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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has issued a formal call for greater transparency and procedural integrity in the ongoing board elections of the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC). more
Panels appointed to hear and decide disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) have long recognized that three letter domains are valuable assets. How investors value their domains depends in part on market conditions. Ordinarily (and for good reason) Panels do not wade into pricing because it is not a factor on its own in determining bad faith. more
ICANN's two-year effort to purportedly preserve the Whois public directory to the greatest extent possible while complying with GDPR has failed. Under the latest proposal, the Whois database, once a contractually-required directory of domain name registrants, will be gutted to the point of virtual worthlessness, as registrars, registries, academics, and hand-wringing others ignored the public interest and imposed ever-higher barriers to legitimate, GDPR-compliant access to registration data. more
Cybersquatting is so 2000, or so we thought. The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) at WIPO has been chugging along for several years now, methodically determining if complainants IP rights have been violated and reassigning "ownership" of domain names. Typically, the cases are fairly boring. But some recent developments in the world of 800 lb search gorillas, Google and Baidu, suggests that the regime could be faced with substantial pressure in the near future. more
David Kesmodel's to be released book The Domain Game, irrespective of how it is received, will undoubtedly catapult the industry into a new era: that of the neodomainers, the super crunchers. To analyze the impact of the book on the industry, let's look at stylized exchange scenarios featuring a domainer as intermediary (an intermediary in that he or she acquires from the seller and then hopes to resell to the buyer)... more
The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) creates two distinct avenues by which mark owners may seek a remedy for cybersquatting. A person who is a suitable defendant under 15 U.S.C. ยง1125(d)(1)(A) is one over whom the court has in personam jurisdiction. However, if the mark owner is "not able to obtain in personam jurisdiction over a person who would have been a defendant" in the ACPA action, then "[t]he owner may file an in rem civil action against a domain name in... more
When you've been around the domain industry for as long as I have, you start to lose track of time. I was reminded late last year that the 6-year agreement Verisign struck with ICANN in 2012 to operate .com will be up for expiration in November of this year. Now, I don't for a second believe that .com will be operated by any other party, as Verisign's contract does give them the presumptive right of renewal. But what will be interesting to watch is what happens to Verisign's ability to increase the wholesale cost of .com names. more
The typical daily accounting of decisions filed in disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) may include an award or two dismissing complaints (three is particularly noteworthy: weddingfleamarket.com, dme.com, and scheduleflow.com from the Forum for January 20, 2018), but overwhelmingly complaints are granted not dismissed. Let us imagine a trademark or service mark that is neither a dictionary word nor composed of common combinations, would anyone be surprised when the Panel rules in Complainant's favor? more
When an outage affects a component of the internet infrastructure, there can often be downstream ripple effects affecting other components or services, either directly or indirectly. We would like to share our observations of this impact in the case of two recent such outages, measured at various levels of the DNS hierarchy, and discuss the resultant increase in query volume due to the behavior of recursive resolvers. more
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. more
This week, I had the privilege of presenting at NamesCon on behalf of the Domain Name Association (DNA) -- in my position as Chair of the Board -- to provide an update on our activities and an assessment of our progress as an industry in light of the goals of the DNA. In summary, there is still a long way to go with many challenges to address. Despite this, there is much to be excited about and incredible opportunity for our combined success. Included here is a transcript of my speech. I welcome feedback and comments. more
In response to a letter from ICANN's Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) to data protection authorities concerning overreaching requests of law enforcement agencies in ICANN's ongoing Registrar Accreditation Agreement negotiations, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has written the ICANN Board. more
There have been a lot of complaints leveled at companies like Amazon and Google who have applied to register a number of new gTLDs. The criticism is that the public will not benefit from having Amazon own .book, .store, .you, and .grocery if they only use it for their own purposes and don't open them up to sell domains to the broader public, and that allowing these companies to own generic registries will hurt their competitors in that space. Although these arguments are not without merit, there are also positive aspects to having established companies own gTLDs. more
Either because of laxness on the part domain name holders or cunning on the part of thieves, registrars have been duped into transferring domain names to fraudsters' accounts. I discussed the matter last year in Recovering Domain Names Lost to Fraudulent Transfer. These cases are mostly filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, for the good reason that the registry for dot com is located in that jurisdiction and they are mostly recovered. more
A new study by anti-phishing company PhishLabs reveals 49 percent of all phishing sites in the third quarter of 2018 had Secure Sockets Layer or SSL with HTTPS in their URL. more
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