Tiered (Variable) Pricing Compromise?

The new and proposed ICANN registry contracts contain no definite price terms, and thus permit potential tiered pricing on a per domain name basis. This has raised concern within the community that a registry operator might abuse its sole source position to engage in pricing practices detrimental to registrants. ...Notwithstanding the possibility of tiered pricing on a per domain name basis in connection with the recently executed sponsored registry contracts (.MOBI, .JOBS, .TRAVEL, .CAT, and .TEL), there have been numerous comments submitted in connection with this possibility in connection with the proposed contracts for the .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG registry contracts. There were four messages that motivate me to write this article... more

Taking Aim at 8 Myths about ENUM

ENUM has a critical role to play in telephony services convergence. Although many carriers are adopting ENUM there are myths swirling around the confuse newcomers. In data networks, the domain name system (DNS) is responsible for converting Uniform Resource Locators (URL's) to IP addresses in order to route data traffic. The ENUM protocol performs a similar essential function of linking E.164 telephone numbers to Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) -- enabling communication services to use traditional phone numbers to set up calls over IP networks. Unfortunately, there's a good deal of hype and confusion around ENUM, which might lead carriers to delay ENUM implementations. That delay would be a mistake... more

IPv6: Extinction, Evolution or Revolution?

For some years now the general uptake of IPv6 has appeared to be "just around the corner". Yet the Internet industry has so far failed to pick up and run with this message, and it continues to be strongly reluctant to make any substantial widespread commitment to deploy IPv6. Some carriers are now making some initial moves in terms of migrating their internet infrastructure over to a dual protocol network, but for many others it's a case of still watching and waiting for what they think is the optimum time to make a move. So when should we be deploying IPv6 services? At what point will the business case for IPv6 have a positive bottom line? It's a tough question to answer, and while advice of "sometime, probably sooner than later" is certainly not wrong, it's also entirely unhelpful as well! more

Will Splogs Kill .INFO Domains?

An article in the September issue of Wired explores search spam and the role of .info domain names. The article, titled "Spam + Blogs = Trouble" is a good overview of the problems of search spam, blog spam, and other various forms of web activity designed to take advantage of search engines. (The article will be online September 5, but you can read it on page 104 of the print edition that is available to subscribers now). For those not versed in search spam, it's basically creating multiple websites, typically auto-generated by computers, to get good search rankings and then monetize the resulting search traffic through AdSense or affiliate programs. The article focuses much of its attention to splogs, or auto-generated blogs... more

Time to Renew .coop, .museum, and .aero ICANN

Way back in 2000-2001, ICANN approved a handful of new top level domains, and entered into agreements with their promoters. Three of the sponsored domains, are coming up for renewal next year, so they've sent in their renewal proposals. A sponsored domain is one that restricts who can register to members of a particular community, in this case respectively co-ops, museums, and the airline industry. Let's take a look and see how they're doing. more

The Catalan Campaign to Win .Cat Top-Level Domain

In September 2005 ICANN approved the first top–level Internet domain to be dedicated to a particular human language and culture: '.cat'. A related paper was recently published in First Monday by Peter Gerrand, titled "The Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain". As explained in its abstract, the paper explains: "While '.cat' creates a precedent for greater use on the Internet of 'minority languages', there are significant hurdles for other candidates for language–based top–level domains. The paper discusses the concomitant factors needed to support the greater use of any minority language on the Internet." more

Google’s Most Popular and Least Popular Top-Level Domains

What are the most popularly used top-level domains (TLDs), or at least, which are the ones that show up on pages indexed in Google? I wondered this yesterday after seeing a news article stating that the registration of .cn (china) top-level domain names topped 1 million for the first time ever by the end of 2005. more

Domain Name Containing Trademark Translation is Determined Confusingly Similar

Interesting WIPO case (D2005-1085): Complainant (Saint-Exupery estate) owns "Le Petit Prince" in EU, US, and other countries. The translation of "Le Petit Prince" is "The little prince". Respondent registered 'thelittleprince.com'. Is such a domain name confusingly similar to the trademark? more

The First French Judicial Decision Over .EU

Over at VoxPI, Alexandre Nappey reports that, a few days ago, the first French judicial decision over a .eu domain name was released -- or more specifically the first decision over an application for a .eu name. The two parties own a trademark "EUROSTAR". They agreed on the coexistence of their respective marks in September 2004. Both applied for the same name 'eurostar.eu', on the same day. more

WIPO Responds to Significant Cybersquatting Activity In 2005

In a report released today, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has announced a 20% increase in the number of cybersquatting (abusive registration of trademarks as domain names) cases filed in 2005 as compared to 2004. The report further indicates that "in 2005, a total of 1,456 cybersquatting cases were filed with WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center. This increase represents the highest number of cybersquatting cases handled by the WIPO Center since 2001." more

Warner Brothers Loses DaisyDukes.com Complaint

Warner Brothers Entertainment, which owns the rights to The Dukes of Hazzard and related characters, including DAISY DUKE, failed in its UDRP case against the registrant of the domain name DaisyDukes.com. The Panelist determined that although WB had common law rights in the DAISY DUKE mark and the registrant lacked rights and legitimate interests in the DaisyDukes.com domain name, WB failed to demonstrate that the registrant had registered and used the domain name in bad faith. more

Internet Wars

A couple of days ago the BBC reported that a document called the Information Operations Roadmap (PDF) had been declassified and that it contained some pretty interesting stuff. The American dominance over the Internet, recently manifested by its unwillingness to hand over some of the critical control to UN-organizations, may have another side to it. more

AOL and Goodmail: Two Steps Back for Email

Remember the old email hoax about Hillary Clinton pushing for email taxation? When we first heard AOL's plans for Goodmail today, we thought maybe the hoax had re-surfaced and a few industry reporters got hooked by it. But alas, this tax plan seems to be true. AOL has long held the leading standard in email whitelisting. Every email sender who cares about delivery has tried to keep their email reputation high so that they could earn placement on AOL's coveted Enhanced Whitelist. Now, AOL may be saying that those standards don't matter as much as a postage stamp when it comes to email delivery. more

IDNs and IE7 and the Coming Storm

If you're brave, today you can finally download the Internet Explorer 7 public beta. Why should you be interested? Not because the browser's wonderful. It isn't -- initial reports are that it's not ready for prime-time. But you might be interested to know that as of today, users of IE will be able to use internationalized domain names (IDNs). ...Many other browsers are already IDN-capable, including Firefox, but most people in the world use Explorer. Think China, Japan, India. Think most of the world's population... Think of millions of new Internet users working in their own language, customers for commercial goods and services. But think also about intellectual property nightmares, think about phishing, think about whether there's one interoperable Internet, or several Internets acting very weird. These issues and others will become big news when people start using IDNs massively -- and with support from Internet Explorer, that's about to happen. more

AOL and Goodmail: Two Steps Back for Email, Part II

There's been a lot of noise this week since the news broke about AOL and Goodmail, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to change the direction of the dialog a little bit. First, there are two main issues here, and I think it's healthy to separate them and address them separately. One issue is the merits of an email stamp system like the one Goodmail is proposing, relative to other methods of improving and ensuring email deliverability. The second issue -- and the one that got me started earlier this week - is the question of AOL making usage of Goodmail stamps a mandatory event, replacing its enhanced whitelist. more