Domain Names

The Name Collision Conference

Earlier this week Verisign sponsored a two day conference on name collisions in the DNS. Despite the very short time frame in which it was organized, only a month from announcement to meeting, there were some very good presentations. I'll just hit some highlights here; all of the papers and slides are on their web site at namecollisions.net. Sunday morning started with a keynote by Bruce Schneier, who is not a DNS expert (and doesn't claim to be) but had some interesting observations on names in general. more

ICANN’s Tokyo Meeting Provides a Little More Clarity on the New gTLD Program

New gTLDs continue to be a major topic of discussion within ICANN circles, and the regional meeting currently underway in Tokyo has revealed some interesting updates for potential applicants. ICANN's Chief gTLD Registry Liaison, Craig Schwartz, delivered a great presentation on the progress being made behind closed doors at ICANN and provided the attendees with an insight into a couple of key changes that are likely to be seen in the Final Applicant Guidebook. more

The Test of Time at Internet Scale: Verisign’s Danny McPherson Recognized with ACM SIGCOMM Award

The global internet, from the perspective of its billions of users, has often been envisioned as a cloud -- a shapeless structure that connects users to applications and to one another, with the internal details left up to the infrastructure operators inside. From the perspective of the infrastructure operators, however, the global internet is a network of networks. It's a complex set of connections among network operators, application platforms, content providers and other parties. more

EFOW Wants Total Protection for Geographical Indications Domains in .VIN, .WINE and All Other TLDs

This is a letter sent from the European Federation of Origin Wines (EFOW) to the courteous attention of Dr Steve Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board , Mr Cherine Chalaby, Chair of the new gTLD Program Committee Board, Mr Fadi Chehadé, CEO of ICANN and Mr Akram Atallah, COO of ICANN. This letter, sent by its President Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, was sent today to ICANN and is entitled "ICANN initiatives for the attribution of new generic top-level Internet domains -- PDO and PGI wines' concerns". more

ICANN Announces Deadline for 2026 New Top-Level Domain Applications

ICANN will open applications for new top-level domains in April 2026, offering brands a rare chance to secure custom domain names to enhance trust, marketing flexibility, and long-term online security. more

Name Collisions, Why Every Enterprise Should Care (Part 3 of 5)

Do you recall when you were a kid and you experienced for the first time an unnatural event where some other kid "stole" your name and their parents were now calling their child by your name, causing much confusion for all on the playground? And how this all made things even more complicated - or at least unnecessarily complex when you and that kid shared a classroom and teacher, or street, or coach and team, and just perhaps that kid even had the same surname as you, amplifying the issue! What you were experiencing was a naming collision (in meatspace). more

Three Things Registrars Must Do to Enhance Security

If the rise of phishing has taught us anything, it's that on the Internet, if a digital asset has value, there's somebody out there who wants to steal it. Whether it's a bank account password, a credit card number, a PayPal login, or even a magic sword in an online game, there's a fraudster somewhere trying to misappropriate it for his or her own nefarious purposes. Domain names have always been a target for such criminals. more

.nxt Conference Inspires and Informs New gTLD Debate

The first-ever .nxt conference recently concluded in San Francisco. The conference featured two days of productive, educational, and passionate discussion about the business of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). While ICANN's public meetings have recently focused on debating the policies that will go into its gTLD Applicant Guidebook, the .nxt meeting moved the discussion into the future to tackle the issue of what to do when the program has actually launched... more

Four New Generic Top Level Domains

At its meeting in Durban, ICANN signed contracts with the applicants for four new top level domains. The new domains are ????, which means "web" in Arabic, ?????? and ????, which mean "online" and "site" in Russian, and ??, which means "game" in Chinese. They should give us an interesting hint about the future of the new TLDs, because all four are utterly, totally, generic. more

WIPO’s UDRP ‘Overview’ Gets Bigger (and Better)

Just as the number of domain names and domain name disputes have expanded significantly in recent years, so, too, has WIPO's "Overview," which has been updated to address the growing complexity of cases under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). WIPO has just published the third edition of its "WIPO Overview of WIPO Panel Views on Selected UDRP Questions" -- commonly referred to as "WIPO Jurisprudential Overview 3.0." more

Next Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services (NG RDS) - Proposed Successor to WHOIS

The information in WHOIS database is very important to Law Enforcement Agencies, Intellectual Property Owners, and all Internet Users in general, who use this data to locate/contact domain name owners for various purposes including but not limited to enforcing laws or addressing grievances related to cybercrime and other cases of DNS abuse like Spam, Phishing, Malware etc. However, Privacy and Proxy Services are also available for many Top Level Domain Registries... more

Kentucky Governor: All Your Gambling Sites Belong to Us

According to news reports, the governor of Kentucky has filed a suit in state court to seize 141 gambling domain names. His claimed authority is a 1974 law against "gambling devices", on the theory that a domain is a "device", and online gambling is taking money away from in-state horse racing and the lottery. The judge sensibly has said that he doesn't understand all the issues, and has given all sides a week to submit briefs. more

The Front Running Class Action Suit

In a recent press release, Los Angeles law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner says it's filed a class action suit against Network Solutions and ICANN for front running. (If you tuned in late, NetSol admits that if you query a domain name on their web site, they will speculatively register it so that it's only available through NetSol for five days, at their above market price.) This is a very peculiar suit... For one thing, it's hard to see how the total class damages would be large enough to be worth a suit... more

Registration of Generic Names: Advocate General’s Opinion Before the Court of Justice of the EU

One of the most debated questions at the time of the opening of the .eu Top-Level Domain (TLD) was whether or not it was possible to register names on the basis of prior rights on signs which include special characters, such as an ampersand. The Advocate General of the Court of Justice of European Union has just published his opinion (4 years later...) more

DNA University Launches to Support Domain Name Industry

In pursuit of continued domain name industry success, the Domain Name Association (DNA) is delighted to announce the launch of the next industry resource -- the DNA University. The aim of the DNA University is to establish a dedicated education platform to facilitate the exchange of ideas, best-practice methodologies and continued development of the industry's combined expertise. To this end, the DNA University will offer stakeholders an opportunity to share their experiences, learn from each other and provide a forum to incubate concepts that will advance the domain name industry. more