Month: August 2012

Un-Convention-al

Posted on by jbourne

Though pushed back slightly due to tropical storms, the kickoff of the Republican National Convention this week coincides serendipitously with our discovery of a new email service claiming to offer more privacy and security than widely used, free email providers. And what is the domain name that the email addresses from this service sport? Reagan.com, of course.

Now, we have no way of knowing exactly how the Gipper would have felt about the Reagan.com homepage’s claims that “some of the largest free email providers are profiting from the information they glean from your emails” as a pitch for the company’s offerings. But what we do know is that Reagan.com may be leading a trend that could take off once new gTLDs begin to launch – “branded” emails. Continue reading “Un-Convention-al”

Craigslist Plays the Waiting Game…and Loses

Posted on by slevy

Craigslist, the popular U.S.-based classified host site, recently filed a UDRP complaint against Craig Solomon Online Services over the domain name Craigslists.com. The three-person National Arbitration Forum (NAF) Panel denied the complaint on a number of grounds in a case that should serve as a lesson to all brand owners.

At first glance, the complaint would appear to be an easy victory for Craigslist on the basis of the domain name being confusingly similar to the company’s “Craigslist” mark. The site that Solomon operates appears to be a deviation of a standard pay-per-click (PPC) site, with only a simple introductory header at the top differentiating it from the standard PPC pages we usually see. The aforementioned reasons would give Craigslist a strong case, but a combination of a delay in filing and a clever Respondent resulted in a surprising loss.

Craigslist’s primary mistake was waiting until 2012 to file this UDRP complaint, without any explanation of the delay. Craig Solomon has operated his site since 2003, and while he may have questionable motives (past iterations of the site do a worse job of hiding its PPC roots, as evidenced by the screen shot below), he has maintained this domain for nearly a decade without hearing from the Complainant. Because of this delay, Solomon invoked the laches defense, claiming that he would suffer prejudice if the domain were transferred.

While the delay might have been the primary reason for Craigslist’s loss, Solomon was also able to convince the Panel that his enhanced PPC site is a directory for residents of the Cayman Islands. The Panelists agreed and stated that because he was operating a legitimate site and because his name is Craig, the respondent had rights to the domain and was not engaging in typosquatting, as Craigslist claimed. It seems as if the Respondent opportunistically used his personal name and a very clever twist on the standard PPC website to force the UDRP panelist’s hand.

The most important takeaway from this case is that all organizations, no matter how big or small, should be cognizant of domains similar to their own and, when necessary, take action as quickly as possible. According to FairWinds’ estimates, Craigslists.com pulls over 100,000 visitors a month, a huge number for any site, but especially a glorified PPC site. Craigslist is missing out on visitors who are trying to access its services, but because it waited so long in filing the UDRP complaint, a victory here would have been hard to come by.

Advice You Can Take to the Bank

Posted on by jbourne

These days, you’d be hard pressed to find a person who owns a personal computer and has a checking account that doesn’t utilize online banking in some capacity, whether to pay their bills, check their balance, or transfer funds. But with the ease and convenience of online banking comes a certain degree of risk, specifically, a risk of fraud. Just as you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t use online banking, you’d be equally hard pressed to find someone who hadn’t at some point received a sketchy email from a scammer masquerading as a “bank,” luring users to enter their personal and account information. Continue reading “Advice You Can Take to the Bank”

Weighing in on Batching

Posted on by jbourne

At the end of July, ICANN opened a public comment period to gather input from the community about how it should handle the issue of batching new gTLD applications. gTLD Strategy readers will remember that once Digital Archery met its bitter end during the last ICANN Public Meeting in Prague, the ICANN Board had not yet come up with a fair but feasible solution to the quandary of limiting the number of gTLDs entered into the root to 1,000 in a year. Continue reading “Weighing in on Batching”

TMCH Tech Summit Kicks Off Today

Posted on by jbourne

If you read our last gTLD Strategy post, you’re probably sick of hearing about the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) by now. But today is an important day in the ongoing development and implementation of this aspect of the New gTLD Program.

Today and tomorrow, ICANN is hosting a technical summit at the Deloitte offices in Brussels (Deloitte and IBM were selected to develop the TMCH), where representatives from registries and registrars will have the chance to weigh in on many of the technical aspects of the TMCH. This meeting was the result of widespread demand expressed by these two groups during the ICANN Public Meeting in Prague in June. Essentially, their argument boiled down to, “We’re the ones who need to use the TMCH, so we should get a say in how it works.” Continue reading “TMCH Tech Summit Kicks Off Today”

Google Sinks Internet Pirates

Posted on by slevy

Google is taking a big step towards combating online piracy, announcing a change in its search algorithm that will favor legally downloadable content over pirated materials. The search engine will begin taking into account the number of valid copyright removal notices when determining the rank of pages in a specific search, thereby theoretically pushing sites that receive the most notices to the bottom of the heap. This announcement will certainly come as good news to groups like the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and other major entertainment industry groups and lobbying firms, some of whom have criticized Google for not taking a stand against copyright violators. This new aspect of the search engine’s algorithm joins the nearly 200 other factors that Google already uses in determining the results and order of search queries.

Although the update is not scheduled to take effect until later this week, it raises a number of immediate questions for brand owners. Will this new element of the algorithm only account for Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices filed through Google, or is Google able to determine how many notices are filed directly with individual websites? Will this new element cause major media sites like YouTube — which is owned by Google — to get lower search rankings due to the sheer number of DMCA notices filed every day, or will other elements be sufficient to maintain high rankings? Will this element look at all filed notices or only successful ones? This question is especially pertinent for sites like YouTube, because it is possible for a website to defend a DMCA notice, and it would seem unfair to count notices that have been successfully defended.

The announcement also brings up certain ethical issues in regards to competition. Will companies start cluster bombing Google with questionable DMCA notices for their competitors’ sites just to activate this element of the algorithm and game the system? Would a site owner have a potential legal claim against Google if it diligently takes down noticed content, or successfully defends many notices, or reports a competitor for notice–bombing yet still gets a lower ranking? How Google handles these issues might not be immediately apparent, but they are important questions going forward.

Of course, we won’t know the answer to any of these questions until the new algorithm is in place, and even then, it will probably require some tweaking to produce the exact results it should. Regardless, it should be a boon for brand owners and corporations looking to protect their content, as their authentic material should rise to the top of the long list of search results.

Clearing Up Clearinghouse Confusion

Posted on by jbourne

In a recent post, we talked about silver bullets – specifically, the belief that new gTLDs would be a magic cure to all search engine optimization quandaries. But after talking with multiple brand owners across a variety of industries, we’ve realized that there is another widely held misconception about a cure-all solution circulating around the business world. This time, it’s about the new gTLD Trademark Clearinghouse, or TMCH for short.

Many brand owners believe that if they register their trademarks in the TMCH, then ICANN will block the registration of all domain names containing those trademarks across all new gTLDs.

Oh, if life were that simple. Continue reading “Clearing Up Clearinghouse Confusion”

Public Comment Period Extended

Posted on by jbourne

ICANN announced today that the new gTLD Public Comment period has been extended until September 26, 2012. This means that members of the public have an additional 45 days to submit comments on new gTLD applications with ICANN’s assurance that those comments will reach new gTLD application evaluators.

So far, 5,636 comments have been submitted in the eight weeks since the Public Comment period opened on June 13, Reveal Day. Over half of the total number of comments were submitted in August alone, meaning that we could see a good deal of activity in the coming 45 days. Continue reading “Public Comment Period Extended”

The Google Question

Posted on by jbourne

It has remained a mystery, an object of sometimes intense speculation, basically since new gTLDs first entered into conversations about digital strategy. “Talk all you want about their potential for online branding,” many digital marketers would say. “I want to know how Google is going to treat these new domains.” Continue reading “The Google Question”