ICANN Staff Requests Six-Month Delay for UDRP/URS RPM Report

Philip CorwinUncategorized

ICANN staff have requested a six-month delay in the delivery date of a Preliminary Issue Report on the “current state of all rights protection mechanisms (RPMs) implemented for both existing and new gTLDs, including but not limited to the UDRP and the URS”.  The request is contained in a January 5, 2015 e-mail sent by ICANN  Senior Policy Director Mary …

Breaking: U.S. Government Funding Bill Delays IANA Transition

Philip CorwinCongress, IANA, ICANN, NTIA

On the evening of Tuesday, September 9th, Congressional leaders unveiled a 1,603 page, $1.01 trillion FY 2015 appropriations bill to fund the U.S. government through the end of September 2015. One provision of the omnibus bill would delay the IANA transition until after the September 30, 2015 expiration of the current contract between the NTIA and ICANN. Language in the …

ICANN New gTLD Auction Proceeds Approaching $30 Million

Philip CorwinUncategorized

While the debate continues as to whether most new gTLDs are a sound long-term investment for their registry operators, there’s no disputing that the program has been an economic boom for ICANN. The 1,930 first round applications each required an application fee of $185,000, which added up to a tidy $357 million. Even after refunds for withdrawn applications ICANN still …

In Quashing .IR Attachment Order Against ICANN DC District Court Declares That ccTLDs Are Akin to Second Level Domains

Philip CorwinDomain Law, ICANN

On November 10th the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted ICANN’s motion to quash a writ of attachment and a related motion for further discovery in a politically charged case in which private plaintiffs sought to seize control of Iran’s .IR country code top level domain (ccTLD). The litigation was brought under a US law that allows …

Chan Luu Case Settles/Registrants Can Still Seek Return of Domains

Philip CorwinUncategorized

While we are not privy to the details, we have received word that there has been a settlement in the litigation brought by Chan Luu against Grant Shellhammer and Online Growth. As we first reported in early October, more than 5,000 domain names were said to have been transferred by VeriSign to Uniregistrar after it was served with a sealed …

ICA Counsel Appointed to Inaugural .US Stakeholder Council

Philip CorwinUncategorized

ICA Counsel Philip Corwin has been appointed to the first Stakeholder Council ever established for .US, the country code top level domain (ccTLD) of the United States. The Charter of this new Council sets its Scope of Work as follows: The Council will address matters related to the operation of the usTLD in the interest of the usTLD user community. …

Undue Process: Nearly Five Thousand Domains Transferred Under Sealed Court Order

Philip CorwinUncategorized

Noted domain investor, industry advisor, blogger, and ICA member Mike Berkens has alerted us to a very disturbing occurrence. Unfortunately for Mike, he has been directly impacted by it. According to an October 2nd blog post at The Domains, “As Many As 5K .Com’s Taken Away By Sealed Court Order By Verisign Including Some Of Mine”— Overnight I received a …

ICA Exploring Domain Theft Project to Counter a Growing Abuse

Philip CorwinCongress, ICANN, Law & Policy, UDRP

There has been a lot of domain industry press attention lately to domain thefts. We don’t know for sure if this problem is becoming more acute or is just being reported on more often. But, regardless of the level of activity, we know that there are inadequate recovery and punitive remedies available at present for domain owners who experience theft …