WebUnited inks deal to “mirror” country’s TLD in the blockchain

Blockchain domains startup WebUnited says it has signed up its first registry client to a service that allows domain names to be “mirrored” on a blockchain naming service.

The company has inked a deal with Global Domains International, the registry for Samoa’s .ws ccTLD (sometimes marketed as a generic for “web site”), that will let its registrars up-sell matching .ws names on the Polygon blockchain.

WebUnited, a Swiss-based joint venture of domain registry ShortDot and “Web3” naming player Freename, says registrants will be able to use their mirrored .ws names to address cryptocurrency wallets, for example.

The company essentially acts as a registry service provider for its registry clients in much the same way as regular RSPs do now, except instead of putting domains into EPP databases and the consensus DNS, it adds them to a blockchain.

Registrars that choose to sign up to the service will use an “EPP-like” API to access the registry, ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas said. He expects .ws to charge about five bucks a year for the blockchain add-on domains.

Kopas said WebUnited is also mirroring policies found in regular domain names, so if somebody loses their domain in a UDRP case, for example, they also lose their matching blockchain name.

After .ws, ShortDot’s own TLDs — .bond, .sbs, .icu, .cyou and .cfd — are also expected to offer the mirroring service. Because these are gTLDs governed by ICANN contracts, ShortDot first has to go through the Registry Service Evaluation Process for approval.

Kopas said that once ShortDot has completed its RSEP it will be able to supply gTLD clients with template language to get their own RSEPs approved. He said WebUnited has a pipeline of potential ccTLD and gTLD registries that have expressed an interest in the service.

Emoji domains get a 😟 after broad study

Domain names containing emojis are a security risk and not recommended, according to a pretty comprehensive review by an ICANN study group.
The Country-Code Names Supporting Organization has delivered the results of its 12-person, 18-month Emoji Study Group, which was tasked with looking into the problems emoji domains can cause, review current policy, and talk to ccTLD registries that currently permit emoji domains.
The ESG didn’t have a lot of power, and its recommendations are basically an exercise in can-kicking, but it’s easily the most comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding emoji domains that I’ve ever come across.
It’s 30 pages long, and you can read it here (pdf).
Emojis are currently banned in gTLDs, where ICANN has to approve new Unicode tables before they can be used by registries at the second level, under its internationalized domain name policy, IDNA 2008.
But ccTLDs, which are not contracted with ICANN, have a lot more flexibility. There are 15 ccTLDs — almost all representing small islands or low-penetration African nations — that currently permit emoji domains, the ESG found.
That’s about 6% of Latin-script ccTLDs out there today. These TLDs are .az, .cf, .fm, .je, .ga, .ge, .gg, .gq, .ml, .st, .to, .tk, .uz, .vu, and .ws.
Five of them, including .tk, are run by notorious freebie registry Freenom, but perhaps the best-known is .ws, where major brands such as Budweiser and Coca-Cola have run marketing campaigns in the past.
The main problem with emojis is the potential for confusing similarity, and the ESG report does a pretty good job of enumerating the ways confusability can arise. Take its comparison of multiple applications’ version of the exact same “grinning face” emoji, for example:

If you saw a domain containing one of those in marketing on one platform, would you be able to confidently navigate to the site on another? I doubt I would.
There’s also variations in how registrars handle emojis on their storefronts, the report found. On some you can search with an emoji, on others you’ll need to type out the xn-- prefixed Punycode translation longhand.
In terms of recommendations, the ESG basically just asked ICANN to keep an eye on the situation, to come to a better definition of what an emoji actually is, and to reach out for information to the ccTLDs accepting emojis, which apparently haven’t been keen on opening up so far.
Despite the lack of closure, it’s a pretty good read if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

Emoji domains now easier to use

Emoji domains have become marginally easier to navigate to in the last month, following an update to Google’s Chrome browser.
Google has added “Emoji” to the context menu that appears when users right-click in any editable text field — including the address/search bar.
Clicking the option brings up a searchable list of common emojis that can be inserted into the address bar for either search or, with the addition of a typed-in TLD, navigation.
TLDs currently supporting emojis include .ws, .fm and .to. ICANN has ruled out support for emojis in the gTLDs for security reasons.
When the domain is resolved, the emojis render in the address bar as Punycode-converted Latin characters beginning with the usual “xn--” prefix, at least under my default configuration.
The whole process is still a bit fiddly, so I wouldn’t all rush out to build your businesses on emoji domains just yet.
The context menu feature appears to have been on the experimental track in Chrome for at least a month, but was more recently turned on by default, at least on all the Chrome 69 installs I’ve tested.
If you don’t get the emoji option in your context menu, you should be able to turn it on by navigating to chrome://flags/#enable-emoji-context-menu and selecting the Enabled option.

Emojis coming to another ccTLD

dotFM is to make emoji domain names available in the .fm ccTLD it manages.
The company said today that it’s currently taking expressions of interest in ‘premium’ emoji inventory, and that such domains will be registerable at an unspecified point in future.
It’s published a list of single-emoji domains it plans to sell.
Emoji domains “will be available based on Unicode Consortium Emoji Version 5.0 standards using single code point; and allowing a mix of letters and emoji characters under the top-level .FM, as well as the dotRadio extensions, .RADIO.fm and .RADIO.am”, dotFM said.
Very few TLDs allow emojis to be registered today.
The most prominent is .ws, which is Western Samoa’s ccTLD, marketed as an abbreviation for “web site”.
.fm is the ccTLD for Micronesia, but dotFM markets it to radio stations.
As ccTLDs, they’re not subject to ICANN rules that essentially ban them contractually in gTLDs.
Emojis use the same encoding as internationalized domain names, but do not feature in the IDN standards because they’re not used in real spoken languages.
Emoji domains are usually considered not entirely practical due to the inconsistent ways they can be rendered by applications.

Why you can’t register emojis in gTLDs

The popular “emoji” smiley faces are banned as gTLD domain names for technical reasons, according to ICANN.
Emojis are a form of emoticon that originated on Japanese mobile networks but are now used by 12-year-old girls worldwide due to their support on Android and iPhone operating systems.
It emerged last week that Coca-Cola has registered a bunch of smiley-face domain names under .ws, the Samoan ccTLD, for use in an billboard advertising campaign in Puerto Rico.
.ws was selected because it’s one of only a few TLDs that allow emojis to be registered. Coke is spinning its choice of TLD as an abbreviation for “We Smile”.
This got me thinking: would emojis be something new gTLD registries could start to offer in order to differentiate themselves?
Coke’s emoji domains, it turns out, are just a form of internationalized domain name, like Chinese or Arabic or Greek.
Emoji symbols are in the Unicode standard and could therefore be converted to the ASCII-based, DNS-compatible Punycode under the hood in web browsers and other software.
One of Coke’s (smiley-face).ws domain names is represented as xn--h28h.ws in the DNS.
Unfortunately for gTLD registries, ICANN told DI last night that emojis are not permitted in gTLDs.
“Emoticons cannot be used as IDNs as these code points are DISALLOWED under IDNA2008 protocol,” ICANN said in a statement.
IDNA2008 is the latest version of the IETF standard used to define what Unicode characters can and cannot appear in IDNs.
RFC 5892 specifies what can be included in an IDNA2008 domain name, eliminating thousands of letters and symbols that were permissible under the old IDNA2003 standard.
These characters were ostensibly banned due to the possibility of IDN homograph attacks — when bad guys set up spoof web sites on IDNs that look almost indistinguishable from a domain used by, for example, a bank or e-commerce site.
But Unicode, citing Google data, reckons symbols could only ever be responsible for 0.000016% of such attacks. Most homograph attacks are much simpler, relying on for example the visual similarity of I and l.
Regardless, because IDNA2008 only allows Unicode characters that are actually used in spoken human languages, and because gTLD registries are contractually obliged to adhere to the IDNA2008 technical standards, emojis are not permitted in gTLDs.
All new gTLDs have to provide ICANN with a list of the Unicode code points they plan to support as IDNs when they undergo pre-delegation testing. Asking to support characters incompatible with IDNA2008 would result in a failed test, ICANN tells us.
ICANN does not regulate ccTLDs, of course, so the .ws registry is free to offer whatever domains it wants.
However, ICANN said that emoji domains are only currently supported by software that has not implemented the newer IDN protocol:

Emoticon domains only work in software that has not implemented the latest IDNA standard. Only the older, deprecated version of the IDNA standard allowed emoticons, more or less by accident. Over time, these domains will increasingly not work correctly as software vendors update their implementations.

So Coke, while winning brownie points for novelty, may have registered a bunch of damp squibs.
ICANN also told us that, regardless of what the technical standards say, you’d never be able to apply for an emoticon as a gTLD due to the “letters only” principle, which already bans numbers in top-level strings.