New and Old Top Level Domain Names (TLDs)

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Joe Alagna

I’ve had an interest in history for many years, especially in the business world.  I collect old books about selling and marketing and I think I have an above average knowledge of the history behind modern sales methods and modern marketing.

Another area that I’ve studied is the Domain Name System (DNS) and I enjoy seeking out the roots behind  ideas, especially when it is relevant to the times.  I dug this piece out of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comment (RFC) archives today and felt that it is especially so.

I never met Jon Postel, but I have quoted him often in my work and we all owe him our gratitude for being an ambassador to the world for the domain name system. Mr. Postel took the domain name system to a new level in 1996 when he authored this RFC about International country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs).  Today, ICANN continues that tradition by opening up TLDs to a new level of freedom and commercialism.  Opinions continue to vary about the wisdom of pushing this envelope but I think that ultimately it will be proven for more good than harm.

Some of you will enjoy this small part of Internet history…

New Registries and iTLDs               June 1996

Two points must be kept in mind: (a) domain names are and must be unique, and (b) trademarked names are not necessarily unique (and the are many examples of non-unique trademarks).

There are no international trademarks.  There is no official
international registry of world wide trademarks.  Trademarks
may be registered per country (and in the United States (at
least) per State).  The World Intellectual Property
Organization offers an international arbitration service on
such matters.

There are “strong” trademarks that are registered in many
countries and are vigorously defended.  These may come close to
being unique.  There are many “not so strong” trademarks that
may be regional or business sector specific (for example,
United Air Lines and United Van Lines, or the Acme Brick
Company and the Acme Electric Corporation)).

There are two conflicting goals of different trademark holders
with respect to domain names: (a) to protect their trademarks
against infringement, and (2) to have access to the domain name system to use their trademarks in a domain name.

Trademark infringement is the use of a trademarked name in a
way that may confuse the consumer about the source or quality
of a product or service.  For strong trademarks there may also
be infringement if the use of a trademarked name dilutes the
value of the trademark.

Holders of strong trademarks want to control every use of their
trademark.  These people would say it is pointless to create
additional top level domains since they will acquire, reserve,
and otherwise protect their trademarked name in every top-level domain so no new users will get access to domain names this way, and besides you are just making more work for the lawyers. While these holders of strong trademarks might not actually acquire their names in all the possible top-level domains (no extra income to the registries), they probably would take steps to stop any infringement thus making those name unavailable to anyone else (extra income to the lawyers).

Holders of not so strong trademarks want the ability to use
their trademarked name in a domain name while some other holder
of the same mark for a different purpose also can use their
trademarked name in a domain name.  These people would say it is essential to create additional top-level domains to permit
fair access to domain names by holders of not so strong
trademarks.

I would suggest that the number of not so strong trademarks far
exceeds the number of strong trademarks and that the domain
name system should provide for the needs of the many rather
than protecting the privileges of the few.  Thus new top-level
domains should be created.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel

http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-postel-iana-itld-admin-01.txt

Posted in Domain Names, Inspiration, New Top Level Domains, Trademarks | Comments Off on New and Old Top Level Domain Names (TLDs)

ICANN To Use “Digital Archery” Method for Secondary Batching in New TLDs

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Joe Alagna

ICANN announced today that since they received over 500 applications they are triggering the use of “Digital Archery” as part of the batching of applications. The last report I saw stated that there were 839 applicants.

It had been stated that they weren’t going to use a first come, first served method and also that they didn’t want for it to be a lottery of any kind.

I had been struggling for some time to understand why what they were going to do. Now that things have played out I can see some of the reasons they didn’t want to do those things. If it were first come, first served, there wouldn’t have been a fair way to deal with same string applications that came in later. If it had been a pick from the hat, it could have been judged an illegal lottery. Both of those methods have problems.

To put it as simply as possible, this method first gives applicants a way to opt out of the digital archery method if time isn’t important to them. Then involves having the remaining applicants participate in process where they…

  1. select a time date in the future
  2. try to ping a server as close to that time as possible

The differences in time they picked and the time they pinged the server to match that initial pick (regardless of before or after) are then compared and ranked. Then any matching strings are grouped with the winners regardless of how they did in the competition so they can be judged together. There is also a locational element to make it fair for applicants from around the globe.

It seems like a game to me, but I guess business can be like a game very often can’t it?

You may review the announcement here:

www.icann.org/en/groups/board/documents/resolutions-28mar12-en.htm

Ok,

This makes it clearer…

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/tas/batching-basics

I can’t believe it! It’s really like playing darts (at least part of it)!

LOL

Geographic regions explained more here…

http://archive.icann.org/en/meetings/montreal/geo-regions-topic.htm

Here is a quote directly from the ICANN announcement:

The batching selection process determines how applications will be divided into batches and prioritized for evaluation analysis. Conceptually, the batching selection process is relatively straightforward and includes the following four steps:

  1. Applicants register in an online batching system to select their batching preference (i.e., earliest or any batch) and select a target date and time (e.g., Target Date: 10 May 2012 and Target Time: 12:00:00 UTC);
  2. Applicants re-enter the online batching system and generate a message that is sent from their computer/system to the online batching system. The online batching system records the date and time the applicant’s message is received. (e.g., Message Received Date: 10 May 2012 and Message Received Time: 12:00:01);
  3. The system calculates the time variance between the applicant’s Target Date/Time from step 1 and the Message Received Date/Time from step 2. This time variance is known as the applicant’s “secondary timestamp” Based on the example in steps 1 and 2 above the secondary timestamp is 1 second. The closer to zero the secondary timestamp is the more likely the application will be processed in the earliest batch, assuming the applicant has opted in to the earliest batch.
  4. The batching selection process then combines the applicant’s batching preference (i.e., earliest or any batch), the “secondary timestamp” (e.g., 1 second), and the geographic region to determine the batch/processing order for the specific application.
Posted in Domain Name News, Domain Names, ICANN, New Top Level Domains, Registries | Comments Off on ICANN To Use “Digital Archery” Method for Secondary Batching in New TLDs

ICANN Adds 266 New Gtld Applicants In A Week

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Joe Alagna

historyICANN has revealed that it now has 556 registered users in its Top-Level Domain Application System, up from 290 just a week ago.

Each TAS account can be used to apply for 49 new gTLDs (not 50 as previously reported), so we’re looking at anywhere from 0 to 27,244 new gTLD applications…

Read the story… | Source: Domain Incite | Date posted: 3/25/2012

Kevin Murphy of Domain Incite reported today that ICANN now has 566 registered users in their TLD Application System (TAS).  Each one of those applicants has the right to add as many as 50 TLDs so that means there could be as many as 27,800 new TLDs entered.  That scenario is highly unlikely but I think we can now assume that the higher estimates were more accurate.  I’ve always felt that we would end up with somewhere in the range of about 1500 but it could be much higher.  There are still three or four more days to get registered in TAS (although it is prudent to get registered earlier rather than waiting till the last minute).  History is being made right now.  Good or bad, it’s going to be very interesting to see how this pans out over the next few years.

Posted in Domain Name News, Domain Names, ICANN, New Top Level Domains | Comments Off on ICANN Adds 266 New Gtld Applicants In A Week

JAS Global Advisors To Be One Of Three Independent Evaluators

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Joe Alagna

JAS Global Advisors LogoA Chicago company, JAS Global Advisors, is playing a key behind-the-scenes role in an unprecedented expansion of Internet domain names – the web’s equivalent of real-estate addresses dominated by .com, .gov, .org and .edu.

The expansion will open the way for new domain names ending in just about any word imaginable – from .chicago for people looking to identify themselves as Chicagoans, to .jeans to .security to .YourNameGoesHere.

As a March 29 deadline nears for applications for the new domain names, JAS Global Advisors, headed by international online security expert Jeff Schmidt, will be one of three companies nationwide that will evaluate applicants for their technical and financial qualifications…

Read the story… | Source: Sun Times | Date posted: 3/24/2012

Note from Joe:

ICANN is using independent evaluators to score new TLD applications. This article identifies one of those evaluators. I typically am an ICANN fan but I’m a little concerned when an evaluator’s site seems out of date and has a broken blog link. These are red flags for any website; indicating that a company is not paying attention or not aware of online best practices.

If you visit JAS Global Advisors’s web site, their blog link is broken and their copyright date is 2011 three months into 2012. There’s also no privacy policy on the site. These are all missing best practices.

I hope they do better and show more sophistication in their judgement of applicants who wish to run TLDs than they show running their own site. Maybe this is a case of the shoemaker whose kids have no shoes?

UPDATE:

I received a note from JSA Advisors and, to be fair wanted to post it here…

In your 24-March blog entry, you fairly pointed-out that our blog had periods of downtime over the weekend. Wanted to assure you that this was
a planned, temporary, and short-term issue as we prepare for larger web enhancements scheduled for mid-summer. Using Pingdom 3rd party
monitoring, we publish uptime stats at http://status.jasadvisors.com dating back to Sep 2009 (for https). You can see that we’ve been 100%
available for the vast, vast majority of the past 2.5 years. I’d also like to point-out that jasadvisors.com was one of the first fully validatable DNSSEC-signed zones in .com. Our DS records appeared in .com on 31-March 2011, the same day .com’s DS records were published in the root. We do eat (and enjoy!) our own proverbial dog food!

Thank you,

Jeff Schmidt, CEO, JAS Global Advisors LLC

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