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ICANN announced recently that it has begun negotiations with an applicant for another 'sponsored' (non-open) top level domain, .XXX. There has been a fair amount of coverage, for and against. My initial reaction is (with the proviso that the public information to assess these things is always insufficient): .XXX seems plausible for what it is but it isn't what many probably think it is. ...that's the key to understanding this. This TLD is intended to be a trade association and is not a form of regulation. more
Starting from an old article (dated July 21st, 2005) published at Computer Business Review, (and following a more recent entry on GoDaddy's Bob Parson's blog) I would like to touch a bit more on the topic of 'traffic testing' or 'traffic tasting' of domains. This topic has been discussed at ICANN meetings since last year and is also referred to by the name of 'add/delete' or 'add/drop' storms... more
Shortly after the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)'s recent announcement allowing Verisign to pursue increased .com registry fees, Verisign published a blog post questioning the business practices of registrars and domain name investors. The ICA, on behalf of its registrar and domain name investor members, had previously spoken out against a .com fee increase, as did others in the domain industry. more
In its February 18, 2005 press release, WIPO has reported filing an average of 3.4 UDRP and UDRP-based cases per calendar day in 2004, bringing the total number of cases received in 2004 to 1,179 -- an increase of 79 cases (or 6.6%) as compared to 2003. Also mentioned in the report is a 37 percent increase in ccTLDs cases over the previous year. Listed below are a number of additional facts and figures reported... more
By now, you should have read elsewhere that the ICANN board has rejected the ICM application to create a .XXX TLD. It still comes as a surprise to some. Frankly, this was the prognosis I made to Stuart Lawley two years ago, for the very reasons mentioned by the European Commission. I mentioned in a previous blog entry that 6000 complaints from US citizens would have more weight on the conservative US administration than any other consideration... more
Earlier in the Registerfly controversy, ICANN Vice President Paul Levins posted to the ICANN Blog: "ICANN is not a regulator. We rely mainly on contract law. We do not condone in any way whatsoever RegisterFly's business practice and behaviour." This is disingenuous. ICANN is the central link in a web of contracts that regulate the business of domain name allocation. ICANN has committed, as a public benefit corporation, to enforcing those contracts in the public interest. Domain name registrants, among others, rely on those contracts to establish a secure, stable environment for domain name registration and through that for online content location. more
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) stops novice spammers but not the professionals, says Spammer-X, a retired spammer who has gone into a lot of the details in his book, "Inside the Spam Cartel". The best way to beat SPF is to join it... First, Joe Spammer rents a dedicated spam host in a spammer-friendly location, like China. Next, he registers 100 domain names, and each domain is registered under a fake name and address. Next, DNS entries for each of the hosts are set up, including a valid pointer record (PTR), an MX record and reverse DNS entries for each domain... more
In the absence of any formal announcements, news of Google being accredited by ICANN as a domain name registrar, spread fast in the media today after it was first reported by Bret Fausett on Lextext -- see Google is a Registrar. The company has since mentioned that "Google became a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet's domain name system," and that it has no plans to sell any domain names at the moment. However, speculations on what Google could do as an accredited registrar are far and wide. Here are ten, listed in no particular order... more
Later this week, ICANN is finally going to vote on the proposed sale of .ORG to Ethos Capital. It will decide the future owner of .ORG, but the decision will also provide a window into whether ICANN will remain independent of the U.S. government. It's a big decision, one that can strengthen both ICANN and the NGO community on the web, if we get it right. For nearly a decade, the ICANN community fought hard to untether itself from the U.S. Department of Commerce. more
On the face of it, Kieren McCarthy's Sex.com was a book that could have written itself: a notorious, well-publicised feud over the most valuable domain name in existence, between two charismatic men -- one a serial entrepreneur with a weakness for hard drugs (Gary Kremen), the other a gifted con-man with delusions of grandeur (Stephen Cohen). It's a story replete with vicious acrimony, multi-million dollar lawsuits, and rumours of gunfights between bounty hunters in the streets of Tijuana. Thankfully, McCarthy wasn't content to just bundle together all the articles he's written about Sex.com over the years and slap a cover on the front... more
This is a hotly debated topic. Some Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) claim that sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine... that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting. ...I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. more
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is inviting experienced professionals to join its board and help guide the organization. more
Anyone who knows Kenya knows it is famous for tea. And while I can now get Kenyan tea online from US companies like Starbucks, Caribou Coffee or any number of other re-sellers, like most consumers I would vastly prefer to cut out the middle man and buy my tea direct from Kenyan companies. Why not? But here's the rub... more
The CENTR Global TLD Report 2024 highlights a modest growth in registered domains across the EU, with a notable increase in Poland, France, and Italy, primarily through their national ccTLDs. more
According to latest reports from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), allegations of cybersquatting by trademark holders continued to rise in 2008, with a record 2,329 complaints filed under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). This represented an 8% increase over 2007 in the number of generic and country code Top-Level Domain (gTLDs and ccTLDs) disputes handled and brings the total number of WIPO cases filed under the UDRP since it was launched ten years ago to over 14,000. To improve efficiency and respond to growing demand, WIPO has proposed an "eUDRP Initiative" to render the UDRP paperless... more
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