do not go far enough to protect registrants.
There are no correct answers to this problem. ICANN needs to find a balance that does the least harm.
Also up for debate will be the rules on how governments and others can object to new TLD applications on “morality and public order” grounds.
Following the report of a working group, which I blogged about here, it seems likely that the term “morality and public order” will be replaced entirely, probably by “Objections Based on General Principles of International Law”.
If the board adopts the recommendations of this “Rec6” working group, there will be no special provision in the Guidebook for governments to make objections based on their own national laws.
There’s also the suggestion that ICANN’s board should have to vote with a two-thirds super-majority in order to deny a TLD application based on Rec6 objections.
It’s another almost impossible problem. Some say the Rec6 recommendations as they currently stand are unlikely to appease members of the Governmental Advisory Committee.
In summary, ICANN’s board has just two days to define the competitive parameters of a market that could be worth billions, figure out how to politely tell some of the world’s largest IP rights holders to back off, and write the rule-book on international governmental influence in the new TLD process.
I predict a small boom in sales of coffee and pizza in the Trondheim region.

Group wants trademark study before new TLDs launch

The International Trademark Association has told ICANN it believes a study into the economic “harms” of launching new TLDs is “essential” before the program gets under way.
INTA president Heather Steinmeyer wrote, in a September 8 letter (pdf) published today (my emphasis):

We applaud the recommendation… to conduct a study to assess the harms associated with intellectual property abuse and related forms of consumer fraud in the domain name system, including how the current gTLDs have affected intellectual property and consumers since their introduction. Indeed trademark owners believe that such a study is not only a sensible recommendation, but an essential prerequisite before any rollout of new gTLDs.

Steinmeyer offered INTA’s assistance with any such study.
The recommendation she refers to can be found in “An Economic Framework for the Analysis of the Expansion of Generic Top-Level Domain Names”, a report prepared for ICANN by three independent economists in June.
That report made a number of suggestions for possible further studies of the possible benefits and harms (although Steinmeyer only mentions the harms) of introducing new TLDs. It did not make any firm conclusions.
Following a public comment period that ended July 22, the status of that report appears to be ‘in limbo’.
The public comments have not yet been compiled into a summary and analysis document and as far as I can tell no other action has been taken on the report’s recommendations.
At least one ICANN director, chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, seems to consider the problem of balancing trademark protection and other parties’ interests pretty much resolved.
Just last week, in a fairly strongly worded statement at the Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, he said:

The IP lawyers… have had their chance to make all these cases in a five-year process, and the intellectual property protections that have been put in place are the result of a delicate balance that has been wrought with everybody in the community, not just with the IP lawyers. IP lawyers always want more protections.

Could litigation delay ICANN’s new TLDs?

Intellectual property lawyers are wondering aloud about the possibility of ICANN being sued in order to delay the launch of new top-level domains.
The idea was raised during a panel at the annual meeting of INTA, the International Trademark Association, in Boston yesterday, according to its daily newsletter (pdf).
Kristina Rosette of the law firm Covington & Burling reportedly “suggested litigation is a possibility to slow down the application launch. One source of litigation could be trademark owners, worried about mass cybersquatting”.
That’s reported speech, by the way, not a quote. The article does not make clear the context.
Rosette is Intellectual Property Constituency representative for North America on ICANN’s GNSO Council.
The IP community is worried that the launch of new TLDs will lead to companies splurging more money unnecessarily on defensive registrations.
The current best, arguably most optimistic guess on the new TLD timeline comes from registry hopeful Minds + Machines. M+M has applications opening next April.
A delay in the launch of new TLDs would hurt most the startup companies that intend to apply for them, and the service providers and consultants hoping to facilitate the launches.
Some of these companies make minimal revenue, are dependent on funding, and would prefer applications open sooner rather than later.