Domain Names

ICANN, WSIS and the Making of a Global Civil Society - Part I

This is the first part of a two-part series interview by Geert Lovink with Milton Mueller discussing ICANN, World Summit on the Information Society, and the escalating debates over Internet Governance. Read the second part of this Interview here. Geert Lovink: "Would it make sense to analyse ICANN (and its predecessors) as a test model for some sort of secretive 'world government' that is run by self appointed experts? Could you explain why governments are seen as incapable of running the Internet? This all comes close to a conspiracy theory. I am not at all a fan of such reductionist easy-to-understand explanations. However, the discontent with 'global governance' discourse is widespread and it seems that the International Relations experts have little understanding how the Internet is actually run. Where do you think theorization of Internet governance should start?" more

Trademarking .generics - the .bank Fiasco!

I, for one, have been a proponent of new gTLDs from the early days of their policy development process within ICANN. I always believed that the existing gTLDs -- and mainly the .com space -- have created artificial scarcity, which is primarily responsible for much of the cybersquatting and the abuse trademarks experience. I do not share the same fears as those who argue that new gTLDs will create intolerable levels of cybersquatting or will necessitate defensive registrations from brand and trademark owners alike. more

ICANN on Closing Off Port 43

ICANN has launched three task forces on WHOIS restructuring...It sounds innocuous enough -- nobody likes spam -- but the restrictions being discussed reach further than marketers. Pushed by registrars who feel that WHOIS amounts to forced disclosure of their customer lists, the task force is seriously discussing closing off port 43's straightforward access to WHOIS information, replacing it with GIF-based barriers or similar access restrictions. more

ICANN and the DOC

ICANN today issued a press release and a series of documents about its relationship with the U.S. Department of Commerce. ...ICANN is no longer bound by the specific set of milestones that were in its prior MoU with DOC. With this freedom comes great responsibility. Without detailed government oversight, and without market competition for policymaking for domain names, ICANN (and the ICANN Board) has a great obligation to be accountable to its community. more

If the Number ‘5’ License Plate is Worth $6.8 Million, What is Your Domain Name Worth?

The number "5" license plate sold for $6.8 million dollars in Saudi Arabia and another 300 vanity plates sold for another $56 million at last week's auction. It is estimated that the number "1" will be auctioned next month for up to $20 million dollars. Domain names and license plates share some common characteristics. Both allow only one person to own a particular word or number. Of course, the exact same license plate 'word' or 'number' can be registered in every country and, in the USA, every state... more

What’s Wrong with Domain Names?

Despite the significant traffic that comes from typed-in domain names, the public harumphing and clucking about type-in traffic is climbing in volume as it becomes clear how much money is involved. Articles this week show that domain names, and the people who make money on them, are making some commentators uncomfortable. more

Registrar Market Share: An Alternative Perspective

In the past, most measurements of registrar market share have tracked overall registrar shares -- number of domains registered by a registrar divided by number of domains registered by all registrars. In this article, I propose some alternatives -- particular subsets of domains in which to measure registrar market shares, providing a basis for comparison with overall market shares. Results vary dramatically across these subsets, with implications on the future customer retention rates of the corresponding registrars.  more

ICANN and Your Internet Abuse

In spite of the material we were presented with in Durban something has gone very wrong inside of ICANN Compliance. KnujOn has published a report which demonstrates that ICANN Compliance appears to completely collapse between September 2012 and December 2012. Following December 2012, ICANN seems to stop responding to or processing any complaints. It is around this time certain compliance employees start disappearing. This was not limited to the Sydney office as some would have us believe... more

Internationalizing Top-Level Domain Names: Another Look

A paper by Dr. John C. Klensin, former Vice President of Internet Architecture at AT&T, a Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Principal Research Scientist at MIT. This paper has been reproduced with kind permission from the Internet Society. "Over the last few years, rising interest in internationalized domain names has been accompanied by interest in using those names at the top level and, in particular, replacing or supplementing country-code based domain names with names in the language of the relevant countries. This memo suggests that actually creating such names in the DNS is undesirable from both a user-interface and DNS management standpoint. It then proposes the alternative of translating the names so that every TLD name is available to users in their own languages." more

Innovation in DNS Business

One thing that amazed me about the ICANN community is the creativeness in finding new business models. I am not even talking about new technology like Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), the number of business models created from the vanilla DNS (actually just .com) are just mind boggling. ICANN was formed in 1999 and introduced the concept of registries and registrars model to the DNS business. With that, we witness the rise of register.com, an IPO darling in the dotcom days, in the early 2000s and subsequently overtaken by the ultra-cheap high-volume reseller model of GoDaddy. We also see new registries like .info and .biz and several others that didn't do so well. There are also after-market (aka ebay) for domain names like afternic and registry outsourcing, DNS hosting, Dynamic DNS etc. That's about what most outsiders know of DNS business models, mostly revolved around the registry-registrar-reseller model. But there are really more and I shall discuss two not-so-well-known but interesting models below. more

The Hidden Perils of Filing a Baseless UDRP Complaint

When properly used, the UDRP enables trademark owners to take control of abusive domain names. Yet sometimes the UDRP itself is misused by trademark owners to try to seize desirable domain names to which they have no legal entitlement. Is there a downside to misusing the UDRP to attempt a domain name hijacking? Unscrupulous companies at times misuse the UDRP by improperly invoking its power to compel a transfer of ownership in order to seize inherently valuable, non-infringing domain names that the companies desire for their own use. more

Questioning Parked Domains and Google AdNonSense

Is contextual advertising helping or hurting the web? It basically started with Google Adsense even though the concept wasn't new. It had never been done on the scale that Google did it. Now we have Yahoo Publisher. MSN is building their version. We have Konterra and a whole lot of other companies scrambling to cash in on the contextual ad craze. Initially contextual advertising seems like a good idea. Ads based on the content of your website that might benefit your readers or visitors. Ads that are related to the content you produce that will also help you make a little money for your efforts. However greed ruins all good things. Now there are probably millions of webpages online that are built for the sole purpose of cashing in on contextual advertising. ...To make money with contextual advertising you want your content to be bad. Yes, you want it to be bad. more

Do We Need Title Insurance for Domain Names?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I read an article in Forbes (November 13, page 148) about real estate title insurance. The article was about how real estate title insurance is a joke and overpriced. But as I read in the article how titles are investigated, in dawned on me that a title check service for domain names would be helpful. Title checks and title insurance would prevent you from losing money when you bought a stolen domain. Last year I almost got bilked for $5,000 buying domains...before I discovered they were stolen... more

Do We Really Need IDN?

James Seng has quoted that Korea, China and Japan must have IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) service. His statement may appear as above mentioned countries desperately need for IDN services because there are no alternative. However, there have already been well established local Internet address providers since quite some time. more

ICANN Transfer Policy: Domain Hijacking Got Easier or Did It?

Slashdot recently ran a story about the upcoming changes to the ICANN rules governing domain transfers between registrars. A blog entry at Netcraft referenced by the story stated that: "...domain transfer requests will be automatically approved in five days unless they are explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change from current procedure, in which a domain's ownership and nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a transfer request. This could mean trouble for domain owners who don't closely manage their records..." more