Domain Names

Opportunity Missed: Hilton Checks-Out of New Domains Boom

American author Mark Twain once wrote: "I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one." Last month we learned that Hilton Hotels & Resorts joined six other new Top-Level Domain applicants in withdrawing their application and exiting the program. I was disappointed when I first heard the news. My initial thoughts were centred on the enormous potential .hilton offered the company and the innovative business opportunities they were now abandoning.

Trademark Clearinghouse Debate is Not About the Trademark Clearinghouse!

A comment period on the "strawman", a proposal to update the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH), is currently underway. Originally planned to end on January 11, it has been extended by ICANN to February 5. The comment portal has so far received 89 email contributions. A fair number, but the real story is how many major brands have spoken out on the proposed amendments to the TMCH model.

A Serious Bug in the Similarity Check

A week ago, ICANN announced the latest delay in the New gTLD Program: the so-called "contention sets" will only be published March 1, 2013. The original deadline was July 2012, postponed serially in two-month intervals. The gTLD program is lost in confusing similarity. What went wrong? In order to determine which TLD applications are in contention, it is necessary to say which TLD strings are confusingly similar to one another.

CircleID’s Top Ten Posts of 2012

Here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry updates featured on CircleID during 2012 based on the overall readership of the posts for the past 12 months. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2013.

Loopholes and Ambiguities in Contracts that ICANN Oversees

ICANN oversees the creation of many contracts. Its highest paid contractor has historically been the law firm of Jones Day, and of course ICANN has many lawyers on staff. In the past I've identified loopholes in proposed contracts, and those were corrected before they were exploited. However, are there other loopholes sitting in existing contracts waiting to be exploited, or ambiguities with major financial consequences depending on their interpretation?

Follow a Phishing Case in Real Time: postfinances.com / Swiss Post

It is just another phishing case. Why should I care? I happened to receive my own copy of the phishing email message. Most Internet users will just smile bitterly before deleting it. I checked it to see why it had gone through the spam filters. It had no URL in the text but a reply-to address. So it needed a valid domain name, and had one: postfinances.com. PostFinance (without trailing "s") is the payment system of the Swiss Post. It has millions of users.

Copyright Infringement and ccTLDs

.tk was once designated as the riskiest ccTLD. .ru is often said to be, after .com, the most used in the content of spam messages. But is there a ccTLD that is a favorite destination for copyright infringement? The question is worth asking in view of the growing trend for .com domain names seizures related to copyright infringement.

Registering for the Registrar Rodeo: A Note to the New gTLDs

Thank goodness for Monday's new gTLD draw!!! To date the process has been more of an intellectual exercise in marketing, technology, and strategic game thinking - it was getting a little boring. A business needs to see regular 'wins' to keep momentum and stay motivated. The presumptive lineup of new gTLDs has now been established which has given most applicants (save those poor souls looking at 2015 as their launch year) a clear view of the starting gate.

Mitigating Harm Caused by the ICANN “Draw”

The gTLD Prioritization "Draw" was a mistake. But its negative impact can still be mitigated. The best course of action follows directly from information that can be gleaned from available data. Let us start with the latest piece of intelligence: who "played" in the "Draw"? 1766 of 1917 applications had a lottery ticket. This is much worse than expected. Very few abstained. Even the purely defensive applicants saw no other choice but to "play".

4 Key Dates on the gTLD Timeline

The new "dot-anything" domain extensions or "gTLDs" have been a major point of debate in the domain community for years now -- ever since they were just a glimmer in ICANN's eye -- and it's all come down to a few very important dates over the next six to nine months.