Why New TLDs Don't Change a Thing

I have a heard a lot lately about ICANN unanimously voting in favor or relaxing top level domain rules and had a few people come to me and ask 'how does that affect what you do?' The short answer is, it won't; at least not for a long time and here is why... There might be some huge potential gain if all shoe companies got .shoes and branded it, but someone would have to manage it and each would have to spend money to brand .shoes to consumers. Adidas gets adidas.shoes but spends nothing to brand it and lets Nike pay to brand .shoes and Reebok to brand it as well and leech. So instead of cartel like behavior (which is hard to maintain), we fall back into .com more»

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

ICANN has posted a request by Afilias for a new registry service in relation to "abusive" domains in dot-info. While in general the proposal is motivated by good intentions, the devil is in the details. While most folks (including myself) probably care very little about the .info TLD, my concern is that any bad implementation in .info might be copied or used as a precedent in other more important TLDs, in particular .com run by VeriSign. more»

It's Time to End Domain Name Front Running

Next week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Board of Directors will consider adopting a 20 cent per-transaction fee that will effectively end the abusive speculating practices of domain tasting, front running and kiting. The fee will only apply when domain names are deleted excessively, a signal that they are being "tasted" by speculators. We, at Network Solutions, strongly encourage ICANN to enact this important provision as part of its budget and we have released a statement to that effect today... more»

Proposal for .sport, a New Top-Level Domain

OK. Now my lawyer has given me the green light, I can officially announce I am working on a proposal for a .sport TLD, to be submitted to ICANN for consideration as a new TLD next year. There is still a long way to go in terms of getting the proposal ready, but I this this one is a winner... more»

CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants -- hundreds of thousands of Canadians -- by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information... Apparently I spoke too soon. more»

.hk the "Most Unsafe" Domains?

Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine's top stories list. But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published. McAfee's study seems to be based on a year's worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk ccTLD. These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards... more»

Dot Travel Still Isn't Dead Yet

I've writen several blog entries about the continued downward swirling motion of Tralliance, the company that runs the registry for .TRAVEL. In this month's installment, as told in their quarterly 10-Q SEC filing, they flirt with bankruptcy but may well end up more stable than before. One of the more eye-catching paragraphs says... more»

ICA Posts Position Paper and Analysis of Snowe "Anti-Phishing" Legislation

The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) has posted a position paper and analysis of S. 2661, introduced on 2/25/08 in the US Senate. While we are firmly opposed to phishing and other criminal activities that may utilize domain names we are very concerned about the provisions of the proposal that appear to provide trademark owners with a means to avoid both UDRP and ACPA actions and alternatively bring private claims against domain names with a lower burden of proof and the potential for far higher monetary damages, without even requiring an allegation that the DN was in any way being utilized in a phishing scheme... more»

Neustar and Afilias Jump on the No-Tasting Bandwagon

In a message posted to the ICANN GNSO list, Avri Doria forwarded along a most interesting document from Neustar, who runs the .biz domain... Neustar proposes to change their registrar agreement so that each registrar will only get credit for deletions of 10% of their new domains, with a few minor exceptions for tiny registrars and bulk registrations due to one-time mistakes. They say they expect Afilias to propose the same change for .info.  more»

Current Difficulties With Displaying Internationalized Top-Level Domains

Earlier this week, we inserted eleven new top-level domains in the DNS root zone. These represent the term "test" translated into ten languages, in ten different scripts (Chinese is represented in two different scripts, and Arabic script is used by two different languages). This blog post is not about that. (If you're interested about it, read our report on the delegations.) What I would like to talk about is some of the difficulties we face today in expressing scripts in a consistent way over the Internet... more»