.tube registry claims victory in linkification fight

Latin American Telecom, the company that runs the .tube gTLD, has claimed victory in its fight to get popular social media apps to “linkify” more than 400 TLDs that have gone live in the last eight years.

As I reported two weeks ago, CEO Rami Schwartz managed to figure out that any TLD that entered the root after November 2015 wasn’t being recognized by apps such as WhatsApp, the world’s most-popular messaging app.

This meant that any attempt to share a URL in .tube or 467 other TLDs (including major dot-brands and geo-gTLDs) would be frustrated by the fact that WhatsApp would not automatically turn the URL into a clickable link.

The root cause of the problem appeared to be a library used in the Android operating system, which had a hard-coded list of valid TLDs that had not been updated since November 2015.

In a press release today, the registry reported that the library in question was updated on September 11 (hey, that’s the same day I published my article!) with a brand-new list of TLDs.

So it seems the linkification issue will be solved, once the updated software actually makes it to affected devices.

There are not many TLDs in the pipeline for delegation for the next four years — maybe some contested 2012-round stragglers and the odd IDN ccTLD — so this particular issue is unlikely to cause much more upset for a while.

“This story exemplifies how the perseverance of a small company unearthed a Universal Acceptance issue of global significance, rallying the support of industry leaders and setting a precedent for cooperation that can positively impact billions of internet users,” the registry said in its press release.

Is this why WhatsApp hates some TLDs but not others?

Developers of major pieces of internet software, including the world’s most-popular messaging app, may be relying on seriously outdated lists of top-level domains.

That’s the picture that seems to be emerging from one new gTLD operator’s quest to discover why WhatsApp doesn’t recognize its TLD, and many others including major dot-brands, as valid.

And ICANN isn’t interested in helping, despite its declared focus on Universal Acceptance, the CEO of this registry claims.

When most social media apps detect the user has inputted a URL or domain name, they automatically “linkify” it so it can be easily clicked or tapped without the need for copy/paste.

But when Rami Schwartz of new gTLD .tube discovered that .tube URLs sent via WhatsApp, said to have two billion users, were not being linkified, despite the TLD being delegated by ICANN almost eight years ago, he set out to find out why.

Schwartz compiled a spreadsheet (.xlsx) listing which gTLDs are recognized by WhatsApp and which are not and discovered a rough cut-off point in November 2015. TLDs delegated before then are linkified, those delegated after were not.

According to my database, 468 TLDs have been delegated since December 2015, though not all are still in the root. That’s about a third of all TLDs.

This means that, for example, .microsoft domains linkify but .amazon and .apple domains do not; .asia domains linkify but .africa and .arab domains do not; .london works but .abudhabi doesn’t. Even .verisign missed the cut-off.

If WhatsApp users include a “www.” or “http://” then the app will linkify the domain, even if the specified TLD does not exist.

During the course of a discussion on the web site of the Public Suffix List — which maintains an open-source list of all TLDs and the levels at which names may be registered — it was discovered that the problem may be deeper rooted than the WhatsApp app.

It turns out a library in the Android operating system contains a hard-coded list of valid TLDs which hasn’t been updated since November 24, 2015.

Any app relying on Android to validate TLDs may therefore be susceptible to the same problem — any TLD younger than seven years won’t validate. Schwartz tells us he’s experienced the same issues with the Facebook app on Android devices.

The problem is of particular concern to Schwartz because he’s been planning to market .tube as a form of link-shortening service, and without full support among the most popular messaging apps such a service would be much less attractive.

“I can’t launch this now if it’s not going to work in WhatsApp, if it’s not going to work in Facebook,” he said.

While engineers from Facebook/WhatsApp parent Meta now seem to be looking into the problem, Schwartz says his complaints fell on deaf ears for a long time.

He additionally claims that “ICANN doesn’t really care about universal acceptance” and his attempts to get the Org to pay attention to the problem have been brushed off, despite ICANN making Universal Acceptance one of its key priorities.

Schwartz says ICANN is much more interested in UA when it comes to internationalized domain names (those in non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese) and not the technical issues that underpin the functionality of all TLDs.

“I’ve no idea why ICANN makes the decisions it makes, but I think it has to do with inclusion, I think it has to do with diversity, I think it has to do with a lot of things — not technical,” he said. “But this is a technical issue.”

ICANN maintains a set of UA technical resources on its web site and supports the work of the independent Universal Acceptance Steering Group.

Facebook sues free domains registry for cybersquatting

Facebook parent Meta has sued Freenom, the registry behind multiple free-to-register ccTLDs including .tk, claiming the company engages in cybersquatting.

Meta alleges that Freenom infringes its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trademarks over 5,000 domain names in the TLDs it operates.

While best-known for Tokelau’s .tk, which had almost 25 million registrations when Verisign stopped counting them a year ago, Freenom also operates .gq for Equatorial Guinea, .cf for the Central African Republic, .ml for Mali, and .ga for Gabon.

Apart from some reserved “premiums”, the company gives domains away for free then monetizes, with parking, residual traffic when the domains expire or, one suspects more commonly, are suspended for engaging in abuse.

Naturally enough, it therefore has registered, to itself, a great many domains previously used for phishing.

Meta lists these names as examples of infringers: faceb00k.ga, fb-lnstagram.cf, facebook-applogin.ga, instagrams-help.cf, instaqram.ml, chat-whatsaap.gq, chat-whatsaap-com.tk, and supportservice-lnstagram.cf, though these do not appear to be monetized right now.

It accuses the registry of cybersquatting, phishing and trademark infringement and seeks over half a billion dollars in damages (at $100,000 domain).

Today, Freenom is not accepting new registrations, but it’s blaming “technical issues” and says it hopes to resume operations “shortly”.

Facebook is one of the most prolific and aggressive enforcers of its trademarks in the domain space, having previously sued OnlineNIC, Namecheap and Web.com. OnlineNIC had to shut up shop due to its lawsuit.

(Via Krebs on Security)

If you guessed Facebook’s “Meta” rebrand, you’re probably still a cybersquatter

Guessing that Facebook was about to rebrand its corporate parent “Meta” and registering some domain names before the name was officially announced does not mean you’re not a cybersquatter.

Donuts this week reported that its top-trending keyword across its portfolio of hundreds of TLDs was “meta” in October. The word was a new entry on its monthly league table.

We’re almost certainly going to see the same thing when Verisign next reports its monthly .com keyword trends.

The sudden interest in the term comes due to Facebook’s October 28 announcement that it was calling its company Meta as part of a new focus on “metaverse” initiatives.

The announcement was heavily trailed following an October 19 scoop in The Verge, with lots of speculation about what the name change could be.

Many guessed correctly, no doubt leading to the surge in related domain name registrations.

Unfortunately for these registrants, Facebook is one of the most aggressive enforcers of its trademark out there, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that Meta-related UDRP cases will start to appear before long.

While Facebook’s “Meta” trademark was only applied for in the US on October 28, the same date as the branding announcement, the company is still on pretty safe ground, according to UDRP precedent, regardless of whether the domain was registered before Facebook officially announced the switch.

WIPO guidelines dating back to 2005 make it clear that panelist can find that a domain was registered in bad faith. The latest version of the guidelines, from 2017, read:

in certain limited circumstances where the facts of the case establish that the respondent’s intent in registering the domain name was to unfairly capitalize on the complainant’s nascent (typically as yet unregistered) trademark rights, panels have been prepared to find that the respondent has acted in bad faith.

Such scenarios include registration of a domain name: (i) shortly before or after announcement of a corporate merger, (ii) further to the respondent’s insider knowledge (e.g., a former employee), (iii) further to significant media attention (e.g., in connection with a product launch or prominent event), or (iv) following the complainant’s filing of a trademark application.

Precedent for this cited by WIPO dates back to 2002.

So, if you’re somebody who registered a “meta” name after October 19, the lawyers have had your number for the better part of two decades, and Facebook has a pretty good case against you. If your name contains strings such as “login” or similar, Facebook’s case for bad faith is even stronger.

Of course, “meta” is a dictionary word, and “metaverse” is a term Facebook stole from science fiction author Neal Stephenson, so there are likely thousands of non-infringing domains, dating back decades, containing the string.

That doesn’t mean Facebook won’t sic the lawyers on them anyway, but at least they’ll have a defense.