Domain Names

2010 Domain Name Year in Review - Oh, What A Year It Was!

Many of us were expecting radical changes in 2010 to the domain name market. There definitely were some of those -- just not the ones I expected. From the seizure of domains names by the US Government to ICANN's removal of restrictions on Registry/Registrar cross-ownership, 2010 was a year full of surprises. In this post, I've compiled what I think were the biggest domain name stories in 2010. more

Domains and the Freedom to Speak

For a very long time, predating the birth of ICANN, there's been a running battle about what should be required when one registers domain names. To oversimplify quite a lot, one side sees domain names as an essential component of free speech, so anyone should be able to register any domain without limit, the other notes that they're primarily used for commercial purposes and they enable quite a lot of mischief, so the more control, the better. more

The Trembling Trademark Owners

Why is so much fear being created in the name of protecting trademark owners? Say, if ICANN allowed some third party a generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) called .panasonic will the sky fall? No, not at all, as Panasonic, the true and rightful TM holder will hit the unauthorized gTLD with a 2x4 and no judge would oppose issuing a cease-and-desist order. Now the other question is... more

Rod Beckstrom, Twiki and the Foswiki fork - ICANN Must “Get Things Right” on New TLDs

One of the most disastrous things that could happen to the DNS would be for the root to "split", as it would mean that identifiers would no longer be universal. Instead, "Example.com" would have totally different meanings for different users, substantially reducing the benefits of domain names. Can this happen? Important lessons for ICANN can be learned by studying the history of Rod Beckstrom, Twiki and Foswiki. more

New gTLDs Differentiation: Do Good

Congratulations! The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved your application for a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) extension. Now what? ...This essay focuses on how to differentiate by being socially responsible. more

ICANN Board - GAC Geneva Meeting: Open to Observers?

The ICANN Board and GAC will be having a meeting in Geneva next month to resolve outstanding issues in connection with the new gTLD implementation process. Unfortunately to date details of whether this meeting will be open or closed to observers has not yet been publicly addressed. As a strong advocate toward openness and transparency I have drafted the following text which calls for the meeting to be open to observers. more

Affidavit Shows Errors in Homeland Security Domain Seizures

TechDirt reviewed the affidavit filed by the United States Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division when seizing various hip-hop and bittorrent-related domain names recently, and discovered some very deep misunderstandings of how content appears on web sites. 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

The Dotcom Kingdom

What will happen to dotcom once a thousand generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) applications were approved and start to skate around on global cyber platforms? Nothing, firstly, there are over 200,000,000 dotcoms while these 1000 exotic high profile gTLD will not even make a scratch to the dotcom market. Secondly, a dotcom is about $10 plus while gTLD is $500,000 plus... After all gTLD are never supposed to be for everyone, as they can only be fitted to right and very special combinations. more

What’s Driving Spam and Domain Fraud? Illicit Drug Traffic

Spam is not about who sent it, it's about who benefits from it. For a moment forget everything you know about filters, zombie PCs, firewalls, spoofing, viruses, beisyan algorithms, header forgery, botnets, or blacklists. These are all methods for sending spam or preventing spam delivery. None of these explain why spam is sent and for far too long all the attention has been paid to the effects and not the driving force. Under the endless onslaught of junk mail it is easy to feel that the goal of the game is send spam and annoy us all. more

Who Is Blocking WHOIS? Part 2

We have just returned from the Brussels, Belgium ICANN meeting where we released our Registrar audit, the Internet "Doomsday Book." There are many topics covered in the report, but we wanted to follow up specifically on the issue of WHOIS access and add data to our previous column Who Is Blocking WHOIS? which covered Registrar denial of their contracted obligation to support Port 43 WHOIS access. more

The Real Threat to the Single Root of the Internet Seems to Come from ICANN Itself, of All Places

The proposed final Guidebook for the New generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) gTLDs contains elements that raise grave risks to the ICANN single root of the Internet caused by none other than ICANN itself. Below is my intervention at the ICANN Cartagena Public Forum today. ICANN President and CEO Mr. Rod Beckstrom was prompt to reply and acknowledge the validity of my statement adding that ICANN is fully aware of the problem. more

ICANN’s Governance Conundrum

After reading Steve Delbianco's recent CircleID article entitled The Tale of Two Governance Models I was torn. On one hand I agreed and supported Steve's comments about the strength of the bottom-up consensus driven model upon which ICANN was originally founded. As I am about to begin my thirty fifth ICANN regional meeting over the last eleven years, it is a model which I still believe in and fiercely fight to defend. However, on the other hand I look back over the last eleven years... more

Wildcarding Subdomains Is OK; Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Isn’t - Goforit v. Digimedia

This is a super-interesting dispute involving two not-so-interesting litigants. The plaintiff Goforit runs a type of meta-search engine at goforit.com. After spending 5 minutes at the site, I couldn't identify a single reason why anyone would want to use it. Also inexplicably, Goforit appears to be quite pleased with its trademark rights in "Goforit," a term that seems more like an exhortation than a trademark. more

The Three Lessons We Can Learn from gTLDs’ Past

History is a great teacher, we are told. So, on the cusp of an explosion in new top-level domains, what can we learn from the two previous expansions of the Internet's naming space? And what are the pitfalls to avoid? Let's just assume the fundamental and obvious lessons of realistic expectations, a solid business plan and prudent resource management, and instead focus on the little talked about but still critical lessons that will separate the winners and the losers in this race. But first - a caveat! more