Domain Names

EURid Updates Post-Brexit

Brexit will impact many things. One that has not been getting much attention, however, is domain names and more specifically .eu domains. Under the current regulations, you need to be a resident of the European Union to register a .eu domain name. As I covered in a blog post last year, there is the potential for hundreds of thousand of .eu domain names being pulled overnight. more

An Investigation Shows How Bomb Threat Scammers Hijacked Thousands of Big-Name Domains

Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports that an "investigation shows the spam run worked by abusing a weakness at GoDaddy that allowed the scammers to hijack at least 78 domains belonging to Expedia, Mozilla, Yelp, and other legitimate people or organizations." more

Prudential Settlements for Alleged Cybersquatting/Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Under the ACPA

Given the number of awards endlessly arriving from Panels appointed to decide cybersquatting disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) (ten to fifteen published daily), the sum total of grievants filing de novo challenges under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protect Act (ACPA) is remarkably small -- one or two at most in any single year; and those rarely proceeding to summary judgment or trial. more

The .BEST Brand Protection (Interview)

Launching a social network based on a single domain name extension is seriously innovative, but such a concept also implies to give Trademarks a chance to protect themselves. I recently interviewed Cyril Fremont, the new operator of the .BEST Registry and also CEO of "THE.BEST Social Network" on his plan to allow Trademarks to protect their assets prior to the launching of the review network. more

ICANN Gives .amazon Talks a March Deadline

ICANN's board of directors has voted to put a March deadline on discussions concerning .amazon top-level domain. more

New Book: Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS

The idea behind my recent book "Managing Mission Critical Domains & DNS" is to provide a unifying overview around the area of domains and naming where I think there exists an artificial divide, and that divide exists between domain policy, and managing ones' domain portfolio; and the DNS ops side of things: running your nameservers or outsourcing to a vendor, or both. I've been doing this for over 20 years, I've seen almost every failure condition that can happen to your domain or DNS... more

Not Another Yearly Recap: What 2018 Tells Us About .brand Domains

It's that special time again! Time to unwind, spend time with loved ones -- and to reflect on another 12 months of progress across the .brand movement. Over the last few years, we've used this end of year assessment and our efforts with MakeWay.World to show you how the industry is being embraced globally -- through a range of examples, statistics and predictions about how the year ahead will be our best ever. more

Why “.brands” Domains Make Sense

I receive spam on a daily basis from various Banks... as well as mine. None are legitimate but actually, that is not what is catching my attention receiving spam. There is something else and it deals with stealing information from me. Creating a personalized ".brand" domain name extension allows avoiding all that. Many are familiar with receiving spam through phishing attempts to have you answering an email and providing personal information such as login and passwords... more

Global DNS Record Manipulation, Hijacking Campaign at Massive Scale Linked to Iran

A wave of DNS hijacking is reported to have affected dozens of domains belonging to government, telecommunications and internet infrastructure entities across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America. more

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2018

It is once again time for our annual review of posts that received the most attention on CircleID during the past year. Congratulations to all the 2018 participants for sharing their thoughts and making a difference in the industry. more

Typosquatting as Per Se Cybersquatting Unless Proved Otherwise

The quintessence of typosquatting is syntactical variation: adding, omitting, replacing, substituting, and transposing words and letters. Since these minor variations are mostly indefensible, respondents rarely respond to complaints, although as I will explain in a moment there can also be innocent and good faith syntactical variations which are not typosquatting. It follows that if there are defenses, respondents should prudently respond and explain their choices because default generally favors complainants. more

CPH TechOps Retrospective 2018

From the perspective of the domain name industry, 2018 was strongly influenced by, among other things, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Temporary Specification and especially the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). For the Contracted Parties House (CPH) TechOps Group, one year after its foundation, it was a very exciting and intensive time. This initiative was created to tackle technical and operational needs and challenges plus ideally to create best practices. more

2018 Domain Name Year in Review

Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when I look back at all of the biggest domain news stories from the last twelve months, and also reflect on my predictions from last year. As expected, GDPR has had a major impact on the ability to access domain ownership information. And we did indeed see a number of M&A transactions over this last year. However, there wasn't a lot of new .Brand activity. This is one prediction where I may have missed the mark... more

2019 Will Be the Year of New gTLDs, Wired Predicts

In an article published today on the state of new top-level domains, Wired says "2019 could be the year of the obscure domain name." more

The New gTLD Market Will Improve Very Slightly Over the Next Year or So, ICANN Predicts

According to ICANN’s latest budget predictions, new gTLD market will improve very slightly over the next year or so. more