EURid To Launch Its New Registration Platform On 15 September
EURid, the company behind .EU extension will launch its new registration platform on 15 September 2014.Thereafter, newly .EU domains will expire at the end of their registration term.
You can read the press release after the jump :
“On 15 September 2014, EURid will launch its new registration platform. Thereafter, newly registered .eu domain names will no longer expire at the end of the month but rather at the end of their registration term, calculated in years starting on the registration date and ranging from one (1) to ten (10) years. Domain names registered on 29 February will always expire on 28 February.
This change has been incorporated into new versions of the .eu Terms and Conditions and .eu Registrar Agreement, which will go into effect on 15 September, when the new registration platform is launched. New versions of these documents in all languages are available below.
For existing domain names – those registered before 15 September 2014 – registrars have been given the option to apply the new expiry date approach or to keep the existing system whereby domain names expire at the end of the month.
The default option, which sees domain names expire at the end of the month, will apply to all registered domain names whose registrars do not indicate their preference by 15 September 2014.
As is already the case, transfers will not change the expiry day but will add an extra year to the registration term of a domain name.
Example:
Current situation (for existing domain names registered before 15 September 2014)
Registration date = 15 January 2014
Expiry date = 31 January 2015 (= 15 January 2014 + forward to the end of month (31 January) + 1 year)
New situation after 15 September 2014 (for existing domain names registered before 15 September 2014)
Registration date = 15 January 2014
If registrar has not made a choice (i.e. default current system applies)
Expiry date = 31 January 2015 (= 15 January 2014 + forward to the end of month (31 January) + 1 year)
If registrar has chosen the new expiry date option:
Expiry date = 15 January 2015 (= 15 January 2014 + 1 year)
New situation after 15 September 2014 (for new domain names registered after 15 September 2014)
Registration date = 15 January 2015
Expiry date = 15 January 2016 (= 15 January 2015 + 1 year)”
Check out Eurid here for more information.
ICANN’s .IR Response Opens Legal Can of Worms by Philip Corwin, Internet Commerce Association
ICANN has filed its initial response to writs of attachment issued by U.S. Courts that seek to have ICANN transfer control of the country code top level domains (ccTLDs) of Iran, Syria and North Korea to plaintiffs in various legal actions. The lawsuits were brought under a U.S. law that permits victims of terrorism and their family survivors to seek the assets of governments that provided support or direction of the terrorist acts.
As expected, ICANN vigorously opposed the court orders and sought to quash them. In an “everything and the kitchen sink” defense, ICANN argues that ccTLDs are not “property”; are not ‘owned” by the nations to which they are assigned; are not within US jurisdiction; are not subject to court jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) even if they are “property”; are not subject to ICANN’s unilateral power under its existing contractual agreements; and that forced re-delegation of the ccTLDs would destroy their value and thus be futile. All these arguments raise subsidiary questions of law and policy.
Anything less than full court opposition by ICANN to the writs of attachment would be politically explosive – especially at a time when the IANA functions contract and its remaining official relationship with the US government is in transition.
I have just completed a quick scan of the ICANN filing in the case of Ben Haim vs. Islamic Republic of Iran (although all of ICANN’s responses in the separate cases appear identical) and have a few preliminary observations – all of which relate to the central observation that this case has opened up a can of worms of legal issues:
- The filing does its best to distinguish ccTLDs from gTLDs. However, because all the relevant US case law involves gTLDs it is forced to cite it and that inevitably muddies the distinction to some extent. For example, at p. 11 of the Motion to Quash (p.21 of the PDF) it cites the 1999 decision of the 9th Circuit in Lockheed Martin vs. Network Solutions which held that the then-manager of the .com registry fell “squarely on the ‘service’ side of the product/service distinction”. Extending this analogy to the present would imply that all incumbent and new gTLD registry operators, including those of .brand registries, have no property rights in those registries, notwithstanding the fact that all the relevant contracts with ICANN provide for a strong presumptive right of renewal.
- At the top of page 18 (28), the memo makes the argument that, under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), Plaintiffs must show that the “property in the United States of a foreign state” is “used for a commercial activity in the United States”. While .IR and the other ccTLDs at issue have no commercial contacts in the U.S., this is not true for .CO and other ccTLDs that have been repurposed as quasi-gTLDs and are being administered by entities located within the U.S. – noting, of course, that this consideration would only be of consequence if a ccTLD with US commercial contacts was determined to constitute “property” under US law.
- At p.20 (30) of the memo, it is noted that ICANN’s authority is limited to recommending a transfer of the ccTLD to the Department of Commerce (DOC) under the current IANA contract; that under that contract ICANN may only recommend re-delegation for narrow technical and ministerial reasons; and that DOC retains the ultimate authority on the matter (in essence, this position tosses this “hot potato” case into DOC’s lap).
However, this argument immediately raises the question of what the situation will be for ccTLDs will be after the IANA transition, when DOC no longer possesses final authority on TLD re-delegations and when there may be no contract at all in place governing the conduct of the IANA functions. Ironically, terminating the IANA contract between DOC and ICANN may place ccTLDs at greater risk of being re-delegated pursuant to the judicial orders of U.S. courts because this fallback contractual argument will no longer be available!
For now at least the DOC does not have to take any position on these disputes, as ICANN has not recommended that any of the ccTLDs be re-delegated pursuant to the Writs. It is probably accurate to speculate that the DOC would prefer to never be asked to make the decision of whether such actions should be taken to compensate US terror victims under applicable US law, as all the answers available would have significant domestic and international political and legal repercussions.
Again, these are just preliminary views based on a quick initial review of the filing. But, while ICANN has done its best to quash the writs of attachment for the ccTLDs in question, its arguments raise multiple other questions and issues.
Now we must await the response of plaintiffs to these motions, assuming that they will make their best efforts to blow holes in them.
But, however these cases proceed, they cannot answer the question of what the judicial exposure of ccTLDs will be when and if the IANA contract is transferred or extinguished, presuming that ICANN remains a non-profit corporation organized under California law – much less what the answer would be if ICANN ever made the IANA functions subject to another nation’s jurisdiction.
ICANN’s press release regarding its response is at https://www.icann.org/resources/press-material/release-2014-07-30-en.
Its legal filings are at https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/icann-various-2014-07-30-en.
The original Writs of Attachment are at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_dOI5puxRA9M3hweE9Eel9mVTQ/edit?pli=1.
This article by the Internet Commerce Association’s Philip Corwin was sourced with permission from:
www.internetcommerce.org/icanns-ir-response-opens-legal-can-of-worms/
In Case Over Attempts To Seize Iran’s ccTLD, ICANN Tells Court ccTLDs Are Not Property
ICANN has told a US federal court in the District of Columbia, that a ccTLD cannot be considered “property,” and thus cannot be attached by plaintiffs in a lawsuit, who are trying to obtain the assets of countries that they argued have supported terrorism.
“We filed a Motion to Quash in the US federal court today, to ensure that the court has the essential information about how the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) works. While we sympathise with what plaintiffs may have endured, ICANN’s role in the domain name system has nothing to do with any property of the countries involved”, said John Jeffrey, ICANN’s General Counsel and Secretary.
“We explained in our Motion to Quash, that country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLD) are part of a single, global interoperable Internet which ICANN serves to help maintain.” Jeffrey further explained that “ccTLD’s are not property, and are not ‘owned’ or ‘possessed’ by anyone including ICANN, and therefore cannot be seized in a lawsuit.”
ICANN’s arguments were put forth when the victims of terrorism who had successfully won lawsuits against Iran, Syria and North Korea, sought to collect on those civil judgments. In their attempt to recover assets from these countries, the plaintiffs served ICANN with “writs of attachment” and subpoenas seeking information to help them seize the ccTLDs of those nations.
ICANN also argued that if ccTLDs were property, they would not be “in the US” and therefore subject to attachment — rather the ccTLDs are located where the servers that contain the domain are located — in this case in Syria, Iran and North Korea, Paul Rosenzweig wrote on the Lawfare blog.
Rosenzweig, a conservative attorney, also wrote that ICANN “argues that the suit is barred by the sovereign immunity of the “property” owners; and that it lacks legal authority to make the transfer requested. Finally (and to my mind most persuasively) it argues that having US courts force the re-delegation of the domains would destroy their entire value and go a long way to fracturing and destroying the general domain name system of the internet.”
If successful, as Domain News has previously reported, the case could set a precedent and mean countries such as North Korea and Syria could lose control of their ccTLDs. The case was won by families in late June who won American federal court judgments that amount to more than a billion dollars against the Iranian government seeking to own all the TLDs provided by the US to Iran including the .ir TLD, the ایران TLD and all Internet Protocol (IP) addresses being utilised by the Iranian government and its agencies. The court papers were served on ICANN.
The ccTLDs (and related IP addresses) targeted by the plaintiffs include; .IR (Iran), .SY (Syria) and .KP (North Korea), as well as internationalised top-level domains in non-ASCII characters for Iran and Syria.
“This is the first time that terror victims have moved to seize the domain names, IPs and internet licenses of terrorism sponsoring states like Iran and are attempting to satisfy their court judgments,” attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Tel-Aviv said in a statement in June. “The Iranians must be shown that there is a steep price to be paid for their sponsorship of terrorism. In business and legal terms it is quite simple – we are owed money, and these assets are currency worth money.”
ICANN Correction: ICANN Updates Specification 13 Process And Application Form
NOTE REGARDING CORRECTION: This announcement is being re-issued to correct the criteria by which ICANN will assess whether an applicant that applies for qualification as a .BRAND TLD may qualify for an extension to execute the Registry Agreement. The announcement issued on 15 July 2014 specified that in order to qualify for an extension to execute the Registry Agreement, “[t]he applicant must meet the definition of a .BRAND TLD as per Section 7 of Specification 13. This is inaccurate. The statement should instead read:
“The TLD string must be identical to the textual elements protectable under applicable law, of a registered trademark valid under applicable law, which registered trademark:
i. is recorded with, and issued a signed data mark file by, the Trademark Clearinghouse;
ii. was issued to applicant or its Affiliate prior to the filing of its TLD registry application with ICANN; and
iii. does not begin with a period or a dot.”
Additionally, “[t]he applicant must provide ICANN with its Specification 13 application an accurate and complete copy of such trademark registration.”
These corrections are reflected below and are the criteria by which ICANN will assess whether an applicant that applies for qualification as a .BRAND TLD may qualify for an extension to execute the Registry Agreement.
Updated Announcement
Today, ICANN publishes updates to the Specification 13 Process and Application Form [PDF, 158 KB]. These updates are results of discussions between ICANN and the Brand Registry Group regarding concerns from the Brand Registry Group that Brands do not have adequate time to execute the New gTLD Registry Agreement.
The Applicant Guidebook provides applicant with a 9-month period to execute the Registry Agreement. This 9-month period generally commences on receipt of the Contracting Information Request (CIR) invitation. For applicants who received CIR invitations prior to January 29, 2014, the nine-month period started January 29, 2014 and ends October 29, 2014.
Some applicants that wish to apply for qualification as a .BRAND have expressed the view that the delay until May 9, 2014 in finalizing Specification 13 should be taken into account in considering the period of time within which an applicant must execute the Registry Agreement, because other applicants have known since January 29, 2014 the form of their Registry Agreements, but applicants for .BRAND TLD status did not see the form of their Registry Agreement finalized until May 9, 2014. In addition, some applicants that wish to apply for qualification as a .BRAND pursuant to Specification 13 have expressed concerns that at the time an applicant submits its CIR response, it does not know whether it will be determined to qualify for .BRAND status, and therefore the applicant does not know the form and content of the Registry Agreement it is expected to sign and cannot assess what contract modifications it may seek to negotiate.
To address these concerns, ICANN has taken the following steps:
- Modified the CIR form so that an attachment of requested changes to the Registry Agreement is no longer required to submit the CIR form.
- Provided guidance on criteria by which ICANN will assess whether an applicant that applies for qualification as a .BRAND TLD may qualify for an extension to execute the Registry Agreement. To qualify:
- The applicant must submit a complete CIR form on or before September 1, 2014.
- The applicant must submit a Specification 13 application on or before September 1, 2014.
- The TLD string must be identical to the textual elements protectable under applicable law, of a registered trademark valid under applicable law, which registered trademark:
i. is recorded with, and issued a signed data mark file by, the Trademark Clearinghouse;
ii. was issued to applicant or its Affiliate prior to the filing of its TLD registry application with ICANN; and
iii. does not begin with a period or a dot.
- The applicant must provide ICANN with its Specification 13 application an accurate and complete copy of such trademark registration.
An applicant that meet the requirements above and request an extension to execute the registry agreement will be deemed to have demonstrated to ICANN’s reasonable satisfaction that it is working diligently and in good faith toward successfully completing the steps necessary for entry into the registry agreement and will therefore be granted an extension for nine (9) months, from October 29, 2014 to July 29, 2015, to execute the registry agreement.
If based on ICANN’s determination of the Specification 13 application, the applicant wants to further negotiate any provision of the Registry Agreement, the applicant must provide its requested changes to the Base Registry Agreement to ICANN in no later than 90 days after the approval or rejection of that applicant’s Specification 13 application or February 1, 2015, whichever is later.
ICANN is not modifying the Applicant Guidebook but is simply clarifying certain criteria that ICANN will apply in making the determination, called for in the Applicant Guidebook, whether an applicant has demonstrated to ICANN’s reasonable satisfaction that it is working diligently and in good faith toward successfully completing the steps necessary for entry into the registry agreement. In evaluating requests from other applicants for an extension of the time period for execution of the registry agreement, ICANN will consider all relevant facts and circumstances in assessing whether an applicant has demonstrated to ICANN’s reasonable satisfaction that it is working diligently and in good faith toward successfully completing the steps necessary for entry into the registry agreement. Most applicants have known the form of the registry agreement they are expected to sign since January 29, 2014, and ICANN believes that in most cases, the nine (9) month period from January 29, 2014 to October 29, 2014 provides adequate time for execution of the registry agreement.
For more information, read the updated Specification 13 Process and Application Form [PDF, 158 KB], and the Specification 13 FAQs [PDF, 428 KB].
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announcement-29jul14-en
Sedo Reports $1,9 Million in Domain Name Sales! Liberty.ch Topped Sedo’s Weekly Sales List at 21,000 EUR
Liberty.ch topped Sedo’s weekly sales list at 21,000 EUR. Highlights also include Lurk.com,leading the “Com” category at 18,000 GBP and Europe.org, leading the “Other” category at $23,000.
Other notable domain name sales include :
.COM
makeyourday.com 12,700 EUR
qyk.com 10,000 USD
ekq.com 10,000 USD
ofz.com 9,999 USD
grossiste.com 9,800 EUR
goracing.com 9,500 USD
searchthis.com 8,500 USD
10past10.com 7,999 USD
retinol.com 7,849 USD
mdglobal.com 7,000 USD
emptynesters.com 6,250 USD
happypower.com 6,000 USD
travelapt.com 5,000 USD
freshempire.com 5,000 USD
atct.com 5,000 USD
jetts.com 4,999 USD
ntgroup.com 4,500 EUR
hascevher.com 4,000 USD
nomatec.com 4,000 USD
responsum.com 4,000 EUR
janko.com 4,000 EUR
ccTLD
campings.uk 7,500 GBP
travelbags.de 7,000 EUR
myprotein.hr 5,000 EUR
onecompare.co.uk 4,500 USD
trainline.de 4,000 EUR
x-in.de 3,600 EUR
asr.be 3,500 EUR
sportzeug.de 3,500 EUR
moovel.jp 3,000 EUR
amateurcommunity.us 2,790 EUR
feiertage-deutschland.de 2,500 EUR
simonimmobilien.de 2,500 EUR
nge.fr 2,000 EUR
platinum.me 2,000 USD
rwc.eu 1,894 USD
zippy.co 1,800 USD
elisabeth.be 1,599 EUR
dpstream.fr 1,500 EUR
mindtree.co 1,500 USD
daktronics.ae 1,500 USD
convenience-shop.de 1,500 EUR
klingelnberg.cn 1,500 USD
waschbeckenunterschrank.de 1,500 EUR
mobilfunk-tarife.de 1,400 EUR
seksplanet.nl 1,350 EUR
qmaxx.ch 1,250 EUR
enterprise.bm 1,200 USD
bomb.me 1,199 EUR
compraroro.es 1,199 EUR
klimrek.be 1,050 EUR
toc.pt 1,000 EUR
brenne.fr 1,000 EUR
golfballs.co 1,000 USD
eshop24.de 1,000 EUR
vermoegen-optimieren.de 1,000 EUR
Other
tts.net 18,000 USD
myfun.info 5,000 USD
cats.club 3,750 USD
doyou.net 2,500 EUR
ramses.org 2,299 USD
cleanfood.org 1,550 USD
cashback.club 1,500 USD
directsales.club 1,500 USD
departure.info 1,500 EUR
france.pro 1,183 EUR
tyre.info 1,000 USD
primus.org 1,000 USD
creditors.info 1,000 EUR
workfromhome.biz 1,000 USD
igay.org 950 USD
etik.org 799 USD
faco.net 700 USD
Check out Sedo.com for more information.
