insight 

Today saw the launch of .tel, a domain intended to act as a repository for contact data and an information sharing platform, rather than as an address for a web site.

Owners of .tel domains will be able to populate them with their contact details, such as their phone numbers, email addresses or GPS data and store this information directly into the Domain Name System.  The data is then displayed in a standard way for anyone visiting the .tel address, no matter what browser or device they are using.

Owners of .tel domains will be able to manage their contact details via a simple dashboard and include as much or as little information as they want to.

The “sunrise” phase for trademark owners to get domains related to their brands begins today, followed by a “landrush” phase open to anyone starting on 3 February 2009. The final general availability phase starts on 24 March 2009 when the domain will be open to all comers.

There will be a number of factors that have an impact on the success of .tel, most importantly how businesses react to this new top level domain (TLD).  Businesses will need to be aware of the potential uses of .tel and how it can work for them.  They should have a clear and robust domain name strategy in place, so that when new TLDs such as these (and there may be potentially many more coming with the new ICANN process for allocating TLDs opening up next year) come onto the market they are ready for them.

As can be seen from data within our recent domain name industry report the challenge for new top level domains is to serve a particular market need, increasing their usage over time and thus sustaining long-term popularity.  For instance, our report revealed that 81% of UK SMEs choose .uk as their primary web address and consumers choose to visit a .uk site because it shows a business is local and trusted. It will be interesting to track the success of .tel.

With the US election finally reaching its conclusion today, it was interesting to read an article in the New York Times recently about domain name trends for the two presidential candidates.  Technology media company IDG used DomainTools to query for domains and discovered that there were 2,357 domains registered for Barack Obama and 1,431 domains for John McCain.  When they expanded the query to domains with either “Obama” or “McCain” included in them, the results were 11,089 for Obama and 5,378 for McCain.

Digging deeper into the various domains registered revealed that there was a mixture of sites for and against each of the candidates, as well as their running mates.  Some of the domains were likely to have been registered or run by the campaigns themselves, in an effort to control the message.  Among the others, not run by the campaigns of either candidate there are a variety of sites including clear expressions of support or opposition; attempts at political satire; entrepreneurial sites selling items and inappropriate domains.

There’s lots more detail and various trend analysis available of web traffic over at Network World, which sheds a little more light on how the campaign went, much of which is of course redundant in the light of today’s result.  However, it does, of course, demonstrate the ever increasing usage of the Internet and the impact of web 2.0 in such campaigns. It also gives some pointers for brand managers (lets face it that’s what these campaigns are about) to a range of tools useful for analysing web site and domain name trends.

I was at the Centr meeting recently where a representative of JPRS, the registry for .jp (Japan) gave a presentation on the increased usage of search boxes in advertising in Japan instead of a URL.  Apparently some recent research showed that more than 35% of adverts in Japan carry an image of a search box with the appropriate search terms in the place of a URL.

I’ve started to notice advertisers occasionally doing something similar in the UK.  Here they tend to use the words “Search for” and then whatever the term is.

I guess that the advertisers are either very confident that their sites will come up as the number one on the list of responses, or they have an arrangement with the search companies to ensure it does.  There does seem to be some suggestion that this may be the case.

One of the key reasons for this practice in Japan, would appear to be that this gets around the issue of the requirement for URLs in Japan to contain both the local Japanese script characters and the latin characters .jp.  Maybe once IDNs are introduced at the root this trend will reverse?

It’s an interesting trend and we shall be monitoring whether this takes off in greater numbers here, and ultimately its impact on the domain name market.

I’m asked all the time what I think is a good idea for a TLD.   The answer depends on how you judge success.  If it’s high volumes of registrations and huge profits you’re after then I’m not sure there is a “good idea” any more, except of course running the root registry, which could be more successful, by those criteria, than any registry before.

The possible route to take is looking at entirely new ideas for TLDs, in the same way that .tel is attempting something completely new.   So in that spirit here is my idea for a completely different TLD that I’ve been shamelessly promoting for the last year.  Not do anything with, you understand, but to get people to think “outside the box” on domains names, because that it where the future may well lie.

My idea then is very similar indeed to TinyURL.  What you register is not a domain, but a URL, which gets translated into a short code and it is that short code that then becomes the domain name.  So you would register the URL “http://blog.nominet.org.uk/insight/2008/06/icann-paris-new-gtlds/” and get given the domain name 6hgntn.l in return.

The domain name would not be a delegation though, just a URL redirection on my huge specially written webserver (easy to do).  You might be able to choose from a variety of redirection techniques and you may be charged differently depending on how much data you allow the registry to keep.  If you let them keep everything then it might even be free.

If you wanted to choose the domain for the redirection, instead of having one assigned then that would certainly cost a lot more, but then the registry would have to do dispute resolution and all that so maybe it is not worth selling these.

So, why .l?  Well obviously, because it is so short and actually any one character TLD will do, l for link or u for URL or r for redirection, it doesn’t really matter.  Some might even say this is the downfall of .mobi, at four letters for the TLD it is three letter too long and should really be just .m.

The issue that ICANN community process has been least able to tackle is that of access vs privacy in the WHOIS databases of Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). On the one side you have registrants, both individuals and organisations who want to maintain privacy for some very sound reasons. If you ran a web site offering abortion advice from a country where that was illegal then you would register in a gTLD, not the local country code and also want some degree of protection of your identity.

On the other side you have law enforcement who regard WHOIS, quite genuinely, as a very important tool in fighting online crime. Obviously that means that either there are a lot of dumb criminals who use their real identities to register domains or, more charitably perhaps, the protections in place to stop fake registration data do actually work.

This side is joined by the formidable Intellectual Property Community for whom domains names and the Internet are a huge problem of detection and enforcement. They, like law enforcement, want free and unfettered access to all WHOIS data.

Stalemate

The current position at ICANN is stalemate. Views are becoming so entrenched that the most recent discussion was on whether or not to commission more research into the problem, with some groups saying quite vehemently that enough research had been done over the years so no more was needed!

Jurisdiction

If we just concentrate on the issue of access for law enforcement you should hopefully understand just how complex and potentially intractable this problem is.

In the UK our policy is pretty straightforward. If you are a UK law enforcement agency and you ask for the data then we give it, even if the registrant has opted for privacy in the WHOIS. If you are a law enforcement agency outside of the UK then you must contact one inside the UK and ask them to ask us. So we deal exclusively with law enforcement agencies in our local jurisdiction.

In the gTLDs however the problem is much more complex. Let’s say PIR were to adopt the same policy and only deal with US agencies, since that is where they are based. Can you really imagine other countries being happy at asking US law enforcement agencies for data from what is supposedly a global domain name? Can you even imagine Iranian or Cuban law enforcement agencies asking or receiving an answer?

So this is altogether a global problem, in a world where mechanisms for establishing credentials over long distances are, at best, informal.

This is why one camp just wants it freely accessible, without limits and with all the data in it checked regularly. That way their access problem is simplified. Of course those who care about privacy would never agree to that.

There was a lot happening in the DNSSEC world at this ICANN, far more than any other forum and far more than previous ICANN meetings.

Signing .org

Public Internet Registry (PIR) announced their intention to sign .org, with the help of their registry partner, Afilias. This will be the first big Top Level Domain (TLD) to sign. The best bit is the reasons they give for doing are exactly the right reasons - they want to make the Internet a safer place by doing the right thing and signing .org.

Implementation is a while off but all the pre-work has been done and the ICANN board voted to give PIR the go-ahead. This is a brave step forward from the progressive CEO of PIR, Alexa Raad, and we wish them all the best.

IANA preparations and the new TAR

IANA announced their plans for a Trust Anchor Repository (TAR) as an interim measure until the root is signed. This will be a web site that us TLDs can populate through our normal processes with our keys. Anyone ISP or business who wants to use DNSSEC on the nameservers now has only the one place to visit to get keys rather than going to lots of different places.

This will certainly make life easier but it is still a poor second to signing the root. That unfortunately is out of IANA’s hands otherwise they would have done it by now, they have a well designed and well built (we’ve audited it) infrastructure in place to do it when they get the go ahead.

One thing IANA have been clear about is that they do not want any API access to the TAR. They are clear that this will develop into a competing technology to signing the root and almost everyone knows that is the best way forward.

US Government internal mandate

I haven’t checked this independently but I’ve been told that some departments of the US Government are going to mandate the use of DNSSEC internally. I’ve no idea how this will work but it shows a genuine recognition of the value of DNSSEC that I hope manufacturers take note of.

Resistance is fading

As knowledge and understanding of DNSSEC and the benefits it brings are spreading, the resistance amongst it from registries is fading. There are two public refuseniks but even then the picture is different depending on which part of the organisation you talk two.

The first is DENIC (.de) who are in the unenviable position of having a zone with more than just nameservers in it, they also have direct customer data of the type normally only seen on registrar nameservers. This means that DENIC have no choice but to sign their whole zone and cannot take advantage of the latest revision to DNSSEC that allows the rest of us to only sign those domains that are actually using DNSSEC. For us that means a gradual and low impact implementation of DNSSEC, but for DENIC it means the kind of big bang implementation us larger TLDs have all been frightened of.

The second, and most recent dissident, is apparently Verisign. Their CTO Ken Silva has been quoted in the media as saying that the urgency for DNSSEC is not there any more. I’ve no idea what is driving that, but I suspect it is the cost and complexity of adding DNSSEC support to their proprietary nameserver cluster. There is no doubt that bandwidth costs will increase for TLDs because the size of the response we are giving is increasing dramatically. But then with the likely gradual increase in DNSSEC takeup I expect this to be naturally absorbed in our rolling upgrade programme.

What this statement does do though is throw the spotlight on their contract with the US Department of Commerce (USDoC) to be the Root Zone Maintainer (RZM). It sits a bit uneasily when the rest of us are all pushing for the root to be signed, IANA are prepared and yet Verisign is going soft on the whole idea.

The exit plan

It might be more accurate to describe this as a lack of an exit plan. It is becoming clear that there is no way currently for a zone to signal that it intends to stop signing itself. If it just does so without such a mechanism then any validators operating in strict DNSSEC mode (nobody would do this just yet) would decide that all replies from that zone were bogus, effectively losing contact with it. Thankfully this is just a theoretical risk for now and our DNSSEC expert, Roy Arends, already has a solution so this should not take long to spread amongst implementors.

So, overall a lot is happening in the push for a secure DNS. All we need now is the root signed!

The most reported news from this ICANN meeting was the apparent go ahead for many new Top Level Domains (TLDs) to be bid for. Some of us here have even been on the new media commenting on it. But as with many of these things the devil is in the detail, so here is some more in depth explanation of this decision.

The background

ICANN is split into various constituencies and all of the work on this has been within the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) the consitutuency that represent registries of Global TLDs (gTLDs) and Sponsored TLDs (sTLDs), registrars and the business community including the powerful intellectual property community. They were asked by ICANN to come up with a policy for how more TLDs might be allowed into the root, which they duly have done. Other than two policy guidelines that had dissenting views, this was largely a full consensus decision. First hurdle crossed.

There was also an investigation into whether or not there were any technical issues with adding many more domains to the root. This concluded that there weren’ t any such issues. Second hurdle crossed.

Finally ICANN itself evaluated the GNSO policy to determine whether or not it is implementable. Not to actually create the implementation plan but to check carefully for any hidden showstoppers in the details. This they did at the cost of $10 million, as reported by their CEO Paul Twomey, and concluded that the policy was indeed implementable.

The decision ICANN actually took

So with all those pre-conditions met the ICANN board voted to ask the executive to go away and come up with an implementation plan, accepting the principle that there is no reason why there cannot be many more names added to the root.

This is going to take some months and may well cost another $10 million to do.

However, during the vote some ICANN board members raised strong concerns with two of the policy guidelines (the same ones that had dissenting views) and there was general agreement that they needed to see how these would be handled in the implementation plan, before the concerns were allayed.

The details of the policy and the two contentious guidelines

The one thing ICANN wants to avoid is having to make judgements on whether or not a new TLD is a “good thing”. They wanted a policy that took much of the decision away from them into a community driven process. Of course, quite what the community is for any new TLD, is still to be decided, but the principle is there.

The policy the’ve got does that with these two exceptions:

• Strings must not be contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law. This obviously is completely open to interpretation and interpretations vary wildly by country. I have no idea how ICANN is going to get a workable solution to this even with the long list of potentially applicable internationally laws.
• An application will be rejected if an expert panel determines that there is substantial opposition to it from a significant portion of the community to which the string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted. Again this is highly subjective in so many different ways. What is substantial? What is a significant portion? And what is the applicable community?

So we wait with anticipation the implementation plan. I’m glad I’m not writing it.

What kind of new gTLDs might we see?

This is the question that everyone is asking and anything said here is purely speculation. Albeit speculation based on the ideas that have been circulating at ICANN, but speculation nonetheless.

1. Generic wordsThese are popular in any TLD, plain generics like colours, animals, vegetables, emotions and so on, mainly because they have such a widespread usage.
2. Regional names that cannot be applied for through the ccTLD process So this might include .sco or .cym. There is already an established precedent for this in .cat for the Catalan language and culture.
3. Global brands I’m writing the application for .nominet as we speak … no hang on … erm …
4. Common word endings For example .tion should get you around 3,000 cool domain names like litiga.tion or rejec.tion. Domains names can be fun and creative.

Before you get carried away the application fee could well be $100,000 and non-refundable, based on previous processes. Furthermore ICANN may have a cunning plan for TLDs where there is more than one applicant - they have already selected an auction provider to build the necessary system to auction the domains. Interestingly though, this is by no means fully decided and is another element that has to go into the implementation plan for further approval.

How many will there be?

This is the most interesing bit and one where I think ICANN has not looked far enough into the future. Currently the application cost is expected to be $100,000, to recoup the $10 million spent so far on this, and the millions more to go. But then what happens?

The root is the ultimate registry, the ultimate domain to have, so the demand is going to be enormous. the policy is designed not to judge except in the very edge cases and so the only thing that will stop a proliferation of names in the root is the price. ICANN has no other lever to hold back the flood because it has specifically not given itself one in this whole policy and process.

So when the initial outlay is recouped and ICANN has made say another $50 million from new applications, will it really be able to sustain such a high price? Granted the assessment for many of the initial applications will be high, possibly covering most of the fee, but soon standard questions, standard answers and a much cheaper process cost will appear. This will then leave ICANN open to a huge pressure to reduce the price to a cost-recovery level, and if does that then the floodgates open and we could get millions of registrations in the root.

That leaves us moving from a distributed, resilient, multi-level hierarchy, towards a concentrated, flat and vulnerable root. It’s all a question of numbers.

But will they be a success?

The problem in answering this has been the apparent ’success’ of .com. Yes it’s huge and yes it is vastly profitable but both of those attributes may not be the best thing for the Internet. The whole Domain Name System is designed to be distributed and putting too many names under one TLD, both as an absolute and as a proportion of the whole, goes against that. Furthermore is sets an unrealistic standard for growth and absolute size that new TLDs are highly unlikely to achieve. China (.cn) and India (.in) will probably exceed .com adding to the imbalance.

So the new TLDs should really be judged by how well they are adopted by their target community (where they have one), how stable they are, and what quality they bring to the market. If this happens then the whole Internet will benefit.

Note: Edited the bit about the application fee as Phil pointed out this had not been confirmed one way or the other.

The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) of ICANN have reported the results of their investigation into Domain Name Front Running (DNFR).  The conclusion, after a pretty thorough analysis, concurs with our findings that there are no provable cases of DNFR.  It also highlights the major issue that there is widespread confusion amongst registrants as to how the domain name industry works and their expectations are very different from reality.

One other very interesting part of the report is the figures given for the volumes of certain lookups done in the .com and .net.  For example in July 2007 there were 3.9 billion  WHOIS lookups for .com and .net !

News that a company has recently paid a record £560,000 for the domain name cruises.co.uk indicates that the secondary market for .uk domain names is still strong.

Cruise.co.uk decided to pay the large sum to a German travel company for the plural version of the domain name in order to improve their chances of being the first port of call for web users searching for cruise holidays.

What’s interesting is that being the registrant of cruise.co.uk, the purchaser has a clear idea of the potential value of the domain name to their business. They were therefore in a good position to determine what was a fair price as opposed to speculating about potential future revenues.

It should also be noted, of course, that we can’t be sure whether this is actually the highest price paid for a .co.uk domain name, as private sales happen regularly and not everyone is as open as this about how much they have paid.

Yesterday ICANN announced that they are proposing to remove their five-day ‘Add Grace Period’ which previously allowed registrars to rectify errors when registering new domain names without cost. Due to serial abuse of this facility by speculators testing the profitability of domain names through advertising revenues, ICANN will instead debit the payment as soon as the domain name is registered.

Although this change will clearly deter tasters from registering high volumes of domains speculatively, it will also make the process of registering less flexible for registrars. It remains to be seen exactly how the new process will work, but it is probably safe to assume that if the registrar has to pay these costs upfront they will ultimately be passed to their customers.

When we took steps against domain tasting in August 2006, we decided to introduce limits on the number of domains a registrar could delete. Our limit for deletions to rectify spelling errors etc is five domains or 5% of the total number of domains registered but not yet invoiced (whichever is higher) but the limit for practices such as domain tasting is zero, and the limits form part of our registrar agreement, the formal contract that all our registrars sign up to. We believe this solution is neater, as it effectively counters the practice of domain tasting but at the same time allows some flexibility for registrars where genuine errors have occurred.

In a separate move, Google announced last week that they will start to monitor domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within the current five-day grace period, and exclude them from their AdSense program. Such a move would clearly strike at the heart of the problem. If tasters stop receiving revenues for pay-per-click ads associated with the domains they are testing, they will soon stop trying.

Both proposals have their merits, and it is encouraging to see that concerted efforts are being made from various sectors within the industry that could herald the beginning of the end of this practice.