Search all new gTLD collision block lists

DI PRO subscribers can now see which strings appear most often in new gTLD registries’ block-lists and search for strings — such as trademarks or premium strings — that interest them.
We’ve just launched the New gTLD Collisions Database.
Currently, it indexes all 14,493 unique strings that ICANN has told the first 13 new gTLD registries to block — due to the risk of collisions with internal networks — when they launch.
By default the strings are ranked by how many gTLDs have been told to block them.
You’ll see immediately that “www” is currently blocked in all 13 registries, suggesting that it’s likely to be blocked in the vast majority of new gTLDs.
Users can also search for a string in order to see how many, and which, new gTLDs are going to have to block it.
We’re hoping that the service will prove useful to trademark owners that want to see which “freebie” blocked strings they stand to benefit from, and in which gTLDs.
For example, we can already see that 10 meaningful strings containing “nike” are to be blocked. For “facebook”, it’s four registries. For “google”, it’s currently three strings across six gTLDs.
The service will also hopefully be useful to registries that want to predict which strings ICANN may tell them to block. We’re seeing a lot of gambling terms showing up in non-gambling TLDs, for example.
Here’s a screenshot of sample output for the search “cars”.

As ICANN publishes lists for more gTLDs, the database will grow and become more useful and time-saving.
Comments, suggestions and bug reports as always to kevin@domainincite.com

Barrett launches new gTLD launch calendar

EnCirca’s Tom Barrett has launched a collaborative calendar to help spread the word about new gTLD launch dates.
Leveraging Google Apps, the service can be found at Calzone.org and is currently in a short beta open only to applicants and registries.
All new gTLD sunrise dates published by ICANN will be incorporated into the service, Barrett tells us, and the registries themselves are invited to add other useful deadlines, such as for founders programs.
Users will be able to synchronize the calendar with their own and receive alerts, he said. They’ll also be able to filter by categories of string, such as “finance” or “health”.

Three gTLD Community Objections rejected

International Chamber of Commerce panelists have recently rejected three Community Objections against new gTLD applications.
The dismissals include objections to the controversial Turkey-based bids for .islam and .halal, filed by Asia Green IT System, which had raised the ire of the United Arab Emirates’ telecommunications regulator.
The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority — also the operator of its ccTLDs — said it was representing the wider Islamic community under orders from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
But ICC panelist Bernardo Cremades ruled, based on a close reading of the OIC’s letter to the TRA and other member states, that the OIC had not formally backed the objection.
While there were over 100 public comments objecting to .islam and over 70 to .halal, because the TRA merely referred to them rather than submitting copies as evidence, the panelist chose to ignore them completely.
He also noted that only the UAE has chosen to file a formal objection.
So Cremades ruled that there was no “substantial opposition” to the applications, which is one of the things objectors need to prove in order to win an objection.
The TRA also failed to persuade the panelist that there was “a likelihood of any material detriment” to the Muslim community if Asia Green’s gTLDs were to be delegated, writing:

The Objector has certainly not provided any evidence that the Respondent is not acting or does not intend to act in accordance with the interests of the Muslim community.

So the TRA’s objections were dismissed and the applicant can proceed to the next phase of the new gTLD program.
Also dismissed recently was Bundesverband der Deutschen Tourismuswirtschaft’s objection to Donuts’ application for .reisen (“travel” in German).
BTW, a German travel industry association, is associated with a competing bid for .reise. Weirdly, it did not file a String Confusion Objection against Donuts’ .reisen.
It had argued among other things that German speakers would expect .reisen to conform to German and European consumer protection laws, while Donuts is planning an open and unrestricted gTLD.
The ICC panelist didn’t buy that argument, noting that a hotel in Argentina could market itself as German-speaking without having to abide by, say, European data protection law.
He also ruled that BTW showed substantial opposition from the commercial sector of German-language travel agents, but not from other sections of the community such as individual travelers.
Finally, he ruled that Donuts had promised to put enough protection mechanisms in place to mean there was unlikely to be a detriment to the .reisen community.
The objection was dismissed.

Chehade talks up split from US oversight

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade used his keynote address at the newdomains.org conference this morning to discuss his plans to divorce the organization from US governmental oversight.
With a split from the US recurring theme in his recent speeches, Chehade nevertheless warned that there were risks that such a move could create a dangerous governance vacuum.
“The current ICANN contract that gives the US government a unique role in the root management function is not sustainable,” he said. “It’s just not sustainable.”
That seems to be a reference to the IANA contract, in which the US has essentially a veto on ICANN’s decisions regarding root zone changes such as new gTLD delegations.
“I think we need to think together how we grow from that and how we globalize that contract,” he said. “But we need to be very careful about creating a vacuum or uninteded consequences that would destabilize the root of the internet.”
While Chehade noted that a split from the US has always been envisaged, he said that the revelations about US internet surveillance made by NSA defector Edward Snowden has provided a catalyst to speed it up.
When Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff recently called for a “multilateral” (read: inter-governmental, (read: ITU)) approach to internet governance, Chehade and an ICANN team traveled to Brazil to persuade her to instead focus on the creation of a “multistakeholder” model instead.
There’s now a “coalition” of the “I*” groups (ICANN, IETF, etc), big-name companies such as Disney, and governments such as Brazil, focused on creating multistakeholder solutions to problems — such as spam and cyber-bullying — that are not in ICANN’s purview Chehade said.
There’s a multistakeholder meeting planned for April or May next year (I’ve heard both dates), to be hosted by Brazil, that will look at internet governance post-Snowden.
This meeting is about “allowing ICANN to not expand its remit”, according to Chehade. He said: “We don’t want to expand our remit.”
What we seem to be looking at here is the creation for a new organization, of which ICANN could be a member, that will allow stakeholders to coordinate responses to tricky cross-border internet problems.
While ICANN seems to be taking the leading role in its creation, it doesn’t sound like ICANN is trying to get into issues beyond naming and addressing, judging by Chehade’s speech this morning
Chehade also talked up ICANN’s support for the domain name industry.
He admitted that ICANN has caused a lot of problems for new gTLD applicants over the course of the gTLD program, but promised that this will change, with ICANN taking a more “background” role.
“You need less risk and more stability from the ICANN side,” he said. “You have suffered for a long time from a lot of instability, a lot of unknowns.”
Increased automation, internationlization and professionalism from ICANN will serve this goal, he said.
ICANN’s compliance department, he added, should “not be the policeman for the industry but be customer service for the registrants”, he said.

Six more gTLD contracts signed

ICANN signed six more new gTLD Registry Agreements on Friday, bringing the week’s total to eight.
Donuts added .cab, .computer and .support to its rapidly expanding portfolio of generics, while its partner United TLD (Demand Media) added .dance.
GMO Registry, which had teething troubles during Initial Evaluation before switching back-end providers, signed a contract for the Japanese geographic .nagoya.
Finally, Spanish clothing company Punto Fa, S.L., trading as MANGO, got the dot-brand .mango.
ICANN now has 72 new gTLD RAs, the first four of which have gone live.

ICANN signs contracts for .wang and .democrat

The new gTLD applicants behind .wang and .democract are the latest to sign Registry Agreements with ICANN.
Demand Media’s United TLD is behind .democrat, while .wang was applied for by small Chinese portfolio applicant Zodiac Holdings. Both were uncontested applications.
Both are to be open gTLDs.
For .democrat, Demand expects names to be registered by anyone who identifies themselves as a democrat. There were no objections, and to the best of my knowledge no explicit support, from “Democrat” parties
.wang is a weird one.
It’s the Latin-script transliteration of the Chinese character 网, which means “net”. Zodiac couldn’t apply for the Chinese because it’s a single character, which are not yet allowed under ICANN rules.
I understand that 网 is often used by Chinese speakers to mean “network” or “website”, but I don’t know how commonly the ASCII “wang” is used instead. Seems like a stretch.
It also of course is a common Chinese surname and a juvenile euphemism for “penis”.

TLDH raises $5 million from gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings made almost $5 million by losing auctions for the .lawyer and .website gTLDs this week, according to the company.
The London-listed company told the markets today that it has added £2.97 million ($4.81 million) to its coffers as a result of the auctions, in which Radix won .website and Donuts won .lawyer.
The number is net of the 4% cut taken by Innovative, which conducted the auctions, and the two $65,000 refunds TLDH will receive from ICANN when it withdraws the applications.
Some portion of the $4.8 million TLDH will have received from Donuts, where .lawyer was a two-horse race.
Radix’s winning bid for .website will have been split evenly between TLDH and Donuts.
At least one of these TLDs seems to have sold for significantly more than the average private auction selling price, which was $1.33 million after the first 14 Innovative auctions.
Innovative has managed auctions for 18 strings, but we don’t know the total price of the latest four.
The .website and .lawyer deals means TLDH now has £10.1 million ($16.3 million) in cash reserves, according to a company press release.
It still has 43 contested applications, however. On a $16 million budget — quite a lot less than some of its portfolio rivals — the company is going to have to make some smart tactical moves to maximize its gTLD portfolio.
“Our strategy remains to best monetise those applications where we see least value so that we can maximise our ability to acquire those names in which we see greatest value,” chairman Fred Krueger said in the press release.
It still has stakes in 25 uncontested gTLDs.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate statements — failing to take into account that .website was a three-way contest — about the average selling price of new gTLDs at auction.

Here’s how to display new IDN gTLDs in Chrome

A lot of people have noticed since the first four new gTLDs were delegated yesterday that Google’s Chrome browser doesn’t seem to handle internationalized domain names.
In fact it does, but if you’re an English-speaking user you’ll probably need to make a few small configuration changes, which should take less than a minute, to make it work.
If you’re using Chrome and you click this link http://nic.сайт chances are your address bar is going to automatically translate it and display it as http://nic.xn--80aswg/.
As far as the DNS is concerned, these are the same URLs. They’re just displayed differently by Chrome, depending on your browser’s display languages settings.
If you want to see the Cyrillic version in your address bar, simply:

• Go to the Chrome Settings menu via the toolbar menu or by typing chrome://settings into the address bar.
• Click the “Language and input settings” button. It’s in the Advanced options bit, which may be hidden at first. Scroll all the way down to unhide.
• Click the Add button to add the languages you want to support in the address bar.

Right now, you can see all three active IDN gTLDs in their intended scripts by adding Arabic, Chinese (Simplified Han) and Russian. As gTLDs in other scripts are added, you’ll need to add those too.
Simple.
Thanks to DNS jack o’ all trades Jothan Frakes for telling me how to do this.

On day one, Donuts in breach of new gTLD contract

Ooops! Donuts accidentally broke the terms of its first new gTLD Registry Agreement last night, just hours after its first string, .游戏, was delegated to the DNS root.
If you’ve been following the name collisions debate closely, you’ll recall that all new gTLD registries are banned from activating any second-level domains for 120 days after they sign their contracts:

Registry Operator shall not activate any names in the DNS zone for the Registry TLD (except for “NIC”) until at least 120 calendar days after the effective date of this agreement.

For the first four gTLDs to go live, that clock doesn’t stop ticking until November 12.
And yet, last night, Donuts activated donuts.游戏, apparently in violation of its new contractual obligations with ICANN.
The name was live and resolving for at least an hour. Donuts pulled it after we asked a company executive whether it might be a breach of contract.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, and I doubt ICANN needs to take any action.
Chalk it down to the understandable ebullience that naturally accompanies finally getting delegated to the root after such a long and painful evaluation process.
The 120-day rule was also a late amendment to Specification 6 of the RA, added by ICANN just seven days before .游戏 was delegated and over three months after Donuts signed the original contract.
It’s designed to address the potential for collisions between second-level domains in new gTLDs and names used on internal networks that already have working SSL certificates.
The no-activation window was chosen to match the 120-day period that the CA/Browser Forum gives its certificate authority members to revoke clashing certificates.
It seems unlikely donuts.游戏 will have caused any security issues during the brief period it was alive.

First new gTLDs delegated (really!)

ICANN has delegated the first new gTLDs to the DNS root.
All four of the first batch of internationalized domain names appear to be present right now in root zone file:

• .xn--ngbc5azd (شبكة.) — means “.web” in Arabic. Operated by dotShabaka Registry.
• .xn--unup4y (.游戏) — means “.games” in Chinese. Operated by Donuts.
• .xn--80aswg (.сайт) — means “.site” in several Cyrillic languages. Operated by CORE Association.
• .xn--80asehdb (.онлайн) — means “.online” in several Cyrillic languages. Also operated by CORE Association.

Infuriatingly, and appropriately given the glitches that have plagued the program for the last 18 months, the news seems to have been announced unexpectedly by ICANN VP Christine Willett during a webinar that most listeners had been kicked out of due to a technical problem.
The race is now one to see which of the four will be the first to go live with a resolving web site.