Hello all

Welcome to another year, and welcome back to the news that
will continue on a bi-weekly basis throughout 2004.

Cheers
David

.au - Domain regulator labels DNA brawl as biggest consumer
issue
The mail-out of 500,000 allegedly misleading advertisements
by Domain Names Australia (DNA) was the biggest issue in
the domain name market to affect consumers in 2003.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebusiness/story/0,2000048590,20282256,00.htm

Canadian Firm Barred From Misleading Domain Name Marketing:
FTC
A Canadian Internet domain name re-seller stands to be
barred by a federal court from misrepresenting its
domain-name registration service marketing and ordered to
pay consumer redress, the Federal Trade Commission
announced December 23. The stipulated order awaits only a
judge's signature to take full effect.

http://www.avnonline.com/issues/200312/newsarchive/news_122403_1.shtml

Court Bars Canadian Company from Misleading Consumers in
Marketing of Internet Domain Name Services
The Federal Trade Commission has requested that a federal
district court enjoin Domain Registry of America, Inc., an
Internet domain name re-seller, from making
misrepresentations in the marketing of its domain name
registration services and require it to pay redress to
consumers. According to the FTC, the company told consumers
that their domain registrations were expiring, leading many
consumers unwittingly to switch their domain name
registrar. The company also allegedly did not disclose that
it would charge a processing fee to consumers if their
transfer request was not competed – for any reason – and
failed to provide consumers refunds in a timely manner.
Under the terms of the stipulated final order announced
today, Domain Registry of America (DROA), based in Ontario,
Canada, may be required to provide redress to up to 50,000
consumers, is prohibited from engaging in similar conduct
in the future, and is subject to stringent monitoring by
the Commission to ensure its compliance with the court
order.
 http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/12/domainreg.htm

ITU Survey of ccTLD Management
As part of its follow-up activities related to ITU
Resolution 102: Management of Internet Names and Addresses
(Marrakesh, 2002), the ITU initiated in April 2003 a survey
and questionnaire with regard to Member States' experiences
with country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs).  As of 12
December 2003, the ITU has received replies to this survey
from 60 countries.
 http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/newslog/2003/12/19.html#a415

http://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/workshop/cctld/survey/index.html

What the net did next
The internet is set to become the basis for just about
every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint
Cerf, and he should know what he is talking about.
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3292043.stm

Wiring the world is one thing, making Internet truly global
another
Rahul Dewan typed "India" into the search box of an online
stock photo service, hoping to find digital images of his
native country. He found only three - all of flags. Dewan
then typed "Switzerland," a country smaller than his, and
found 33, while "USA" returned 72.
...
The Internet's key oversight body also is studying domain
names entirely in non-English characters - instead of
requiring ".com" or another English suffix. Other
challenges remain.

http://www.beaufortgazette.com/24hour/technology/story/1091630p-7626700c.html

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031218.gtnett1218/BNStory/Technology

ICANN DNS Infrastructure Recommendation Of the Security and
Stability Advisory Committee
A key element of the DNS infrastructure is the delegation
of zones. Beginning with the root of the DNS ("."), each
zone administrator has the authority to delegate sub-zones
to other responsible parties. Each sub-zone becomes another
delegation point in the DNS infrastructure tree. The
correct operation of the delegation hierarchy is essential
to the stability of the DNS.

http://www.icann.org/committees/security/dns-recommendation-01nov03.htm

ICANN Announcement - Details on March 2004 ICANN Meeting to
be Held in Rome, Italy
ICANN's next round of meetings will be held 2-6 March 2004
in Rome, Italy. The meetings are free to attend and open to
any interested person. ICANN encourages broad participation
in its bottom-up, consensus development process.

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-23dec03.htm

ICANN Approves Community User Groups
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN.org) announced this week that six community user
groups in three geographic regions have received "at-large
structure" certification in a step towards fulfilling the
organization's objective to have structured individual
Internet user participation.
 http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/ica121803.cfm

http://alac.icann.org/announcements/announcement-16dec03.htm

Signs of Recovery: Domain Names Once Again Fetch Top Dollar
News from Associated Press tells us the Internet is ringing
in the new year with domain names that, once again, are
netting seven figures. According to an AP report, a man in
Florida sold the domain name, men.com, to a company called
men.com LLC for $1.3 million. He paid $15,000 for it in
1997. The purchasing company intends to create a portal for
men.

http://channelzone.ziffdavis.com/article2/0,3973,1422990,00.asp

http://newsobserver.com/24hour/technology/story/1098142p-7681053c.html

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/12/25/internet.domains.ap/index.html

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8258423%5E15343%5E%5Enbv%5E15306%2D15318,00.html

Dispute rages over Nigeria's internet domain name
The hosting of the Country's Country Code Top Level Domain
(ccTLD) name locally may remain elusive for long as
contenders to the hosting right are yet to resolve their
dispute.
 http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/news/article03

Letting DNS Loose
RFID tags, UPC codes, International characters in email
addresses and host names, and a variety of other
identifiers could all go into DNS, and folks have
occasionally proposed doing just that. Its really just a
question of figuring out how to use the DNS -- its ready to
carry arbitrary identifiers. And by the way, this isn't a
new idea, see RFC 1101 for proof, although even earlier I
designed the DNS in the early 1980s to allow it to be so,
but it seemed too far fetched to document for a while. ...I
was in Geneva for a WSIS meeting of CTOs, and was surprised
that the various organizations (ITU, ICANN, ISOC) haven't
figured out that they need each other to make this
technology work, rather than asserting ownership.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/415_0_1_0_C

What the Net Did Next
During this slow and long lull of domain name policy and
ICANN related news stories, I thought it would be a good
time to bring an article by BBC News Online technology
correspondent Mark Ward to the attention of the CircleID
community. In it, ICANN Chairman of the Board Vint Cerf
reflects on the history of the Internet and his involvement
as somewhat of a "midwife," rather than the "father" title
he doesn't like. He also looks to the future and identifies
two key, fundamental changes that will shape the next stage
of the Internet. As he puts it, they are VoIP and ENUM.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/414_0_1_0_C

WSIS: What Is It 'Really' All About?
Until a few weeks ago, almost everyone in the Internet
governance circus seemed to ignore the very existence of
WSIS. After it popped up on international newspapers,
however, things have been changing; and suddenly, I have
started noticing plenty of negative reactions, on the lines
of "we don't need WSIS, we don't need the UN, we don't need
governments, we don't need internationalization - just go
away from our network". However, I often find that these
reactions are based on fundamental misunderstandings of the
issues at stake; so please let me offer a different
perspective.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/411_0_1_0_C

A Psychoanalysis of Corporate Domain Names and Branding -
Part II
Naming for today's global e-commerce is very fragmented and
every corporation is trying to cope with little or no
guidance at all. When a name fails to deliver a clear and
distinct message no amount of bizarre branding ideas will
ever save it. Now to check on the health of a name here are
some key reasons and if not corrected, a name will
endlessly shout and eventually die.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/409_0_1_0_C

A Psychoanalysis of Corporate Domain Names and Branding -
Part I
A corporate name of any merged entity, at best, is really
an outcry from the deep bottom of a corporation, all in
search of attention and in pursuit of fame and glory.
Whether you read a corporate brand name in a column, see it
in a phone book, hear it on a radio, TV or come across it
on the web, the name is always, a real show-off with a
desperate mission to seek all the attention it can get.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/399_0_1_0_C

A Study on Public Participation in ICANN
The following is an executive summary from the preliminary
study by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah
Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at
Harvard Law School. This study considers to what extent the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
has achieved its stated goal of a "representative" and
"open" decision-making process.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/405_0_1_0_C

Centralizing the Net, Monetizing DNS, Getting Trendy?
In a Red Herring Conference held last week in California,
Mitch Ratcliffe's offers an analytical overview of an
interview held with Stratton Scalovs, VerisSign's CEO..."He
then goes on to say that we need to move the complexity
back into the center of the Net! He says the edge can't be
so complex. Get David Isenberg in here! Ross Mayfield,
sitting in front of me, laughs out loud. I am dumbfounded.
According to VeriSign, the Net should not be open to any
type of application, only applications that rely on single
providers of services, like VeriSign. This is troglodyte
talk."
 http://www.circleid.com/article/402_0_1_0_C

ICANN on Closing Off Port 43
ICANN has launched three task forces on WHOIS
restructuring...It sounds innocuous enough -- nobody likes
spam -- but the restrictions being discussed reach further
than marketers. Pushed by registrars who feel that WHOIS
amounts to forced disclosure of their customer lists, the
task force is seriously discussing closing off port 43's
straightforward access to WHOIS information, replacing it
with GIF-based barriers or similar access restrictions.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/401_0_1_0_C

ICANN and the Virtues of Deliberative Policymaking - Part
II
In the second part of this two-part series article, Andrew
McLaughlin concludes his critical look at the recently
reported study, Public Participation in ICANN, by John
Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at
the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law
School.
 http://www.circleid.com/article/407_0_1_0_C

ICANN and the Virtues of Deliberative Policymaking - Part I
In this two-part series article, Andrew McLaughlin takes a
critical look at the recently reported study, Public
Participation in ICANN, by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam
Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for
Internet & Society at Harvard Law School..."The study's
presentation and analysis of data contain much of interest,
and much that could assist ICANN (and other policy-making
bodies) in improving its use and management of online
public forums. But the study's value is diminished by two
rather fundamental shortcomings: (1) its misapprehension of
both the theory and the practice of ICANN's
policy-development process, and (2) the sizeable gap
between the broad scope of the study's conclusions and the
very narrow -- indeed, myopic -- focus of the analysis from
which they are derived. Simply put, the study scrutinizes a
small and misleading corner of ICANN (namely, its online
public comment forums) and leaps to a sweeping (and, in my
view, unwarranted) conclusion."
 http://www.circleid.com/article/406_0_1_0_C

Unexpected twists in Internet law
Internet law in 2003 was full of surprises, with Congress
passing an antispam bill, the courts blessing pop-up
advertising, the music industry losing lawsuits and the
Supreme Court finally upholding an Internet law.
 http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5131781.html

Foundation wins Internet dispute
It has ruled that the Staten Island-based Joey DiPaolo AIDS
Foundation, whose Internet identity was hijacked by a porn
site back in September, has exclusive rights to the use of
its name in cyberspace.

http://www.silive.com/news/advance/index.ssf?/base/news/107210432636520.xml

Consumeractive: Domain name pain
What happens when your domain name isn't re-registered: I
often receive emails or letters from small organisations
that need help or tell me that my advice has not brought
about a resolution.
 http://www.vnunet.com/News/1151734

.us - New Yorker accused of cybersquatting
MediaNews Services Inc., parent of the Charleston Daily
Mail, has accused a New York man of cybersquatting in a
federal lawsuit that seeks to shut down a Web site with an
address similar to the newspaper's site.

http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/virginia/dp-apindustrynews1222dec22,0,1439807.story

.us - Cyber-squatter burns area politician
A Web site address for Assemblywoman Carol Liu, D-Pasadena,
has been taken over by a business in Switzerland peddling
pills for penis enlargement.

http://www.sgvtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,205~12220~1843140,00.html

RegisterFly Offers New.net Domains
Web hosting and domain registrar RegisterFly.com
(registerfly.com) announced on Wednesday that it is
offering domain name registrations for New.net (new.net)
domain extensions. Pasadena, California-based New.net is
the registry for descriptive domain extensions such as
.sport, .club, and .family.
 http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/reg121703.cfm

http://www.webhostdir.com/news/articles/showarticle.asp?id=1770

.in - HC restrains foreign firms from using 'Zee' in domain
names
Stung by its trade name being robbed off by non-descript
foreign firms to squat on domain names, Zee Group of
Company approached the Delhi High Court which has
restrained firms from America, China, Pakistan and Nepal
from using the word "ZEE" in their domain names.
 http://www.indiantelevision.com/mnd/y2k3/dec/1decgm1.htm

.us - Pot-linked senator domain names de-activated
More than 100 World Wide Web domains belonging to a group
that linked Florida senators’ names to a marijuana seed
seller were de-activated Thursday and Friday. The same
group has attempted in the past to attach Florida
congressmen to a political group promoting white rights.
Friends of Chantal, an organization in Mossyrock, Wash.,
bought the names of a dozen Florida state senators in
January as Internet domains names. Those domains were then
linked to Overgrow.com, a World Wide Web site that sells
marijuana seeds from Canada.

http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/701/public/news513848.html

Network Solutions v. Hoblad in the 4th Circuit Court of
Appeals, United States District Court
The district court determined that Appellants were bound by
the registration agreements because the intermediaries had
acted as Appellants’ agents in executing those agreements.
For the decision see
 http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/031226.U.pdf

Web addresses get nip and tuck--and spam
A crop of Web sites have sprung up with the mission of
making long, easily breakable Web addresses shorter--and at
least one of them is trying to make money at the idea.

http://ups.asia.cnet.com/c/as.ch.nt.stories/asia.cnet.com/newstech/systems/0,39001153,39162150,00.htm

FieldTurf Scores in ACPA Decision - from
http://www.udrplaw.net UDRPlaw.net
FieldTurf, Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of
synthetic sports surfaces, received a favorable decision
from U.S. District Court Judge John Darrah in its case
against competitor Sportexe, Inc., over its registration
and use of the domain names FieldTurf.net and
FieldTurf.info.
 http://www.arbforum.com/domains/decisions/100509.htm

When Does an Expired Domain Name Become Available?
In order to know exactly when an expiring domain name will
become available for re-registration by a new owner, you
must understand the ‘Status’ of a domain as listed in the
‘whois’ database.

http://www.cpureview.com/articles/20031223expireddomains.html

Choosing a Domain Name for Optimization Purposes
A web site's URL can serve many purposes. One of those
purposes is to improve the site's visibility and rankings
on the search engines. This worksheet focuses exclusively
on choosing a domain name for optimization purposes.
Remember that a URL can serve other purposes, therefore,
these suggestions will not and should not be followed
exactly in all cases. After all, there are many factors in
developing a online business in addition to its search
engine rankings.
 http://www.isedb.com/news/index.php?t=reviews&id=614

E-scams rule the roost in 2003
Regrettably, 2003 proved to be a year in which online
scamming elevated itself to new heights, with
inexperienced, gullible or just plain unfortunate
individuals facing a minefield of potentially expensive
schemes.
...
Domain name renewal notices
One issue that has generated significant angst is that of
the distribution of advertisements for domain names that
appear to look like domain renewal notices.

http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/security/0,39001150,39163323,00.htm


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Sources include Quicklinks (www.qlinks.net) and BNA
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=====
David Goldstein
 address: 2/4 Dundas Street
             COOGEE NSW 2034
             AUSTRALIA
 email: Goldstein_David§yahoo.com.au
 phone: +61 418 228 605 - mobile; +61 2 9665 0015 - home

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