Key-Systems to take a loss on .hiv domains

Key-Systems said yesterday that it plans to make .hiv domain names available at “below net cost price”, in solidarity with would-be new gTLD registry dotHIV.
The registrar said it will also offer free .hiv names at launch to organizations involving in fighting the virus via its Moniker and domaindiscount24.com retail registrars.
dotHIV, also a German company, plans to donate all of its profits to HIV/AIDs charities.
Its application is uncontested and has already passed Initial Evaluation, but is the target of Governmental Advisory Committee advice, which has put its bid on hold.
Despite this uncertainty, Key-Systems said it expects the Sunrise phase for .hiv to start in December.

First three new gTLD objections thrown out

Three objections against new gTLD applications have been thrown out by the World Intellectual Property Organization, two of them on the basis that they were blatant attempts to game the system.
The objections were all Legal Rights Objections. Essentially, they’re attempts by the objectors to show that for ICANN to approve the gTLD would infringe their existing trademark rights.
The applications being objected to were Google’s .home, SC Johnson’s .rightathome and Vipspace Enterprises .vip.
The decisions are of course completely unprecedented. No LROs have ever been decided before.
Let’s look at each in turn.
Google’s .home
The objector here was Defender Security Company, a home security company, which has also applied for .home and has objected to nine of its competitors for the string.
Basically, the objection was thrown out (pdf) because it was a transparent attempt to game the trademark system in order to secure a potentially lucrative gTLD.
Defender appears to have bought the application, along with associated companies, domains, social media accounts and trademarks, from CGR E-Commerce, a company owned by .music applicant Constantine Roussos.
The panelist in the case apparently doesn’t have a DomainTools subscription and couldn’t make the Roussos link from historical Whois records, but it’s plain to see for those who do.
The case was brought on the basis of a European Community trademark on the term “.home”, applied for in December 2011, just a few weeks before ICANN opened the new gTLD application window, and a US trademark on “true.home” applied for a few months later.
The objector also owned dothome.net, one of many throwaway Go Daddy domain name resellers Roussos set up in late 2011 in order to assert prior rights to TLDs he planned to apply for.
The panelist saw through all the nonsense and rejected the objection due to lack of standing.
Here’s the money quote:

The attempted acquisition of trademark rights appears to have been undertaken to create a basis for filing the Objection, or defending an application. There appears to have been no attempt to acquire rights in or use any marks until after the New gTLD Program had been announced, specifically two weeks before the period to file applications for new gTLDs was to open.

For the EC trademark, lack of standing was found because Defender didn’t present any evidence that it actually owned the company, DotHome Ltd, that owned the trademark.
For the US trademark, which is still not registered, the panelist seems to have relied upon UDRP precedent covering rights in unregistered trademarks in his decision to find lack of standing.
The panelist also briefly addresses the Applicant Guidebook criteria for LROs, although it appears he was not obliged to, and found Defender’s arguments lacking.
In summary, it’s a sane decision that appears to show that you can’t secure a gTLD with subterfuge and bogosity.
It’s not looking good for the other eight objections Defender has filed.
Vipspace Enterprises’ .vip
This is another competitive objection, filed by one .vip applicant against another.
The objector in this case is German outfit I-Registry, which has applied for four gTLDs. The respondent is Vipspace, which has only applied for .vip.
In this case, both companies have applied for trademarks, one filed one month before the other.
The panelist’s decision focuses, sanely again, on the generic nature of the string in question.
Because both trademarks were filed for the word “VIP” meaning “Very Important Person”, which is the intended meaning of both applications, it’s hard to see how either is a proper brand.
The panelist wrote (pdf):

while SOAP, for example, may be a perfectly satisfactory trade mark for cars, it cannot serve as a trade mark for the cleaning product “soap”.
…
While the parties have used the term, “VIP”, in various forms on their website to indicate the manner in which the term will be used if they are successful in being awarded the domain, there is nothing before the Panel (beyond mere assertion) to show that either of them has yet traded under their marks sufficiently to displace the primary descriptive meaning of the term and establish a brand or at all.

In other words, it’s a second case of a WIPO panelist deciding that getting, or applying for, a trademark is not enough to grant a company exclusive rights to a new gTLD string.
Sanity, again, prevails.
SC Johnson’s .rightathome
While it contains the word “home”, this is a completely unrelated case with a different objector and a different panelist.
The objector here was Right At Home, a Nebraska-based international provider of in-home elderly care services. The applicant is a subsidiary of the well-known cosmetics company SC Johnson, which uses “Right@Home” as a brand.
It appears that both objector and applicant have really good rights to the string in question, which makes the panelist’s decision all the more interesting.
The way the LRO is described in ICANN’s new gTLD Applicant Guidebook, there are eight criteria that must be weighed by the panelist.
In this case, the panelist does not provide a conclusion showing how the weighting was done, but rather discusses each point in turn and decides whether the evidence favors the objector or the applicant.
The applicant here won on five out of the eight criteria.
The fact that the two companies offer different products and/or services, accompanied by the fact that the phrase “Right At Home” is in use by other companies in addition to the complainant and respondent appears to have been critical in tipping the balance.
In short, the panelist appears to have decided (pdf) that because SC Johnson did not apply for .rightathome in bad faith, and because it’s unlikely internet users will think the gTLD belongs to Right At Home, the objection should be rejected.
I am not a lawyer, but it appears that the key takeaway from this case is that owning a legitimately obtained brand is not enough to win an LRO if you’re an objector and the new gTLD applicant operates in a different vertical.
This will worry many people.

Geo gTLD bidders propose new constituency

Applicants for geographic gTLDs voted unanimously to form a new ICANN constituency last week.
According to minutes of a meeting hosted by .london applicant London & Partners in London last Thursday, 20 applicants voted in favor of a constituency and nobody voted for the alternatives.
Not every geo was in attendance, however. Twenty votes represents less than a third of the overall geographic gTLD applicant base.
A new constituency would likely join registries and registrars in the Contracted Parties House of the Generic Name Supporting Organization.
A constituency for dot-brand applicants, the Brand Registry Group, is also currently being formed.

Demand Media withdraws .bar application

Demand Media has withdrawn is application for the .bar new gTLD.
It’s the first of the company’s applications, filed via its United TLD subsidiary, to be withdrawn.
It was in a contention set with only one other applicant, a Mexican venture by the catchy name of Punto 2012 Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, which has also applied for .cafe and .rest.
There are now 97 withdrawn applications and a maximum of 1,357 future delegated gTLDs.

Amazon’s dot-brand likely doomed as US withdraws geo objection

The US government is set to allow the Governmental Advisory Committee to kill off Amazon’s application for .amazon, along with eight other new gTLDs with geographic flavors.
In a position paper published last night, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said:

the United States is willing in Durban to abstain and remain neutral on .shenzen (IDN in Chinese), .persiangulf, .guangzhou (IDN in Chinese), .amazon (and IDNs in Japanese and Chinese), .patagonia, .yun, and .thai, thereby allowing the GAC to present consensus objections on these strings to the Board, if no other government objects.

According to a GAC source, US protests were the “only reason” the GAC was unable to reach a consensus objection to these applications during the Beijing meeting three months ago.
Consensus would strengthen the objection, giving the ICANN board the presumption that the applications, some of which have already passed Initial Evaluation, should not be approved.
None of the nine applications in question met ICANN’s strict definition of a “geographic” string, but they nevertheless look geographic enough to raise concerns with GAC members.
Amazon’s application for .amazon raised the eyebrows of the Latin American countries that share the Amazonia region.
The company has been in talks with these GAC members since Beijing. If it wants to secure .amazon, it has a little over a week to address their concerns, if it wants to avoid an objection.
While the US is now promising to drop its objection to the GAC’s objection, it does not appear to have changed its position, claiming that governments have no rights to geographic strings. NTIA said:

The United States affirms our support for the free flow of information and freedom of expression and does not view sovereignty as a valid basis for objecting to the use of terms, and we have concerns about the effect of such claims on the integrity of the process.
…
the United States is not aware of an international consensus that recognizes inherent governmental rights in geographic terms.

It’s calling for a rethink of the process, during the mandatory review of the new gTLD program that ICANN must conduct before accepting a second round of applications.
Given that the GAC currently has the ability to object to any string for any reason, it’s difficult to see how a review could achieve the NTIA’s goal without reining in the GAC’s powers.

ICANN says DotConnectAfrica’s .africa bid is officially “Not Approved”

Artemis signs 30 anchor tenants for .secure gTLD

Artemis, the NCC Group subsidiary applying for .secure, says it has signed up 30 big-name customers for its expensive, high-security new gTLD offering.
CTO Alex Stamos said that the list includes three “too big to fail” banks and three of the four largest social networking companies. They’ve all signed letters of intent to use .secure domains, he said.
He was speaking at a small gathering of customers and potential customers in London yesterday, to which DI was invited on the condition that we not report the name of anyone else in attendance.
Artemis is doing this outreach despite the facts that a) .secure is still in a two-way contention set and b) deep-pocketed online retailer Amazon is the other applicant.
Stamos told DI he’s confident that Artemis will win .secure one way or the other — hopefully Amazon’s single-registrant bid will run afoul of ICANN’s current rethink of “closed generics”.
He expects to launch .secure in the second or third quarter of next year with a few dozen registrants live from pretty much the start.
The London event yesterday, which was also attended by executives from a few household names, was the second of three the company has planned. New York was the first and there’ll soon be one in California.
I’m hearing so many stories about new gTLD applicants that still haven’t figured out their go-to-market strategies recently that it was refreshing to see one that seems to be on the ball.
Artemis’ vision for .secure is also probably the most technologically innovative proposed gTLD that I’m currently aware of.
As the name suggests, security is the order of the day. Registrants would be vetted during the lengthy registration process and the domain names themselves would be manually approved.
Not only will there not be any typosquatting, but there’s even talk of registering common typos on behalf of registrants.
Registrants would also be expected to adhere to levels of security on their web sites (mandatory HTTPS, for example) and email systems (mandatory TLS). Domains would be scanned daily for malware and would have manual penetration testing at least annually.
Emerging security standards would be deployed make sure that browsers would only trust SSL certificates provided by Artemis (or, more likely, its CA partner) when handling connections to .secure sites.
Many of the policies are still being worked out, sometimes in conversation with an emerging “community” of the aforementioned anchor tenants, but there’s one thing that’s pretty clear:
This is not a domain name play.
If you buy a .secure domain name, you’re really buying an NCC managed security service that allows you to use a domain name, as opposed to an easily-copied image, as your “trust mark”.
Success for .secure, if it goes live as planned, won’t be measured in registration volume. I wouldn’t expect it to be much bigger than .museum, the tiniest TLD today, within its first few years.
Prices for .secure have not yet been disclosed, but I’m expecting them to be measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. If “a domain” costs $50,000 a year, don’t be surprised.
Artemis’ .secure would however be available to any enterprise that can afford it and can pass its stringent security tests, which makes it more “open” than Amazon’s vaguely worded closed generic bid.
Other ICANN accredited registrars will technically be allowed to sell .secure domains, but the Registry-Registrar Agreement will be written in such a way as to make it economically non-viable for them to do so.
Overall, the company has a bold strategy with some significant challenges.
I wonder how enthusiastic enterprises will be about using .secure if their customers start to assume that their regular domain name (which may even be a dot-brand) is implicitly insecure.
Artemis is also planning to expose some information about how well its registrants are complying with their security obligations to end users, which may make some potential registrants nervous.
Even without this exposure, simply complying appears to be quite a resource-intensive ongoing process and not for the faint-hearted.
However, that’s in keeping with the fact that it’s a managed security service — companies buy these things in order to help secure their systems, not cover up problems.
Stamos also said that its eligibility guidelines are being crafted with its customers in such a way that registrants will only ever be kicked out of .secure if they’re genuinely bad actors.
Artemis’ .secure is a completely new concept for the gTLD industry, and I wouldn’t like to predict whether it will work or not, but the company seems to be going about its pre-sales marketing and outreach in entirely the correct way.

New gTLD registry contract approved, but applicants left hanging by GAC advice

ICANN has approved the standard registry contract for new gTLD registries after many months of controversy.
But its New gTLD Program Committee has also decided to put hundreds more applications on hold, pending talks with the Governmental Advisory Committee about its recent objections.
The new Registry Agreement is the baseline contract for all new gTLD applicants. While some negotiation on detail is possible, ICANN expects most applicants to sign it as is.
Its approval by the NGPC yesterday — just a couple of days later than recently predicted by ICANN officials — means the first contracts with applicants could very well be signed this month.
The big changes include the mandatory “Public Interest Commitments” for abuse scanning and Whois verification that we reported on last month, and the freeze on closed generics.
But a preliminary reading of today’s document suggests that the other changes made since the previous version, published for comment by ICANN in April, are relatively minor.
There have been no big concessions to single-registrant gTLD applicants, such as dot-brands, and ICANN admitted that it may have to revise the RA in future depending on how those discussions pan out.
In its resolution, the NGPC said:

ICANN is currently considering alternative provisions for inclusion in the Registry Agreement for .brand and closed registries, and is working with members of the community to identify appropriate alternative provisions. Following this effort, alternative provisions may be included in the Registry Agreement.

But many companies that have already passed through Initial Evaluation now have little to worry about in their path to signing a contract with ICANN and proceeding to delegation.
“New gTLDs are now on the home stretch,” NGPC member Chris Disspain said in a press release “This new Registry Agreement means we’ve cleared one of the last hurdles for those gTLD applicants who are approved and eagerly nearing that point where their names will go online.”
Hundreds more, however, are still in limbo.
The NGPC also decided yesterday to put a hold on all “Category 1” applications singled out for advice in the Governmental Advisory Committee’s Beijing communique.
That’s a big list, comprising hundreds of applications that GAC members had concerns about.
The NGPC resolved: “the NGPC directs staff to defer moving forward with the contracting process for applicants who have applied for TLD strings listed in the GAC’s Category 1 Safeguard Advice, pending a dialogue with the GAC.”
That dialogue is expected to kick off in Durban a little over a week from now, so the affected applicants may not find themselves on hold for too long.
Negotiations, however, are likely to be tricky. As the NGPC’s resolution notes, most people believe the Beijing communique was “untimely, ill-conceived, overbroad, and too vague to implement”.
Or, as I put it, stupid.
By the GAC’s own admission, its list of strings is “non-exhaustive”, so if the delay turns out to have a meaningful impact on affected applicants, expect all hell to break loose.

GNSO still breathing as ICANN retracts “flawed” Trademark+50 thinking

The Generic Names Supporting Organization isn’t dead after all.
ICANN’s Board Governance Committee has retracted a document related to new gTLD trademark protections that some on the GNSO Council believed spelled the end of the multistakeholder model as we know it.
The BGC, in rejecting a formal Reconsideration Request related to the “Trademark+50” mechanism, had used a rationale that some said was overly confrontational, legalistic and gave ICANN staff the ability to ignore community input more or less at will.
We reported on the issue in considerable detail here.
The committee on Friday retracted the original rationale, replacing it with one (pdf) that, while still containing some of the flawed reasoning DI noted last month, seems to have appeased the GNSO Council.
Neustar policy VP Jeff Neuman, who raised the original concerns, told the Council: “I believe the rationale is much more consistent with, and recognizes, the value of the multi-stakeholder model.”
The BGC did not change its ultimate decision — the Reconsideration Request has still been rejected and Trademark+50 is still being implemented in the new gTLD program.

Four new gTLD applications withdrawn, including one closed generic

Four new gTLD application were withdrawn overnight, including the first “closed generic” bid to be dropped since ICANN implemented a freeze on such applications.
Today’s withdrawals are:

• .movie — Of the eight applications for this string, this Dish DBS bid was one of only two proposed with single-registrant business models. It would have undoubtedly have been captured by the current ICANN hold on closed generics.
• .chesapeake — A dot-brand filed by Chesapeake Energy. It had already passed Initial Evaluation. While arguably a geographic string, it had not been classified as such by ICANN and had no objections or GAC advice.
• .chk — An abbreviation of the above, matching Chesapeake’s stock market ticker symbol. It had also already passed IE and had a clear run at delegation.
• .kerastase Yet another L’Oreal dot-brand application, the sixth of its original 14 bids to be withdrawn.

The total withdrawals to date now stands at 94, 49 of which were uncontested.