New gTLDs Race to the Bottom With Domain Giveaways?

The new .BERLIN domain added 67,000 new registrations early this week and another almost 6,000 yesterday. This occurred after a few registrars ran a promotion offering free .BERLIN domains. As reported at DomainIncite, over a 1/3 of these domains were purchased by one registrant - making them the largest "landowner" in .BERLIN. Giving away domains may be a good short term business practice... But the geographical domains are not supposed to be generic... more

New gTLDs Questions Not Answered: Which Kind of Auction?

I was expecting something that would discuss the unique properties, if any, of the domain name market, and the types of inventory theoretically available to allocate, and the expected outcomes for the various types of auctions, and some showing that for some desired policy goals, whether greatest gain to seller or lowest loss to buyer, or something entirely different, the expected outcomes. This would assist the better informed, bottom-up, stakeholder-driven, consensus policy making. Is the domain name market indistinguishable from the spectrum market? If name spaces are distinguishable from units of spectrum... more

Disputes Falling Outside the Scope of the UDRP

The UDRP is a forum of limited jurisdiction designed for trademark owners to combat a certain kind of tortious (sometimes tipping to criminal) conduct by which registrants register domain names with the bad faith intent of taking economic advantage of owner's marks and injuring consumers by beguiling them to disclose personal information. The forum is not open to trademark owners whose claims are outside its scope, even though they may include allegations of cybersquatting. more

A Look at Nine Years of RIPE Database Objects: IPv6 Objects on the Rise

The RIPE Database is about to enter its fourth decade. It began humbly as a place to store network and contact information back when the RIPE community formed in 1989. When the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) was created three years later and started to assign and allocated IP address space, the database was expanded to include the registration of more detailed network and routing information. more

All New gTLD Registrations Should Be Subject to Sunrise Periods - Even Reserved Names

Planning to register your trademark as a domain name during a Sunrise Period only to find out that the registration appears on a Reserved Names list? There are a number of reasons why a domain that matches your trademark is appearing on a Reserved Names list. First of all, if the domain desired is the subject of Name Collision, it may appear on a Reserved Names list. Although this is not true for all registries, as some operators are allowing domains that have been the subject of Name Collision to be allocated during Sunrise, but not delegated. more

Parsing Predatory and Parasitical from Innocent and Good Faith Domain Name Registrants

When the World Intellectual Property Organization began deliberating in 1998 and 1999 about creating an arbitral regime that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers transformed into the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy the curse words of choice were "predators" and "parasites" to describe cybersquatters. (In an early UDRP decision a Respondent who had also featured as a defendant in a trademark case asserted he had "just as much right to own the Domain Names [with typographic variations of the mark] as the person who owns the correct spelling of [the mark]" more

The Only Winning Game at the WCIT

With Russia flipping its far reaching Internet takeover proposals into the WCIT pile this morning, it became apparent to WCITeers heading to Dubai in a couple of weeks that the entire show was on a fast trajectory into the wild blue yonder. Indeed, the event may provide an opportunity for Hollywood to film a sequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Unfortunately, the Russian proposals are only one of many wake-up indicators that this event may not be the exercise in rational, intelligent discourse that some in the preparatory process apparently believed. more

First Square Mile is not the Last or First Mile: Discovery not Just Choices!

The term "last mile" highlights the fact that we are the consumers at the end of a broadband "pipe". Saying "first mile" is a little better but the Internet is not a pipe to or from somewhere else. It's about what we can do locally and then what we can do when we interconnect with other neighborhoods. It's better to describe our neighborhood as the first square mile. Telecom is about selling us services; the Internet is about what we can do ourselves locally and then interconnecting with others everywhere. In writing the First Square Mile - Our Neighborhood essay which I just posted I came to better understand the fundamental difference between the world of telecom which is about giving you choices and the Internet which provides opportunity to discover what we can't anticipate... more

A Logical Place to Start the IPv6 Transition

The transition to IPv6 is top of mind for most service providers. Even in places where there are still IPv4 addresses to be had surveys we've run suggest v6 is solidly on the priority list. That's not to say everyone has the same strategy. Depending where you are in the world transition options are different -- in places such as APAC where exhaustion is at hand one of the many NAT alternatives will likely be deployed since getting a significant allocation of addresses is not going to happen and other alternatives for obtaining addresses will prove expensive. more

Keep Politics Out of 5G International Standardization

For the past hundred years or so, the world's vendors of communication networks and services have collaborated -- largely among themselves -- with great success. That paradigm continues today for 5G with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and an ecosystem cluster of related organizations where industry and affected government agencies worldwide successfully work on a massive scale. more

A Link to Eternity

While Google is as secretive about its internal processes and systems as Apple is about product development, every now and then senior people post articles on the official Google blog and offer their thoughts on the development of the web. In the latest posting, two Google engineers, Alfred Spector and Franz Och, look at how search strategies will benefit from the faster computers, greater volumes of data and better algorithms we are likely to see in the next decade, speculating that "we could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognise the plot or the symbolism." more

Huawei Files Motion in US Federal Court Calling Ban Unconstitutional, an Assault on Human Rights

Huawei has filed a legal motion in the United States federal court calling for the ban to be declared unconstitutional and deemed an assault on global human rights. more

Five Reasons to Avoid Using Maps on Websites

Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors. Yet when it comes to virtual fences, visualized as maps, I'm not sure there is any way to create "good fences." So many regions around the world are under dispute. And even regions that may appear settled may be anything but. I've long written about the problems of using flags on your website, particularly for navigation. But maps often present a much larger geopolitical challenge. If you can avoid using them, do so. more

The Journey of IPv6 Implementation 9 Months Later

ICANN 43 in Costa Rica was in the heart of IPv6 implementation with everybody touching on how much it was needed as part of the internet ecosystem to fully utilize the ICANN expansion of the new gTLD namespace from 21 to the maximum number that will manage to get delegated at the beginning of 2013. more

Transfers of Domain Names Contemporaneous with Complaint: Cyberflight?

Cyberflight (defined as strategically transferring accused domain names to another registrar or registrant upon receipt of a complaint) was a sufficient irritant by 2013 for the ICANN to adopt recommendations to amend the Rules of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). Effective July 1, 2015 the Rules now include a requirement for locking the domain as well as a change in the timing of transmitting the complaint to respondents. Before the amendment there had been no uniform approach to locking. more