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TechDomainer - Domain Name News

Well here we go again! The new domain get rich quick ploy. It is amazing to me that anyone with $185,000 and a good lawyer can apply to get their own domain name extension. That’s great if you hundreds of millions of dollars to build brand awareness in the years after receiving the approval. The only business that will benefit from this is ICANN.

If I remember correctly, ICANN is supposed to manage the system, not become an extremely wealthy organization. Each time you register a domain name, you pay an ICANN fee. I don’t mind paying a fee if the money is used properly built the new domain extension is nothing more than a ploy to make ICANN rich.

If this were a true benefit to the Internet than why have extensions such as .biz and travel worked? They have not been popular because businesses know that having their name or names in .com, .net or .org are industry bedrocks.

Anyone with a new extension will have to convince people that new extensions are a benefit to their business or efforts. Asking people to change from 25-years of .com to another extension is going to be almost impossible. In my opinion, this is going to be a land rush and when the concept slows down or fails, extension owners will be selling these extensions at a fraction of what they paid.

Again, sticky with 25-years of marketing for the popular three is a safer bet to me. As for ICANN, shame on you… work on things that make the DNS system more stable and safer. My guess is money will trump the common good though and I will watch your organization grow to be filthy rich while we pay for it.

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If there’s one thing that’s giving intense headaches to Rwanda, a country that’s determined to become the regional ICT hub by 2020, is the fact that its country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) name (.rw) is still in the hands of an individual — a foreign citizen to put it right. “It’s shameful that our country’s ccTLD is managed by a custodian,” says Justin Rugondihene, Director of Internet, Media and Postal Affairs at RURA.

Rwanda’s ccTLD was registered and reserved by Frédéric Grégoire, a European man, under his Switzerland-based company, NIC Congo – Interpoint, during the dawn of the dot-com bubble (1995-) when the World Wide Web hadn’t reached many African countries yet. He registered it through Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private organization that’s responsible for the coordination of the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers — addresses used by computers to know where to find each other. At the time, registration was first-come, first-served.

It was in 2005 that Rwanda, through then RITA (now RDB/IT), took the first initiatives to approach ICANN for a possible redelegation of the domain name to Rwanda. RITA, the government’s organization, wasn’t the right institution to pursue the process due to ICANN’s recommendations that the domain name must be managed by a private institution. That’s when RICTA, Rwanda Information and Communication Technology Association, was born; with mandates of redelegation and management of .rw domain.

RICTA followed the requests until ICANN arranged negotiations between both parties, RICTA and Frédéric Grégoire, but, according to RURA, the latter imposed a series of impediments that the country doesn’t have enough infrastructure and skills to manage the domain. And RICTA, because of lacking enough budget, was sometimes absent for the meetings (in Geneva, Switzerland). All this, among others, led the negotiations to becoming fruitless and later lying dormant.

They were resumed at the time of Ignace Gatare, then Minister in President’s Office in Charge of ICT, who said that for Rwanda, a country with goals of becoming the regional ICT hub (with no domain), the redelegation process must be a priority.

Rwanda is the only country that doesn’t manage its own top-level domain.

Minister Gatare brought together RDB/IT and RURA for a meeting about the redelegation and it was decided that RICTA, for the matter of consistence, must be supported financially so that the redelegation process runs faster. RURA provided seed money through its Universal Access Fund while RDB/IT gave offices at Telecom House. Everything — equipments, personnel, letters of recommendation from the minister, support of local ICT community… — has been done just to once again find Grégoire sticking to the same old claims.

Frédéric Grégoire gives the domain name to citizens of Rwanda completely free of charge. The process is strikingly straightforward and simple: Go to http://nic.rw, attach a copy of the passport (to prove your citizenship) on the email that was sent to you after filling the form earlier, and your .rw top-level domain name will be opened in less than 6 hours. No matter all that, the country is always concerned about the security and management of its own domain. After all, this is the property of Rwanda.

The good news is that Frédéric Grégoire has cooled down, agreed to re-attend the meetings and the bilateral discussions are running smoothly. ICANN has done technical evaluation and been satisfied by the correct expertise it found, and the application (for redelegation) to ICANN has been made in December 2011. It was later approved.

If all goes as expected, Rwanda will be handed over its top-level domain name not later than October 2012.

RICTA has sophisticated equipments, engineers, coordinators and professional personnel. This is the same institution that manages country-code second-level domain names (ccSLD) of .co.rw and .com.rw for commecial entities, .ac.rw for educational institutions, .org.rw for NGOs, .id.rw for individuals, .as.rw for associations and .gov.rw for the Government of Rwanda — it won’t be difficult for them to manage the .rw ccTLD.

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Norid, the .NO registry, is investigation a legal dispute over co.no, which is being used as a means of entering the Norwegian domain name market for foreigners, something they are currently unable to do under Norid’s terms and conditions.

The lawsuit about co.no concerns whether it in real terms has been illegally transferred, and whether the current use of the domain is in breach of the domain name policy for .NO. One of the important questions is whether the domain is used in a way that may cause confusion with official domains that use “co” at the second level such as co.uk and co.nz.

Co.no was added to the list of reserved and forbidden domain names in July 2009 and may therefore not be transferred to another holder the registry advised.

Norid’s rules state that registrants must either be a registered businesses or a professional or an individual registered in the Folkeregisteret, although individuals can register domains under priv.no.

The co.no domain is registered by the Norwegian company Elineweb AS, but is administered by the Dutch company CoDNS BV, that offer subdomains under co.no.

Norid claim they made inquiries about the domain after they received notification that co.no was intensively marketed as a way into the Norwegian domain market for foreign parties. The marketing also hinted that this had been cleared with Norid.

Norid have asked Elineweb AS about the establishment of the service who replied by bringing a lawsuit against Norid. A court-sponsored mediation was unsuccessful and the legal proceedings took place in Sør-Trøndelag district court on 24 and 25 May. The court’s decision will be ready by the end of June.

To register your .NO domain name, if eligible, check out EuroDNS here.

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FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warns a House committee that Google, iTunes, Facebook, and Netflix could face new international taxes.

(Credit: U.S. House of Representatives)

Democratic and Republican government officials warned this morning that a United Nations summit in December will lead to a virtual takeover of the Internet if proposals from China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are adopted.

It was a rare point of bipartisan agreement during an election year: a proposal that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described last year as handing the U.N. “international control of the Internet” must be stopped.

“These are terrible ideas,” Rep. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, said during a U.S. House of Representatives hearing. They could allow “governments to monitor and restrict content or impose economic costs upon international data flows,” added Ambassador Philip Verveer, a deputy assistant secretary of state.

Robert McDowell, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, elaborated by saying proposals foreign governments have pitched to him personally would “use international mandates to charge certain Web destinations on a ‘per-click’ basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe.”

“Google, iTunes, Facebook, and Netflix are mentioned most often as prime sources of funding,” McDowell said. Added Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat whose district includes Facebook’s headquarters, many countries “don’t share our view of the Internet and how it operates.”

What prompted today’s hearing — and a related congressional resolution (PDF) supporting a free and open Internet — is a Dubai summit that will be convened by the 193 members of the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union, which was chartered in 1865 to oversee international telegraph regulations.

Called the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT, the summit will review a set of telecommunications regulations established in 1988, when home computers used dial-up modems, the Internet was primarily a university network, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a mere 4 years old.

That review has created an opening for countries with a weak appreciation of free speech and civil liberties — with Russia and China in the lead — to propose the U.N. establish an new “information security” regime or create an alternative to ICANN, the nonprofit organization that has acted as the Internet’s de facto governance body since the late 1990s.

Unless the U.S. and its allies can block these proposals, they “just might break the Internet by subjecting it to an international regulatory regime designed for old-fashioned telephone service,” Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican said. (U.S. allies include Japan, Canada, Mexico, and many European countries.)

This is hardly the first time that the U.N. or its agencies wanted to expand their influence over the Internet. At a 2004 summit at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan criticized the current system through which Internet standards are set and domain names are handled, and delegates from Cuba, Ghana, Bolivia and Venezula objected to what they said was too much control of the process by the U.S. government and its allies.

Two years later, at another U.N. summit in Athens, ITU Secretary General Yoshio Utsumi criticized the current ICANN-dominated process, stressing that poorer nations are dissatisfied and are hoping to erode U.S. influence. “No matter what technical experts argue is the best system, no matter what self-serving justifications are made that this is the only possible way to do things, there are no systems or technologies that can eternally claim they are the best,” Utsumi said.

In 2008, CNET was the first to report that the ITU was quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous. A leaked document showed the trace-back mechanism was designed to be used by a government that “tries to identify the source of the negative articles” published by an anonymous author.

December’s meeting has alarmed even the Internet’s technologists. The Internet Society, which is the umbrella organization for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), sent a representative to today’s hearing.

ISOC’s Sally Wentworth, senior manager of public policy for the group, warned that the proposals to be considered are not “compatible” with the current open manner in which the Internet is managed.

Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol, and former chairman of ICANN, said the ITU meeting could lead to “top-down control dictated by governments” that could impact free expression, security, and other important issues..

“The open Internet has never been at a higher risk than it is now,” Cerf said.

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Last month, Google told Ad Age that it was poised to go on a web-domain buying spree. Today, thecompany announced in a blog post some of the specific top-level domains it is applying for and the general categories they fall into.

Among the top-level domains (the part of a web address to the right of the dot) Google is applying for are “.google,” “.docs,.” “.youtube,” and “.lol”, the blog post said. The company applied for more than 50 top-level domains in total, according to a person close to the situation. Each application carries an $185,000 application fee.

ICANN said it received more than 1,900 applications, which would bring in an estimated $350 million in application fees. In its blog post, Google lumps .YouTube into a category of domains meant to “improve user experience.”

As for .YouTube, the post says the domain “can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified.” Improving content discovery on YouTube is more important than ever for Google considering the millions of dollars YouTube is pouring into original programming.

The example Google gave of domains it is seeking related to its core business was”.docs,” while “.google” was an example of trademark-related domains. On the other hand, “.lol” is part of a bundle of domain applications that Google thinks “have interesting and creative potential.”

A Google spokesperson declined to provide more details on how the four domains would be used or which other top-level domains Google applied for.

ICANN says it will unveil all of the applications June 13. It’s not clear when these domains will hit the web. A batch of 500 applications will be looked at first, and it’s possible some of those accepted domains could start rolling out next year.

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(Karen Bleier – AFP/Getty Images)Google said Thursday it has applied for the Internet identifiers “.google,” “.docs” and “.youtube,” with the planned expansion of the Web’s domain name system.

Aside from the suffixes that reflect their brands and services, the search giant said in a blog post that it has also applied for a bunch of other domain names that “we think have interesting and creative potential.”

The rush for top level domain names comes amid a controversial decision in 2008 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to expand the Web’s suffixes. About half of all domain names are of the “.com” suffix, which was first introduced in 1984. Some Web experts say the Internet risks running out of Web addresses and have pushed for new top level domain names to be introduced by ICANN.

ICANN, based in Marina del Rey, Calif., closed applications for new domain names on Wednesday and said it plans to list new domain name applications on June 13.

Critics say the process of rolling out domain names has led to a legal and administrative nightmare for companies that are forced to apply for domain names to protect their trademarks. Some federal regulators have called on the multi-stakeholder organization, run by an international board, to pare down how many domain names are approved to clamp down on potential.

Google is first among the major U.S. companies to announce their applications. The search giant said it has been working with ICANN and will work with the non-governmental international group in its own quest for new domain names. It didn’t elaborate in the blog what other domain names it wants aside from “.lol.”

“We’re just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment,” Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf wrote in the blog. “By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverse — and perhaps shorter — signposts in cyberspace.”

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Those anxiously waiting to find out what new names may be introduced to the Internet’s domain name system will finally find out on June 13.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit group that manages the domain name system,unveiled a new timeline related to its controversial new domain name program late on Tuesday.

The program, launched in January, allows for the introduction of an unlimited number of new Internet addresses to compete with the 22 existing names such as .com and .org. The deadline for applying to operate a new domain name ends Wednesday evening.

When ICANN releases the list of proposed names, governments can begin raising objections to any domain name extensions that may conflict with geographic names or spark other concerns. The public also will have about two months to comment on the proposed names.

ICANN won’t begin evaluating the applications until July 12. The group will be looking to see if those who applied for the new extensions have the technical and financial means to operate an Internet address.

ICANN’s timeline was pushed back by a technical glitch that forced the group to shut down its application database in April for about a month.

“We’ve been disappointed with the delay and the technical problems so far, and hope that ICANN can stick to the timeline it has laid out,” Josh Bourne, president of the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, said in a statement. His group has been critical of the new domain name program and has called for greater protections for trademark holders and consumers.

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CUNA on Tuesday submitted an application for “.creditunion” to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which has been taking applications from individuals and groups to buy the rights to new “top-level domain names”, also known as the words to the right of the dot in an Internet address.

The new names can focus on a community of businesses or services, such as “.creditunion” or “.news”. Others may be used to market specific brands or products.

According to ICANN, thousands of applications were expected to be filed by this week when the organization closed the application process. Those approved would likely go live in 2013.

According to CUNA President/CEO Bill Cheney, CUNA’s move to reserve a credit union specific top-level domain, such as .creditunion, ensures this important identifier will stay in credit union hands and will allow the credit union movement to collectively take full advantage of the next stage of the Internet’s development and growth.

“Through the financial support of CUNA Mutual Group and CO-OP Financial Services, which made our application filing possible, this unique credit union top-level domain name, if approved, would be available to credit unions to supplement or replace their existing web names,” Cheney said. He estimated the annual cost for an individual credit union to obtain its own web address under a credit union specific top-level domain name to be $100 to $200 annually per credit union.

Earlier this year, a CUNA-sponsored survey among CEOs of CUNA-member credit unions, members of its Marketing and Technology councils and others, found that nearly 60% of credit union respondents said they were interested in adding a credit union specific domain name, such as “.creditunion” to their credit union’s Internet applications.

Additionally, CUNA said, nearly 70% indicated that, if the credit union system were to obtain a new top-level domain name such as “.creditunion”, they would obtain an additional domain name for their credit union or change their current domain to the new “.creditunion.”

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China on Tuesday started to allow individuals to apply for “.cn” and “.中国” (China) domain names, said the China Internet Network Information Center, the de facto administrator of the country’s domain names.

“Any individual or organization that can carry independent civil liabilities has the right to apply for the domain registration under the implementing rules,” said CNNIC in an announcement released on Monday afternoon.

CNNIC stopped accepting individual applications for the nation’s top-level domain names in December 2009 because a large number of them were used to distribute illegal material such as pornography and gambling sites.

The Ministry of Public Security has launched a series of campaigns targeting cyber crimes since then.

“Individuals will become the major drive for the development of websites in China,” Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Qi Lin, vice-director of CNNIC. “Reopening the domain name registration right to individuals is expected to boost the openness and uniqueness of the Internet.”

The nation had about 2.3 million websites by the end of 2011, up by 20 percent year-on-year, statistics from CNNIC showed.

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