Domain DNS Hosting Blogs

April 19, 2013

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

ICANN starts the clock on new gTLD GAC advice

The over 500 new gTLD applicants affected by Governmental Advisory Committee advice on their bids have 21 days from today to file their responses officially with ICANN.

But there’s still some confusion about who exactly is expected to file responses, given the extraordinary breadth of the advice contained within thh GAC’s Beijing communique.

ICANN today put applicants on formal notice of the publication of the Beijing communique, which actually came out a week ago, and said applicants have until May 10 to respond to the ICANN board.

What it didn’t do is say which applicants are affected. Technically, it could be all of them.

The Beijing communique contains six “safeguards” related to things such as abuse and security, which it said “should apply to all new gTLDs”.

On a more granular level, the GAC has called out, we believe, 517 individual applications that should not be approved or that should not be approved unless they do what the GAC says.

The Beijing communique, it could be argued, throws the whole new gTLD program into disarray, and this is the first chance applicants will get to put their views directly in writing to the ICANN board.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-19T08:32:33Z

Michele Neylon

.co chopsticks

The guys from .co gave me some chopsticks, which was appropriate since we were in China

.co chopsticks

.co chopsticks is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

by Michele at 2013-04-19T08:10:25Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

After announcing new name, 21st Century Fox files UDRP

Company goes after 6 domains related to new brand.

Last week I scooped that 20th Century Fox would be changing its name to 21st Century Fox thanks to some domain name registrations.

One of the big questions remaining questions is how the company will get the domain name 21stCenturyFox.com, which was registered in 1997.

Well, the company has turned to UDRP to recover some domains related to 21st Century Fox – but it’s not for 21stCenturyFox.com (at least yet).

The company filed a complaint against Brando Bronzino of Hollywood over six domain names:

21stcenturyfoxfilmcorporation.com
21stcenturyfoxstudios.com
21stcenturyfoxfilmcompany.com
21stcenturyfox.mobi
21stcenturyfox.me
21stcenturyfox.net

All of the domains were registered February 25, which suggests that Bronzino may have figured out (or guessed) the name change ahead of time.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-19T02:07:26Z

April 18, 2013

Circle ID

Video: Watch This Bufferbloat Demo and See How Much Faster Internet Access Could Be!

What if there was a relatively simple fix that could be applied to home WiFi routers, cable modems and other gateway devices that would dramatically speed up the Internet access through those devices? Many of us may have heard of the "bufferbloat" issue where buffering of packets causes latency and slower Internet connectivity, but at IETF 86 last month in Orlando I got a chance to see the problem with an excellent demonstration by Dave Täht as part of the "Bits-And-Bytes" session (as explained in the IETF blog).

My immediate reaction, as you'll hear in the video below, was "I WANT THIS!” We live at a time when it's easy to saturate home Internet connections… just think of a couple of people simultaneously streaming videos, downloading files or doing online gaming. To be able to gain the increase in web browsing speed you see in the video is something, that to me, needs to be deployed as soon as possible.

To that end, Dave Täht, Jim Gettys and a number of others have been documenting this problem — and associated solutions — at www.bufferbloat.net for some time now and that's a good place to start. If you are a vendor of home routers, cable modems or other Internet access devices, I would encourage you to look into how you can incorporate this in your device(s).

Meanwhile, enjoy the demonstrations and information in this video: (and for the truly impatient who just want to see the demo, you can advance to the 3:08 minute mark)

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies

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More under: Broadband, Web

by Dan York at 2013-04-18T21:01:00Z

Domain Name News

Bill Sweetman to Leave Tucows, Starting Domain Name Consulting Firm

As announced on his personal Blog, Bill Sweetman is leaving his job Vice President, Domain Portfolio at Tucows as well as General Manager of YummyNames, on April 26, 2013. He joined Tucows in 2007 and is now planning to launch a “boutique domain name consulting firm later this quarter”.

Bill writes about his change: Over the last few years I’ve discovered that what I really love doing, more than anything else, is helping people and companies with their domain name challenges. More specifically, I love domain name consulting, especially working with startups, entrepreneurs, and marketers to find and buy their ideal domain name. So, after much reflection and soul-searching, I’ve decided to leave Tucows to do domain consulting and domain buyer broker work full-time under my own new brand.

by Frank Michlick at 2013-04-18T20:06:26Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

Lawyer asks: how the hell did Demand Media pass the new gTLD cybersquatting test?

A lawyer apparently representing a rival new gTLD applicant has questioned ICANN’s background screening processes after Demand Media managed to get a pass despite its history of cybersquatting.

Jeffrey Stoler, now with the law firm Holland & Knight, last July said ICANN should ban Demand Media and its partner Donuts from applying for new gTLDs under the rules of the program.

This month, he’s written to ICANN, the GAC and the US government to express “alarm” that both companies have managed to pass their background checks. Stoler wrote:

This alarm arises from the overwhelming evidence, as referenced below, that: (a) Donuts is a “front” for Demand Media, Inc. (“Demand Media”), and (b) Demand Media’s status as precisely the kind of proven cybersquatter that ICANN’s rules were designed to weed-out of the gTLD application process.

How ICANN’s background screening panel could — in the teeth of that evidence — approve the continued participation of Donuts in the new gTLD program (the “Donuts Decision”) requires justification. This letter formally requests that ICANN, pursuant to its obligations of accountability and transparency, provide an explanation of how, and on what basis, the Donuts Decision was made.

Both Donuts and Demand Media responded with anger and disdain.

CEO Paul Stahura told ICANN that Donuts has discovered that Stoler, who has still not disclosed which client he’s representing in this matter, is actually on the payroll of a rival.

Donuts suspected his client was a competing applicant seeking to gain commercial advantage, and we have since confirmed this in fact is the case.

Not only do the letters intentionally misrepresent facts, they are a preposterous, extra-procedural tactic that is a regrettable waste of time and community resources.

David Panos, director of Demand’s applying subsidiary, United TLD Holdco, was similarly dismissive:

Clearly, Mr. Stoler’s client has a substantial commercial interest in the new gTLD program and is seeking to eliminate its competition by mischaracterizing the relationships of other competing applicants and by restating factually inaccurate statements

What’s notable from both the Stahura and Panos letters is that neither company actually addresses Stoler’s allegations directly, resorting instead to mainly fudging and ad hominem arguments.

Stoler probably is seeking a competitive advantage for his mystery client, and his claims about Donuts being a “front” for Demand do come across as a bit of a stretch even for a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean that all of his arguments are wrong.

ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program is pretty clear: if you’ve had more than three adverse UDRP decisions, with at least one in the last four years, you’re “automatically disqualified” from the program.

Demand Media, as Stoler alleges and the public record supports, has lost about three dozen UDRP cases through subsidiaries such as Demand Domains, the most recent of which was in 2011.

So how did Demand pass its ICANN background screening?

The Guidebook does say “exceptional circumstances” are enough to get an applicant off the hook, but it’s hard to see how that would apply to Demand’s over 30 UDRP losses.

And Demand doesn’t want to talk about it.

None of its responses to ICANN that have been published to date even attempt to say why Stoler is wrong, and the company declined to comment when we asked for clarification today.

Donuts, which is using Demand as its back-end registry and has given the company the right to acquire interests in over 100 of its new gTLDs (should they be approved) didn’t want to comment either.

Which, some might say, plays right into Stoler’s hands.

If there’s a simple, straightforward explanation for why the background screening rules apparently didn’t apply to Demand Media, is it unreasonable to ask what that explanation is?

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-18T19:07:00Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Paul.com fights PaulDotCom.com over trademark

Two techies fight over “Paul Dot Com”.

The owner of Paul.com is fighting the PaulDotCom security podcast over the latter’s attempt to trademark “PAULDOTCOM”.

In November 2011, Paul Asadoorian filed a trademark application for PAULDOTCOM, the name he uses for his IT security podcast hosted at PaulDotcom.com. Once the mark was published for opposition, the owner of Paul.com filed a challenge with the USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).

Paul Niedermeyer and his company PN, LLC owns Paul.com, which he uses to promote his own computer software and security services. (Niedermeyer also owns PN.com.)

You can see the grounds for confusion between the names, especially when you consider that both people operate in a similar field.

Paul Asadoorian of PaulDotcom.com says he got the nickname because he’s a geek.

“A friend of mine a while back just blurted it out and its stuck ever since,” he claims on his site.

Also on his site he wrote, “Please do not confuse me with “paul.com”, thats (sic) a different “paul”.

Asadoorian filed his response to the appeal on Monday.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-18T18:09:01Z

Name.space sends lawsuit against ICANN over new TLDs to Court of Appeals

Company that offers domain names in alternative root pushes forward with legal challenge.

Alternative root company name.space isn’t letting its beef with ICANN die just yet.

The company has filed an appeal (pdf) with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after its suit against ICANN was tossed out by a lower court last month.

Name.space offers domain names in an alternate root, and applied to ICANN in 2000 to add 118 of its domains to the “real” root.

In October it sued ICANN asking for damages and an injunction against approving any new TLDs that are the same as domain names it currently offers. Some of the domains it offers are .online, .blog, and .africa.

Last month the United States District Court for the Central District of California granted ICANN’s motion to dismiss.

name.space, Inc.’s opening brief isn’t due until September, by which time the first new top level domains may already be available on the internet.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-18T17:22:38Z

Circle ID

Horse's Head in a Trademark Owner's Bed

Recently, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) unveiled its Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH), a tool it proposes will help fight trademark infringement relating to another of its new programs — generic top level domain (gTLD).

As Lafeber describes, criticism of ICANN's gTLD program and subsequent TMCH database is mounting. Skeptics have noted that given the significant cost of registering a gTLD — the application fee is $185,000 and subsequent annual fees are $25,000 — the program appears to be solely a cash cow, without adding much value to Internet users. In fact, Esther Dyson, ICANN's founding chairwoman, was quoted in August 2011 (during the nascent stages of the gTLD program's development) as saying:

"Handling the profusion of names and TLDs is a relatively simple problem for a computer, even though it will require extra work to redirect hundreds of new names (when someone types them in) back to the same old Web site. It will also create lots of work for lawyers, marketers of search-engine optimization, registries, and registrars. All of this will create jobs, but little extra value."

While the gTLD program lacks intrinsic value-added, and may in fact have anticompetitive effects given its exorbitant fees, I think there may be something more nefarious at play here. Essentially, ICANN has positioned itself as the Corleone family of the Internet space, making an offer no one can refuse. ICANN created a market in which individuals can launch new gTLDs, even using another's trademark-protected brand as their domain extension. Subsequently — and here's where the mafia-like "protection" arises — it has "offered" trademark owners the ability to head off infringements by either buying their gTLDs or receiving notification if an infringing gTLD is registered by another party.

Programs to monitor the use of one's brand in a domain name have long existed. The TMCH charges subscribers $95 to $150 annually to be notified of the registration of infringing gTLDs. Instead of extorting fees to be the watchdog for illegal activity ICANN itself facilitates, it could more ethically operate its gTLD program by mining publicly available government databases and instituting a freeze on registration of questionable domain names. Moreover, it could even provide a valuable service by offering a clearly defined resolution process for trademark disputes.

The gTLD-TMCH pairing is the proverbial horse's head in a trademark owner's bed.

Written by James Delaney, Chief Operating Officer at DMi Partners

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Policy & Regulation, Top-Level Domains

by James Delaney at 2013-04-18T17:12:00Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

15 Fortune 100 companies have domains that expire this year

American Express’ domain expires in about six weeks. Here are other companies that need to pay attention.

Regions Bank, part of a Fortune 500 company, let its domain name registration expire over the weekend. As a result, thousands of customers were unable to conduct online banking transactions.

Generally, when a domain expires and is taken offline, that also means emails to and from employees won’t be delivered as well.

In other words: letting your domain expire is a big screw up.

I just ran a check on the 2012 Fortune 100 list to see now many of them have their key domain name expiring in 2013. 156 companies have domains set to expire, and some as early as six weeks from now.

The good news is that almost all of these companies use a brand protection registrar such as CSC or MarkMonitor. Presumably, these registrars have safeguards in place to auto-renew key domains. I also doubt they take a domain offline the moment it expires. (New rules that go into effect August 31 will require registrars to cause a DNS interruption at some point in the expiration/deletion process.)

That said, if you’re American Express, why haven’t you already renewed your domain for another 10 years? Big brands should make sure they never have a key domain expiring within 12 months. That’s the kind of safeguard I’d add if I ran one of these companies.

Here’s the full list:

Company, Domain, Expiration

American Express americanexpress.com 6/3/2013
Ingram Micro ingrammicro.com 6/26/2013
Lowe’s lowes.com 6/28/2013
Coca-Cola coke.com 7/6/2013
New York Life Insurance newyorklife.com 7/10/2013
Goldman Sachs Group goldmansachs.com 7/25/2013
Berkshire Hathaway berkshirehathaway.com 9/5/2013
Lockheed Martin lockheedmartin.com 10/11/2013
Johnson & Johnson jnj.com 10/31/2013
MetLife metlife.com 11/13/2013
Delta Air Lines delta.com 11/22/2013
FedEx fedex.com 11/29/2013
United Continental Holdings United.com 12/16/2013
Liberty Mutual Insurance Group liberymutual.com 12/16/2013
Bank of America Corp. bankofamerica.com 12/27/2013

Update: I missed one. Cardinal Healthcare’s domain Cardinal.com expires in October.

For companies that have multiple sites but a key consumer facing one, I ran the check on their key consumer facing web site (e.g. coke.com for Coca-Cola).

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-18T15:22:35Z

Ouch: Regions Bank video mea culpa for letting domain name expire

Head of eBusiness for bank explains that company let domain expire and apologizes to customers.

Hopefully this video saves other companies from letting their domain names expire.

Over the weekend Regions Bank let its domain name expire, which took its entire web site offline. It quickly renewed the domain name, but any sort of downtime for a bank of this size (1,700 branches) is more than an “uh-oh”.

Can you imagine the questions you’d receive from the CEO if your business unit was responsible for renewing the domain name?

I’m sure it was painful for Chris Cox, head of eBusiness for Regions. Below is a video Regions posted in which Cox explains the mistake and apologizes to customers.

Perhaps something good will come of this. Perhaps some CEO will see this video and ask his CTO, CMO, and the rest of the c-suite if they have a redundant plan to make sure their domain name – one of their most important but inexpensive assets – doesn’t expire.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-18T14:25:25Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

Will the Trademark Clearinghouse kill off premium domains?

Rules proposed for the new Trademark Clearinghouse threaten to cut off some of new gTLD registries major sources of early revenue, according to registry providers.

Premium domain sales and founders programs are among the now industry-standard practices that would be essentially banned under the current draft of the TMCH rules, they say.

The potential problems emerged in a draft TMCH Requirements document circulated to registries 10 days ago and vigorously discussed during a session at the ICANN meeting in Beijing last week.

The document lists all of the things that new gTLD registries must and must not, and may and may not, do during the mandatory Sunrise and Trademark Claims rights protection launch periods.

One of the bits that has left registries confused is this:

2.2.4 Registry Operator MUST NOT allow a domain name to be reserved or registered to a registrant who is not a Sunrise-Eligible Rights Holder prior to the conclusion of the Sunrise Period.

What this means is that trademark owners get first dibs on pretty much every possible string in every gTLD.

“Trademark owners trump everything,” Neustar business affairs veep Jeff Neuman said during the Beijing meeting. “Trademark owners trump every possible use of every possible name.”

It would mean, for example, that if a new gTLD wanted to allocate some names to high-profile anchor tenants during a “founders program”, it would not be able to do so until after the Sunrise was over.

Let’s say the successful applicant for .shop wants to reserve the names of hundreds of shop types (book.shop, food.shop, etc) as premium names, to allocate during its founders program or auction later.

Because the .shop Sunrise would have to happen first, the companies that the own rights to, for example, “wallpaper” or “butcher” (both real US trademarks) would have first rights to wallpaper.shop and butcher.shop, even if they only planned to defensively park the domains.

Because there’s likely to be some degree of gaming (there’s a proof-of-use requirement, but the passing threshold is pretty low), registries’ premium lists could be decimated during Sunrise periods.

If ICANN keeps its TMCH Requirements as they are currently written, new gTLD registries stand to lose a lot of early revenue, not to mention control over launch marketing initiatives.

However, if ICANN were to remove this rule, it might give unscrupulous registries the ability to circumvent the mandatory Sunrise period entirely by placing millions of strings on their premium lists.

“Registries should have discretion to schedule their start-up phases according to their business plans so long as rights protection processes are honored, so that’s the balancing we’ve tried to do,” ICANN operations & policy research director Karen Lenz said during Beijing.

“It’s trying to allow registries to create requirements that suit their purposes, without being able to hollow out the rights protection intention,” she said.

The requirements document is still just a draft, and discussions are ongoing, she added.

“It’s certainly not our intention to restrict business models,” Lenz said.

Registries will get some flexibility to restrict Sunrise to certain registrants. For example, they’ll be able to disqualify those without an affiliation to the industry to which the gTLD is targeted.

What they won’t be able to do is create arbitrary rules unrelated to the purpose of the TLD, or apply one set of rules during Sunrise and another during the first 90 days of general availability.

The standard Registry Agreement that ICANN expects all new gTLDs to sign up to does enable registries to reserve or block as many names as they want, but only if those names are not registered or used.

It seemed to be designed to do things like blocing ‘sensitive’ strings, rather like when ICM Registry reserved thousands of names of celebrities and cultural terms in .xxx.

The Requirements document, on the other hand, seems to allow these names being released at a later date. If they were released, the document states, they’d have to be subject to Trademark Claims notices, but not Sunrise rules.

While that may be a workaround to the premium domains problem, it doesn’t appear to help registries that want to get founders programs done before general availability.

It seems that there are still many outstanding issues surrounding the Trademark Clearinghouse — many more than discussed in this post — that will need to be settled before new gTLDs are going to feel comfortable launching.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-18T03:54:27Z

April 17, 2013

Circle ID

Massive Spam and Malware Campaign Following Boston Tragedy

On April 16th at 11:00pm GMT, the first of two botnets began a massive spam campaign to take advantage of the recent Boston tragedy. The spam messages claim to contain news concerning the Boston Marathon bombing, reports Craig Williams from Cisco. The spam messages contain a link to a site that claims to have videos of explosions from the attack. Simultaneously, links to these sites were posted as comments to various blogs.

The link directs users to a webpage that includes iframes that load content from several YouTube videos plus content from an attacker-controlled site. Reports indicate the attacker-controlled sites host malicious .jar files that can compromise vulnerable machines.

On April 17th, a second botnet began using a similar spam campaign. Instead of simply providing a link, the spam messages contained graphical HTML content claiming to be breaking news alerts from CNN.

Cisco became aware of a range of threats forming on April 15th when hundreds of domains related to the Boston tragedy were quickly registered. Regarding the botnet spam-specific threat – from a volume perspective – peaks approach 40% of all spam being sent. (Source: Cisco)

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More under: Malware, Security, Spam

by CircleID Reporter at 2013-04-17T23:48:00Z

Circle ID

Correlation Between Country Governance Regimes & Reputation of Their Internet Address Allocations

[While getting his feet wet with D3, Bradley Huffaker (at CAIDA) finally tried this analysis tidbit that's been on his list for a while.]

We recently analyzed the reputation of a country's Internet (IPv4) addresses by examining the number of blacklisted IPv4 addresses that geolocate to a given country. We compared this indicator with two qualitative measures of each country's governance. We hypothesized that countries with more transparent, democratic governmental institutions would harbor a smaller fraction of misbehaving (blacklisted) hosts. The available data confirms this hypothesis. A similar correlation exists between perceived corruption and fraction of blacklisted IP addresses.

CAIDA's Country IP Reputation Graphs (Click to Enlarge)
See the interactive graph and analysis on the CAIDA website

For more details of data sources and analysis, see:
http://www.caida.org/research/policy/country-level-ip-reputation/

Written by kc claffy, Director, CAIDA and Adjunct Professor, UC, San Diego

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More under: Cyberattack, Cybercrime, IP Addressing, Policy & Regulation, Spam

by kc claffy at 2013-04-17T23:19:00Z

Over 80 European Organizations Demand Protection for Net Neutrality

Today, more than 80 organizations, represented by The European Consumer Organization (BEUC) and European Digital Rights (EDRi), sent a letter [PDF] to the European Commission demanding the end of dangerous experimentation with the functioning of the Internet in Europe and the protection of the principles of openness and neutrality.

"The Internet's unique value is openness. The experimentation by certain European access providers with blocking, filtering and throttling of services creates borders in an online world whose key value is the absence of borders." explains Joe McNamee, Executive Director of EDRi. "This reckless experimentation will continue unless the European Commission puts a stop to it."

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More under: Access Providers, Net Neutrality, Policy & Regulation

by CircleID Reporter at 2013-04-17T19:37:00Z

Michele Neylon

New Zealand Politician Gives Hilarious Speech On Marriage Equality

Marriage equality is being debated in many countries at the moment. It's a serious topic and it impacts a lot of people.

Having said that there's no reason why all the talk around it has to be boring as this New Zealand politician, Maurice Williamson, shows:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

And New Zealand has now legalized same sex marriage ..

New Zealand Politician Gives Hilarious Speech On Marriage Equality is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

by Michele at 2013-04-17T18:43:40Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

What domains Pfizer and 24 others bought last week

Pfizer is among the big companies buying domains last week.

Afternic sold slightly less than $1 million worth of domain names last week. Here are some of the end users who bought domains through the service.

Czech Republic beverage company The Drinks bought TheDrinks.com for $1,500. Its main web site is TheDrinks.cz.

Open Lease Software shortened its web address from OpenLeaseSoftware.com to OpenLease.com for $2,250.

Core Merchant, a merchant services company, bought CoreFeedback.com for $1,100.

SunnyRentals.com bought its singular version, SunnyRental.com, for $2,500.

Farmers Alliance Mutual Insurance Company bought FAMI.net for $3,888. It already owns the .com.

A new business called eventSpider bought EventSpider.com for $1,500. It owns the .com.au version of the name.

Schnake Turnbo Frank PR in Oklahoma bought Schnake.com for $1,300.

Redneck Manufacturing, LLC in Lamar, Missouri paid $2,088 for RedneckOutdoors.com.

Pfizer bought LifelongCare.com for $9,500.

Entertainment company Bigfoot bought FashionPassport.com for $1,800.

Valley Health System in New Jersey bought ValleyMedicalGroup.com for $1,000.

eozone Group Ltd went global with EOzone.com for $3,000. Its web address is EOzone.co.uk.

Simpleware, which converts 3D images into models, bought HumanBodyModel.com and HumanBodyModels.com for $2,500 each.

Florida commercial roofer Advanced Roofing bought AdvanceRoofing.com for $1,600. Yes, it owns the correct version AdvancedRoofing.com.

Mid-America Estate and Insurance Services LLC picked up AnnuitiesAndInsurance.com for $1,288.

United Nations Foundation bought NothingButNets.com for $1,450. It runs its mosquito net program at the .net version of this domain.

Topcon Positioning Systems bought TopCon.net for $3,788 to go along with its TopCon.com domain.

Napa Valley vineyard Robert Biale Vineyards bought Biale.com for $3,850.

Manufacturing company The Federal Group bought TFGusa.com for $1,000.

Roots of Peace, a group that wants to eradicate land mines and replace the land with sustainable agriculture, bought EconomicsOfPeace.com for $3,088.

Kids furniture store Crib and Teen City bought CribCity.com for $1,450.

San Francisco Art Exchange LLC paid $1,388 for AmericanArt.net.

Run Coach, an online “trainer” for runners, bought RaceCoach.com for $1,888.

Inman Shipping Worldwide bought InmanInc.com for $1,395.

Desert Valleys FCU bought DesertValleys.com for $1,995. It has been using the awkward domain MyHomeCU.com.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-17T17:38:55Z

Circle ID

Live Today - "IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6" from INET Denver

If you are interested in the current state of IPv4 address exhaustion within North America as well as the current state of IPv6 deployment, there will be a live stream today, April 17, of the sessions happening at INET Denver starting at 1:00pm US Mountain Daylight Time (UTC-6). The event is subtitled "IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6” and you can view the live stream at:

http://www.internetsociety.org/events/inet-denver/inet-denver-livestream

Sessions include:

IPv4 Exhaustion Update
IPv4 Exhaustion at ARIN
Address Policy Workshop
Evaluation of Current Transfer Market
TCO of IPv6
Internet Society Initiatives and How To Get Involved

The list of speakers includes people from ARIN, CableLabs, Internet Society, Time Warner Cable, Google and more.

It sounds like a great event and I'm looking forward to watching it remotely. It will be recorded so that you will be able to watch it later if you cannot view it live.

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies

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More under: Internet Protocol, IP Addressing, IPv6, Policy & Regulation

by Dan York at 2013-04-17T17:26:00Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Go Daddy proves it’s a tech company, but not with its commercials

Recent moves by new CEO Blake Irving show the company’s path forward.

If you ask the typical person on the street what Go Daddy is about, they’ll probably say something about sexy Super Bowl commercials.

Last year the company decided to change that image and show people that it was a serious tech company. It advertised its tech prowess on various blogs and hired ad agency Deutsch to produce new commercials, culminating in the Bar Rafaeli “kiss” commercial during the Super Bowl.

Blake Irving, Go Daddy CEO

This certainly raised awareness about what’s powering the world’s largest domain registrar and shared hosting company. But it’s moves that Blake Irving has made in his first 100 days as CEO of the company that have done the most to raise the company’s street cred with techies.

Irving has hired a number of tech and product leaders from big name tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. He’s also set up offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle, and is making the Scottsdale office more like one you might find in Sunnyvale.

Although it’s not his primary goal, Irving’s moves are repairing the company’s image with many techies that associate the company mostly with SOPA and controversial advertising. In the tech community, his actions carry more weight than TV commercials do.

I find Irving’s quote in the company’s press release about opening a Seattle office indicative of his beliefs:

“The reason to join Go Daddy is simple … you can make a difference at a company that is hell-bent on changing the world…We have the opportunity to help small businesses in ways no one else in the space is doing right now. This is a chance to change lives in profound ways, to expand the world’s economy by empowering people to start, grow and successfully run their small businesses. I’ve yet to meet a great engineer or developer who doesn’t want to leave their mark on this world in a meaningful way.”

If you’ve ever been involved in crafting a press release then you probably know that the quotes are rarely crafted by the person they are attributed to. But after spending time with Irving in Phoenix last month, I believe this quote embodies what Irving believes is the opportunity Go Daddy has in front of it.

That goes a long way in the tech community.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-17T17:08:26Z

Forward U.S. bought domain for $1,500

New immigration reform group bought .us domain for $1,500 at Sedo.

Forward U.S., the new immigration reform group led by companies including Facebook, Google, and PayPal, paid $1,500 for its domain name.

The new immigration reform group that Ron Jackson wrote about last week paid $1,500 for FWD.us.

That’s just one of the end user sales that Sedo made last week. It had a big week, closing nearly $2 million in sales. Here are some of its other end user sales.

SumUp, a Square competitor that allows you to accept credit cards with your mobile phone, bought Sumup.com.cn for $750.

Data networking accessories (e.g. cables and connectors) company KSM Limited bought KSM.co.uk for 2,800 GBP, which it now forwards to madaboutcable.com.

Game hosting company Cubed Host bought CubedHost.com for $2,595 and forwards it to CubedHost.org.

Bridge Entertainment, Inc bought CelebrityScores.com for $940. The company runs E-Poll Research, which offers E-Score Celebrity to provide ratings on celebrities.

Campus Special, which offers online food ordering at universities, bought Campus101.com for $2,500.

HR company Adecco paid $3,500 for the domain hack Adec.co, which I imagine they’ll use as a URL shortener.

World Travel Holdings, which specializes in cruises, bought CheapRiverCruises.com for $20,000. I saw an ad in The Economist yesterday for a Mississippi river cruise. Perhaps Carnival Cruises should offer river cruises. When their boats malfunction they’ll be really close to shore.

Hempconsult UG bought HempTrade.com for $1,900. Business needs no explanation.

Boston property management company Butler Property Management paid $700 for BostonMAApartments.com.

Document sharing company iDeals Solutions Group S.A. paid 1,400 EUR for ideals.net. It uses the domain IdealsCorp.com.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-17T14:17:27Z

Here’s the real reason people hate the domain industry

You don’t need a survey to uncover the real reason people despise the domain industry.

DomainIncite is reporting that next week’s new TLD launch party in NYC has been canceled, and instead ICANN will meet with registrars and registries to discuss improving the image and professionalism of the domain name industry.

The discussions follow the not-so-startling confirmation that people perceive the domain industry in a negative light.

There are certainly a number of reasons for this, and parts of the industry are definitely short on professionalism.

But I think the real reason people “hate” the domain industry is quite simple: they wanted a particular .com domain and it was already registered by, heaven forbid, a “squatter”.

I frequently talk to otherwise professional, upstanding, straight-thinking business people who get seriously pissed that someone is sitting on the domain “they thought of” and wants to charge them a couple grand to use “their idea”.

They get all riled up, and then all of the other aspects of the industry that are befuddling simply add to their negative perception.

There’s not much the industry can do to solve the trigger, but hopefully focusing on other areas of professionalism and image will help.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-17T13:29:41Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

ICANN cancels New York new gTLD party

ICANN has decided to call off its big New York City new gTLD launch “party”, DI has learned.

The high-profile media event, scheduled for April 23, was set to feature an appearance from mayor Michael Bloomberg and was expected to be a coming-out party for new gTLDs.

The original plan was for ICANN to sign the first registry agreements with new gTLD applicants during the event, but that notion was later scrapped due to ongoing contract talks.

However, during the public forum at the ICANN Beijing meeting last week, CEO Fadi Chehade said that the event was still going ahead.

That, according to an ICANN email sent to registries and registrars today, appears to be no longer the case. The email cited “current timelines” as the reason for delaying the event.

The Registry Agreement and Registrar Accreditation Agreement still under discussion between ICANN and contracted parties, and there are other factors in play such as the Governmental Advisory Committee’s wide-ranging advice from Beijing and continued uncertainties about the Trademark Clearinghouse.

With so much up in the air, a public awareness-raising event for the program may have been seen as premature.

A second, private set of meetings between ICANN and domain name companies, also scheduled for April 23 in New York, is still going ahead, according to the ICANN email.

Following on from discussions held over the last few months, the New York talks will focus on improving the image and professionalism of the domain name industry, one of Chehade’s pet projects.

Talks will cover items such as: forming a DNS industry trade association, a possible trust-mark scheme, conferences and media/analyst outreach.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-17T03:40:22Z

April 16, 2013

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Yep, it’s 21st Century Fox

As I predicted, News Corp announces 21st Century Fox.

News Corp today announced that its entertainment business will be called 21st Century Fox.

Over the weekend I was willing to bet money that 21st Century Fox was in the works.

My suspicions started on April 10 when 20th Century Fox registered a number of domain names including 22ndCenturyFox.com, 23rdCenturyFox.com, etc.

Just a defensive branding play?

Perhaps, but then over the weekend I noticed that the company registered a large number of domains related to 21st Century Fox. These types of domains would not have been registered unless something was afoot.

Domain name registrations often times tip of business activity, whether it be merger talks, new corporate initiatives, or even winning contestants on TV shows.

20th Century Fox (or shall I say 21st) registered a lot of key domains. But it’s missing a biggie: 21stCenturyFox.com, which is registered to a South Carolina man.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-16T22:06:23Z

Circle ID

High-Performing Cloud Networks Are Critical to M2M Success

Machine to machine (M2M) communications may not be new, but with the rapid deployment of embedded wireless technology in vehicles, appliances and electronics, it is becoming a force for service providers to reckon with as droves of businesses and consumers seek to reap its benefits. By 2020, the GSM Association (GSMA) predicts that there will be 24 billion connected devices worldwide, while Forrester predicts that mobile machine interactions will exceed the number of mobile human interactions more than 30 times. To ensure competitive advantage, service providers must invest in their networks to enable M2M services more quickly, economically, securely and assuredly.

The principle of M2M communications is straightforward. Sensors are installed on consumer or commercial hardware to transfer application-relevant information to other sensors and/or to a centralized storage facility. Using this information, complicated algorithms infer decisions relevant to the specific application, and are executed accordingly. While this is simple in theory, in-practice, it actually requires the construction of a complex network, with a clear path between devices and storage; the ability to store, process and analyze large amounts of data; and the ability to take action based on this intelligence.

As evidenced by recent reports, it's clear that the industry believes that cloud computing is becoming a viable service option for mission critical business applications. In a 2012 survey conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners, and sponsored by 39 cloud companies including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, and Glasshouse, found a meager 3% considered adopting cloud services to be too risky — down from 11% the previous year. In addition, only 12% said the cloud platform was too immature, and that's down from 26% the year prior. This evolution of the computing industry towards cloud has enabled the storage of vast amounts of data from devices and also made the analysis of this data more feasible. In fact, Microsoft recently said that its Azure cloud has more than four trillion objects stored in it, a fourfold increase from a year before. Its Azure cloud averages 270,000 requests per second, while peaking at 880,000 requests per second during some months. The requests per second have increased almost threefold in the past year, a Microsoft official wrote in a blog post. As a comparison, Amazon Web Services said that just its Simple Storage Service (S3) holds 905 billion objects, and was growing at a rate of one billion objects per day, while handling an average of 650,000 requests per second. As cloud becomes the de facto model for M2M communications, M2M vendors must understand what it takes to enable secure and reliable transfer of information via that vehicle.

It is also important to note that M2M communications can be triggered by both planned and unplanned events. For example, in a smart grid application, smart meters can send information about electricity consumption to a centralized database at pre-scheduled times. Sensors can also be designed to react to unplanned events, such as extreme weather conditions, and trigger increased communication in a certain geography or location. As such, the network that connects these devices to each other, and to the cloud, has to perform in both instances, adapting to both forecasted increases in traffic and random spikes, with automatic, assured performance.

Cloud Infrastructure Requirements for M2M Communications

The network platform that enables M2M communications has multiple segments: the access segment (wireless radio or wireline-based), backhaul to the cloud and the cloud network.

Figure 1: Information from billions of sensors is captured in data centers for processing. Sensor data is transmitted over a wireless access network, mobile backhaul and core network to the data centers.

Sensor data travels to the cloud over wireless/radio or wireline access infrastructures. The aggregation network has to provide highly resilient, scalable and cost-effective backhaul either from mobile or wireline access to be effective. If not the case, M2M communications would be unreliable and many of the new-age applications could never be fully realized.

In order to enable cloud as a platform for M2M adoption, innovation and communication, the cloud has to serve as a high-performance computing platform, often referred to as an enterprise-grade or carrier-grade cloud. High-performance cloud networks need terabit-level connectivity to be able to withstand the projected volume of M2M traffic. These networks will require a provisioning tool so that administrators can allocate resources to where and when they are needed, and also ensure that network assets are available to support delivery of bandwidth-rich applications and services. And, finally, data centers and the cloud backbone need to function as a seamless, single network — a data center without walls — to optimize performance and economics.

Widespread availability of M2M technology has already spurred innovative use cases across different industries, such as: smart grid in energy/utilities; communication between various devices for security and industrial/building control; environmental monitoring; and many applications in the consumer domain ranging from retail to home appliance intelligence.

For example:

In healthcare, mobile platforms can be connected wirelessly to a patient's body or garments for doctors to observe glucose, blood pressure, temperature, EKG and imaging data to alert staff to any abnormalities without the patient having to be checked into the hospital.
Innovative "green" solutions including, solar-powered, wireless parking meters that allow credit card payments to a web-based irrigation control system, which protects the environment and saves money and time for businesses and consumers.
Fleet management specialists can optimize fleet performance through integrating GPS capability, vehicle diagnostics and wireless communications to provide real-time field status information, including current location and diagnostics alerts. Fleet managers are able to monitor and manage driving behavior to improve safety and reduce risk, as well as log drivers' hours to ensure they comply with regulations.

Keys to success

To foster adoption of M2M-enabled technology, initiatives such as GSMA's Connected Life regularly bring together thought leaders within the M2M ecosystem to share their insights to help increase availability of anywhere, anytime connectivity.

The successful adoption of M2M depends on the maturity of multiple elements in the ecosystem, including the wireless technology and business system; the network connectivity that connects the machines and sensors to the cloud; the cloud computing platform; and the software applications that translate the huge amount of data into useful intelligence.

To build an enterprise or carrier-grade cloud platform that can support the projected volume of M2M traffic, the underlying network that connects enterprise data centers, and data centers to the cloud, has to be reliable, high-performing, connection-oriented and have low latency. It must be responsive and integrated into the cloud ecosystem to satisfy connectivity requirements of storage and compute cloud subsystems. It must also enable elastic/liquid bandwidth to ensure the performance and economic benefits of the cloud are realized. Carrier-class network infrastructure — with the ability to scale to 100G today and terabit capacities in the future and with multiple levels of resiliency enabled by an intelligent control plane — will be critical to enabling these cloud networks.

Written by Mariana Agache, Director of Service Provider Industry Marketing at Ciena

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More under: Cloud Computing

by Mariana Agache at 2013-04-16T18:58:00Z

MobiThinking

Mobile events 2013: best mobile conferences, great discounts and free tickets – mobile marketing, mobile Web, m-commerce…

Planning which mobile events to attend in 2013? You’ve come to the right place. This is our pick of mobile conferences from the North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa and we’ve also negotiated some great discounts and free tickets to give away. This is not your usual mobile events list.
• Event organizers of mobile marketing, mobile Web, mobile payments and m-commerce conferences interested in media partnerships, please contact: editor (at) mobiThinking.com.

Great mobile events from mobiThinking partners:

by Editor at 2013-04-16T18:36:13Z

Circle ID

What's the Best IPv6 Transition Option for You?

After decades of talk, the time for IPv6 has finally arrived. There are several transition options available, but whatever approach you choose, the challenge will be to make sure that your subscribers don't experience a reduction in quality of service.

IPv4 is likely to co-exist with IPv6 for some time, so a native dual-stack migration strategy will be the best transition option for most providers. Dual-stack mode allows both IPv4 and IPv6 to run simultaneously over the network, which lets end-user devices communicate via whichever protocol they are equipped for. With dual-stack mode, there is no disruption to the service if a client requests an IPv4 address. Clients that receive both an IPv4 and IPv6 address will prefer to access the IPv6 network, if it's available. The DNS can determine whether the service is reachable over IPv6 or whether to fall back to IPv4.

Of course, dual-stack provisioning isn't perfect. Service disruptions can occur if you don't have enough IPv4 addresses to hand out to new subscribers. This is because dual-stack systems require devices to have both an IPv4 and IPv6 address. If this is a problem for you, it may be possible to use a tunneling technique or network address translation (NAT).

NAT, however, comes with its own set of problems, including:

Impaired quality of service for internal and external systems
Increased network complexity and fragmentation
Security concerns when multiple subscribers share a single, public IPv4 address
Difficulty with law enforcement compliance

Despite these issues, you may find it difficult to implement native dual-stack mode without NAT if you continue to delay your IPv6 preparations. The sooner that you can begin handing out IPv6 addresses to new customers, the sooner you will be able to store IPv4 resources to provide addresses to older subscriber devices. This means you need to start your IPv6 preparations now — even if you still have plenty of IPv4 resources.

If you're interested in learning more about dual-stack migration or want to explore other transition options, download our free ebook: IPv6 eBook Series: Migration.

Written by Stephane Bourque, Founder, CEO and President at Incognito Software

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More under: IP Addressing, IPv6

by Stephane Bourque at 2013-04-16T17:58:00Z

ICANN Official Blog

An Update on Technical Engagement

ICANN has a long tradition of working with the Internet community to support technical training, going back 10 years to the ICANN meeting in Carthage, Tunisia in October 2003. Over the years, these trainings have assisted with improving skills, creating awareness of DNS threats and mitigations, and enabled DNSSEC in a number of ccTLDs. Last month, ICANN, the Network Startup Resource Center (http://nsrc.org/) and ISOC Lebanon conducted DNSSEC training in Beirut, Lebanon. ICANN Security was also represented at the ION Singapore Conference in collaboration with the Internet Society’s Deploy 360 initiative (http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/).

In the Security team [https://www.icann.org/security], we see this technical engagement with the community as a key part of delivering on ICANN’s mission to facilitate the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet’s unique identifier systems through coordination and collaboration.

We do this with community partners across the globe, at the request of operators and universities in the Caribbean and the Middle East, in Africa, Asia-Pacific and South America. We have increasing interest among the law enforcement community for this training. The Security team recently conducted DNS training at Europol, at the International Criminal Law Network in the Netherlands, and with other agencies in the United Kingdom. We are exploring opportunities with the Commonwealth Cybercrime Initiative, and have upcoming DNSSEC training in Tunis, Tunisia next week.

The community has an opportunity to tell us what you think of this training, and on ICANN’s security activities by commenting on the FY 14 Security, Stability and Resiliency Framework. The document has been translated into 7 languages, and is open for comment through 20 April 2013 (with a reply comment period to 20 May 2013, 23:59 UTC). Please take some time to read this document, and provide comments.

Here is some testimony from Rick Lamb, one of our team members and a lead on DNSSEC adoption and engagement:

I consider myself fortunate to be able to participate in this space, following in the footsteps (and the beneficiary of the experience pool) of other seasoned ICANN trainers.

Although I have taught in the past, I had forgotten about the heady mixture of fear, happiness and exhilaration that comes from interacting with a classroom full of intelligent, interested students. After typically spending the better part of an intense week together, trusted relationships are forged, giving the students not just technical knowledge, but a sense of being part of the larger Internet community. These relationships clearly benefit everyone involved.

I know that these are familiar sensations for my seasoned colleagues, but I think that sometimes we should be reminded about the not-so-obvious value of training efforts and the importance of these personal interactions toward building and maintaining the international network of trust that keeps the international network we call the Internet running.

Dr. Richard Lamb
Sr. Program Manager, DNSSEC, ICANN

If you are interested in more information on these trainings, our partners at NSRC maintain excellent wiki pages providing past training agendas and materials. An example from the Lebanon training can be found at https://nsrc.org/workshops/2013/nsrc-isoclb-dnssec/.

ICANN, Network Startup Resource Center and ISOC Lebanon conducted DNSSEC training in Beirut, Lebanon

Photo Credit – Phil Regnauld, NSRC

by Patrick Jones at 2013-04-16T16:44:32Z

Circle ID

ICANN gTLDs: When Names Are Borrowed from an Atlas

When names are borrowed from an Atlas, things happen. Use of Geographic names have always caused some problems for two reasons; one they are in the public domain so anyone else can use them and two they connote that business is confined to just that geographic area. Like Paris Bakery, Waterloo Furniture or London Bank. Geographic naming was the biggest thing during last couple of centuries, as using name of a village or a city as a moniker was considered being on top of the hill. The sudden worldwide expansion of markets due to ease of communications in the early Computer Society created a massive exit of businesses from geographical names.

Back in 1985, ABC Namebank conducted a major study of all of the corporate names listed in Fortune 500. Starting from the first ever list of 500 published in 1955 all the way to 1985 and concluded by this 30 year by year comparison that why most corporations replaced geographic names with appropriately border-less names to reach an international audience.

Amazon as a brand name for online book retailer is the largest and most successful. At this stage, it's not important where and why that business name was chosen; originally from ancient Greece for big breasted female warriors, or the Amazon River, the fact remains it's now a geographical name in public domain. So who should get the super power gTLD dot.amazon, the book store or the region of Amazon in Brazil? Names borrowed from the Atlas often face sudden crossroads.

ICANN gTLD name evaluations policy has only two clear options; either follow the proven rules of trademark registrability or follow the first-come, first-served 'lawless' rule of early domain name registrations.

To go granular on this early lawless domain name approval system, let's clarify two things: if the 'no questions asked' and 'first-come, first-served' original policy created massive domain name expansion, did it also not create some 25 thousand of UDRPs conflict resolution proceedings and also created a multi-billion dollar defensive name registration industry? Who are the real beneficiaries of such lawless registrations? When a legit multi-billion dollar company buys a name for a business, say ibm.com the same system allows a kid to buy myibm.com, next in line. Is this a way to earn few dollars on a sale or is it a plan to fuel massive global litigation and speculative markets on Intellectual Properties? Under this lawless thinking trademark system would have collapsed couple centuries ago. Now let's fast forward.

Name-centricity clashes with global branding

"A complete breakdown of the domain name registration system, a type of anarchy on the Internet, as allowing anybody to register anything. Registrars throw up the towels. Trademark offices threaten to shut down. Intellectual property becomes public domain. The part-time guy at the local Pizza Hut answers the phone "Hello this is IBM — how can I help you" Battalions of lawyers will band around the word, declaring war on each other, and forcing conflicting points of views in endless battles will win trademarks. This war, would be a great windfall for the profession, as monthly billings would only become perpetual ones." —Excerpted from Domain Wars, by Naseem Javed, Linkbridge Publishing 1999.

Back to gTLDs, on another example; if ICANN approves the name for the athletic brand Patagonia, already objected by the Region of Patagonia of South America, it will cause serious damage to the credibility of a gTLD ownership. Once it's cracked there will be no end as every tenth gTLD name poses special conflicting issues and giving in would chip away gTLD quality.

If, on the other hand, ICANN recognizes geographic gTLDs as rightly belonging to the locals and regions, it will send a shock-wave to all the global name brands with words borrowed from the atlas.

There are at least 10% very tough name approval decisions in the big list of 1930 pending applications. If this alone does not place ICANN in the eye of a storm of naming complexity than where else is it headed? ICANN is now approaching the crossroads where the seriousness and fairness of the usage of names under trademark laws must be clearly declared or it will crack the gTLD program where litigious and hyper-defensive registration mechanisms suck out the positive energy. The Trademark clearing house without such clarity and direction is poised to become the Achilles Heels on the gTLD battlefield.

ICANN slowly approaches the crossroads and so are the global brands with borrowed words from the atlas but still both sides need good maps.

Written by Naseem Javed, Expert: Global Naming Complexities, Corporate Nomenclature, Image & Branding

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Top-Level Domains

by Naseem Javed at 2013-04-16T15:17:00Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

1&1 ditches .mail, keeps .gmx (for now)

One of seven applicants for .mail top level domain withdraws its application.

United Internet 1&1 Mail & Media GmbH has withdrawn its application for the top level domain .mail in the wake of receiving two formal objections against its application.

It’s not clear if the objections were part of the company’s rationale for dropping its application. There seven applicants for .mail, including heavyweight Google.

Both the United States Postal Service and Universal Postal Union objected to the applications. The USPS filed a bizarre objection based on legal rights while the Universal Postal Union objected on community grounds.

Given that 1&1 owns Mail.com, I don’t understand how these objectors find .mail to be that much more of a threat. 1&1 stands to gain if someone else successfully launches .mail is it will deliver a lot of error traffic to Mail.com.

1&1 is part of United Internet, the same family of companies that owns Sedo.

The company has not yet withdrawn its application for .gmx, which is basically a .brand application. It has plenty of time to decide whether or not to withdraw the .gmx application since it pulled prioritization number 1,452 for it.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-16T14:55:58Z

MobiThinking

How mobile is changing travel in Asia: interview with Skyscanner Asia-Pacific director Ewan Gray

Skyscanner, available via multilingual apps, PC sites and mobile sites, searches through thousands of airlines, hotels and car-rental suppliers to find the best travel options for customers, for free. However, when Skyscanner’s millions of mobile users click through to the travel suppliers from its apps/site, they find that only 38 percent of the travel operators’ sites are mobile-friendly.

by admin at 2013-04-16T14:11:47Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Review: Taking IP Neighborhood for a Test Drive

IP Neighborhood combines a number of valuable tools for domain name investors.

IP Neighborhood compiles valuable domain data at a low monthly price.

Last month Ron Jackson profiled IP Neighborhood, a new service by Simon
Johnson.

The profile piqued my interest because it described tools on IP Neighborhood that are similar to those of DomainTools. And with IP Neighborhood’s low price point (I just signed up for the $19.95/month plan), it could be a good alternative to DomainTools.

After trying it out for a bit I can confirm two things.

First, IP Neighborhood has some useful tools worth checking out. Second, it’s in no way a replacement for similar tools offered by DomainTools.

Whois History

One of the tools I use most often at DomainTools is whois history.

IP Neighborhood has a whois history tool that purports to give dates when changes were made in whois.

To give it a spin I punched in DNW.com. At first it said there was no record of the domain in the database, but it quickly pulled it up when I searched a second time.

The whois history section shows two changes. First, it shows in 2007 that iDev owned the domain. Then it shows in 2012 that my company owned the domain. But iDev didn’t own the domain until 2008. I bought the domain later in 2008, and that doesn’t show up as a change until 2012.

I ran a few other domains and found similar results with inaccurate dates.

I wouldn’t put much stock in the information you get from IP Neighborhood’s whois history tool.

Reverse whois

Click on a name or email address on a whois record and you can see a reverse whois, i.e. find other names owned by the same person. There’s also a separate search feature for this.

The reverse whois didn’t pull up nearly as many results at DomainTools’ similar service, but it was somewhat useful. DomainTools charges an arm and a leg for reverse whois reports, so if you’re just trying to get a feel for the types of domains someone owns, IP Neighborhood might be a good bet.

Domain Comparison

Want to find domains registered in .net or .org but not in .com? You can search by keyword and see a list. Don’t expect to find any gems, but a bit of sifting and you might discover some domains worth registering.

Auction Intelligence

This tool is pretty nifty. It lets you see who purchased domains at various domain auction services. It shows the whois record the day of the sale, 7 days later, and a month later.

Auction Intelligence might be a useful way to find people that are buying domains with certain keywords. They might be good buyer prospects for some of your similar domains. You might also use it to “decode” who certain buyers at expired domain services are.

There’s also some neat data on which companies are buying the most auction domains.

New Domains

The pitch on the site is that IP Neighborhood monitors “new domain name registrations in .com .net and org, so you can uncover new trends, emerging markets and track competitors.”

I checked a sample of domains and they were all fairly old registrations, so I don’t see the point of this tool.

I think you’d be better off using Lean Domain Search’s trend tool for this.

Valuation

Sales comps can be really valuable. IP Neighborhood pulls in sales data from certain venues, some of which you won’t find on other services (e.g. Australian sales).

This is useful, although I wish it included the name of the venue where the domain sold. It’s helpful to know if a domain was sold in an expired domain auction as opposed to a one-to-one transaction.

I also spot checked a number of domain sales reported by Afternic last week and none of them were in the tool.

In general, I’ve found it best to check multiple sources of data when looking for sales comps. Two good resources are DNSalePrice.com and Namebio.com.

Bottom Line

IP Neighborhood does a good job pulling together lots of types of domain data. I can see how it would be useful to a number of domain investors, especially at such a low price point. There are better alternatives for most of its tools, but the compilation of data in one place is a nice value-add.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-16T13:36:25Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

Google domain hijacked in Kenya

Google’s Kenyan web site was reportedly inaccessible yesterday due to a hijacking of the company’s local domain name.

Google.co.ke briefly redirected users to a site bearing the slogan “hacked” on a black background, according to the Daily Nation. A change of DNS was blamed.

Google Kenya reportedly said:

Google services in Kenya were not hacked. For a short period, some users visiting www.google.co.ke and a few other website were re-directed to a different website. We are in contact with the organisation responsible for managing domain names in Kenya.

Google is of course a high-profile target; hackers often exploit weaknesses at third-party providers such as domain name registries in order to take down its satellite sites.

Its Irish site was taken down in October last year, after attackers broke in through a vulnerability in IEDR’s Joomla content management system.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-16T10:04:26Z

April 15, 2013

ICANN Official Blog

Single Source of Whois-Related Agreement Provisions and Policies

Today, ICANN posted a single information source for the current gTLD WHOIS-related agreement provisions and policies to make them easier for the community to access. The suggestion for such a webpage came from the WHOIS Policy Review Team and was accepted by the Board for implementation on 8 November 2012. This single source documents the current gTLD WHOIS-related policies set out in the gTLD Registry and Registrar contracts and GNSO Consensus Policies and Procedures. It will be incorporated in an “information portal” that is under development to support easy access to existing WHOIS information. This compilation of Whois-related policies and agreement provisions will be revised in the future to reflect new agreements and policies as they are adopted.

by Denise Michel at 2013-04-15T20:29:15Z

Domain Tools Blog (Jay Westerdal)

5 Tips for Developing a Competitive Intelligence Strategy Using DomainTools

As a marketer, I rely on a wide range of tools every day to track campaign ROI and gain insight into the health and impact of the various DomainTools marketing programs I run. Some of the tools I use (such as Twitter, ExactTarget, Facebook, and LinkedIn) provide their own metrics based on number of visits, specific content impressions/shares, overall engagement numbers, etc.

In addition to monitoring the pulse of current programs, it’s also very important to research and monitor what is developing in the market so you know how to best position your company.

Specifically, what are your competitors planning? Do they have upcoming product plans or launches in the near future? What does that larger strategy look like? What programs or promotions have they ran in the past, in addition to current offers?

How are you currently uncovering this information?

Before joining DomainTools, I wasn’t tapped into the fact that you can leverage domain name data to bolster your competitive intelligence. Here are 5 tips you can use to keep tabs on what different companies are up to in the marketplace —whether you’re a marketer, movie or gaming buff, CEO, product manager. Or, keep tabs on certain companies just for fun!

1. Monitor your trademarks/brand AND know when your competitors register new domains with Brand Monitor email alerts. You’ll get notified every time DomainTools discovers a domain name registration that includes an exact match with a brand name, trademark term, or other text string you indicate. This will help with you with proactively approach competitive planning.

2. See how your competitor’s website homepage has changed over time using Screenshots.com. You can see how the brand has evolved, how promotions changed, and uncover other key information.

3. Understand your competitor’s entire domain portfolio. As long as you have a key piece of information (name, address, phone number, for example), you will be able to uncover all the domain names associated with the specific piece of information you shared using the Reverse Whois tool. From the tally of domain names, you’ll gain a clearer picture of the company’s brand positioning and product plans (if there’s a domain name you weren’t aware of / isn’t built out yet).

4. After reviewing your competitor’s domain name Whois records, you may want to keep an eye on a specific registrant so you can be notified via email whenever a person or company registers a new domain, has one transferred to them, or transfers a domain out of their control.

5. If you’d like ALL of the competitive information listed above, available in a simple PDF report, Domain Report makes it simple. You’ll get a complete picture of your competitor’s current website’s lifeline including historical screenshots, historical Whois records, nameserver, registrar and IP address changes.

If you’re a DomainTools professional member, be sure to take advantage of all of these tools in addition to Reverse Whois and Domain Report!

by Monica at 2013-04-15T18:14:03Z

Circle ID

China and the United States Agree on Forming Joint Cybersecurity Working Group

China and the United States will set up a working group on cybersecurity, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday, as the two sides moved to ease months of tensions and mutual accusations of hacking and Internet theft. Speaking to reporters in Beijing during a visit to China, Kerry said the United States and China had agreed on the need to speed up action on cyber security, an area that Washington says is its top national security concern.

Read full story: Reuters

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More under: Cyberattack, Cybercrime, Internet Governance, Security

by CircleID Reporter at 2013-04-15T17:10:00Z

Fourth Round of Initial Evaluation Results for New TLDs

Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the fourth round of Initial Evaluation results, bringing the total number of applications that have passed the Initial Evaluation phase to 131. ICANN is targeting completing Initial Evaluation for all applicants by August 2013. To learn more, see http://www.getnewtlds.com/news/Third-Round-of-Initial-Evaluations.aspx.

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More under: ICANN, Top-Level Domains

by CircleID Reporter at 2013-04-15T15:58:00Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Final new TLD objection tally: Donuts 55, Amazon 24, Google 22

Three of the largest applicants for new TLDs are facing a mountain of objections.

Donuts Donuts, Amazon, and Google have the dubious honor of having the most objected-to applications for new top level domains.

There were 263 formal objections to new top level domains, and that doesn’t include GAC advice.

Donuts received 55 objections covering 45 unique objections, which means about one out of seven of its 307 applications are facing an objection.

24 of Donuts’ objections are community objections. Groups purporting to represent the gold, band, and ski, among other “communities”, decided to fight the company.

Amazon received 24 objections on 18 unique applications. Half of the 24 objections are community objections, thanks in part of the company’s plans to keep its TLDs closed.

Google, which applied for more domains than Amazon, was hit with 22 objections on 18 unique objections. 9 are community objections and 7 are legal rights objections.

The “our competitors ganged up on us” winner is Fidelity, which applied for only four top level domains but managed to receive 11 objections. Only its .Fidelity application wasn’t objected to. Its .IRA, .MutualFunds, and .Retirement applications received multiple objections from a combination of TIAA-CREF, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Prudential.

The spreadsheet below lists each objection and “decodes” subsidiaries to show applicants such as Donuts. It is sorted by applicant.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-15T14:50:33Z

SnapNames no reserve auction ends Thursday

Three auctions are running on SnapNames.

SnapNames has three auctions running this month, and the first one ends Thursday.

SnapNames’ “April Deals” auction ends Thursday, April 18.

The auction includes just 44 domains and all have no reserve (but a $199 minimum bid).

So far three domains have bids, including WorkToDo.com, CashCrash.com, and KindGift.com.

Most of the domains are brandable, such as BuzzIncome.com, BeyondCeleb.com, and ScienceGo.com.

Next, the Doster partner auction includes 80 domain names and most of them have no reserve. The auction ends April 25.

Two domains in the Dotster auction have bids and Classifier.com has been bid up to $1,000. The auction is fairly heavy with .net domains and there are a handful of four letter .com’s available.

Finally, the Moniker Premium Spring Auction has started and runs until May 9. Top domains include Feature.com, Visitor.com, Rin.com, and Sandwich.com.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-15T13:57:23Z

Google beats Google in UDRP

Company wins case against spoofer.

Google It’s pretty easy to spoof someone else in a whois record, and a recent UDRP is a case in point.

Officially, Google Inc. prevailed over Google Inc. in a UDRP for the domain GoogleDNSService.com.

When you first look at the whois record for this domain you might assume it’s owned by Google:

The name, phone, and address are all those of Google. But you’ll notice that the email address, dns-admin@googlednsservice.com, differs from Google’s email address for whois records, dns-admin@google.com.

The nameservers were set to ns1.googlednsservice.com to further trick people.

The domain was registered on February 7 and Google quickly filed the UDRP on March 5 to quell any user confusion.

This isn’t the first time a company beat “itself” in a UDRP under similar circumstances; see Microsoft Corporation vs. Microsoft Corporation for the domain microsoftetest.com.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-15T13:27:34Z

Michele Neylon

Men vs Women

No comment

Men vs Women is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

by Michele at 2013-04-15T09:04:30Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

GAC Advice on new gTLDs “not the end of the story”

Governments may want new gTLD registries to become the internet’s police force, but ICANN doesn’t have to take it lying down.

ICANN is set to open up the shock Beijing communique to public comments, CEO Fadi Chehade said Friday, while chair Steve Crocker has already raised the possibility of not following the GAC’s advice.

“Advice from governments carries quite a bit of weight and equally it is not the end of the story,” Crocker said in a post-meeting interview with ICANN PR Brad White.

“We have a carefully constructed multi-stakeholder process,” he said. “We want very much to listen to governments, and we also want to make sure there’s a balance.”

The ICANN bylaws, he reminded us, give ICANN “a preference towards following advice from the GAC, but not an absolute requirement.”

That’s a reference the the part of the bylaws that enables ICANN’s board to overrule GAC advice, as long as it carries out consultation and provides sound reasoning.

It was invoked once before, when ICANN tried to get a handle on the GAC’s concerns about .xxx in 2011.

In this case, I’d be very surprised indeed if the GAC’s advice out of Beijing does not wind up in this bylaws process, if only because the document appears to be internally contradictory in parts.

It’s also vague and broad enough in parts that ICANN is going to need much more detail if it hopes to even begin to implement it.

It looks like at least 517 new gTLD applications will be affected by the GAC’s advice, but in the vast majority of cases it’s not clear what applicants are expected to do about it.

The first part of dissecting the Beijing communique will be a public comment period, Chehade said during the interview Friday. He said:

The community wishes to participate in the discussion about the GAC communique. So, alongside the staff analysis that is starting right now on the GAC communique we have decided to put the GAC communique out for public comment, soliciting the entire community to give us their input to ensure that the GAC communique is taken seriously but also encompasses our response, encompasses the views of the whole community.

Watch the full video below.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-15T08:20:01Z

April 14, 2013

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Hmm… Perhaps 20th Century Fox really is rebranding to 21st Century Fox

Latest domain registrations suggest movie studio might rebrand to 21st Century Fox.

21st Century Fox Last week I wrote about how movie studio 20th Century Fox had registered domains to protect itself for the next millennium: It registered domains from 22ndcenturyfox.com up to 29thcenturyfox.com.

At the time I figured it was just an over-the-top defensive domain registration campaign.

But now that more domain registrations have come to light, I’d up the odds that 20th Century Fox is working on a rebrand to 21st Century Fox.

Among the new domain registrations are www21CenturyFox.com and www21stCenturyFox.com.

www typos that don’t have the dot between the three w’s and the main domain are common, but the only time I’ve seen companies register such domains is if they plan on using the correct version of the domain. The only reason these typos get any traffic is if someone is promoting the actual, non-typo domain name. So if you’re going to protect one, that likely means you’ll promote the associated correct URL.

Need more evidence? The company even went so far as to register this same typo in .info, www21CenturyFox.info.

It also didn’t bother to register these typos for variations of “22CenturyFox”, which it wouldn’t use for a while.

Furthermore, it registered many ccTLDs of the 21st Century Fox name: 21stcenturyfox.cn, 21stcenturyfox.in, and 21stcenturyfox.jp. But it did not register the 22nd version of these ccTLDs.

Add to that multiple hyphen variations of non .com domains like twenty-firstcenturyfox.org, twentyfirst-centuryfox.org, and twentyfirstcentury-fox.org, and I’d say you have the most overzealous defensive registration campaign in history or the company is getting ready to rebrand to 21st Century Fox.

The company doesn’t even own TwentiethCentury-Fox.org. Why would you register a domain with 21st but not your actual brand 20th?

The only other possible explanation is that people already think 20th Century Fox is 21st Century Fox, so they’re trying to protect everything related to that.

It definitely looks like something is going on…

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-14T17:47:49Z

Michele Neylon

ICANN 46 Gala Beijing

Taken in the "Hall of the People" in Beijing, China

Gala

ICANN 46 Gala Beijing is an article from Michele Neylon :: Pensieri - Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts

by Michele at 2013-04-14T13:54:43Z

April 13, 2013

Domain Name News

DotWeekly.com is Back

After a brief hiatus, Jamie Zoch at Dotweekly.com has returned to blogging. Jamie lost all of DotWeekly.com in a hosting move and decided to take some time off .

Jamie always had good content and interesting insights, so I’m glad to see him back at it. Frankly, domain blogging seems to be a sea of copycatting daily domain lists, weekly sales reports, and who bought what. Jamie always had a knack for coming up with new content. It takes a lot of work to crank out that original content.

by Adam Strong at 2013-04-13T15:48:50Z

Governments adds categories to new gTLDs

(This article was first published in the NetNames Blog) After 10 grueling days of intense meetings, the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has given the ICANN Board its thoughts on the first batch of applications made as part of the new gTLD program.

This GAC “advice” comes in two parts.

Two applications received outright GAC objections, and are therefore unlikely to proceed any further. These are .GCC (contested by some of the Gulf countries claiming similarity between this string and the Gulf Cooperation Council) and .AFRICA submitted by DotConnectAfrica (one of two for this string, and governments have explained that this application did not have official support from the region).

The second part of the advice provided by government has come in the form of “safeguard” advice.

In essence, the GAC has created categories of TLDs which will require additional protections or restrictions to be implemented.

In addition, the GAC also made several other requests, including the singular and plural versions of the same basic string not to be considered separately (.GAME and .GAMES for example) which was a new topic of controversy that developed over the Beijing meeting week.

Finally governments tied the signing of any new gTLD contract to the completion of the new registrar contract currently being finalized.

Read the full GAC document here.

by Stephane Van Gelder at 2013-04-13T11:10:29Z

23 April new gTLD approval date slips

(This article was first published in the NetNames Blog) The first new gTLD contract will not be approved on 23 April as originally planned. Both the new Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and Registry Agreement (RA) are simply not ready.

Keeping to the 23 April date would have required a special meeting of the ICANN Board. In fact, one had been planned for this on April 20. But due to ongoing contract negotiations, in Beijing ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé confirmed that he had asked his Board to cancel this meeting.

“I am anticipating that we will publish the new contracts for the whole community to view early next week,” Chehadé explained on 11 April, the last day of the Beijing conference. “We will then have the mandatory 21-day comment period, and 21-day reply period. However, we will look for agile ways to make sure that we don’t add another 40 days to the program. For example, we may be able to work on operational aspects at the same time as these comment periods”.

A “new gTLD launch party” originally planned for 23 April in New York to celebrate the approval of the first new gTLD contract will still happen, but will now just be an ICANN Public Relations event rather than a celebration.

by Stephane Van Gelder at 2013-04-13T11:03:23Z

April 12, 2013

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

ICANN announces 263 new TLD objections on final list

263 total objections filed against new top level domain applications.

As per the requirements of the applicant guidebook, ICANN has published a list of all new top level domain objections accepted for consideration.

Below is a summary. You can learn more about how these objections will proceed here.

String Confusion

67 objections based on string confusion were filed.

The top objector was Commercial Connect LLC, which has applied for .shop. It has objected to 9 IDNs as well as .shop, .shopping, .shopyourway, .store, and .supply. You can understand more about where it’s coming from in this letter (pdf).

Verisign filed the second most objections with 16.

Legal Rights

69 legal rights objections were filed with WIPO.

In many cases one competing applicant filed objections against all competitors. For example, Starbucks (HK) Limited (not related to the coffee chain) opposed all .now applications. The company owns now.com as well.

In others a non-party objected, such as the United States Postal Service objecting to .mail.

Limited Public Interest

This category was the smallest, with just 23 objections.

Financial firms made up the bulk of objectors, with TIAA-CREF, Prudential, TD Ameritrade, and Charles Schwab ganging up on Fidelity by opposing names such as .mutualfunds and .retirement.

Community Objections

Most objections fell into this category, with 104 objections in total.

As with legal rights objections, many were filed by competitors against all competing applications.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T21:56:58Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Bidding on MD.org tops $500,000 at NameJet

Two letter .org domain goes sky high.

[Update: 'winters' one the auction for $555,650]

Two bidders are determined not to walk away from a NameJet auction for MD.org without their prize.

Bidding for the domain, which will end within a few minutes of either bidder giving up, topped $500,000 at 12:31 PM PDT.

Bidders ‘winters’ and ‘freedotcom’ are the only two participating since a $35,000 bid by ‘time25′ at 11:15 am.

As for why the domain is worth so much, your guess is as good as mine. Auctions for even the single letter .org domains that Public Interest Registry is auctioning off haven’t come close to this.

MD.org

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T20:16:06Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

Delay not certain as new gTLD contracts reopened

The launch window for new gTLDs may have just got pushed back another month or two, following the announcement of a new 42-day comment period on registry and registrar contracts.

But ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said he’s looking at ways to streamline the process to offset the delays.

During the public forum in Beijing yesterday, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade said that he’d cancelled a scheduled April 20 meeting of its board of directors, during which the new agreements were targeted for approval.

Instead, new versions of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement and new gTLDs base Registry Agreement will be posted for public comment next week.

As these are expected to be the final versions of both documents, they’re also expected to have full comment periods of 42 days — 21 for comments and 21 for replies.

“I believe that putting the last version of RAA for 2013 out for full public comment process is actually strengthening that agreement,” Chedhade said today. “It makes it an agreement of the community.”

For the Registry Agreement, Chehade said talks with registries are going well and that he hopes to have a version ready for public comment agreed with negotiators in less than a week.

Assuming an April 19 start, that puts the earliest possible date for ICANN board approval at May 31, assuming the board waits for the comment period to end before giving it the rubber stamp.

Before the contracts are approved, they can’t be signed by registries and registrars, and before they are signed new gTLD applicants cannot progress to the final pre-launch stages of the delegation process.

But Chehade is weighing an idea put forward during the public forum by Donuts’ Jon Nevett: why not allow applicants to complete pre-delegation technical testing before contract signing?

“We could potentially do something about advancing this step ahead of contracting, finding a way to start pre-delegation testing before contracting is done,” Chehade said.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-12T19:27:20Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

Demand Media passes a new TLD Initial Evaluation

Company passes initial evaluation despite rule about UDRP losses.

Demand Media’s new top level domain company, United TLD Holdco, has passed the initial evaluation stage on one of its TLD applications.

The company passed the initial evaluation for ~~Fish.com~~ .fishing today.

Demand Media was the biggest question mark amongst big-name TLD applicants with regards to if it would pass initial evaluation.

Part of the initial evaluation is the background check, and passing this requires that the applicant not have three or more UDRP losses in the past four years:

has been involved in a pattern of adverse, final decisions indicating that the applicant or individual named in the application was engaged in cybersquatting as defined in the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), or other equivalent legislation, or was engaged in reverse domain name hijacking under the UDRP or bad faith or reckless disregard under the ACPA or other equivalent legislation. Three or more such decisions with one occurring in the last four years will generally be considered to constitute a pattern.

Demand Media subsidiary Demand Domains has many UDRP losses.

Of course, I suppose United TLD Holdco is not Demand Domains…

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T18:48:47Z

DomainIncite (Kevin Murphy)

First new gTLD to fail evaluation revealed

With 132 new gTLD applications in receipt of their Initial Evaluation results, the first to fail has been revealed.

The failed application was for العلیان., an Arabic dot-brand filed by Olayan Investments Company, a 65-year-old privately held Saudi conglomerate.

It failed IE on financial grounds, according to its published results (pdf).

To pass the financial portion of the evaluations, applicants must score a minimum of eight points, scoring at least one point on each of the six questions.

While Olayan did score eight, it scored a zero on question 45, “Demonstration of Financial Capability”, which asks applicants to file audited or unaudited financial statements.

It appears that the applicant in this case did not provide enough information to be evaluated either during the application itself or in response to ICANN’s “clarifying questions”.

The application is now categorized as “Eligible for Extended Evaluation” by ICANN, meaning Olayan can provide extra information in an attempt to pass the failed question.

There’s no fee to do so in this case, but there would be a delay.

ICANN has so far delivered IE results for 132 applications for applications with priority queue numbers up to 149. Every other result to date has been a “pass”.

by Kevin Murphy at 2013-04-12T18:32:28Z

Circle ID

SPECIAL: Updates from the ICANN Meetings in Beijing

CircleID, once again, in collaboration with the team from Dyn Inc. and ICANN Wiki, brings you video blogs and updates from the 46th ICANN meeting in Beijing, China (7-11 April 2013).

Stay tuned as we keep this page updated through out the meetings.

Comments and questions? Please post them below in the comment section of the page or send us an email.

* * *

Update / Apr 12, 2013 — Ray King of ICANNWiki talked with Ben Crawford, CEO of CentralNic.

Update / Apr 12, 2013 — Dyn's Rich Peterson talked with UNH School of Law's Mary Wong.

Update / Apr 12, 2013 — As part of our ICANN 46 coverage, Ray King of ICANNWiki chats with Chuck Gomes, a member of the Registries Stakeholder Group.

Brought to you in partnership with Dyn Inc and ICANN Wiki. Please add your feedback and suggestions using the comment form provided on this page or contact us directly.

Video Coverage of past ICANN meetings:
ICANN 44 Meetings in Toronto
ICANN 44 Meetings in Prague
ICANN 43 Meetings in Costa Rica
ICANN 42 Meetings in Dakar
ICANN 41 Meetings in Singapore
ICANN 38 Meetings in Brussels
ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya
ICANN 36 in Seoul, South Korea
ICANN 35 in Sydney, Australia
ICANN 34 in Mexico City

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Top-Level Domains

by CircleID Reporter at 2013-04-12T17:43:00Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

26 end user domain sales

Here are 26 sales to end users on the Afternic platform last week.

Before jumping into the Afternic end user sales report, take a look at the details behind Afternic’s biggest reported sale of the week. It sold TribalWars.com for $34,910 to the company that tried to take it with a UDRP a couple years ago.

Here are other end user sales from Afternic:

Quicken Loans bought QuickenRealty.com for $1,277. It recently bought RocketLoan.com for $4,500, too.

Prosight Specialty Insurance bought the acronym PSIS.com for $5,000.

American Surgical Association bought AmericanSurgical.org for $1,900.

Affiliate network Shareasale bought StorefrontBusiness.com and RaiseRevenue.com for $1,688.

Triumph Group, based in Italy, bought TheTriumph.com for $1,500.

Acrospire Management LLC bought Acrospire.com for $2,600.

The Boston Globe bought LocalAxis.com for $1,422.

“As Seen on TV” product company Telebrands bought LightAngel.com for $3,859, ostensibly for a new product.

Real estate company Urban Collective bought UrbanCatalyst.com for $1,500.

Hsien Chang Metals Co., Ltd. in Taiwan bought TaiwanHardware.com for $2,500.

United International Business Schools bought UIMC.net for $1,194.

A company called Education Next bought EdNext.com for $1,400.

Educate School Services, which owns EducateServices.co.uk, bought EducateServices.com for $2,495.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which wants to promote a Circular Economy, paid $1,000 for CircularEconomy.com.

Online education company K12 bought EducationTransformation.com for $2,000.

ATM sales company National ATM bought ATMMachines.net for $1,600. It already owns the .com.

The owner of chicagoinstitute.org bought the matching .com for $1,400. There’s not yet a site at either domain.

Lone Star Automotive made a big upgrade, going from LonestarAuto.biz to LonestarAuto.com for just $2,000.

Lighting company Aurora bought AuraLighting.com for $3,500.

Real estate developers Basser Kaufman bought NYDevelopers.com for $2,000.

Religious political site WeBelieve.com bought the matching .net for $1,545.

Lead gen company QuoteWizard.com bought SupercheapInsurance.com for $2,500.

Dependable Packaging & Displays bought DependablePackaging.com for $1,500. It had been using DependablePkg.com.

BioSan Laboratories Inc. paid $1,200 for MegaHerbs.com.

New York construction lawyer Michael Giannasca bought NYConstructionLawyer.com for $3,888.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T16:27:40Z

After losing UDRP, company pays NameMedia $34,910 for TribalWars.com

I bet legal fees were included in this sales price.

The top sale on this week’s Afternic domain sales report is TribalWars.com at $34,910, and it’s an interesting one.

The buyer, Innogames, has an MMORPG called TribalWars. In 2011 Innogames filed a UDRP against NameMedia (technically against BuyDomains) for the domain.

It lost.

Now, two years later, Innogames has finally realized that if it wants a good domain is simply needs to pay for it.

Innogames has gone from filing a complaint against NameMedia to being a customer.

TribalWars.com isn’t the only domain it has purchased from NameMedia. Last month it bought BattleCommander.com for $2,731. Perhaps it is learning to buy the .com domain before launching a web site.

I wonder how much NameMedia would have demanded for BattleCommander.com had Innogames first tried to steal it with a UDRP?

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T16:13:31Z

Ticket Broker loses French Open domains

French Tennis organization awarded 13 domain names used by ticket broker.

FFT A UDRP panel has ordered ticket broker Ticketfinders International LLC to transfer 13 domain names to Fédération Française de Tennis (FFT).

FFT is the governing body for tennis within France. It also holds trademarks for the French Open, which is also called the Roland Garros tennis tournament and is played at Roland Garros Stadium.

Ticketfinders didn’t formally respond to the complaint, and the single member WIPO panel ruled in FFT’s favor. Here are the domains that will be transferred:

french-open-2012.com
frenchopen2012.net
frenchopen2013.net
frenchopen2014.net
frenchopen2015.net
frenchopen2016.net
frenchopen2017.net
roland-garros-tickets.com
roland-garros-2012.com
roland-garros-2013.com
roland-garros-2014.com
2012-french-open.com
2012frenchopen.com

Ticketfinders created web sites for each domain that offered tickets to the events.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T15:32:36Z

What domain JetBlue bought and a $120,000 end user domain sale

JetBlue pays little for a domain, but another end user pays dearly.

Sedo’s headline $120,000 sale of ConnectNow.com last week was (of course) to an end user. JetBlue also bought a domain through the service.

Here’s a list of end user sales on Sedo last week.

American Association of Young People bought yet another domain, Young-People.com, for $1,250.

Cargill acquired the domain Cargill.kr for 1,200 EUR.

Payment processing company First Data Corporation recently bought SureReturns.com for $1,995. Last week it paid $2,395 for PayStart.com.

Airline JetBlue bought Jetaways.com for 1,100 GBP.

M & T Bank paid $5,000 for RaiseYourExpectations.com.

The AARP (American Association of Retired People) bought MentorUp.com for $15,000.

Vision Signs in Ontario bought VisionPromo.com for $799.

Tailor Limited in New Zealand, which owns Tailor.co.nz, bought Tailor.co for $6,000. That many ccTLDs use a second level domain of “co” is one more draw for .co.

Millennium Scanners and Printers paid $1,200 for DallasPrinterRepair.com.

Investor services company ComputerShare bought ConnectNow.com for $120,000. The purchase may have been by ComputerShare company Serviceworks Management, which provides services to the utilities industry.

The blog Roknrol.info bought Roknrol.com for $700

Dealer Traction, which creates web sites for car dealers, bought CarFish.com for $3,750.

XL Video Ltd in Great Britain bought XLAudio.com for 800 EUR.

Harry and David, seller of fruits online (famous for its pears), bought FruitoftheMonth.net for $850. It already owns the .com.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-12T14:00:00Z

April 11, 2013

Circle ID

DNS Bug Disclosure: ICANN Releases New Guidelines

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has released new guidance concerning the reporting and disclosure of bugs that affect the Domain Name System, including information of how ICANN itself will behave in response to vulnerabilities.

Until recently, ICANN, which is responsible for maintaining the root domain servers at the heart of the DNS system, had no specific guidelines for the reporting of vulnerabilities, leaving responsible disclosure protocols up to the researchers who discovered the bugs. With the release of the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Reporting [PDF] document they hope to instigate a more unified and consistent process for disclosure.

The guidelines are intended to:

"define the role ICANN will perform in circumstances where vulnerabilities are reported and ICANN determines that the security, stability or resiliency of the DNS is exploited or threatened. The guidelines also explain how a party, described as a reporter, should disclose information on a vulnerability discovered in a system or network operated by ICANN."

The document outlines procedures that ICANN will follow in various roles, including as an affected party, where the vulnerability directly impacts ICANN's operations; as a reporter, when ICANN researchers discover vulnerabilities; and as a coordinating party.

Security vulnerability reporting is a controversial topic, with some researchers advocating immediate full disclosure, and others opting for responsible disclosure where vendors and stakeholders are notified privately before a full release is made only following the patching of relevant software. There is also a thriving black market for security vulnerabilities, where the information is disclosed only to the highest bidder for use in hacking attacks.

As an essential and ubiquitous part of Internet's infrastructure, the security of the Domain Name System is of particular interest to hackers and those engaged in industrial or state-sponsored espionage. ICANN is advocating a system of responsible disclosure with ICANN itself acting as a coordinator in some cases. Bugs that impact DNS can be reported directly to ICANN, who will then inform affected vendors or service providers.

Public disclosure is strongly discouraged until vendors have been informed of the vulnerability and have fixes in place. However, the methodology recommended by ICANN makes it clear that in the case of vendors who fail to respond to attempts at coordination, researchers may choose to disclose vulnerabilities.

None of these recommendations is binding, and researchers are still free to choose how to react to discovered vulnerabilities. However, the creation of these guidelines is a positive move towards a unified and coordinated system for handling security vulnerabilities in the DNS.

Written by Evan Daniels

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More under: DNS, ICANN, Security

by Evan Daniels at 2013-04-11T23:01:00Z

Circle ID

New TLDs: Time For a Do-Over on Plural Similarity

Mandarin is a tricky language, but ICANN may want to learn the expression chóngfù before leaving the Beijing meeting. Chóngfù means "do-over" and that's what ICANN needs to forestall an entirely preventable disaster in the delegation of new top-level domains (TLDs).

The issue of "string similarity" seems straightforward. Nobody inside ICANN or out there in the real world wants Internet users to be confused by new TLDs that are confusingly similar. Imagine hearing an ad offering low rates at car.loans but you encounter something completely different at car.loan instead? And what would stop somebody from launching a new TLD by just tacking an "s" onto popular domains like .com or .org?

The Government Advisory Committee (GAC) is catching a lot of flack for it's Beijing Communiqué, but one thing the GAC got right was its advice that singular/plural strings are confusingly similar.

So how did we get to a point where ICANN inexplicably failed to find confusing similarity for 24 pairs of singular and plural forms of the same words, including .web /.webs, .game/.games, and .hotel/.hotels? More important, how do we fix this?

Chóngfù is hard for westerners to say and will be even harder for ICANN to do.

For starters, a little transparency is probably in order. The string-similarity review process was opaque by design. But many in the community want to know how ICANN's experts either failed to recognize the plurality issue — which would be troubling — or decided that single and plural gTLD strings can successfully coexist — which would be ludicrous.

Thankfully, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has basic guidance on similarity: "words used in the singular include the plural and vice versa, as the context may require." That's the kind of common sense ICANN could use to correct the Guidebook and do a quick do-over on those 24 pairs of singular/plural TLDs.

ICANN may get a convenient backdoor out of this dilemma from the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, which is reviewing string confusion objections on seven of the single/plural pairs. If ICDR makes the right ruling, ICANN should apply that rule to all 24 single/plural pairs.

And if all else fails, there's always ICANN's "reconsideration" process for a formal chóngfù.

ICANN's critics at the United Nations and within many governments are waiting for a highly visible misstep in the ambitious expansion of top-level domains. That could be used to justify having governments displace the private sector in its leadership role on growing and governing the Internet.

Better that ICANN find a way to do-over on singular/plurals, than to risk having governments impose a bigger do-over on ICANN itself.

Written by Steve DelBianco, Executive Director at NetChoice

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Top-Level Domains

by Steve DelBianco at 2013-04-11T16:13:01Z

Domain Name Wire - Andrew Allermann

The story behind .Vegas

The story of how Dot Vegas, Inc. won the battle for .vegas and how it plans to bring the TLD to market.

DotVegas I recently met Dustin Trevino, CFO of Dot Vegas, Inc., and learned more about the company’s plans for the .Vegas top level domain. In this interview, the company explains the effort it undertook to get city approval for the .vegas top level domain, and reveals that it quietly obtained the blessing of Nevada’s then-governor for its bid.

DNW: When did you start working on the idea for a .vegas top level domain?

To be honest, the idea of a .vegas TLD was an afterthought. We, the founders of Dot Vegas, Inc., all had previous experience with the eNIC Corporation, the Registry and Registrar for the country code top level domain .cc. As a result, when ICANN first announced its intention to open up the TLD space, we put our heads together and started formulating ideas. Like others we played around with strings ranging from .astro to .zifundel. It wasn’t until the 2008 Paris ICANN meeting that we settled on the string .vegas and started working with Mayor Oscar Goodman and other city officials. Until then, .vegas wasn’t even on our radar.

DNW: Explain the challenge that came up between the city of Las Vegas and the county over which had power to “endorse” a Las Vegas top level domain.

That’s a tough question to answer in isolation. After reading the draft application guidebook it was apparent that we would need the city of Las Vegas’s endorsement. And since the City Council is the only governing body with jurisdiction over matters concerning Las Vegas we knew that they would consider themselves the final arbiter of all things Vegas. After all, Las Vegas has been known as Vegas almost since its incorporation in 1911.

On the other hand, the Clark County commission is the governing body for Clark County. And while the city of Las Vegas does reside (geographically) within the boundaries of Clark County, the two entities are separate and distinct. To us we always saw the endorsement of the Clark County commission as secondary to that of the Las Vegas City Council. While it is an important body whose authority should not be underestimated, nowhere upon its seal or stationary does the name Las Vegas appear. We felt this would be problematic to anyone looking from the outside in.

For us, asking the Clark County Commission for their endorsement would be like asking Elvis Presley’s manager for his autograph because Elvis wasn’t available. However, just in case we did get into a game of one-upmanship, which we did, we got the then sitting governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, to quietly endorse our .vegas application. Until today this information was not known to the public.

DNW: You ended up choosing .vegas instead of .lasvegas, why?

Las Vegas has two names. To those that live here, it is Las Vegas. To those that visit it is known as Vegas. Our rational was simple. If forty million annual visitors and hundreds of million more know it as Vegas, who were we to argue? Plus the City made it clear that they wanted the .vegas TLD to be a world wide TLD. So choosing .vegas over .lasvegas was easy.

DNW: The Geographic Names Panel ended up determining that .vegas wasn’t a protected geographic name because it wasn’t .lasvegas. Does that have any effect on .vegas?

We were shocked by the Geographic Names Panel decision. To be honest we are not sure why they decided we are not a geographic name. To date no one from the panel has contacted us about their decision. As far as impact goes we are not sure. However, we are hopeful that being classified a generic TLD will help us reach a larger audience. After all, the City has always wanted the .vegas TLD to reach a worldwide audience.

DNW: Who is the target market for .vegas? In other words, what types of registrants do you expect?

With over 40 million visitors a year and hundreds of millions more who have or will come to Vegas the possibilities are endless. Because Vegas means different things to different people we expect it to appeal to a broad cross section of users. As the head of the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Center once remarked, “Wherever you go in the world you meet people who have been to Vegas, are going to Vegas or want to go to Vegas.” To us that’s our market.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-11T15:55:00Z

How to learn more about your buyer on Sedo

Video explains how to learn more about who placed an offer on your domain at Sedo.

So you received an offer on Sedo, and you’d like to know who’s making the offer?

One of the benefits to buyers of using an exchange like Sedo is anonymity. But Sedo does provide some information about the buyer. In most cases you can figure out if the buyer is an end user or another domainer.

In this video, I’ll explain the four pieces of information Sedo providers to sellers about the company or person buying the domain name. I explain how two of them can be used in combination to give a good indication about what type of buyer you’re dealing with.

Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

by Andrew Allemann at 2013-04-11T15:05:15Z

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