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There are thousands of sites and services on the 'net that offer domain name whois lookup services. As of last night, many of them may have stopped working. Why? Many of them rely on fairly rudimentary software that parses the whois from Verisign (for .com and .net) and then relays the query to the registrar whois. The site or service then displays the whois output from the registrar's whois server to you. more
Swedish Regulator PTS have today notified .SE, the Swedish (.SE) TLD registry that they have to change the rules... In short, the decision implies that any form of the sequence of the characters "b", "a", "n", "k" are illegal in domain names in Sweden. Further that checks of what domain names are registered are to be checked before registration. more
Oh, Internet. You had such potential when you were born — darling of the research community, supported by the wealthiest military the world has ever known. And you married well, into a powerful merchant family. Why are you so lost? Is it a midlife crisis? You were born, some say, 40 years ago this week in a lab at UCLA — one of ARPA's many children. It wasn't until nearly two months later that you first spoke, transmitting the letters "L" and "O" before crashing... more
Doc's post and the impending comments deadline for the next iteration of ICANN's never-ending WHOIS saga finally pushed me to write up my thoughts on the latest iteration of ICANN debate. As Doc points out, much of the current debate is very inside baseball, tied up in acronyms atop bureaucratic layers. Small wonder then that ordinary domain name registrants and Internet users haven't commented much, while the fora are dominated by INTA members turning out responses to an "urgent request" to "let ICANN know that Whois is important to the brand owners I represent"... more
According to media sources, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) wrote to Verisign last Friday, objecting to the company's plan to auction o.com to the highest bidder. The planned release for o.com - described by the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement and intended as a pilot for the remaining reserved single-character .com names - involved an opaque consideration process that ignored community input and set aside hard-won trademark protections developed by stakeholders in order to maximize dollars earmarked for an unidentified cadre of non-profit organizations. more
As we advance into 2024, the global landscape remains etched with the marks of a tumultuous previous year. The world economy grappled with challenges on multiple fronts in 2023, from surging inflation rates across significant economies to geopolitical conflicts and instability fostering a climate of uncertainty. Compounded by ongoing disruptions in global supply chains, these factors painted a rather somber picture of the economic outlook for many sectors. more
Some Top-Level Domain (TLD) applicants have been saying that they're "community" applications, which means that would avoid an auction and prevail over even deep-pocketed competitors. But according to ICANN's Applicant Guidebook, very few if any applications will qualify as a community. If you're an applicant who's been telling your supporters or investors that you're going to win because you're a community, you might want to take a step back. more
In Part 1 of this series of blog posts I described the need for an industry association of operators to discuss the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), performed by registries and registrars to ensure interoperability and share best practices when providing registration services. In this blog post I'll describe a way to make that happen. more
According to a recent study on trends of disputed domain names, companies could save millions on legal costs by being more proactive about registering the names first. "The results indicate more than $220 million was spent on reclaiming domain names from third parties through the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP)," says Corporation Service Company (CSC). "If brand owners had registered these domain names proactively, it would have only cost them $1.1 million (£600K), yielding a cost savings of $219 million." more
On June 9 CircleID published an insightful article by Thomas Rickert entitled "Demystifying Art 28 NIS2." In that piece Thomas set forth two alternative interpretations of Article 28(6) of NIS2, and argued that TLD registries should not be required to maintain a separate database of the registrant data under NIS2. In my view, Thomas' approach is inconsistent with the remainder of Article 28, and would not achieve the goals of NIS2 to improve cybersecurity across the EU member states. more
The Twitterverse is awash with catchy URL shortening services, which allow what would otherwise be long URLs to fit within the strict character limit of individual Tweets. Before the Twitter phenomenon really took hold, tinyurl.com was one of the more popular services; now much shorter options are available, using various Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) which have the significant advantage of being only two characters after the last dot. more
Efforts to take down websites for copyright infringement are likely to move beyond U.S.-based domain name registries, with ICANN promising to more closely cooperate with global law enforcement agencies and governments. During an open session with the Government Advisory Committee (GAC), the ICANN board confirmed that it will enforce its contracts with registrars more effectively in order to meet expectations from governments and law enforcement authorities. more
Most users who already use websites have heard about domain names and they know what they are. Although .COM domains are already very popular, they are no longer as appealing as they once were, because they don't mean anything as such and all of the cool, short names have long since been registered. In 2014, this will change with the emerging new domain names. I like to think that it is possible that, with the increased communications that exists around new gTLD and the fact that many of these new domain names actually mean something, people will start paying more attention. more
This week in Singapore, important decisions are being made about the future of the Internet at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 52 conference. At stake are fundamental questions: Should the American people surrender stewardship over core technical functions that have preserved the open and neutral operation of the Internet since its inception? Should the Obama Administration cede this authority to an organization many consider to be non-transparent, unaccountable and insular? more
It's hard to believe that another year has come and gone and that I'm now publishing my 5th Annual Domain Name Year in Review. It's sort of fun to look back 5 years ago to see how much things have changed, especially as focus has shifted to issues related to the launch and use of new gTLDs. Of course, much has stayed the same too. Concerns related to domain name security and domain portfolio management are still important. more
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