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.
DomainHoldings Releases Q2 Report 2014
DomainHoldings released recently their Q2 results, showing almost $10 million in sales and $764,278 average weekly sales.
You can read the press release after the jump:
“Domain Holdings is extremely proud to report our Q2 results showing almost $10,000,000 USD in sales. These results are not just a testimony of success for our team but further acknowledgment that our brand continues to earn trust around the world. During Q2 we celebrated a lot of success but also introduced many new features for both buyers and sellers. Some of the main highlights from Q2 were:
$9,935,618 in Total Q2 Sales
$764,278 Average Weekly Sales
79.21% of ALL Sales End Users
28% Increase in New Relationships
22% Increase in Numeric Domain Sales
Over 12,000 + Phone Calls
Over 72,000 Targeted Emails
More End Users
We handled transactions for great brands like PolicyMic, Wickr, Mark Cuban Investments, Liberty Tax and many more with 79.21% of all sales to end users (compared to 76.25% in Q1)
Custom Portfolio Management
Started the rollout of custom portfolio management for large owners of premium domains offering custom landing pages, a dedicated broker, portfolio valuation services, portfolio auction management and more. While this is currently an invite only offering we are open to discussing the program with any premium portfolio owner who is interested in increasing overall sales. View some of custom for sale landing pages by visiting 95.net, 617.com or designerclothes.com
More Inventory
Signed several exclusive corporate deals to handle existing inventory from of some of the world’s most notable brands.
More Training
Invested thousands of dollars on further sales and negotiation training for our brokers and tools to help refine our outbound sales approach.
While we celebrate our success in this report we should also look beyond the numbers and note that the value of premium domain names are growing due to the combined efforts of the industry and greater public awareness. From the success of the new GTLD’s to the millions of new dollars being invested in promoting existing options there never has been such a time with such extensive global marketing finally supporting the industry we love so much.
View the full Q2 report below or download the PDF version here.
ICANN : Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel Report on PIR’s Request to Implement Technical Bundling in .NGO and .ONG
To obtain community input on the Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel (RSTEP) report regarding Public Interest Registry’s (PIR) request to implement technical bundling of second level domains for .NGO and .ONG.
PIR defines technical bundling as a set of two different gTLDs, with identical second level labels for which certain parameters are shared.
Categories/Tags:
Top-Level Domains
Second-Level Domains
Contracted Party Agreements
Security/Stability
Public Comment Box Link: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/rstep-technical-bundling-2014-07-29-en
This announcement was sourced from :
