ICANN To Spend $1M On Ads – Reports $4.7M Investment Loss

ICANN is apparently embarking on a million dollar campaign to convince us to buy their story on generic domains. Its reported that the campaign will start in Q4 2009 with a series of announcements and PR.

The Australian is reporting that Dr Twomey said an independent panel would be appointed to decide who would be allowed to register a disputed domain, but no details were available about who might be on it. I’m sure its going to be “fair and balanced” – just like Fox news.

Best of luck to the ICANN Executive who are no doubt practicing their Jedi mind tricks – “these arent the domains droids your looking for”.

What do you think? Is $1million a waste of funds? After all, its 5,000,000 ICANN .20 cent fees for a .com!

Add this to the “Realized and unrealized investment losses of $4.7 mil thru year to date” which was very quietly disclosed in the unaudited financial results. Click on the down arrow on the left hand side of the graph and you will see a little pop-up that mentions this little gem!

Who in ICANN is being made accountable for this investment loss?

WIPO To Go Paperless For UDRP – Saves HOW MUCH Paper?

WIPO has sent a letter to ICANN to “seriously consider moving towards an essentially paperless UDRP”. Here are some interesting stats that appear in the letter:

• Over the lifespan of the UDRP, the total number of pages filed with WIPO alone is estimated at some ten million (roughly equivalent to over one thousand trees).

• The approximate number of paper pages from Respondents is over 300,000.

The letter outlines a number of reasons including:

1. Environmentally friendly
2. Efficient – leading to cost savings
3. Most already file electronically anyway
4. 4% email bounce back in 2008
5. The average time that elapsed between WIPO’s receipt of the electronic Compalint and its receipt of the hard copies was four days. “A delay in receipt of a Response in hard copy may also delay the Panel’s review of the complete record“.

I think this is a great move. Although I’m not surprised that its WIPO taking the initiative to suggest an improvement to an ICANN process. It just goes to show how inefficient ICANN is.

Although this week I did have similar, strange technology interactions with two companies:

1. Company A – a webhost asked me to print out, scan in and email them a copy of an invoice that I received via email. Apparently their process said that email (text) wasn’t good enough.
2. Company B – asked me to email them, post a hardcopy and fax them the same document.

Its 2009 and we are still using fax machines and printing stuff out – unbelievable. Shouldn’t we all have jet-packs by now?

ICANN Publishes AGP Limits Policy = Registrar Pricing Models Change

We all knew it was coming. ICANN has released their Add Grace Period Policy and as a direct result registrars are looking at changing their pricing models.

Here is an extract from the new ICANN Policy:

“During any given month, an Operator shall not offer any refund to an ICANN-accredited registrar (hereinafter referred to as “Registrar”) for any domain names deleted during the AGP that exceed (i) 10% of that Registrar’s net new registrations (calculated as the total number of net adds of one-year through ten-year registrations as defined in the monthly reporting requirement of Operator Agreements) in that month, or (ii) fifty (50) domain names, whichever is greater, unless an exemption has been granted by an Operator.”

In an email to me yesterday, Dynadot stated “Due to this change, we may have to raise grace deletion fees substantially or remove grace deletions altogether.” This really means “We don’t know what we are going to do yet”. It will be interesting to see what some of the larger registrars do, in particular Moniker. Lets wait and see.

Adrian Kinderis, MD of AusRegistry – Live from Traffic DownUnder 2008

AusRegistry was co-founded in 2001. Since then its had substantial growth:

• 1 million .au names in November 2007
• 1 million .com.au names in June 2008
• Currently 1.25+ million .au names
• Average 25% annual growth

Adrian talked a LOT (in fact too much) about AusRegistry, explained some auDA policy around domain name monetization. For example, you can acquire a name if your primary business is to monetize. While there is no formal policy on domain tasting, there is a 3 day grace period.

Here is an interest graph of growth in the sector:

Personal comment: Given the low CPC rates and the population, I’d still question the viability of this space.

Paul Twomey Keynote Speech – Live from Traffic DownUnder 2008

Paul Twomey is the CEO of ICANN. His speech mainly focused on stability, resiliency and security of the Internet.

IDN ccTLDs

• Draft implementation plan posted for 45-day public comment period ending December 8.
• Many issues to be resolved.

Protective Measures (that ICANN provide)

• Timely de-accreditation and transfer of names to accredited registrars.
• Compliance audits, surveys, reports – transparency and accountability.

Registrar Accreditation Agreement

Substantative changes developed in cooperation with the community include proposals for:

• Stricter enforcement provisions
• Improved data protection and notice and education requirements
• Shared compliance responsibilities

Data Escrow, Data Accuracy and Warehousing

• Over 95% of all domain name registrations are with a data escrow provider.

RegistrarFly Issue

During the RegisterFly issue, we were trying to looking after the registrants;  one of the issues we had was to identify the registrants.

What Does The Future Hold?

• Global economy will be a major factor in the foreseeable future?
• Fastest growth and greatest potential lies in Africa, Asia, Middle East
• New gTLDs and IDN TLDs will bring challenges to do business around the world.
• Explosion in multilingual, multiculturalcontent, ideas, social and business interaction, education, things we have not dreamed of.

The Internet of the Future

• Internet and the domain name space are rapidly evolving.
• Wider variety of devices used to provide services.
• Evolving new services – banking and financial services – based on proximity
• Evolving new products – smart objects, RFID embedded objects, Internet enabled as standard
• Evolving new products – RFID technologies
• Convergence of other uses with devices
• Wide variety of devices used to provide services
• Increasing demand for products and services by developing countries

ICANN stands for a single, stable, globally interoperable Internet.

Will Obama Shape The Future Of The Internet?

2009 is going to be a big year for all of us. ICANN wants to divorce the US government and screw up the Internet with 50 companies running new top-level domains, and application fees at $185,000 each.  This gives them a mere $9,250,000 in cash; then cometh the domain registrations. Can we stop this? Yes we can!

The WSJ is reporting that companies are protesting about the proposed new domain names. Who is going to own .hotel or .bank and how much will they charge for a domain name in those TLD’s? Think about all the brands, variants, trademarks – this is going to be a very costly nightmare for business and lead to mass confusion on the part of the consumer.

ICANN‘s pathetic reason for existence is based on a deal with the US Government which expires in September 2009. The agreement is through the Department of Commerce and is known as the Joint Project Agreement (JPA). Will Obama renew it? What are some of the alternatives to ICANN? Running it through/with the Internet Governance Forum at the United Nations?

New Security Flaws In ICANN Proposal

Last month I talked about ICANNs new proposal to allow domain names with non Latin characters. The media has yet to realize the true implications of this, so I’m going to spell it out in “plain English”.

• www.pàypal.com
• www.ebày.com
• www.bànk.com
• www.päy.com

Notice that mark on your screen? In German its called an umlaut, also known as an accent mark.  What does it mean for the Internet:

1. An increase in phishing sites that look like the real thing.
2. A new opportunity for typosquatters to profit from registering domain names.

So when is an a, not an à’ ? What happens when an international visitor goes to www.pàypal.com in their browser? Will they go to www.paypal.com or www.pàypal.com? That depends on the characterset they use!

For domainers, its time to start thinking about those new domain names to hand register. For corporates, it time to think about tracking down all those domain names with a view to getting them registered when this thing goes live.

ICANN – Kill Off & Recreate The Domain Name Industry

Is ICANN the right entity to provide oversight of the Internet? Given the crazy proposals that have received board approval, I believe its time for a change before the Internet crosses that “point of no return” and ends up in a total mess. ICANN said in a recent press release:

“The Board today accepted a recommendation from its global stakeholders that it is possible to implement many new names to the Internet, paving the way for an expansion of domain name choice and opportunity” said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN. A final version of the implementation plan must be approved by the ICANN Board before the new process is launched. It is intended that the final version will be published in early 2009.”

At a high level, this is what the recent Paris junket meeting was about:

1. Domain Tasting

ICANN doesn’t *really* make any money out of this, so they decided to make the 20-cent registration fee (paid to them) non-refundable to reward their friends, they then made domain tasting almost impossible for everyone except the most popular registrars. As these registrars have high numbers of domain registrations, 10% could be a high enough number to perform a good degree of tasting.

2. Dot WhatEverYouWant

Give anyone the ability to create a .WhateverYouWant, thus decreasing the value of existing domain name portfolios. It would appear that ICANN is a little bit irritated by domainers who had the vision (and took high risks many years ago) to snap up valuable domain names. After all, ICANN didn’t make the millions the domainers did.

3. Foreign Superpowers

Allow non Latin characters such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic. Chinese being the largest ccTLD, soon to be the #1 superpower. Arabic (that’s English for oil) and Cyrillic (Russia – say no more). While the PR spin is to make it a warm, fuzzy internet for everyone (lets hold hands now and sing koom-by-ah) – I don’t believe it for a nanosecond. It’s all about making money for a small group of people.

I’ve already covered domain tasting and other character sets in other posts, so lets focus on adding more domain name extensions.

Why Is This Bad News For Domainers

Allowing anyone to create an extension could:

1. Decrease the value of existing domains. What if a single company controlled .sex ? How much would that be worth!?!?! How do you compare the value of lesbian.com to lesbian.sex ? Yes, I had to use that as an example. Ok, well what about www.newyorkrealestate.com compared to www.realestate.newyork or newyork.realestate ? Get the picture?

2. Lead to mass confusion amongst the public. What is an Internet address? Wasn’t that .com ?

3. Change the flow of traffic on the Internet. This is because Internet browsers and search engines may give preference to other domain extensions. Say goodbye to “type it in traffic” to .com.

4. Increase the number of trademark violations. How does ICANN expect to handle that? That’s ok – there are a lot of lawyers who are on “advisory panels” that can profit from giving advice. For those around in the early days of the Internet, Network Solutions ran into the same problem (and largely ignored it for awhile until it got out of control).

5. Attract the wrong type of people to the industry. In recent times we have seen a lot of dodgy “management” around various extensions and ccTLDs. Do we need any more people getting attracted to this new “gold rush”?

Impact On Existing Domain Portfolios

If you hold a large portfolio of anything other than .com, then you might find it decreases in value. For example, .net, .org .biz and .info and .us are not in a good position. However, those people who have purchased geographic domain names (eg: newyork.com) are also at risk. I’ll just pay off ICANN and create my own .newyork extension.

Why Does ICANN Do This?

Again, I believe that it’s all about ICANN making money for a small group of people.

1. ICANN looked at tasting. I can imagine the conversation – “hmmm… we’re not getting a cut… I know, lets make the 20-cent registration fee non-refundable!”.

2. ICANN looked at Verisign. I can imagine that conversation went like “hmmm… how can we multiply this? I know, lets give anyone the ability to create .whateveryou like, and then they pay $100,000 a piece to us (ICANN) for the privilege.” Multiply that out, per every conceivable extention you can think of, and that’s a MASSIVE of money.

By the way, just in case anyone didn’t notice:

ICANNs memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Commerce expires in September 2009.

What happens when ICANN gets so much cash in the bank it has more dollars than a small country? It already has gone about publicizing its view that it should be independent of the US Department of Commerce. Is ICANN going to be “a nation” that controls the communications infrastructure of the world?

How much $$$ is it worth to turn the Internet into a train wreck?

The Hidden Dangers In ICANN’s New Proposal

Today, ICANN is going to vote on allowing domain names with non Latin characters. For example, Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic.

If this proposal goes ahead, its going to be very difficult to distinguish between domains in Latin characters and others such as Cyrillic. What does this mean? It’s going to:

a) increase phishing as organized crime is going to catch on that they can register ebay.com or bank.com using Cyrillic characters. Best of all, those domain names will not be registered because the character sets are different.

b) increase the number of dodgy, misleading domain names that are for sale on auction sites. We all know the good old trick of using an 0 (zero) as opposed to an O (oh). Introducing non Latin characters makes it all that more difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it entirely – I just think its going to introduce problems – many of which haven’t been thought about or widely discussed.

Will there be another mini landrush to grab all those trademarks using Cyrillic? Who knows. It also presents a problem when you show Cryillic in italics and non italics:

We will see what ICANN comes up with later today.

ICANN: Who Wants 5,800 Domain Names?

Two ICANN gTLD registrars have bitten the dust and ICANN wants to palm off their domains to another registrar.

Who Was De-accredited?

1. Best Registration Services, Inc. dba Bestregistrar.com (IANA ID 473). They had 5,400 gTLD registrations.

2. DotForce Corp. dba DotForce.com (IANA ID 461). While they only had 400 gTLD registrations, they were based in Korea, so there could be an opportunity for someone to play in the international space.

How Do I Get 5,800 Domains?

If you are an ICANN accredited registrar, you need to send an email to Mike at ICANN by no later than 23:00 UTC on Friday, 13 June 2008, and include the following info:

1. Registrar experience, including number of registrations and customers managed;
2. Availability of sufficient customer service staffing to timely respond to customer service requests during and shortly after the bulk transfer;
3. Ability to communicate with customers in languages other than English;
4. A list of the TLDs in which accredited and operational;
5. Experience with and knowledge of bulk-transfer procedures;
6. Documentation of procedures to resolve potential disputes of domain name control or registration rights;
7. Experience as a customer-facing / “retail” registrar business;
8. Experience with second-level IDNs in the com & net zones;
9. Ability to provide ICANN with regular status reports.

Of course, if your company name is Godaddy then you probably don’t need any of this. (See sarcasm). Incidentally, if you have not read Bob Parsons 16 Rules then be sure to check them out – excellent work. Go and order the poster.