The September Newsletter

Episode 6 - The Turning Point: How 2023 Reshaped Web3 is now available.

In January 2012, ICANN’s Board of Directors approved the Applicant Guidebook and authorised the launch of Round One of the New gTLD Program. Last month, the current Board Chair Tripti Sinha announced in her blog that the next Applicant Guidebook will be completed in May 2025.

ICANN may not move at the speed of the internet, but it is nothing if not thorough. A detailed “Next Round Implementation Plan and Timeline” forecasts the opening of the next application round in Q2 2026, with the goal of an April launch. A budget for the program has been set at $70 million, with 2,000 applications expected and the hiring of 29 new staff. There will also be a Communications and Outreach Program. Registry service providers will be pre-evaluated and an Applicant Support Program will be developed. Public Comments on drafts of the Applicant Guidebook will also be considered.

Our dotBrand team are heavily involved in the remaining discussions, with our Head of Policy, Susan Payne, playing an important role as she co-represents the Intellectual Property Constituency on the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), which is where policy is created.

Brand owners with an interest in the benefits and viability of an application have just over 30 months to act. Could a dotBrand registry help to deliver your digital strategy? What will you need to prepare your business case? Who should be involved in your project team? What’s involved in operating a dotBrand, and how will you gain value from owning one??Find out more here.

In Round One, we managed over 120 applications from brand owners, achieving the highest scores awarded by the ICANN evaluators with a 100% success rate. We have now launched a comprehensive Pre-Application service, which includes a Feasibility and Landscape Evaluation and access to our CLASS digital library of information. At the last ICANN meeting in Washington DC in June, we fielded eight people and we will have more in Hamburg at ICANN78 in October 2023. View the upcoming events we are attending.

Global Block

For some brand owners, the advent of new registries brings opportunity. A dotBrand registry can deliver control and a platform for innovation at the Top Level. At the second level, there may be the chance to register a domain which is perfect for their business sector. Despite strong rights protection mechanisms mandated by ICANN or a national government, the opening of new registries always brings cost and risk. The unscrupulous always seem to find a way to file identical or confusingly similar variations of brand names that will confuse internet users, exposing them to malware and fraud.

To help brand owners protect their customers, the Brand Safety Alliance has been formed. It plans to launch “Global Block” in early 2024. This is a service which will give rights owners the chance to buy one block that works across over 1,000 registries.

The Brand Safety Alliance is an initiative of GoDaddy Registry in partnership with Identity Digital. Other registry providers, such as GMO from Japan, have confirmed their participation whilst some ccTLDs are evaluating the scheme.

The Trademark Clearinghouse remains cumbersome, expensive and therefore of limited value. In Round One, many brand owners only protected their most valuable brands, instead opting for defensive registrations as a cheaper alternative. However, competition and choice are two of the pillars that ICANN was built upon. We hope that entrepreneurs planning to apply for an Open Registry in Round Two of the new gTLD program will also participate in Global Block.

MEME-ING

In Round One of the new gTLDs, Google applied for 101 registries. Some applications were folded to resolve contentions with other applicants, others they fought fiercely for, like .app for which they paid $25m in an ICANN Auction of Last Resort in 2015. Since then, they have released new registries at regular intervals with the stated aim of “tying things together or moving really fast”. Earlier this year .zip and .mov were launched to criticism from some in the tech community fearing confusion because .zip is an extension used for compressing files and .mov often appears at the end of video files used in Apple’s Quicktime.

Now, through its Charleston Road Registry subsidiary, Google is launching .ing and .meme, neither of which are controversial and both of which have notable features to enhance security. .ing is aimed at those who like playing with domain names such that you might register driv.ing or div.ing. .meme is for the light-hearted amongst us, who enjoy sharing video and images. We are not sure about the appeal of these registries to brand owners, but we do like the fact that registrants must obtain an SSL certificate and configure HTTPS for the domains to work. Furthermore, registration of .meme domains is restricted to content creation platforms specialising in the creation and distribution of memes in a one month Limited Registration Period from 31 October 2023. Find out more here.

Web3 Issues?

We’ve been helping clients register blockchain domains for over two years. The first requests for assistance came from brands with a vested interest in Web3 because of their technical focus. Then came brands, such as global fashion leaders, that wanted to explore the fascination they had discovered amongst their clients for innovation. McKinsey might be forecasting that the Metaverse economy will generate $30 trillion by 2030, but momentum stalled when the 2022 crypto crash was followed by the arrival of popular AI applications like ChatGPT at the end of 2023. We think that there are five main reasons why brand owners are right to be cautious about Web3:

• No-one is in charge, and with anonymity by design, knowing who you are working with is next to impossible
• Concerns over the legal framework including IP protections and privacy
• No harmonised technical or operational standards means no interoperability?
• We need a technical upgrade: connectivity is too slow and our devices are not powerful enough
• There’s a serious environmental issue; blockchain processes take far more energy than for example credit card processing.

We think that the right strategy for IP owners big and small is to secure key brands as blockchain domains and to possibly monitor the NFT platforms for unauthorised use. We can count over 10 million registered blockchain domains. It is surely better to wait and see how Web3 plays out from a position of protection rather than exposure. Registration is less expensive than you might think and there are no annual renewal charges.

Lock Up Your Domains

Domain security is our priority. We train our teams to be vigilant, we retain experts to advise and test us, we audit our processes and our online and physical security. What keeps us awake at night is the number of clients who don’t place Registry Locks on their key domains, despite our advice that this is the best way of stopping a critical domain from being hijacked. Perhaps this is because they have confidence that we can stop a domain from being hijacked at the registry level. Unfortunately, we can’t reach into a third-party registry. No-one should be able to breach registry security protocols but somehow the bad guys get through with alarming regularity, changing nameservers or transferring out critical domains. This disrupts business continuity, brings down your content and most importantly damages your reputation. Sometimes they hold your domain to ransom. Other times they will delete your domain (a favourite activity of activists) or post harmful content.

We strongly recommend you add a Registry Lock to your domains wherever you can. Locks are not available at all registries but you can buy them for .com and a growing number of ccTLDs including .UK. Once your domain is locked, no changes can be made to it or its DNS configuration until the lock is removed. A locked domain name can be unlocked and re-locked by a pre-authorised representative through Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). You lock your front door at home and your office door at work. Why not lock your domain too? Contact your DS for advice and support.