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I'm in the camp that ICANN Top-Level Domains (TLDs) are businesses that should be allowed to evolve from their original charter to increase their viability in the marketplace. It was announced today that VeriSign is proposing to allow telephone numbers and other numeric identifiers in the .NAME top-level domain. This could be the Killer App that ENUM has been waiting for. more
It nearly goes without saying that if ".CA" means and should continue to mean, "Canada", the registration of a .CA domain name ought to involve some tie to Canada. As Canadian Internet Registration Authority ("CIRA") CEO, Byron Holland, aptly put it, "The fundamental requirement of having a Canadian presence in order to get a dot-ca domain name make sense...because it is a country code and there is an assumption that there is some "Canadian-ness". And that is why, in a nutshell, I support a Canadian 'presence requirement' for the registration of .CA domain names. Nevertheless, the question of what constitutes an appropriate 'presence requirement' is an interesting issue... more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a Petri dish for acronyms. The latest one to be introduced into the ICANN lexicon is MOPO which is short for Morality and Public Order. MOPO is one of the four grounds by which a third party can challenge an application for a new generic top-level domain (gTLD). The profile of MOPO recently increased when ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC) provided formal advice to the ICANN Board regarding the current MOPO procedures set forth in ICANN's Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) for new gTLD applicants. The resolution of this issue will largely determine whether new gTLD applications will be accepted by ICANN in 2011 as planned or sometime in the far distant future. more
To some applicants, ICANN's variant management policy in DAG4 has become a big obstacle to the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) application. The policy is to delegate the string while reserving the variants, and these variants will not be delegated until a sound mechanism is developed and the desired variants are evaluated. But for some languages, Chinese for example, the so called string and its variant, namely simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, are equivalent and must be simultaneously delegated. more
The .CO top-level domain made over $10 million in just a couple of months. What do the results of the .CO re-launch mean for new gTLDs? Remember, .CO is the country-code TLD for Colombia. Until this summer, you could only register names under .com.co, .net.co, etc. You couldn't register myname.co. Now anyone in the world can register a .co name, and register it directly under the top level. more
The announcement that .co has already achieved over 450,000 new registrations since the opening up of the second level a month ago demonstrates that there is strong demand in the global domain name marketplace for quality new domain spaces. Though .co is the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for Colombia, the second-level registrations (i.e. company.co) are available on a global basis and it is being pitched as a direct competitor to the dominant .com gTLD. Google has altered its algorithm to increase the relevance of search results in the .co domain by treating .co as a gTLD... more
New gTLDs continue to be a major topic of discussion within ICANN circles, and the regional meeting currently underway in Tokyo has revealed some interesting updates for potential applicants. ICANN's Chief gTLD Registry Liaison, Craig Schwartz, delivered a great presentation on the progress being made behind closed doors at ICANN and provided the attendees with an insight into a couple of key changes that are likely to be seen in the Final Applicant Guidebook. more
As a result of ICANN's IDN ccTLD Fast Track process, which was launched in November of last year, a number of new ccIDNs (Country Code Internationalized Domain Names) have been successfully added to the root including: China (.??, .??), Egypt (.???), Hong Kong (.?? ), Russia (.??), Saudi Arabia (.????????), Taiwan (.??, .??) and the UAE (.??????). ... With so many new registration possibilities available, and several Sunrise periods quickly approaching, many corporate domain managers are asking themselves whether new registrations should be added to portfolios which are already bursting at the seams. more
Bulgaria is a nation which is directly impacted by the current Fast Track automatic disqualification when Top-Level Domain (TLD) strings are "confusingly similar" to other TLDs, in this case an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). Bulgaria has already been declined twice (in late 2009, and in May of 2010) to register the *.?? Cyrillic IDN on the premise that it looks confusingly similar to Brazil's *.br ASCII TLD. Being a native Bulgarian, I did not see how these two strings are similar more
A new book by Dr. Konstantinos Komaitis (Lecturer in Law at the University of Strathclyde) provides a passionate yet legalistic and well-researched overview of the legal, institutional and ethical problems caused by the clash between domain names and trademarks. This is really the first decent book-length treatment of what is now a decade and a half of legal and political conflict between domain name registrants and trademark holders. more
New generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) appear to be headed for introduction next year, finally. That's a good thing for many ICANN constituents who have been waiting for them to become available. Important questions persist about how new gTLDs will affect ICANN and its constituents, however, despite a lot of effort to resolve concerns. Pressing those questions should not be taken as criticism of the basic wisdom of making new gTLDs available to many constituents under many circumstances. But too much is at stake not to get it right. more
If the rise of phishing has taught us anything, it's that on the Internet, if a digital asset has value, there's somebody out there who wants to steal it. Whether it's a bank account password, a credit card number, a PayPal login, or even a magic sword in an online game, there's a fraudster somewhere trying to misappropriate it for his or her own nefarious purposes. Domain names have always been a target for such criminals. more
In my last post I discussed some questions that remain about ICANN's generic Top-level Domain (gTLD) budget. Today I discuss the rights protections mechanisms as they currently appear. An economic study commissioned ICANN to analyze the new gTLD process recently concluded that "the biggest likely costs" of approving new gTLDs are "consumer confusion and trademark protection." more
Paul observed that most new domain names are malicious. Are they? Since the "dawn of tasting", some 30 million domain names have been created for the purposes of interposition on existing name to resource mappings. That is a third of the .COM historical growth, and mostly in the last five years. ... It is difficult not to conclude that interposition on persistent, public referents is without malice, and that the malicious parties are advertisers seeking to transform public referents into private property, as promotional devices... more
Almost exactly nine years ago, the .INFO domain first started accepting registrations. This was an historic event as it was the first time a new generic top-level domain (TLD) was launched to an existing domain marketplace and, in fact, was the first new TLD to be added since .com. We've seen (and provided technology to power) many other TLD launches since then, with many business models. As you seek to introduce your own new TLD however, you should carefully evaluate the different launch models that have been tried before and determine which one will work best for your specific TLD. more
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