Banks to write security rules for “.bank”

Financial services firms unhappy with ICANN’s new top-level domains program are to take matters into their own hands by writing security guidelines for TLDs like “.bank”.
BITS, the technology policy arm of the Financial Services Roundtable, said it plans to develop “elevated security standards for financial gTLDs” and wants ICANN to make them mandatory.
The organization, which counts many major world banks as members, is concerned that a “.bank” in the hands of a registry with lax security could increase fraud and reduce confidence in banking online.
BITS said its guidelines would be drafted by a globally diverse working group and submitted to an international standards-setting organization for ratification.
It wants ICANN to include a single sentence in its new TLDs Applicant Guidebook, apparently incorporating the guidelines by reference:

Evaluators will use standards published by the financial services industry to determine if the applicant’s proposed security approach is commensurate with the level of trust necessary for financial services gTLDs.

An ICANN working group is working on the concept of a High Security Zone TLD for precisely this kind of application, but in September the ICANN board abruptly decided that it “will not be certifying or enforcing” the idea, apparently in order to mitigate its own corporate risk.
The BITS project appears to be in direct response to that move.
It certainly seems to be a more productive avenue of engagement than hinting at a lawsuit, which it did in a November letter to ICANN.
I’m attempting to confirm whether the BITS plan, submitted as a response to the Applicant Guidebook public comment period, is being proposed with ICANN’s backing. (UPDATE: it isn’t.)

No cheap TLDs for poor countries

Applicants in the developing world that hoped to get a new top-level domain on the cheap will be disappointed after proposals to help subsidize their applications were watered down.
The ICANN GNSO Council last week voted against measures that could have reduced application fees or asked ICANN set up an aid fund for applicants from poor nations.
ICANN’s application fee for a single TLD is $185,000, but it is widely expected to cost most applicants at least double or triple that, once add-on fees and consulting costs are taken into account.
While this is not a lot of money if you’re a big corporation, it’s a substantial barrier to entry if you’re an entrepreneur or community initiative from a poorer country.
So for several months an ICANN working group known as JAS, for Joint Applicant Support, has been working on ideas for how ICANN and others can support less wealthy applicants.
The group wanted to do further work to establish ways to subsidize the application fee, set up an ICANN fund using revenue from TLD auctions, and negotiate registry-level support.
But the GNSO Council voted those ideas down last Thursday, ostensibly on the basis that they were too far-reaching and “beyond the scope of the GNSO” to approve.
The vote was split roughly along party lines, with almost all of the support for the broader motions coming from non-commercial stakeholders.
Business interests such as registrars, registries, ISPs and intellectual property stakeholders voted in favor of a more “limited” set of objectives.
Proponents of the new limited charter tell me that they remain supportive of the work of the JAS, but that they did not believe it has the expertise to carry out such far-reaching work.
I suspect that commercial factors also played a role. For example, the JAS wanted to:

Discuss with Backend Registry Service Providers the extent of coordination, to be given by Backend Registry Service Providers (e.g. brokering the relationships, reviewing the operational quality of the relationship) and propose methods for coordinating that assistance

But the registry-supported replacement resolution, which was approved, asks the JAS to instead:

Propose methods for applicants to seek out assistance from registry service providers.

References to reduced application fees for needy applicants, and to the need for an ICANN-supported fund, were cut entirely.
The changes received majority support on the Council, but were not universally welcomed. Former Council chair Avri Doria called it “neocolonialism”, and wrote on her blog:

The only kind of aid the JAS WG is allowed to work on is aid that makes a applicant from a developing economy beholden and subject to the control of an incumbent or an expert.

Because the JAS working group was a joint effort of the GNSO and At Large Advisory Committee, it now has two charters – one broad, one narrow – and it’s not entirely clear how its work will proceed.
But it does seem that the $185,000 application fee is here to stay, no matter where you come from.

Cute sees .org’s future in new TLDs

The Public Interest Registry sees new top-level domains as an opportunity to strengthen the .org brand as well as add new TLDs to its stable, according to newly appointed CEO Brian Cute.
“We have the new round of gTLDs opening up soon, and I see that as genuinely an opportunity for PIR, so a lot of our strategic focus will be there,” Cute said in an interview.
Internationalized domain name TLDs will play a major role in this strategy. Cute said that “expanding .org into the IDN world” will be the key focus.
While PIR plans to apply to ICANN for several IDN variants of .org, there’s less interest in expanding into ASCII strings or outside of the company’s “public interest” mission.
“We not particularly looking at that opportunity,” Cute said.
He also believes that the large number of new TLDs ICANN is expected to authorize could actually strengthen .org as a brand.
“There will be lots of new entrants, lots of new competition,” he said. “The environment will be one where if we play our cards right, we’ll be able to be successful and in fact flourish.”
Cute was named CEO of PIR earlier today. Previously, he worked at Afilias, a close partner, so his learning curve at his new employer will be relatively gentle.
He said he doesn’t plan to shake things up much.
“I don’t see any need to make any major course corrections to our strategy,” he said. “It’s now a matter of execution. There will be new competition so we will have to execute well.”

ICANN staff swamped

ICANN’s board of directors is giving its staff and policy-making bodies more work than they can handle.
The GNSO Council yesterday voted to shelve board-requested work on the new top level domains program because no ICANN staffers have the time to help coordinate the project.
Last month, the board asked the GNSO and other constituencies to come up with ideas, before mid-March, about how to measure the consumer benefits of new TLDs after they launch.
But the Council yesterday was faced with having to suspend other policy development, in order to get the required staff support, so decided instead to defer the new work.
A senior ICANN executive at the meeting said that ICANN staff is “not an unlimited resource” and has “no bandwidth to keep taking these projects”.
This has apparently been an issue for over a year.
In this particular instance, the problem project comprised part of ICANN’s obligations under its Affirmation of Commitments with the US government, so it’s not trivial stuff.
As others have noted, sometimes the amount of policy development going on in ICANN can appear overwhelming to outsiders, but it seems that this problem also extends to ICANN internally.

IP lawyers call for halt to new TLDs

Some trademark interests are ratcheting up the rhetoric in opposition to ICANN’s new top-level domains program, with one company calling for it to be scrapped altogether.
While ICANN’s extended public comment period on the proposed final Applicant Guidebook does not end until the weekend, a Danish bloc of companies has already made its objections known.
The most vociferous views so far this week have come from Lundbeck, a drug company that researches treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Lundbeck trademark counsel Søren Ingemann Larsen accused ICANN of operating “fake” comment periods that ignore feedback from the trademark lobby.
In a cap-happy missive, he said the program should be “HALTED” until ICANN can prove the domain market lacks competition, then “cancelled” if such proof is not forthcoming.

The fact of the matter is that the only entities that are in favour of the Program are the ones who can make money out of it, and that is ICANN and the Registrars. The “internet community”, including private users and brand owners, are NOT interested.

Lundbeck, which has brands such as “Cipralex” and “Xenazine”, does not appear to be a major target for cybersquatters, judging by how many UDRP complaints it has filed (none).
It did however join CADNA, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, at the same time as prolific UDRP user Lego Juris, last November.
Lego, and a few other companies submitting virtually identical comments to ICANN this week, have reiterated criticisms of the program’s trademark protections expressed in previous months.
But they have now also seized upon elements of the latest independent economic report into the costs and benefits of new TLDs, which ICANN published last month.
One extract Lego and the others quote questions whether new TLDs are needed to provide some of the services proposed by community TLD wannabes:

Are there other ways to achieve the primary objectives of the proposed gTLD, such as: (a) second-level domain names; (b) certificates; (c) software tags; and (d) filters that look at content beyond the URL and any tags? How do the alternatives, if any, compare in terms of their likely effectiveness in achieving the primary objectives of the gTLD and the costs they would impose on different members of the Internet community?

It’s an interesting argument – that a community TLD could just as well operate as a second-level domain – not one I recall reading in a long while. I don’t think it has legs.

Native Americans want new TLD protection

The National Congress of American Indians, a Native American rights group, has asked ICANN for special protection for tribal names under the new top-level domains program.
In comments filed with ICANN today, the NCAI asks for the same level of protection given to countries and territories found on various UN lists, such as the ISO 3166-1 list of country names.
NCAI president Jefferson Keel wrote:

Allowing the approval of top level tribal domain names (such as .navajo or .seneca) without considering the protection of tribal governments would cause confusion, attributing certain information or views to a tribal government which would lack control while its name is being used. In our view, only tribal government websites should be authorized to use a tribal name gTLD, unless express consent is granted by the tribal government.

The letter appears to request that these protections are extended both to TLD strings and to names registered at the second level, although it’s not entirely clear on that point.
In other words, the NCAI appears to want not only “.navajo” reserved, but also to have “navajo” placed on the list of reserved strings that all TLD registries will have to abide by.
The latest list of tribes officially recognized by the US government has several hundred entries. If ICANN were to make the requested changes, more tribes would be protected than UN members.
Most of the push for protection of geographic terms has come from ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which does not have any Native American tribal representatives.
Keel’s comments were filed in response to the ongoing ICANN public comment period on the latest version of the Applicant Guidebook, which ends this Saturday.

Ready to apply for a gTLD? No, you’re not. Not even remotely

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kieren McCarthy.
So, yes, it’s been a long, drawn-out and dispiriting exercise to get to the point where the structure of the internet will be radically changed forever.
But even if the US government invades ICANN’s offices in Los Angeles, trademark lawyers kidnap Rod Beckstrom, and Marilyn Cade clones herself 100 times, nothing can stop the raw reality that 2011 is the year of the gTLD. It’s happening. So stop sulking and start getting excited about it.
It’s been a long 30 months since Paris in June 2008. Plenty of time to talk and plan and consider the future. The biggest negative impact of this delay however has not been on the process but on the gTLD applicants themselves who have started to persuade themselves they know what they’re doing.
We don’t need a four-month communication period, they cry, we are ready to go. We have been ready to go for two years!
The sad truth however is that you’re not. You’re not even remotely ready to face a brave new world of internet extensions that fit around its users, rather than the other way around.
Sure, you know the rules in the Applicant Guidebook. Well, most of them. And you know how the application process will work (but you don’t though, do you?). But that’s all just paperwork, as soon as you get through the doors of bureaucracy there standing in the brilliant light will be hundreds of thousands of internet users clamoring to hear what you have to tell them, basking in the glory of a new dawn.
Except they won’t.
Instead you are more likely to find yourself coming out of a cinema in a bad part of town just as the sun sets, looking for a taxi and realizing you haven’t got enough cash left to get home.
Make no mistake: new internet extensions are the future of this extraordinary global network. VeriSign doesn’t drop half a million dollars for a one-hour session at an ICANN meeting if it’s doesn’t think it’s critical to its future. But there was a long gap between the invention of the steam engine and the Japanese bullet train. The Wright Brothers took off in 1903 but it took 32 years for the DC-3 to bring air travel to commercial travelers.
The big boys will be fine of course; they have the money and resources to flex and change. But if you are not VeriSign or GoDaddy, how are you going to ensure that your internet dream isn’t just a pipe-dream or, worse still, a nightmare?
The answer is terrifying simple: talk to people.
The fact is that no one knows how the domain name market will pan out in the next few years. There are plenty of ideas, some new, some radical. Some of these will take root; others will fade or fail. The only way to get a sense of what will be a rapidly changing market is to find out what everyone else thinks. You need to talk to everyone, and they need to talk to you.
The other side of this coin is learning from the past. We have had two previous extensions of the internet namespace, albeit much smaller. But those that started up the dot-infos and dot-names were once in the same place as new applicants will be in six months’ time: full of ideas and staring at an uncertain path forward.
The domain name industry, though still maturing, is also not an empty space anymore. There are enough established companies and there have been enough conferences and meetings about that market for relationships to be formed. A status quo of sorts is in place, and a collective sense of how things work has emerged.
Even so, was it only me that listened to person after person in 2010 call ICANN’s economic studies inaccurate and incomplete and thought: “Not one of you has the same idea about the industry you live within.”
How much do new gTLD applicants know or even understanding the different sides of this industry?
If you go to ICANN meetings, you may know some of the politics of it. You may even have grasped some of the multitude of processes that accompany internet infrastructure. But you won’t have got a feel for the sheer business of the internet.
If you come from the domainer industry, chances are you have a sense of the intrinsic value of domains and what makes them move or not move. But even the CEO of Oversee.net, Jeff Kupietsky, said this time last year there needs to be some kind of organized effort to turn what is an ad hoc market into something more stable. Domainers know how auctions work – but not how to build the factory to make the products that are sold.
If you have run a registry in the past, you may have a leg up. But how do you differentiate between useful lessons from the past, and old ways of thinking that will put you at a competitive disadvantage?
How many of those wonderful, market-tested systems have in fact been dangerously patched and cobbled together over the past decade? How will you recognize the market-changing products when they appear?
And, of course, the biggest, the most unknown and yet the most crucially important aspect of new gTLDs: marketing.
In an industry where the epitome of marketing prowess is a woman making double entendres in a tight T-shirt, we all have much to learn from the marketing crowd. When you enter the market alongside 499 other new extensions, you better be damn sure you have a plan to persuade people why they should choose yours.
So what is the solution? Well a big part of one solution is to attend the first ever conference that is dedicated to figuring out this new market.
The .nxt conference on 9-10 February in San Francisco will feature everyone from ICANN’s CEO and the ICANN staff in charge of running the process, to the established players, the visionaries as well as the heretics, the observers and the advisers.
Over two days, you will get a masterclass in what we all collectively know, and are still figuring out, about new internet extensions. It’s the one place where you can check your assumptions and learn about others’. Miss that opportunity and in 12 months’ time you’ll be wondering how you managed to get it all so wrong.
Kieren McCarthy is an author and consultant, formerly ICANN’s general manager of public participation. He is a founder of the Global Internet Business Coalition and general manager of the .nxt conference.

The Top Ten Hottest Posts of 2010

Tumbleweeds are blowing through the domain name industry this week, which makes it an excellent time to take a look back at 2010, in the form of a list of this blog’s most widely read posts.
In descending order, here are the top ten DomainIncite stories of 2010:
ICANN had no role in seizing torrent domains
When ICANN stood accused by the blogosphere of helping the US government shut down dozens of .com domains in November, it took the organization a full week to officially deny it. In the meantime, it kicked off a Twitter campaign encouraging people to visit this post, making it the year’s most-read by some margin.
dotFree’s “free” domain names explained
Everyone wants something for nothing, so when I provided the first interview with the chief executive of the recently launched dotFree Group in August, it gathered a lot of attention. It turned out .free domains may not be as “free” as some had hoped.
WordPress.com becomes a domain name registrar
When I spotted that WordPress.com owner Automattic had received an ICANN registrar accreditation, company CEO Matt Mullenweg was good enough to link back to this post when he subsequently announced the move to his readers in October.
First reactions to ICANN’s VI bombshell
It was the biggest shake-up in the domain name industry in a decade – ICANN announced in November that it would start letting registrars and registries own each other. The full repercussions have yet to be felt, but this post summarized some of the early reactions.

ICANN will not attend White House drugs meeting
When and how governments and law enforcement should be able to block domain names is an ongoing hot topic for the industry. This September post broke the news that ICANN would not participate in US talks about blocking “fake pharmaceuticals” web sites.
Porn group starts anti-XXX campaign
The ongoing .xxx drama continues to be one of the key domain name industry stories that plays just as well with a mainstream readership. In addition, including the keywords “xxx”, “group” and “porn” in the same headline has proven disturbingly useful for acquiring search engine traffic.
Gaming scandal hits Russian domain launch
Internationalized domain names finally arrived on the internet in 2010, and the launch of Russia’s .РФ (.rf) IDN ccTLD was easily the biggest success story. It has racked up almost 700,000 registrations in the last two months, but was hit by allegations of registrar gaming, which I reported on here.
ICANN told to ban .bank or get sued
The road to the approval of ICANN’s new gTLD program was widely anticipated to have wrapped up by the end of the year. It didn’t, but that didn’t stop some eleventh-hour special pleading by organizations such as the Financial Services Roundtable.
Whistleblower alleged shenanigans at DirectNIC
DirectNIC has had its fair share of legal troubles in 2010. First it was sued for cybersquatting by Verizon (which it denied) and then, as I reported in this December post, a former employee alleged a complex scheme to make money through fraudulent domain arbitrage (which it denied, then settled).
Survey reveals demand for .brand TLDs
A World Trademark Review survey revealed mixed reactions from trademark lawyers and corporate marketing departments to new TLDs, but it did reveal that most companies would use their “.brand” TLD, if they had one, as their primary online address.
Let’s hope 2011 brings such a diverse range of interesting topics to write about. I’m certain it will.

Go Daddy passes 45 million domains milestone

Go Daddy now has 45 million domain names under management.
That’s the word from Scottsdale tonight. The news comes less than a year after the registrar announced its 40 millionth domain name registration.
According to the company, it “is registering, renewing or transferring a domain name every eight-tenths of a second” and is now “larger than eight of its closest competitors combined”.
Obviously, this is great news for Go Daddy.
It also means that the company is in a very dominant position in the market, which may attract more attention in future.

Incumbents get the nod for new TLD apps

Domain name registries such as Neustar, VeriSign and Afilias will be able to become registrars under ICANN’s new top-level domains program, ICANN has confirmed.
In November, ICANN’s board voted to allow new TLD registries to also own registrars, so they will be able to sell domains in their TLD direct to registrants, changing a decade-long stance.
Late last week, in reply (pdf) to a request for clarification from Neustar policy veep Jeff Neuman, new gTLD program architect Kurt Pritz wrote:

if and when ICANN launches the new gTLD program, Neustar will be entitled to serve as both a registry and registrar for new gTLDs subject to any conditions that may be necessary and appropriate to address the particular circumstances of the existing .BIZ registry agreement, and subject to any limitations and restrictions set forth in the final Applicant Guidebook.

That doesn’t appear to say anything unexpected. ICANN had already made it pretty clear that the new vertical integration rules would be extended to incumbent gTLD registries in due course.
(However, you may like to note Pritz’s use of the words “if and when”, if you think that’s important.)
Neustar’s registry agreement currently forbids it not only from acting as a .biz registrar, but also from acquiring control of greater than 15% of any ICANN-accredited registrar (whether or not its sells .biz domains).
That part of the contract will presumably need to be changed before Neustar applies for official registrar accreditation or attempts to acquire a large stake in an existing registrar.
VeriSign and Afilias, the other two big incumbent gTLD registries, have similar clauses in their contracts.