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Group forms to object to .jobs expansion.

A group calling itself The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition is asking ICANN’s board to reconsider its decision to open up the .jobs top level domain name to non-company name registrations. The coalition’s members include major employment web sites such as Monster and CareerBuilder, along with a number of associations.

In a letter (pdf) to the Committee of the Board on Reconsideration, the group argues that:

-The .jobs phased allocation program violates the .jobs charter
-The members of the coalition will be harmed by the by the expansion of the .JOBS space beyond employers without any of the customary and usual protections against abusive and infringing registrations
-Other people will also be harmed by the expansion
-The board’s decision should be stayed pending the outcome of reconsideration
-ICANN’s staff-prepared comment summary was flawed

A number of job boards have been vocal opponents of the plan. Much of the opposition suggests that the purpose and charter of .jobs (an sTLD) has been violated. But I suspect we’ll see more of this sort of backlash as new top level domains are introduced in the coming years.

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Related posts:

1. .Jobs Expansion Approved, .Travel to Release 1 and 2 Character Domains
2. Battle Over .Jobs is Growing
3. The .Jobs Backlash Has Begun

According to a post on DomainConsultant’s site, the registrar DomainName.com and related assets have been sold today. The buyer and final selling price have not been disclosed. At the same time the company announced an upcoming auction with an 8% commission and is now accepting domain submissions via email to mike (at) domainconsultant.com.

Disclaimer: Adam Strong, Managing Editor of DNN, also is a consultant with DomainConsultant.com.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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NBC wants lawsuit over domain name dismissed.

NBC Universal has filed a motion to dismiss (pdf) a lawsuit filed by DONE! Ventures over DONE!’s failed purchase of Women.com. DONE! claims it had an agreement to buy women.com and women.net from NBC, and that NBC later backed out of the deal that was brokered by Sedo.

NBC’s first line of defense is that it hadn’t reached an agreement with DONE! because communications only referred to Women.com, not .net — so key terms hadn’t been agreed to:

The Complaint makes clear on its face that no binding contract was formed because there was no meeting of the minds on a material term: the property for sale. Plaintiff alleges that it made a $1 million offer for two domain names: women.com and women.net. Yet, the correspondence from the NBC Defendants’ broker, which Plaintiff attaches to the Complaint and specifically incorporates by reference, states that the NBC Defendants would accept $1 million for women.com alone. Thus, the parties never agreed on what could be purchased for the $1 million price.

Its second line of defense is that Sedo told DONE! it would need to complete a bill of sale with NBC before completing the transaction. NBC argues that no bill of sale was completed, so there was no breach of contract:

Further, the parties’ correspondence states that the NBC Defendants required specified information about the Plaintiff and the completion of a bill of sale before a deal could be consummated. As Plaintiff admits in the Complaint, no bill of sale was ever drafted or signed. Therefore, even if the parties had reached a meeting of the minds about what property was for sale and at what price, which they did not, at most, there was an unenforceable agreement to agree. Plaintiffs breach of contract claim thus fails as a matter of law.

If the court doesn’t buy either of these arguments, NBC wants it to move the case from California to New York.

So here’s the (literally) million dollar question: if DONE! would accept just the .com domain for $1 million, would NBC go through with it?

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Related posts:

1. NBC Universal and DONE! Fight Over What to Do With Women.com
2. DONE! Ventures Sues NBC Universal Over Failed Women.com Deal at Sedo
3. Ad.com Sale Falls Through, Lawsuit Filed

Is Nokia planning to add its name to the list of “.brand” new top-level domain applicants?

That’s the intriguing possibility that emerged during a conference call of ICANN’s vertical integration working group yesterday.

Nokia working group representative Tero Mustala said, “our company is considering the possibilities to apply for a new gTLD”.

The revelation came as one of the disclosure statements that each participant was obliged to make, and should probably not be taken as an official company position.

As far as I know, this is the first time that the mobile phone giant has been connected to a new TLD bid. But is it a .brand? Unknown.

Nokia is an old hand at TLD applications, being among the over a dozen companies that financed the successful .mobi sponsored TLD application back in 2005.

In the 2000 “test-bed” round, it applied for .mas, .max, .mid, .mis, .mobi, .mobile, .now and .own but failed on technological grounds.

Under the new TLD application process, unsuccessful 2000 applicants get an $86,000 credit towards their new application, if they apply for the same string(s). That’s not an amount of money Nokia would care too much about, obviously.

There have been very few publicly disclosed .brand applications. Canon was the first and loudest. A couple of other companies, such as IBM, have been dropping hints.

Related posts:

1. Brand owners drop hints about .brand TLD plans
2. DotFree wants to give away .free domains
3. Five killer TLDs nobody wants (and five rubbish ones)

Just when you thought making phone calls couldn't get any cheaper, along comes last week's news from Google about their latest iteration of Google Voice. There have been several steps along the way for Google to get to this point, and there are a host of reasons why this news is of interest to service providers of all stripes. I often write about how certain technologies and disruptive forces change the business of being a service provider, and this is but the latest example.

Ever since Vonage came to market, residential carriers have been faced with declining revenues for landline service, which itself is quickly losing ground to wireless substitution. Then Skype came along and brought desktop VoIP to a whole new level of adoption. Along with that came a new value proposition for voice. Whereas Vonage was offering a lower cost monthly plan, Skype was offering free or near free voice, driving the price down to levels that no conventional service provider could sustain.

Google has its own take on voice, which is why this story should be of interest to service providers. Vonage is marketed primarily as a replacement service for POTS, making it a direct competitor to telcos. Nothing complicated there—it's really just a price game, but telcos do have more options to bundle telephony with other things—and of course, even more so for cable operators.

Skype is primarily a Web-based IM/chat service, on top of which they do voice very well, and at low cost to subscribers. As popular as Skype is, their proprietary technology keeps them a bit inside their own sphere. They are still a major threat to telcos, but when positioned a bit differently, they can be a very good complement.

The latest news with Google, though, is something entirely different. Their calling service—Google Voice—is mainly an add-on to Gmail, and works a lot like Skype. As such, it's not a pure telephony service like Vonage, and it's not really built off IM/chat like Skype; it's built around email. Of course, Google has all these other tools, but email is ubiquitous, and Google has been successful building a strong user base here. Gmail binds the user more deeply than IM/chat, making it a great platform for both business and personal usage. I'm not alone in noticing these days that when you get a personal email address as a backup for someone you're working with, more often than not it's a Gmail address.

Google already has GTalk, which supports free online calls between Google users—and is comparable to the free calling Skype users have among themselves. Google Voice is much bolder and is their answer to Skype Out/In, and gives Gmail users a PSTN interface to make calls to the rest of the world. In the short term, this may take a bite out of Skype in that Google Voice calls within the U.S. and Canada will be free until year end (but maybe longer). Longer term - along with Skype - Google Voice is more of a threat to telcos as they accelerate the race to the bottom, bringing the value of a voice call pretty much down to where email is.

Why are they doing this?

In my view, it's not to put the telcos out of business. They're offering domestic PSTN calls for free, in the hopes of subsidizing them by charging two cents a minute for international calls. Fair enough, but I don't see that happening, and Google really doesn't need to make money with this service. Of course, free beats paid any day—so long as the quality is comparable—and I see them making the voice pie bigger, much the way Skype has. The key for me is more about how Google Voice interacts with Gmail. By escalating an email message to a free phone call, users will stay longer in the Google environment, and the ability to transcribe voicemail will certainly appeal to some.

However, I think there's more to the story. Am mentioned, Google is coming from a different place than Skype, who depends almost solely on those Skype In/Out minutes for revenues. VoIP service is not expensive to provide, and Google has spent relatively little to get in the game. I would contend that the vast majority of their Google Voice capability comes from three small acquisitions that cost them maybe $150 million. When you think about the annual Capex budget of any incumbent, this really is pocket change. Going back to 2007, they acquired GrandCentral; last year they acquired Gizmo5, and a few months ago, they added Global IP Solutions. Collectively these companies have given them the pieces to offer a very appealing VoIP-to-PSTN service globally, and if they never make a penny from it, so be it.

As mentioned, free beats paid, and there's no better incentive to get people to use your service. Look how long Vonage has been around, and they barely have two million subscribers. Unlike Skype, Google doesn't have to build its user base from scratch, and it won't take long for them to start logging millions of calls. Just consider what happens when school resumes next month, and students will be falling over each other to make free calls home from those super-retro red UK phone booths that will be popping up on college campuses (and solar powered to boot).

As such, Google Voice will be one more reason to cut the cord, and the race to zero just picked up some speed. Thanks to Gizmo5, Google Voice is SIP-based and works nicely on both softphones and hand-held endpoints. Short term, there will be some cannibalization with Android by competing with voice from data plans, but Google will figure out how to make all these pieces fit. This is actually where the GIPS acquisition comes in, with their ability to support both voice and video over mobile devices, which in turn can make Google Voice a great add-on for businesses.

While Google Voice is primarily an outbound telephony service, I think they'll be able to take free calling beyond the desktop, and that's really what service providers need to be thinking about. Free on the desktop is one thing, but when you push out to mobile devices, things get more complicated. If this isn't enough, I think there's a separate agenda at work here, and it's something I've commented about elsewhere for quite some time.

Google is really interested in the voice business, not to make life difficult to telcos, but as a source of raw material—snippets from voicemail and live calls, if you will—that can be harvested for search. I'm not sure about the regulatory issues around this—and apparently Google has been vague here—but certainly for voicemail, free calls will generate a huge cache of "content" that they can apply speech recognition algorithms to and build an archive of audio-based search prompts. Once those audio cues are transcribed into text, they can become hugely valuable for the next frontier—mobile search. This sounds a bit on the dark side ("do no evil" as we're told), but it's a far better way to monetize voice than charging a few cents a minute or a few dollars a month. When viewed from this lens, Google Voice is a very different business than Skype, Vonage, or any telco for that matter. Disruption comes in many forms, and we're seeing a new one with Google Voice. Don't let the race to zero fool you; I think it's just a side-show compared to what Google really has in mind.

This article of mine originally ran today on my Service Provider Views column on TMCnet.

Written by Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates

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More under: Email, Telecom, VoIP, Web

Domain marketplace release new search system.

Sedo has released new searching tools that make it much easier to sift through the site’s 7 million domain names for sale.

The new search allows you to add and change search criteria and get updated results on the fly. Limit the number of words in domains, price range, and even parking traffic (if the domain is parked at Sedo). You can also preview a listing by clicking on the domain rather than loading an entirely new page. DomainsBot technology is integrated to show synonyms and domains similar to the keywords you provide.

As you search you’re able to add domains to a watchlist for later review. You can also create RSS feeds for your saved searches.

The need for improved search features had developed as the number of domains at Sedo has grown. These new search features will hopefully boost sales as quality domains will be easier to find.

Given browser constraints and the speed of real time updates, you might have a better experience viewing the search tool in Google Chrome instead of Firefox or Internet Explorer.

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1. Sharing Domain Parking Stats is Easy with DNW Certified Stats
2. Sedo surpasses 3 million domain listings
3. DNW Certified Stats Now Works with Parked.com

Attention domainers. The .travel registry wants your business.

Tralliance has become the latest of the sponsored top-level domain registries to decide it needs to loosen the shackles of sponsorship and target a more general user base.

Its sponsor, The Travel Partnership Corporation, has quietly changed the policies governing .travel in order to substantially liberalize the namespace.

I say quietly, because the policy changes were published August 20 and there does not appear to have been any coverage yet beyond TTPC’s own site and this press release from a registrar today.

The new policy document contains only two small changes, but they have big implications.

The first is to add a new category of approved registrant to the existing list, which includes hotels, airlines and so on. The new category is:

Creators and providers of travel and tourism products, services and content.

This seems to be general enough to exclude nobody, especially when one puts it in the context of the second big change that TTPC is proposing, which seems to allow domain parking.

Currently, the registry policies state that all .travel domains need to resolve to active travel-related web sites or email addresses. That restriction is to be dumped entirely.

In fact, the word “restriction” has been replaced with “incentive”. This is from the redlined policy doc:

The Registry has the discretion to develop restrictions incentives for on use of any domain name, such restrictions incentives to apply to any name registration that occurs after such restrictions come into effect. Restrictions may include, but are not limited to, a requirement to develop a website that uses the registered name, to ensure that each registered name resolves to a working website

No such incentives are included, but I’d guess that they may end up looking a little like the recent moves by .jobs and .co to engage in joint marketing deals with companies willing to promote the TLD.

The upshot of all this is that it appears that .travel domains will soon be close to unrestricted. Registrants will still have to undergo a one-time authentication process, but that’s looking increasingly like a formality.

The policy changes take effect September 20. It doesn’t look like they would disenfranchise anybody, except perhaps those who considered .travel an exclusive club, so I doubt there’ll be the same kind of outcry that .jobs recently saw.

The .travel domain launched in October 2005. As of April 2010, it had 47,338 active registrations.

Related posts:

1. .jobs seeks comment on dictionary domains
2. Want thousands of free .jobs domains? Now’s your chance
3. .jobs aiming to become a gTLD by the back door?

Reading through Brian Kreb's blog last week, he has an interesting post up on the White House's call upon the industry on how to formulate a plan to stem the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals:

The Obama administration is inviting leaders of the top Internet domain name registrars and registries to attend a three-hour meeting at the White House next month about voluntary ways to crack down on Web sites that are selling counterfeit prescription medications.

The invitation, sent via e-mail on Aug 13 by White House Senior Adviser for Intellectual Property Enforcement Andrew J. Klein, urges select recipients to attend a meeting on Sept. 29 with senior White House and cabinet officials, including Victoria Espinel, the Obama administration's intellectual property enforcement coordinator.

"The purpose of this meeting is to discuss illegal activity taking place over the internet generally, and more specifically, voluntary protocols to address the illegal sale of counterfeit non-controlled prescription medications on-line," the invitation states.

Klein did not return calls seeking more information. A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget confirmed the event, but declined to offer further details. The meeting appears to be a continuation of the administration's Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement, an initiative unveiled in June that promised to "address unlawful activity on the internet, such as illegal downloading and illegal internet pharmacies."

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 8 percent of the bulk drugs imported into the United States are counterfeit, unapproved, or substandard, and 10 percent of global pharmaceutical commerce—or $21 billion—involves counterfeit drugs. LegitScript.com, a verification service for online pharmacies, is currently tracking more than 45,000 rogue Internet pharmacies.

It is unclear to me whether or not the goal of this initiative is to stem the flow of online crime in general or to reduce the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals flowing into the United States (since presumably this cuts into the profits of large pharmaceutical companies… who would naturally want to see their profit margins increased in return for pledging their support for health care reform that was passed earlier this year). Assuming that the target of this are the online pharmaceuticals, there are a few things I can think of. Unfortunately, a three hour meeting really isn't enough to get this off the ground because it is a series of interconnected events that would need to take place. Anyhow, here's a list of things I'd do:

1. Stopping illegal pharmaceuticals piggy-backs onto stopping illegal <anything> on the 'net. Spammers who advertise illegal software, or fake degrees, or fake enlargement pills, or fake mortgages are all basically doing the same thing. So, any strategy that is aimed at stopping those other things will extend to stopping fake pharmas as well. My point here is that concentrating only on fake pharmaceuticals may exclude strategies that scale to others.
2. Registrars need to get their act in gear. When a website advertising cheap Viagra goes up, somebody somewhere needs to register that site. Whoever registers is needs to do a better job of verification of the identity who registered it. The problem here is that so many of these sites are registered by registrars in foreign countries which is outside the jurisdiction of the US. However, just like in the Wizard of Oz, there's no place like home and the government can pressure domestic ones to do better proactive abuse mitigation.
3. WHOIS protected services are questionable. I don't deny the need for WHOIS-protected services in some cases. However, any time I am looking up a suspicious site and the WHOIS registration is protected, that's pretty much all I need to make the determination that the site is abusive. It doesn't cost much to shield your WHOIS information. If you want to do it, that's fine but there should probably be a stricter set of criteria who shielding your information like this requiring you to jump through a couple of more manual hoops.
4. Crack downs on spammers will go a long ways. One of the chief mechanisms of advertising illegal pharmaceuticals is through the use of spam. We all get it in our inboxes. Of course, there are other avenues of advertisement such as black search engine optimization. However, because it is not particularly difficult to send out a lot of spam and make money off of it, and because there is little chance of repercussion, spammers continue to do it. If law enforcement had more resources dedicated to prosecuting spammers such that it became more de-incentivized, then the supply part of the equation would start to dry up. In other words, putting spammers in prison will help in this regards, and this requires a prioritization of law enforcement resources. Whether or not they are willing to divert resources from one area of law enforcement to another is an open question.
5. Perhaps walled gardens are a good idea. In Australia, some ISPs kick infected computers off of their network if the ISP can detect that the machine connecting to it is infected with malware. Or, they redirect them to a sandbox and alert the user that they cannot continue until they clean their system. If more ISPs made this a policy, then maybe we'd have less malware abuse flowing back and forth in cyber space. I don't think I'd want government to enforce this, but perhaps ISPs might be willing to voluntarily comply with this.

This is a small list of things that could be done but by no means it is exhaustive. Running up-to-date software is a good idea, and so is running the latest patched version of one's software. What other ideas do you have to cut down on the flow of illegal online pharmaceuticals?

Written by Terry Zink, Program Manager

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More under: Cybercrime, Domain Names, Domain Registries, ICANN, Internet Governance, Spam, Whois

Case over generic domain name denied.

A National Arbitration Forum panelist has rejected a company’s claim to the domain name MyHealth.com.

My Health, Inc registered its mark for “My Health” in 2009. But the registrant of the domain name acquired it prior to that (in 2007) for $150,000. Making matters worse, when My Health, Inc filed its complaint it thought that the respondent had owned the domain name since way back in 1995. Regardless of which date you choose, the complaint must fail because there was no way for the registrant to register it with the non-existent (at the time) trademark holder in mind.

Another interesting aspect to this case is that the panelist brings up the issue of reverse domain name hijacking even though the respondent didn’t request it — but then declines to find RDNH because it wasn’t requested:

It appears from the facts of this case that Complainant established its business and trademark rights while aware that the disputed domain name was already registered by another entity. Indeed, it appears that Complainant brought this arbitration proceeding only after negotiations to purchase or join with Respondent failed. Lastly, as noted above, Complainant has alleged bad-faith registration notwithstanding the fact that it did not even exist (or own any trademark rights) at the time of Respondent’s registration.

Paragraph 15(e) of the Rules provides inter alia that the Panel may find that the Complainant brought an arbitration proceeding “in an attempt at Reverse Domain Name Hijacking or . . . primarily to harass the domain-name holder.” … However, the Respondent has not alleged Reverse Domain Hijacking and the Panel declines to make this determination where the parties have not raised the issue or been given the opportunity to brief the Panel on their respective positions.

A panelist does not need a party to raise the issue of RDNH in order to rule on it. But the fact that he brings it up in his decision shows his opinion on the matter.

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© DomainNameWire.com 2010.

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Related posts:

1. National Arbitration Forum FAIL
2. MIA.com Saved in Arbitration, But Who’s This Lazy Panelist?
3. National Arbitration Forum Provides Shortcut to UDRP Arbitrators

[Update] The registrar has been sold.

DomainConsultant.com, mostly known for their Domain Madness auctions so far have a special item that is being auctioned today – an entire domain registrar business. The business is an ICANN accredited company that has about 8,000 domains under management and uses “DomainName.com” as their brand. You can find a breakdown of their existing registrations, for which they currently charge $29.95(!) per year, below. The customer base also includes 200 hosting accounts with an annual revenue of $200 each.

While the Buy It Now price of $3,000,000 USD expired yesterday, bidders are welcome to bring forward their bids by visiting DomainConsultant or send an email to Mike Fiol at mike (at) domainconsultant.com.

The auction started at 9am EDT today and will end at 3pm EDT.

Disclaimer: Adam Strong, Managing Editor of DNN, also is a consultant with DomainConsultant.com.

TLD	Amount of Registrations
Total	8,019
.com	5,971
.net	990
.org	537
.biz	171
.info	163
.us	170
.ws	17

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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Case dropped pending settlement.

A lawsuit filed against the original registrant of CamRoulette.com has been settled.

Craig Snyder (not related to the Oversee.net employee) originally registered CamRoulette.com and sold it for $1,200. But another person, Fraser Brown, said he had already agreed to purchase the domain name from Snyder for $700 before Snyder sold it to the other party for $1,200.

It likely wouldn’t have bothered anyone if it weren’t for the domain quickly being resold for $151,000 shortly thereafter. Brown sued, claiming damages for the difference between his $700 offer and the $151,000 sales price.

The terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed, and the case may be reopened within 30 days should the settlement fall through.

It’s not surprising to see an agreement reached. It appeared that Brown had identified another (wealthier) Craig Snyder as the culprit instead of the actual Snyder (who says he’s broke). There probably wasn’t much to gain by moving forward with the suit.

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Related posts:

1. Domain Owner Wins Expenses in Lawsuit

Just read a post on the ICANN Blog entitled "is ICANN handling too many policy issues?". The post is a response by ICANN VP of Policy Development David Olive to an article published in another blog and asking that very question.

David joined ICANN earlier this year (February) to manage its policy department. As Vice Chair of the GNSO I was fortunate to work with him almost from the get-go while he took over from previous VP Policy Denise Michel (who is now advisor to the ICANN CEO). David is an instantly likeable guy: soft-spoken yet resolute, mild-mannered and extremely easy to get on with, he has brought a new energy to ICANN's policy team.

Now you guessed it, if I start off by being so nice about David it's because I'm about to criticise him . Well actually, not so much criticise as simply disagree with his latest post. David argues that ICANN isn't taking on too much policy work because a) everyone's issues are important and ICANN could not say "yes" to one and refuse another and b) the work isn't prioritised so it looks like it's all over the place when it actually isn't.

Continue reading "Is ICANN in danger of overload? Yes!"

German domain conference and auction takes place this week.

Germany’s only dedicated domain name conference, DomainvermarkterForum, will take place this Thursday and Friday in Munich. The event is at the five-star Hotel Sofitel Bayerpost. Gold sponsors for the event include PartnerGate and, as you might guess given its German headquarters, Sedo.

Sessions include: advantages of your own DENIC membership, speed networking, info on VeriSign Internet Profile Service, and a presentation on The Water School.

There will also be an auction Friday afternoon conducted with Moniker and Snapnames. Here are some of the domains in the auction along with their English translation, according to the show organizers:

Kameras.de Cameras
LeihWagen.de Rental Car
Militär.de Military
Lüfter.com Fan
DebitKarten.com Debit Card
Speisen.de Food

Information about the auction is available here.

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Earlier this month, DomainNameWire.com published an article about ICANN’s policy development process. The author, Andrew Allemann, strives for balance but overall leaves the impression that ICANN has “policy overload,” handling too many policy efforts at once. Andrew also cites the technical and complex topics we ask the public to comment upon.

Since I was quoted briefly in the article, I’d like to share some additional thoughts.

Why so much Public Comment?

Public Comment periods are vital in satisfying ICANN’s goal to be a bottom-up multi-stakeholder policy making body and to provide openness and transparency in its policy development processes. An ICANN core value is to employ open and transparent mechanisms in policy development processes. Such openness promotes well-informed decisions, and ensures that people affected by a new policy can participate and assist in the policy’s formation. That’s why the Bylaws mandate public comment periods (for example, see Annex A, Sections 6 and 9).

The Affirmation of Commitments reflects the same principles, calling for ICANN to provide transparent and fact-based policy development, cross-community deliberations, and responsive consultation procedures. In the Affirmation, ICANN committed to provide detailed explanations of the basis for decisions — including how comments have influenced policy considerations.

Thus, the desire to hear all voices on each policy issue comes right from ICANN’s core. Frankly, we don’t want to limit public comments.

Is ICANN handling too many policy processes at the same time?

The answer is “No!” as soon as you consider the alternatives.

Three Supporting Organizations and a number of Advisory Committees can bring policy issues before the community. To which of them would we say, “Sorry, too busy to care about your issue; check back later”? Obviously, none of them.

An ICANN policy development process takes time to gather all viewpoints. Imagine how long it would take ICANN to address your particular policy issue if there were an arbitrary limit. If the ICANN community only handles seven or ten issues at once, that means all other issues remain parked indefinitely, probably for months. Notable achievements from this year, such as IDNs and DNSSEC going into the root, might still be waiting to happen. Do we want to slow our processes? Obviously, no. (Improve and prioritize better? Yes, indeed!)

Andrew reports that “some people” believe there are too many simultaneous policy issues pending, and are worried (with some justification) about overload in our volunteer community. This perception may be due to several factors, including:

• Our list of open issues initially looks confusing because issues have not been prioritized. The GNSO is about halfway through creating a method for prioritizing projects. Ranking their relative importance will help make them easier to take in all at once.
• Many policy-related reports exceed 100 pages. The GNSO has recently resolved that its reports should begin with an Executive Summary. This will help reduce the reading an individual has to do in deciding whether to comment.
• Our large, diverse volunteer community is avid and committed to follow the growing number of policy issues that reflects the increased global impact of the Internet.

We will also be examining the processes and mechanisms we use to manage the public comment process in hopes of identifying more effective and efficient ways to publicize, collect and organize community comments.

Policy development has an ebb and flow. Recently, we seem to be at high tide. Some of the tide will ebb when the new gTLD program launches and GNSO Improvements Initiative winds down. Five working groups will go away (one already has). Optimistically, the bulk of the GNSO improvements effort may be completed in early 2011.

We shouldn’t set an arbitrary limit to the number of issues evaluated by the ICANN Community. The issues arise from the community, and staff works diligently to support that work. We all recognize that many issues are both important and urgent to different parts of the ICANN community. I do not believe that ICANN is handling too many policy issues.

The ICANN community is also working hard to enhance our collective management of so many important issues, which is not always easy. Yet, if the current situation seems difficult, consider the alternative: Further delays in improvements to WHOIS.  The 65% of Internet users who do not speak English await IDNs in their own languages. Communities still waiting more years for their new gTLDs. Phishers continue defrauding consumers using techniques that DNSSEC can stop. If we must err, it is better for ICANN to handle too much, than for ICANN to handle too little.

If you're going to spend money registering domains in target countries and doing targetted pay per click campaigns you should also take the time to do some basic market research. And no, I don't mean pure figures - I mean cultural stuff.

Jonathan Brazil spotted a really silly mistake this morning:

If you go to the hassle of buying a .ie and sponsored Google links for Irish searches, don't call it EIRE and price your products in GB£

The ad in question:


And here's another one I found:
I can't think of anyone IN Ireland using the term "Eire" or in what context they might even try to use it.

Seriously.

If you're going to try selling to us then learn to speak to us in terms we understand and use.

Employ Media has made a request for proposals from companies that want to apply for generic .jobs domain names, to predictable criticism.

ICANN recently permitted the company to start selling non-”company name” .jobs domains, and the RFP is the first phase of its plan.

It basically constitutes a landrush process, albeit one that makes .cn registrations seem laissez faire, and in which you don’t actually get to “own” any domain names at the end.

To apply, companies have to present Employ Media with a business plan and a list of their desired domains, among other information.

The registry appears to be reluctant to talk about the money side of things, other than the non-refundable $250 application fee.

The closest thing in the RFP to an outstretched palm appears to be this paragraph:

Employ Media’s role is to make .JOBS domain names available to those interested in serving the needs of the International HR management community as set forth in the .JOBS Charter. Describe how your proposal will contribute to Employ Media’s role in a manner that reflects the value (financial, services or otherwise) of the proposed .JOBS domains.

The CollegeRecruiter.com blog, and some reader comments, suggest that the registry has been asking potential applicants for “creative” ideas, including revenue sharing deals, and then threatening legal action when such overtures are recounted in public fora.

CollegeRecruiter’s CEO Steven Rothberg was one of the leading opponents of the .jobs liberalization plan.

The only organization I’m aware of that is on record intending to respond to the RFP is the DirectEmployers Association, which intends to apply for thousands of generic domains under its controversial universe.jobs plan.

Related posts:

1. Want thousands of free .jobs domains? Now’s your chance
2. .jobs gets its landrush windfall
3. Jobs boards slam plan to open up .jobs

I was using Sweetcron to publish a rather boring "life stream" over on one of my other personal domains.

Unfortunately the script has been pretty much abandoned by developers, so no new features or updates have been made in well over a year.

It also didn't have ANY caching options whatsoever, so it really wasn't a "gentle" script to run.

I'm currently looking for a suitable alternative, though I'm experimenting with a Wordpress plugin and theme, which seem to work reasonably well.

WordCamp Utah is coming up this weekend Saturday August 28th from 9am-5pm. For more information about the event visit: http://2010.utah.wordcamp.org. BlueHost does not normally sponsor events or setup booths at tradeshows mainly because its too much of a hassle just to try and get your name out there WordPress on the other hand is one of our favorite and most popular open source products available. Over 650,000 WordPress blogs are hosted on our servers and that number grows by hundreds per day.

The keynote speaker at this event is Matt Mullenweg who is the founding developer of WordPress. There are also a number of great learning sessions that can help you get started or enhance your current web presence using this amazing FREE tool. See the full schedule at: http://2010.utah.wordcamp.org/schedule/ for more information on the speakers and sessions that will be available.

Also, BlueHost is buying lunch for EVERY attendee, and we want that bill to be HUGE. So if you haven’t signed up for the event yet go register now at: http://wordcamputah2010.eventbrite.com/ and make sure to stop by and say “Hi!”. I’d love to meet some Bluehost customers in person!

Thanks,
Matt Heaton

Time flies. Although it was over 18 months ago, it seems just like yesterday that a small Czech provider, SuproNet, caused global Internet mayhem by making a perfectly valid (but extremely long) routing announcement. Since Internet routing is trust-based, within seconds every router in the world saw this announcement and tried to pass it on. Unfortunately, due to the size of this single message, quite a few routers choked—resulting in widespread Internet instability. Today, over a year later, we were treated to a somewhat different version of the exact same story.

First, let's review the Czech incident from February 2009. There were many positives to take away.

• It was precipitated by an honest mistake.
• It was an extremely unlikely event, as many stars had to be in exact alignment.
• Most of the Internet's core survived.
• The response from operators was fast and efficient, with the damage largely contained within an hour.

The complete technical details can be found here.

Deja vu all over again

Fast forward to today: Friday, 27 August 2010. What do you think would happen if another large and unusual routing announcement was made on the Internet? Do you think all the router vendors have perfected their code in the past 18 months? Do you think the entire planet has upgraded to this new, improved and perfect code base? Do you think it makes sense to use the Internet as your testbed? I doubt you answered "yes" to any of these questions.

We'll begin to describe what happened today with a snippet from a private mailing list. We'll purposely leave out the technical details so that we don't inadvertently contribute to the building of a Cybernuke.

On Friday 27 August, from 08:41 to 09:08 UTC, the RIPE NCC Routing Information Service (RIS) announced a route with an experimental BGP attribute. During this announcement, some Internet Service Providers reported problems with their networking infrastructure.

Immediately after discovering this, we stopped the announcement and started investigating the problem. Our investigation has shown that the problem was likely to have been caused by certain router types incorrectly modifying the experimental attribute and then further announcing the malformed route to their peers. The announcements sent out by the RIS were correct and complied to all standards.

Um, while standards compliance is nice, it is foolhardy to assume that all BGP implementations are perfectly compliant, especially given recent history. Over 3,500 prefixes (announced blocks of IP addresses) became unstable at the exact moment this "experiment" started. Not surprisingly, they were located all over the world: 832 in the US, 336 in Russia, 277 in Argentina, 256 in Romania and so forth. We saw over 60 countries impacted by a "correct" announcement that "complied with all standards". The following graph shows the timeline of the event, followed by a map of the impacted countries by prefix count. Notice that it takes a bit for the Internet to stabilize after RIPE claims to have withdrawn the announcement at 09:08 UTC.

Conclusions

On the positive side, the incident was very brief, the damage was limited to under 2% of the Internet and the responsible parties quickly fessed up, aborting their "experiment". On the negative side, the Internet remains a very fragile place, even if that fragility is highly localized and different in different places. Standards aren't followed, code isn't tested and people make mistakes. That's life with any complex system and, while we can certainly do a better job, we will continue to see these types of events no matter what safeguards we might take. What puzzles me is how anyone thought it might be a good idea to test fate in this way. The end result was completely predictable.

Written by Earl Zmijewski, VP and General Manager, Internet Data Services

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More under: Internet Protocol, Security

After the jump you will find the live auction results from thew MeetDomainers Event held in Manchester, UK by Daniel Dryzek‘s DDFund.eu and NameDrive. Highlight was the sale of QuadBikes.co.uk for £12,500 and BackLinks.co.uk for £3,000, but it is also worth mentioning the unusual auctioneer the event had – domainer and domain reporter Morgan Linton did the job.

The event sold 10 out of the 50 listed domains for a total of £20,100 (close to $31,000 USD), with the proceeds of the first two lots going to the Waterschool charity.

Lot #	Domain(s)	Opening Bid	Status	Price
1	YouthClubs.co.uk	£75	SOLD	£350
2	BowlingClub.co.uk and BowlingWear.co.uk	£200	SOLD	£450
3	apartmentrentals.im & apartmentrentals.co.im	£200	pass
4	PropertyRentals.im & PropertyRentals.co.im	£100	pass
5	CarHire.co.im	£100	pass
6	CheapHotels.co.im	£100	pass
7	Flights.co.im	£100	pass
8	HolidayHomes.co.im	£100	pass
9	Holidays.co.im	£100	pass
10	CampingGoods.co.uk	£200	SOLD	£250
11	NewBrighton.co.uk	£250	pass
12	Vets.org.uk	£300	SOLD	£450
13	LinkBuildingServices.co.uk	£350	pass
14	PersonalisedGift.co.uk	£500	SOLD	£950
15	AsbestosTests.co.uk	£500	pass
16	BlackBoards.co.uk	£500	pass
17	ChalkBoards.co.uk	£500	pass
18	StudentCreditCard.co.uk	£500	pass
19	VII.co.uk	£550	SOLD	£550
20	TRX.co.uk	£750	pass
21	Holy.co.uk	£750	SOLD	£800
22	Shirts.org.uk	£750	SOLD	£800
23	Groom.co.uk	£1000	pass
24	FashionDesigner.co.uk	£1,000	pass
25	Universities.co.za	£1,000	pass
26	Entry.co.uk	£1,150	pass
27	EuroPallets.co.uk	£1,500	pass
28	Clothes.org.uk	£1,750	pass
29	HomeCinemaSystems.co.uk	£1,998	pass
30	PhoneContract.co.uk	£2,000	pass
31	PrivateYachtHire.com & PrivateYachthire.co.uk	£2,998	pass
32	TopUps.co.uk	£3,000	pass
33	HolidayInsurance.CO	£3,000	pass
34	BackLinks.co.uk	£3,000	SOLD	£3,000
35	ComputerRepair.co.uk	£3,000	pass
36	ProductFeeds.co.uk	£4,000	pass
37	MobilePhones.co.za	£4,000	pass
38	Smartphones.co.za	£4,000	pass
39	Blades.co.uk	£4,000	pass
40	Snorkel.co.uk	£4,500	pass
41	MediaSales.co.uk & Media-Sales.co.uk	£6,000	pass
42	HighChair & HighChairs.co.uk	£10,000	pass
43	QuadBikes.co.uk	£10,000	SOLD	£12,500
44	Invoicing.co.uk	£10,000	pass
45	Penrith.com	£10,000	pass
46	Phone.co.za	£15,000	pass
47	Cumbria.com	£10,000	pass
48	GymEquipment.co.uk	£11,000	pass
49	HotelBookings.co.uk	£20,000	pass
50	CoffeeMachine.co.uk + CoffeeMachines.co.uk		pass

Obama administration wants to address illegal online pharmacies.

The White House has called for a meeting with domain name registrars, registries, and ICANN to discuss rouge online pharmacies.

According to an email obtained by Krebs on Security, White House Senior Adviser for Intellectual Property Enforcement Andrew J. Klein sent a letter earlier this month urging companies to send a representative to a meeting on September 29.

A number of advocacy groups have called out registrars for failing to control the activity on domain names registered with them, and eNom in particular has been singled out. Domain name registrar Go Daddy has actively lobbied Congress for controls on online pharmacies.

While few would argue counterfeit drugs are a good thing, it’s a shame this action has to come on intellectual property grounds as opposed to consumer protection.

---

© DomainNameWire.com 2010.

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Related posts:

1. Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons Buys Cher’s House
2. Meet the Faces Behind the Top 10 Domain Registrars
3. ICANN Board Drops Bomb on Registrars Hoping to Launch New TLDs

In case you haven’t guessed already, my “It’s Friday…” headlines mark an irregular series of tragically cliquey attempts to be humorous.

This week, 12 fictional TV shows related to the domain name business that could be super-duper awesome, if only somebody would make them.

Apologies in advance to those concerned.

Sponsored TLD Survivor

Stranded on a desert island, .mobi, .jobs, .asia and .tel must fight to stay alive against all the odds. Each week, viewers vote for which contestant they think should be acquired by Afilias.

South Park

Controversial animated series following the antics of a domain parking company that rejects Adsense links in favor of slandering celebrities and deliberately inciting religious violence.

Lawley & Order

Porn-themed police procedural.

DNSSEC and the City

Paul Vixie, Phillip Hallam-Baker and Ram Mohan star as a trio of independent, no-nonsense women trying to find love, fulfillment and stable DNS resolution in New York City.

Bertrand De La Chappelle’s Show

Racially charged stand-up comedy from everybody’s favorite French GAC rep.

America’s Next Top-Level Domain

In which the 300-page DAG is thrown out in favor of a single sassiness-based criterion.

Rick Schwartz Apprentice

Surreal adaptation of the original, in which the self-styled Domain King imparts utterly unintelligible advice to teams of confused domainers, firing one per week with the catchphrase “You’re pigeon shit!”.

UDRP Panelist Judy

Judge Judy takes a break from her important judicial work in order to oversee UDRP complaints in which the winner is decided purely on the basis of which party can shout the loudest and has the most outrageous mullet.

Domaining With The Stars

Teams of top domainers and D-list celebrities compete to see who can make the biggest profit on a domain sale. This week, Elliot Silver patiently explains the finer points of drop-catching ccTLDs to a sobbing Danny Bonaduce.

Rod the Bounty Hunter

Beckstrom and his team pin down a bail-jumping crack dealer at a seedy El Paso motel.

The .XXX Factor

Same as the original, but goes on for six years.

The Daily Show with Jim Fleming

The perennial commentator and theorist takes a sideways look at today’s domain name news, whether you want him to or not.

Next week: domain-themed movies.

In the meantime, I want to see your TV show ideas in the comments please. If golf can have its own channel, I’m sure we can fill a schedule too.

Related posts:

1. It’s Friday, time for the world’s first domain name industry cryptic crossword
2. It’s Friday, time for some Paul Kane Facts

New gTLDs continue to be a major topic of discussion within ICANN circles, and the regional meeting currently underway in Tokyo has revealed some interesting updates for potential applicants.

ICANN's Chief gTLD Registry Liaison, Craig Schwartz, delivered a great presentation on the progress being made behind closed doors at ICANN and provided the attendees with an insight into a couple of key changes that are likely to be seen in the Final Applicant Guidebook. As many of our readers would be aware, we have been waiting in anticipation for the new gTLD Final Applicant Guidebook to be approved at a previously unconfirmed meeting of the ICANN Board. The date for this meeting was today announced as September 10th.

Like many others in the industry, we'll be actively watching for the outcomes of this Board retreat where the focus will be on the new gTLD program's remaining unresolved issues. In particular, the Board's willingness to address the complicated Vertical Integration topic (given the inability of the VI Working Group to reach consensus) will be of interest to the many applicants likely to be affected by the outcome.

On another interesting note, one very important topic that has been flying under the radar is Registry Transition, namely the current requirement for new gTLD applicants to provide both a backup Registry Services organisation and a financial instrument sufficient to guarantee a minimum of three years of Registry operations in the event of the TLD owner being unable to operate it.

Obtaining a backup Registry Services provider is not particularly difficult. However, for many potential applicants (in particular smaller community-based applicants) the requirement to obtain a letter of credit from a financial organisation is an enormous burden and a significant additional cost.

Acknowledging this today and noting that the protection of the Registrant is paramount to this process, Schwartz said that ICANN had invested significant time and will further expand the recent concept of Emergency Backend Registry Operator (and yet another acronym, EBERO) whereby qualified applicants (i.e. Existing Registry Operators) could tender to ICANN to provide 'temporary' Registry Services in the event of critical failure of the Registry Operator to operate the gTLD.

This is a great initiative and should be welcomed by the community for two key reasons:

a) It has the potential to remove the requirement to name a pre-organised backup Registry Service.

b) It has the potential to reduce the level of financial guarantee to ICANN from applicants.

Other interesting points worthy of note from yesterday's session:

• Communications Plan – This is being worked on by ICANN currently but won't be rolled out until the Final Applicant Guidebook is approved, almost guaranteeing that the earliest date for applications will be March or April 2011
• DAGv4 Summary of Analysis – This won't be released to the public until after the Board's retreat, which is a surprise given that the public comment finished quite some time ago
• IDN ccTLD Fast Track – ICANN have 33 applicants, representing 22 languages, currently under review as this program continues to drive the expansion of the internet across the globe

All in all, these small yet important pieces of information represent yet another positive step forward in the new gTLD process. I for one can't wait to see what the next few months will bring.

Click here if you want to see the presentations from the Tokyo meeting as provided by ICANN.

Written by Tony Kirsch, Senior Manager - International Business Development, AusRegistry International

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More under: Domain Names, Domain Registries, ICANN, Multilinguism, Top-Level Domains

A week of news while I was away on vacation.

I’m back from an enjoyable family vacation at Disneyland. If you ever make the trip, I highly recommend staying at this house — the kids will love it! Also, a quick shout out to my daughter, who just turned 4 last week yet braved Space Mountain. Gutsy girl.

As much as I’d like to just click the pause button on the industry while I’m out of town, it doesn’t work that way. Here’s some of the week’s news, as reported by my fellow bloggers.

- Here’s the latest on the .xxx contract

-Quotes.com sells for $1.15 million

-Thinking about going to the Epik conference next month? Read this interview with Rob Monster over at Elliot’s Blog.

-Domain attorney Zak Muscovitch is running for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) board of directors.

---

© DomainNameWire.com 2010.

Get Certified Parking Stats at DNW Certified Stats.

Related posts:

1. 2 domain name industry conferences kick off this week
2. Epik Domain Developer Conference Taking Shape for September
3. Epik Provides Excuse to Visit Seattle in September

As reported on this blog on 23 and 28 April 2010, ICANN has consulted with an open drafting consultation group on several issues relating to implementation of the new gTLD program. Earlier this year the “Temporary Drafting Group” group met twice to discuss the Trademark Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution Process and the process for future amendments to the registry agreement for new gTLDs.

ICANN will convene a third consultation on 8 September 2010 at 18:30 UTC (http://timeanddate.com/s/1tre) to review and discuss community comments (http://forum.icann.org/lists/4gtld-base/) submitted on draft version 4 of the proposed new gTLD registry agreement (http://icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-agreement-specs-clean-28may10-en.pdf).

If you would like to participate, please submit your name to tdg-legal@icann.org, and we will provide you with call information when it is available.

Staff Responsible: John Jeffrey, General Counsel and Secretary

Yesterday CommunityDNS noticed a sudden, heavy spike in traffic through its Anycast node in Hong Kong. While comfortably processing queries at 863,000 queries per second for close to 2 hours the occurrence was undeniable. While we can't say the increase in traffic was specifically due to DDoS, its sudden increase is suspicious and reminds us that DDoS is still a popular tool used by the malicious community.

DoS and DDoS attacks are happening throughout each day. Just as UltraDNS was twice regionally impacted in 2009 by DDoS traffic, Register.com with close to a 3 day outage in 2009, and DNS Made Easy, the recent target creating close to a 1.5 hour outage for its users earlier this month, we (enterprise, ISPs, hosting firms, registrars and DNS providers) are not all immune to such malicious antics. While all queries appeared legitimate in yesterday's spike, there is no reason to believe CommunityDNS was the intended target for the sudden increase in traffic. However, it still raises the issue of the impact such malicious activity can have on the general user base as well as online economy.

Last year and earlier this year CommunityDNS worked on a study developed for the EU Commission's office of Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security, regarding the resilience of the DNS for the EU and its member states. The study pointed out the affects such malicious activity has on the confidence of legitimate Internet users. Such affects erode confidence, thus the EU's online economy not able to reach its full potential. The same concept would apply to any online economy. The study also noted how "suspicious" traffic appeared more elevated in some European cities over others. A recent Forrester survey indicated organizations experienced more than 350,000 DDoS attacks in 2009. Another study, from Arbor Networks, yielded a statistic of approximately 3% of the Internet's traffic is tied to DDoS, or roughly 1,300 attacks each day.

So as the Internet marches on with the needed ramp up of DNSSEC, the rollout of IDNs and eventually the addition of new gTLDs, the malicious community continues their global activity. Such activity should make us all question, "Are we doing the best we can to ensure maximum resilience for Internet users and online economies?" The best way to ensure maximum resilience for users, businesses and the general online economy is through platform diversity. Where one has an open source-based DNS platform, a non-open source-based platform should be used. A mix of hardware platforms, upon which the open source and non-open source DNS software operates, is also necessary as the hacker community has more tricks up their sleeve than DDoS attacks. Adding hardware and software diversity into an infrastructure with strong security, ample capacity and scalability is the strongest method for ensuring maximum resilience to the DNS.

Written by Chuck Kisselburg, Director, Strategic Partnerships

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More under: Cybercrime, DNS, DNSSEC, Security

As announced by the .ORG registry, Public Interest Registry, Alexa Raad has resigned as President and CEO, effective September 24th, 2010. She was with the registry operator for 3 1/2 years.

The Board has initiated a search committee for the next CEO. In the meanwhile, Mr. Botterman will step in as Interim CEO following Ms. Raad’s departure.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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Alexa Raad has announced that she will be leaving PIR at the end of next month to "seek new challenges".

In a press release issued yesterday the registry operator highlighted some of the achievements under Ms Raad's leadership, such as the growth of the registration base and the deployment of DNSSEC.

Maarten Botterman will be interim CEO while the registry seeks a replacement for Ms Raad.

by Ken Hansen, Neustar

[A big hurdle for new top level domains is getting attention as potentially hundreds of competitors are launched concurrently in the near future. In this guest post Ken Hansen, Senior Director of Business Development at Neustar, explains that getting good distribution from domain registrars is key. Neustar Registry Services operates the global registry for .biz and .us and provides back-end registry services for .co, .tel and .travel. -Andrew]

Will new gTLDs will be successful? The answer I’ve always given is, “yes and no” and, “it depends on how you define success”. For some gTLDs, success simply means serving the needs of a specific community or advancing a cause, while generating enough cash to support ongoing operating expenses. Applicants for gTLDs with broad mass market appeal like .web on the other hand, are likely to define success as millions of registrations. Brand owners will measure success based on incremental brand awareness, advertising return-on-investment, or market share. One measure of success, although certainly not the goal at the very beginning, is simply staying in business. Based on that criterion, not a single gTLD introduced in the past has failed.

Regardless of how success is defined, with so many new gTLDs coming to market at the same time, some will be successful and others (perhaps many others) will not. Although there will be many factors that determine which gTLDs will “succeed”, with the exception of brand gTLDs, for most distribution will be critical.

Like most products in the brick-and-mortar world, getting on store shelves is an essential step in building a new gTLD business. With hundreds of gTLDs coming to market, the competition between gTLDs for prime shelf space will be fierce. So how do you ensure your new gTLD will gain the distribution required?

For those seeking broad distribution of a new gTLD, instituting policies and processes that are consistent with other gTLDs is recommended. Anything “non-standard”, unless it adds substantial value to registrants, and therefore drives demand, will require Registrar development and create an obstacle that could result in fewer channel partners. Unless your gTLD is compelling for some other reason, make your gTLD registrar-friendly by sticking to what is familiar to them and their users.

It is also advisable to work with a registry that is already connected to a large number of registrars. With hundreds of new gTLDs coming to market, registrars may be hard pressed to find the time and resources to integrate with a registry they are not currently working with. Turning up a new gTLD with an existing registry partner is a relatively simple task for a Registrar. A registry partner that knows and works with a large number of registrars can also be very helpful in terms of making registrar introductions. Also look for registry partners with significant experience working with the distribution channels to launch new gTLD through the sunrise, land rush and first-come-first-serve phases.

Some gTLDs, particularly those targeted at narrowly defined niche markets, will find it very challenging to get broad distribution. Even if they are successful in attracting registrar partners, they may be relegated to the bottom of drop-down menus or several clicks deep on a registrar site. Some gTLD applicants, for this reason, may even prefer to work with one or a few registrars for which their gTLD is an important revenue stream. Indeed, the needs of niche gTLDs could be addressed by the emergence of new registrar channels that are focused on single gTLDs and their target markets (e.g. focused on the Music or Sports industries). Existing registrars might also deploy gTLD specific sites and marketing initiatives.

Of course, no one distribution strategy is right for all gTLDs. Many factors other than distribution will also influence whether an individual gTLD will be successful. Those factors include: market size; market maturity; growth rate; segment dependence on the Internet; number of alternative gTLDs choices; and, the number of attractive premium names in a gTLD. One thing for sure; given the number of new gTLDs expected to come to market, having a well thought out distribution strategy will be critical in determining whether or not your gTLD will be the next .co!

You can contact Ken Hansen at newgtld@neustar.biz.

---

© DomainNameWire.com 2010.

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Related posts:

1. Domain Distribution Network Partners with Moniker
2. ICANN Releases Two “Whitewash” Reports to Defend its Positions on new gTLDs
3. In Battle Over Retail Distribution, NameMedia Leaving Sedo in the Dust

Trademark holders have been screwed over by ISP domain name wildcarding more than they realise, I’ve discovered from the .xxx contract documents.

ICM Registry is planning a novel approach to trademark protection if its application to launch the .xxx top-level domain is successful, but it’s been watered down compared to its original plan.

Hypothetically, let’s say you’re Lego. You really, really don’t want some cybersquatter snapping up lego.xxx and filling it with… well, you can imagine what Lego porn might look like.

At the same time, for the sake of your family-friendly brand, you don’t want to actually own a resolvable lego.xxx either.

And you certainly don’t want to be forced to to hand some pornographer over $60 a year for each of your brands. Some companies could see this as supporting pornography.

ICM had originally planned to allow companies in this position to pay a one-time fee to have their brand.xxx turned off permanently.

Personally, I like this idea. It would give the IP lobby a lot less to complain about in discussions surrounding the new TLD program.

But the company may now water down this plan, called IP Protect, due to the way that non-existent domains are increasingly handled by some ISPs.

As you probably know, ISPs worldwide are increasingly capturing NXDOMAIN traffic in order to show search results and advertising links to their customers.

It’s generally frowned upon in DNS circles, and it’s now likely to have the effect of making IP Protect costlier and more of an administrative hassle for brand owners.

You’re Lego again. You pay ICM the one-time shut-down fee, only to find that Comcast is now showing its users links to Lego porn whenever they type in lego.xxx.

ICM president Stuart Lawley tells me that one option currently being looked at is to have IP Protect domains resolve to a standard page at an ICM-controlled server.

The problem here is that ICM has to pay ICANN and its registry back-end provider annual fees for every resolving domain name, and that cost will have to be passed on to the registrant, in our case Lego.

Lawley says that ICM is “engaging” with the ICANN intellectual property community to figure out the best solution. It appears that both options are still open.

Related posts:

1. Will new TLDs be delayed by the trademark owner outcry?
2. Lego launches attack on new TLDs
3. Porn domain firm urges ICANN to ignore the haters

The announcement that .co has already achieved over 450,000 new registrations since the opening up of the second level a month ago demonstrates that there is strong demand in the global domain name marketplace for quality new domain spaces.

Though .co is the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for Colombia, the second-level registrations (i.e. company.co) are available on a global basis and it is being pitched as a direct competitor to the dominant .com gTLD. Google has altered its algorithm to increase the relevance of search results in the .co domain by treating .co as a gTLD and allowing .co website owners to specify the geographic regions they are targeting. Though .CO Internet has the freedom enjoyed by all ccTLDs of not having to operate under ICANN's policy framework, they have elected to adopt policies that very closely match that framework, including the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

The launch of second-level registrations under .co therefore represents, to all intents and purposes, a new gTLD launch, and appears to be a popular alternative to .com for both large corporations and small businesses, at least at this early stage. Overstock's purchase of o.co for US$350,000 shows a high degree of confidence in the new .co brand, and Twitter has also joined their list of high-profile anchor tenants, launching t.co as a secure URL shortening service. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that small businesses are taking the opportunity to secure names within this new space that they had been unable to register in .com or other spaces.

The .co launch is just the latest in a long line of examples of the opportunistic repositioning of ccTLDs to compete in the global market against the 'official' gTLDs. Colombia, like Montenegro (.me) and Tuvalu (.tv) and a number of others are simply leveraging their luck in the two-character assignment lottery by opening up their ccTLD to the world. Both Colombia and Montenegro have however tried to maintain the best of both worlds by reserving third-level registrations (such as .com.co and .com.me) for local entities, thereby providing trusted and dedicated domain spaces for the domestic market, while reaping the benefits of having a desirable ccTLD extension by opening up the second level to the world.

Despite the fact that they are globally-focused and effectively gTLDs, the success of .co and .me highlights the market opportunity that currently exists for other ccTLDs that are yet to establish a clear market position.

Of course, the vast majority of countries do not have the opportunity to reposition themselves as gTLDs to chase the global market, and in most cases there will be a clear preference to focus on the needs of the local market.

A report [PDF] released by Eurid (the .eu Registry) in June highlights the power that well-established and effectively managed ccTLDs can exert in their local markets. In Sweden, for example, the local .se ccTLD scored nearly 100% in terms of awareness and 49% for preference, compared with only 34% for .com. Similar rankings are likely to be enjoyed by other well-established ccTLDs, and we've seen similar numbers in relation to the position of .au in Australia.

Many ccTLDs however face a raft of challenges that are preventing them from achieving anything like this sort of local market position. These challenges can include the absence of local control, legacy systems, inefficient registration processes and restrictive policies, as well as a general lack of local capacity.

When ICANN's new gTLD program finally comes to fruition (likely towards the latter part of 2011), there will be a dramatic increase in choice for prospective domain name registrants across all regions and language groups. Those ccTLDs that are yet to position themselves as the pre-eminent domain space and default choice in their local markets therefore have a finite window of opportunity in which to do so, to ensure that they are not consigned to relative obscurity in the face of dozens of new Top Level Domains.

Written by Jon Lawrence, Business Development Consultant, AusRegistry International

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More under: DNS, Domain Names, Domain Registries, Top-Level Domains

These are the official results of the extended DomainFEST NYC auction, which ended today. The highlight of the extended auction was the sale of Quotes.com for $1,100,000 USD.

Domain	Sale Price
quotes.com	$1,100,000.00
luxuryapartments.com	$62,500.00
cj.org	$29,420.00
cashit.com	$5,890.00
basketballdrills.com	$1,400.00
messageboards.net	$1,180.00
okd.net	$975.00
ivv.net	$940.00
bridaldresses.net	$715.00
homecomingdresses.net	$710.00
financialengineering.com	$665.00
windowdecor.com	$590.00
seas.net	$500.00
orlandocarrental.org	$480.00
womenjeans.net	$425.00
buymetals.com	$360.00
pause.org	$360.00
bigspeakers.com	$300.00
nygolf.org	$300.00
Ext Auction Total	$1,207,710.00

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