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ICANN seems to be out to re-prove Hirschman's theories of exit, voice, and loyalty by driving all of its good people to exit rather than giving them meaningful voices. Thomas Roessler, a long-time advocate of individual users' interests on the interim ALAC now suggests it's Time to Reconsider the structure of ICANN's At-Large, as he feels compelled to promise himself not to get involved with ICANN again... more
This article discusses grassroots progress toward the development of a "Domain Registrant's Code of Rights and Responsibilities." This Code is an effort to create a balanced combination of the rights that domain name registrants should enjoy and the responsibilities that domain name registrants should fulfill. Discussion and survey results concerning this Code at domain-related forums show far greater grassroots consensus than one might think between what might be called the "domainer" and "intellectual property" communities. Informal surveys at some domain-related forums show very strong support in favor of this Code. more
The European Union's .eu Top-Level Domain (TLD) sunrise and landrush has probably been discussed to death, but what is the landscape like over a year later? A lot of industry insiders were right to express their doubts about the stability of .eu following on from the high profile squats that have been discussed here at length. Of course any discussion on a new TLD would have to wait until after the first wave of renewals. That happened in April, so now, in July, it's a good as time to take stock of the situation... more
No that's not really happening, Google is not buying VeriSign. But given Google's ravenous appetite for data, it might find VeriSign quite attractive. VeriSign has both root domain name servers and servers for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs). VeriSign could data mine the queries coming into those servers and produce a very valuable real-time stream of what users on the net are doing... Google just bought Postini -- and one would have to be fairly naive to believe that Google does not intend to dredge through all... more
ICANN has embarked on the IDN boat at the same time it wants to introduce DNSSEC and new gTLDs. This promises lots of fun. Or grey hair, depending how you look at it. First is the issue of country code IDNs. The ISO-3166 table, based on two letter codes, is a western convention. Some cultures do not use abbreviations or acronyms. Some do not use a character-based alphabet, but a syllabic one. Hence, the next logical step would be to represent the full country name in local script, rather than a transliteration of the ISO string... Imagine the case of India, where there are 1.652 languages, of which 24 are spoken by more than one million people... more
When I was growing up, one of the annoyances of life in New York City was squeegee men. When your car was stopped at a light, these guys would run up, make a few swipes at your windshield with a squeegee, then look menacing until you gave them a tip. It occurs to me that domain "monetizers'' are the Internet's squeegee men. If I make a minor typing error entering a domain name, they run up and offer to sell a link to the place I wanted to go (well, they sell the place I wanted to go a click from me, but close enough.) more
Domainer litigation is heating up, and this lawsuit may be the most ambitious anti-domainer lawsuit to date. First, it is a putative class action lawsuit. Second, in addition to naming four leading domainer firms, the plaintiffs provocatively go after Google for providing ads to domainer sites. I believe this is the first lawsuit against Google for its domainer relationships. The complaint itself is a 121 page, 638 paragraph (with one paragraph enumerating 47 defined terms), 4.3MB behemoth alleging trademark infringement and dilution, ACPA violations, RICO and other claims. more
A case study by Efficient Frontier mentions how using the Google Adsense for Domains network doubled the conversion ratio of search ads for their clients. According to their website, "Efficient Frontier manages more than $400 million in annual PPC spend under management, counts 80 of the top 500 search advertisers as clients and manages over 30 million keywords"... "When we analyzed the results, we were shocked. We didn't expect to see that domain park sites can bring in the quality of traffic necessary..." more
ICANN sent a 10-page letter to RegisterFly on February 21st threatening to terminate its accreditation. The letter is available here. ICANN's not exactly advertising this -- no conspicuous notice appears on its home page and, more curiously, no update has been posted by the Ombudsman despite two prior postings about RegisterFly in the past week. A member of the general public would be hard pressed to find out that any action has been threatened. more
This morning I was forwarded a link to the Business2.0 article on domainer Kevin Ham about a half-dozen times and one sent the reddit comment thread on it (titled "This guy is a piece of s**t") and I had to chuckle and replied "I see Techno-Pinkos are out in full force". Some of the comments are just classicly clueless: "He's just a parasite. Someone gaming the system for their own financial ends without providing a useful service to anyone, and making it worse for many." ...Newsflash: Speculation is any time you choose one path, good or service over another in the hopes that you will do better... more
Social Science Research Network has published a paper examining "the large gaps and inconsistencies in current domain name law and policy" as compared with domain name use in the political context. The paper suggests that the current domain name policy is focused on protecting trademark uses of domain names against bad faith commercial 'cybersquatters' but does not deal with protecting use of domain names as part of the political process. more
A corporate name of any merged entity, at best, is really an outcry from the deep bottom of a corporation, all in search of attention and in pursuit of fame and glory. Whether you read a corporate brand name in a column, see it in a phone book, hear it on a radio, TV or come across it on the web, the name is always, a real show-off with a desperate mission to seek all the attention it can get...a corporate brand name is the single most important issue of corporate communications today. Equally, a domain name, the twin of a corporate name, still as to most CEOs, it is the most misunderstood term of corporate communications. Even now, domain name issues are often left to webmasters, ISPs and, sometimes to lawyers. It has yet to earn the respect as the single most important issue of e-Commerce and also to earn the respect as a real and a true passkey for global access for the web. more
On the face of it, Kieren McCarthy's Sex.com was a book that could have written itself: a notorious, well-publicised feud over the most valuable domain name in existence, between two charismatic men -- one a serial entrepreneur with a weakness for hard drugs (Gary Kremen), the other a gifted con-man with delusions of grandeur (Stephen Cohen). It's a story replete with vicious acrimony, multi-million dollar lawsuits, and rumours of gunfights between bounty hunters in the streets of Tijuana. Thankfully, McCarthy wasn't content to just bundle together all the articles he's written about Sex.com over the years and slap a cover on the front... more
I just got back this morning from attending the OASIS XRI TC face-to-face meeting with Bill Barnhill, Drummond Reed, Laurie Rae, Les Chasen, Markus Sabadello, Marty Schleiff. A number of good things came out of the meeting, which I'll leave for another blog because this post is about Internationalized Domain Names, not XRI. So we just opened the flood gates for Chinese and Japanese IDNs for .BIZ. This has been my brainchild for the past half a year or so, and represents a significant step forward for our registry in terms of internationalization. more
ICANN's recently released report, ICANN's Whois Data Accuracy and Availability Program: Description of Prior Efforts and New Compliance Initiatives [PDF], is a summary of the Whois Data Problem Report System's (WDPRS) reports spanning a one-year period that concluded at the end of Fenruary 2007. In case you're not familiar with the WDPRS, it's system that tracks complaints about inaccurate or incomplete whois entries. Notable facts from the report include: There were 50,189 reports for which ICANN received follow-up responses during the year... more
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