Domain Names

UNESCO Director-General on Linguistic Diversity on the Internet: Main Challenges Are Technical

Today, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO has released a statement concerning the linguistic diversity on the Internet stating: "UNESCO's experience and the 2012 study of the use of internationalized domain names undertaken with EURid show that the main challenges are technical. Obstacles lie with Internet browsers that do not consistently support non-ASCII characters, with limited e-mail functionality, and with the lack of support of non-ASCII characters in popular applications, websites and mobile devices." more

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. more

ACPA Applies to Noncommercial Use of Domain Name

A recent decision by the Ninth Circuit confirms that "commercial use" by the defendant is required for a Lanham Act trademark or dilution claim, but is not required in a cybersquatting claim under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). Michael Kremer, a dissatisfied hair transplant patient, used the domain name www.BosleyMedical.com as a site critical to the Bosley Medical Institute, a hair transplant clinic. Bosley sued. The district court entered summary judgment for Kremer on the grounds that his conduct was not commercial... more

Report on Survey of Domain Registration Services

Numerous competitive registrars offer diverse domain registration services to individuals, companies, and organizations. This study attempts to index and analyze their service offerings, facilitating analysis by other researchers and in preparation for additional analysis by the author.  more

Mooning the Porn Stars

Steve DelBianco did a great job of discussing the rocky relationship between ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and the Board of Directors, in his piece entitled ".XXX Exposes the Naked Truth for ICANN". I've been keeping an eye on the adult industry press to see what their reaction is to the .XXX debacle. But before we start, let's get something out of the way. more

IDN Evolution Discussed at ICANN Cartagena

Internationalized domain names (IDNs) have been available to Internet users for many years, but this year the first fully non-Latin IDN domains have become enabled by ICANN and country-code top-level domain registries. The recent success of the launch of Russia's .?? (.rf) ccTLD shows that there is an enormous demand for domain names in Internet users' native languages. more

ICANN’s Contract Not Enforceable on WHOIS Accuracy

This may or may not come as a shock to some of you, but ICANN's contract with the Domain Name Registrars, in terms of WHOIS inaccuracy is not enforceable. Bear with me. The ability of ICANN to enforce against a Registrar who fails to correct or delete a domain with false WHOIS does not exist. more

Why FOISA Should Never Become Law

In a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal, I noticed an underreported story about an embarrassing glitch that occurred involving the "washpost.com" domain name, which is used by the Washington Post Newspaper Company. Apparently, recently, the domain name stopped working -- no domain name services. This disrupted the flow and access of e-mail at the Washington Post as well as the operations of the washpost.com website.  more

Perfect Information: Involving Registrants in the Expiring Domain Names Market

This proposal outlines the creation of a new market for the efficient disposal of domain names that are about to expire and how Registrants are best included as an integral part of this process. This document does not make any proposals regarding the existing primary or secondary markets for domain names. Further, this proposal is not intended to criticise, condemn or make any declarations about the appropriateness of any particular primary or secondary market business models. more

A Look at New gTLDs Numbers… We’re Doing Good

Like it or not, new gTLDs are here and they're here to stay. If it is still common to read that the ICANN new gTLD program was a failure and few users are using new domain names, numbers show the opposite. I recently read very rude critics addressed to new gTLD applicants but surprisingly, critics often come from ".com" investors and my understanding of this is that new domain names lower their margins ...since the domain name offer is now larger. more

Customer Service is Law: The Panix Story

The NANOG list yesterday was the virtual equivalent of a nearby nocturnal car alarm: "panix.com has been hijacked!" (whoo-WEE, whoo-WEE); "those jerks at VeriSign!" (duhhhhh-WHEEP, duhhhh-WHEEP); "no one's home at Melbourne IT!" (HANK, HANK, HANK, HANK). Finally, on Monday morning in Australia, the always-competent and helpful Bruce Tonkin calmly fixed the situation. So the rest of us can get some sleep now. But as we nod off in the quietness, let's consider just exactly what happened here. more

What Is the Domain Name Expiry Cycle and Why Should You Know About It?

Domain names are registered by the thousands every day. In July 2021, 236,336 domains were newly registered daily on average across all top-level domains (TLDs). Tens of thousands were also newly expired. Other months could be just as busy. "Newly registered" and "newly expired." Those are two terms I often get questions about. Newly registered domains are domains that someone just reserved, typically through a registrar or web hosting company. Newly expired domains, meanwhile, are those domains that someone had reserved but decided to let go for one reason or another. more

How Big Is the Domain Business?

When you're standing close to ICANN, the domain business may seem pretty big, but when you stand farther away, not so much. Verisign's revenues are about $1 billion/year. The .COM and .NET top-level domains together have about 150M names. The next biggest gTLDS are .ORG with 25M and .INFO with 12M. The biggest new TLDs are TOP with 2.9M and .XYZ with 1.8M, with both bloated by firesale prices. The rest are smaller, mostly much smaller. more

The Ultimate Solution to Internet Governance: Let ITU and ICANN compete

Controversies over ICANN led to the creation of the Working Group on Internet Governance, but so far there have been few specific proposals for change. The Internet Governance Project has entered that breach with a new policy paper: "What to Do About ICANN: A Proposal for Structural Reform." The proposal, by Hans Klein and myself, proposes three clean, clear but probably controversial solutions to the criticisms that have been made of ICANN. more

Time to Renew .coop, .museum, and .aero ICANN

Way back in 2000-2001, ICANN approved a handful of new top level domains, and entered into agreements with their promoters. Three of the sponsored domains, are coming up for renewal next year, so they've sent in their renewal proposals. A sponsored domain is one that restricts who can register to members of a particular community, in this case respectively co-ops, museums, and the airline industry. Let's take a look and see how they're doing. more