The Christmas Newsletter
The team at Com Laude wish you a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year. We are grateful for your trust in us over the past 12 months and look forward to another successful year working with you in 2024.
We have a rota of team members who will be available across the Festive Season to provide you with assistance. Please send your urgent requests to [email protected] as this is the email box which the team providing cover will be checking and don't forget to copy in your Domain Strategists.
We will also continue to provide 24/7 monitoring of our services and servers and emergency cover in the event that you have a critical requirement outside of our "follow the sun" office hours.
Please call our emergency helpline on one of the following numbers in such circumstances - UK: +44 (0) 20 82313 5922, USA: +1 2064877683.
The Year Ahead - a message from our leaders
It has always surprised us that the path of internet innovation has mostly meandered past the domain name system. Social media, content streaming, the metaverse, AI, have arrived bringing possibilities and problems, hype and hope.
In our narrow, more predictable world of Corporate Domain Name Management and Enforcement a domain remains a signpost to authentic content, trusted by internet users. We’ve faced the challenge of new registries, Internationalised Domains (in scripts other than Ascii), a rising tide of abuse and more recently blockchain domains, to name but a few.
We don’t expect the rate of change in 2024 to be very different though we anticipate the gradual permeation of AI into our day-to-day operations. Indeed, we are harnessing AI ourselves as you can see from the roll-out of our impressive “Com Laude Intelligence” system which provides “Always On” actionable analysis into your portfolios, of real commercial value.
Next year we expect that ICANN, which is important because it controls the technical standards of the domain name system and keeps it inter-operable, beyond the reach of any autocratic government, will advance Round Two of the new gTLD program.?2024 might also be the year when Blocking emerges as a viable alternative to defensive registration. The Brand Safety Alliance – an alliance of GoDaddy and Identity Digital will be launching its GlobalBlock early next year.?
We always value hearing from you on issues of importance so please continue to reach out. We are here to help.
领英推荐
With our best wishes,
The Year Behind Us
For those of us dedicated to domain name management, 2023 was a curious year. It drifted past undramatically for the most part but with the occasional dramatic turn.
After a quiet summer, ICANN shook itself awake again and in the autumn announced the launch of the Registration Data Request Service (RDRS). This is a free, global service designed to help individuals and entities with a legitimate interest, such as law enforcement, brand owners and their attorneys, to access domain registrant information that has been redacted since the advent of the GDPR and other personal data protection laws.
The RDRS will connect accredited requestors with participating registrars. Benefits include the simplification of a request for data via one standardised form and the easier, more rapid identification of registrars: rather than searching yourself, the service will do it for you. But there are significant drawbacks: it only covers gTLDs, not ccTLDs, not all registrars are participating and there is no guarantee of disclosure of data. Registrars decide on a case by case basis.
The irresistible rise of blockchain domains has continued, though at a slower pace following the crypto crash of late 2022. At every ICANN meeting Unstoppable Domains and representatives from Ethereum pop up, explaining how their decentralised Web3 domains are a viable alternative to Web2 domains. Estimates vary, but we think there are close to 10 million registered now. Cries to regulate blockchain domains miss the very essence of them: no-one is in charge and registrants are largely anonymous. We’ve continued to help our clients secure their key brands as a protective measure. There is a very real threat that a blockchain domain applied to a crypto wallet abusively registered in the name of a brand can be used to defraud internet users.
WIPO has entered into an agreement to provide UDRP-lite services for .HNS domains built on the Handshake blockchain registered only through the Namecheap registrar. It is a start but it is probably not a model that can be expanded because it is focussed so narrowly and transfers are impossible. In November 2023, Andrew Lothian, one of our Dispute specialists played a leading role in WIPO’s Update on Precedent and Practice in Geneva. It is remarkable that since it started in December 1999, WIPO has processed over 66,000 cases helping brand owners to recover over 120,000 domains (and WIPO is not the only provider of UDRP services though it is in our opinion, the best).
Finally, the expertise of all of our teams was validated in our annual Client Satisfaction survey carried out between October and November 2023. 97% of our clients would recommend us to a colleague. 94% feel very secure with our support. 92% believe we provide excellent value for money. These are astonishingly high numbers we are very proud of.