Internet domain names
.combat
A messy and expensive row is brewing over new suffixes for internet addresses
InternationalJun 2nd 2012 edition
Jun 2nd 2012
IT IS the online equivalent of the land-grabs of 19th-century America. Earlier this year the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the outfit in charge of addresses in cyberspace, allowed applications for new suffixes. That would allow new domains, such as .microsoft, .paris and .music, to join the 22 existing handles, such as .com and .info.
This move has generated excitement, but also controversy. Security experts fret about fraud. Even if the new suffixes flop, brand owners complain they will have to spend millions buying domains they don't want, just to protect their online identities. The cost was pitched high to deter timewasters: $185,000 to ICANN to start with, an annual $25,000–and tens of thousands in lawyers' fees. But such "defensive registrations" will be costly for small businesses and charities—and a nuisance for big ones, who may have to register multiple domains. Esther Dyson, who used to chair ICANN's board, has compared the expansion to financial derivatives that add complexity without creating value. The price for the new names is less a result of the scarcity of online real estate than of greed among powerful domain registries, marketing agencies and lawyers.
ICANN is used to such accusations. Instead, it worries about a crippling wave of disputes, whether in its arbitration framework or in court. In early April it halted applications for new domains after discovering a technical glitch that may have allowed some applicants to view each other's confidential plans. The system was rebooted on May 22nd and the applications will probably be made public in mid-June. Lawsuits loom about that.
Indeed, ICANN has parked around a third of the $350m in application fees it has so far collected in a fund to pay for legal and other hiccups. Intellectual-property lawyers are notably ingenious. A big, unprecedented, ill-run, overpriced and technologically suspect expansion of domain names offers rich pickings.
The juiciest target, say several of them, is the way ICANN plans to process applications 500 at a time, with each bundle taking perhaps six months. Assuming six batches (more than 2,000 are already in), the first will be up and running two to three years before the last ones are. Rivals can claim unfairness.
All fingers and thumbs
ICANN's solution is "digital archery": it sets a time, everyone clicks, and the closest to the mark are the winners. Many agree with the Intellectual Property Constituency, a lobby group for name-owners, that this is "complex, untried and subject to gaming". Some applicants are using tricks to get to the front of the queue. For $25,000 pool.com, a domain-auction company, will try to get its clients in the first batch (with a partial refund if it fails). If disputes bog the process down, later batches could be pushed back further, making things even worse.
Who gets what may mean more battles. No one will challenge Disney for .disney, but what about .disneyexperience? Such questions remains unclear despite more than 300 pages of guidelines, says Dan Jaffe of the Association of National Advertisers. Jeff Duke, general counsel at Zippo, a lighter-maker, says the firm already spends $3m a year "playing whack-a-mole" with claim-jumpers—a tidy sum for a small manufacturer, albeit one with a big brand. The expansion will "multiply our headaches", he predicts. Zippo will apply for .zippo, even though "we don't have any great plans for it." He sees possible battles ahead with impostors using Zippo's name, or variants of it, with .shop or .lighter. Some 90% of brand-owners' applications are driven by anxiety, not optimism, says Josh Bourne of the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, an industry group.
Companies with names that are commonly used by others, such as Delta and United, could struggle to secure the domains they want. Some will be decided in auctions, the last resort of the ICANN process, others possibly in court. Where two companies have similar names, say UBS (a bank) and UPS (a courier), an ICANN panel will use judgment and algorithms to decide whether approving both domains would cause confusion. Some are sure to challenge its rulings.
The battles will be fiercest over the most popular generic suffixes—such as .art, .radio, .music and .web. Some bidders have sought trademark protection in the hope of scaring off rivals. Applications are pending in America for, among other suffixes, .art, .shop, .safe, .wedding, .franchise, .food and .bank, lodged by both individuals and companies.
An aggressive San Francisco law firm, Rodenbaugh Law, has filed 15 internet-suffix applications with ICANN.* America's trademark office generally rejects such applications on the ground that they are purely descriptive. But some appear to have slipped through. Several cases are in court or heading there. Claiming that the trademark office gave it sole rights for its use, Planet.Eco, a small firm, is suing two others that want the .eco string.
Whether or not such cases are real or try-ons, the potential for disruption is clear. The .eco case has been rumbling on for over two years. It does not help that Europe approves applications to register proprietary internet domains more readily than America does. "Trademarks are country-specific, domains unique. The two will never match up exactly," says Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's chief executive.
J. Scott Evans, a lawyer with Yahoo!, points to another potential conflict: when a company applies for a term that is generic to its industry. If a big technology firm bid successfully for, say, .cloud, consumers might come to associate cloud computing with that company above others. Rivals might respond with antitrust suits.
Mr Beckstrom plays down the risk of a legal quagmire and says the roll-out has been wrapped in "an extremely rich set of protections". These include newly streamlined vetting and dispute arbitration. (This newspaper's sister company, the Economist Intelligence Unit, has been hired to help.) But much remains unclear. Lawyers seem unsure what would constitute the "blatant" abuse that would bring fast-track arbitration, or what a much-trumpeted new clearing house for trademarks will do.
ICANN's failure to keep bids confidential has dented faith in its ability to manage disputes. But bigger worries predate the glitch, not least the ham-fisted handling of quarrels over existing domains.
Conceived as a voluntary option for pornographic sites, .xxx, for example, was rejected three times before finally being approved by ICANN last year. Respectable outfits had to buy .xxx sites to stop others abusing them. This has sometimes proved tricky. Meetup, a do-gooding network, tried to buy meetup.xxx to preserve its good name. But the address was on a "premium list" and due for auction—in which Meetup could not bid because it is not part of the "adult community".
ICANN also botched the policing of .jobs, supposedly for specialist human-resource managers only. When the firm running the domain opened it to other employment firms in the hope of perking up sales, ICANN failed to take the resulting wave of complaints seriously. If the body cannot manage the 22 suffixes that it already oversees, what hope does it have with 100 times as many?
A serious mess around the expansion will play into the hands of the repressive governments that want control of the internet's naming system to be handed to the UN's International Telecommunication Union. All the squabbling parties agree that though ICANN may be flawed, the alternative would be much worse.
*Rodenbaugh Law has filed 15 internet-suffix applications with ICANN, not with America's trademark office, as this piece originally reported
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline ".combat"
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