An annual effort to stop websites from illegally selling counterfeit products continues to grow, said an Immigration and Customs Enforcement announcement. Along with law enforcement agencies in 27 countries, ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit shut down 37,479 websites that sold counterfeit merchandise online, up from the 29,684 seized domain names last year, the agency said Monday. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, a U.S. interagency collaboration led by HSI, joined with Europol and Interpol for the operation, called In-Our-Sites VI. "Over the past year, and leading up to Cyber Monday, the IPR Center and its partners used both criminal and civil actions to successfully seize domain names," said ICE. This was the sixth year the anti-counterfeiting website operation.
Thirty-one ICANN users’ credentials were used for gaining unauthorized access to new generic top-level domain (gTLD) applicants’ and operators’ contact information via ICANN’s new gTLD applicant and Global Domains Division portals, ICANN said Thursday. ICANN temporarily took both portals offline in late February to investigate unauthorized data exposures on the portals. Information from 29 registry operators was exposed via unauthorized access, though ICANN noted that information “was accessed inadvertently.” The “exposed registry contact information does not appear to contain sensitive personally identifiable information,” ICANN said. “Each of the affected parties has been notified of the data exposure.” ICANN said it took necessary steps to prevent similar types of data exposures from occurring in the future and “continues to deploy security-based updates on a regular basis as part of a broader, multiyear effort to harden all of ICANN's digital services.”
Nonprofit domain names .org, .ngo and .ong are continuing to gain traction worldwide, the Public Interest Registry (PIR) said in reports on the three domains. The .org domain remains the third-largest top-level domain, with more than 130,000 additional registrations in the last 12 months and registrants renewing their .org registrations at a rate of 73.7 percent annually, PIR said. International registrations on the domain demonstrated “steady growth,” with countries in Asia continuing to increase their share of the registration pool, PIR said. More than 2,300 .ngo and .ong domain bundles were registered globally between the domains' launch in early May and June 30, PIR said. “The continuous growth of the .org domain, and the early adoption of the .ngo and .ong domains is a clear indication that organizations and individuals around the world understand the need for global collaboration and collective empowerment to successfully serve the public interest,” PIR CEO Brian Cute said in a news release.
ICANN began collecting comments on two-character ASCII domain name labels as it considers whether to authorize the release of requested two-character domains it had previously withheld from authorization. ICANN's current registry agreement allows the release of such domains if measures are in place to “avoid confusion with the corresponding country codes.” Input from governments and registries will help ICANN “draft criteria for evaluating whether measures identified by a registry operator successfully mitigate concerns raised which relate to confusion with a related government's corresponding country code,” ICANN said Tuesday. “These criteria will be available for public comment prior to final adoption.” Comments are due to ICANN by Dec. 5.
The African Network information Center (AFRNIC) should prepare now for the exhaustion of its remaining IPv4 addresses, based on the experiences of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and other regional Internet registries (RIR) that have run out of their IPv4 allocations, said ICANN Vice President-Technical Engagement Adiel Akplogan Monday in a blog post. ARIN said last week that it had officially run out of IPv4 addresses, making AFRNIC the “last frontier for IPv4,” Akplogan said. “When a region runs out of IPv4 addresses, it does not negatively impact that region's Internet growth and development,” Akplogan said. “To the contrary -- it forces the region to embrace the future. It should not be any different in Africa. The AFRINIC community probably needs to take a closer look at the situation and develop policies that strike the right balance between allowing newcomers to come online and giving the region a chance to actively embrace the future.” ARIN's exhaustion of its IPv4 pool highlights “the need for consumer technology companies to continue joint efforts to move the industry to IPv6,” CEA said in a news release. “There are already more connected devices in the world than IPv4 addressing supports, and companies are using more complicated IPv4 address sharing techniques to compensate,” said CEA Senior Vice President-Research and Standards Brian Markwalter in the release. “With some projections envisioning more than 50 billion devices connected to the Internet as soon as 2020, the time is now for CE manufactures to help lead the shift to IPv6.”
There aren’t any inherent obstacles in the Internet infrastructure to limit the accessibility of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), but systems changes may be needed to completely open up the possibilities that gTLDs provide, said ICANN’s Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) Monday in the results of a study. The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre’s APNIC Labs division did the study June 9-July 10 via an online advertisement using Google Ads, ICANN said. The study included more than 184 million automated tests involving more than 36 million end-users, the nonprofit said. There was a 5 percent failure rate of tested unique URL queries, ICANN said. The most common problems involved Adobe’s Flash product being used in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser when accessing Internationalized Domain Name TLDs, ICANN said. The problems the UASG report identified “resulted in a larger than expected number of IDN TLDs being unresolvable, clearly an issue for Universal Acceptance,” UASG Chairman Ram Mohan said in a news release. “The UASG is reaching out to Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe to further investigate and mitigate this issue identified in the report, and ensure problems are resolved for all TLDs.” The study results “were in-line with our expectations," said ICANN Chief Technology Officer David Conrad in the news release. "However, there will need to be changes to systems and software to fully leverage the global opportunities these new TLDs enable.”
The Donuts domain registry opened registration for two-character domain names on its generic top-level domains (gTLDs) Wednesday. The move follows Donuts’ release this summer through its Early Access Program of thousands of domain names that were previously withheld to “address the potential for name collision,” a spokesman said. Two-letter domains like tv.show will be available through Sept. 16 in a Dutch auction before Donuts reverts them to its regular pricing structure, the registry said.
About 70 percent of a tested set of 10,000 domain names in ICANN’s Whois system passed all syntax accuracy requirements included in ICANN’s 2009 registrar accreditation agreement (RAA), ICANN said Monday in a report. ICANN has been developing and testing its Accuracy Reporting System to identify potentially inaccurate Whois contact information and forward that information on to registrars for further action. Ninety-nine percent of all tested email addresses met the 2009 RAA’s syntax requirements, as did 85 percent of tested phone numbers and 79 percent of all postal addresses, ICANN said. All domains are required to meet the 2009 RAA’s syntax accuracy standards, while only domains not grandfathered under the 2013 RAA must meet the 2013 agreement’s stricter syntax accuracy standards. Only 34 percent of the 3,848 tested domain names not grandfathered under the 2013 RAA met all of that RAA’s syntax accuracy requirements, though 97 percent met requirements for email addresses. More than 84 percent of the nongrandfathered 2013 RAA domains met requirements for phone numbers, while 44 percent met requirements for postal addresses. The 2013 RAA’s additional syntax accuracy requirements mainly focused on postal addresses, ICANN said. The organization said it’s planning to issue a report on follow-up efforts to remedy syntax inaccuracies in the tested domain names and is planning to complete an additional round of syntax accuracy testing in November. In a related Whois issue, groups have been battling over whether ICANN should allow registrations that mask domain-name ownership through the use of IP proxy servers (see 1507060059 and 1507170064).
User names, email addresses and encrypted passwords for users of ICANN’s website were "obtained" at some point in the past week via “unauthorized access to an external service provider,” ICANN said Wednesday. The data breach didn’t expose information related to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions or ICANN financial information, ICANN said. “There is no evidence that any profile accounts were accessed or that any internal ICANN systems were accessed without authorization,” it said. ICANN hasn't sought a law enforcement investigation of the breach but its own inquiry is "ongoing," a spokesman said. The nonprofit said it’s requiring all users to reset their passwords and cautioned them to also reset passwords for other websites if they are the same as the one they used on ICANN’s website. ICANN previously was the target of other data breaches, including a November spear phishing attack that affected its centralized zone data system (CZDS), which contained names, email addresses, phone numbers and other information of CZDS users. That breach also affected ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee members-only wiki website (see 1412170037).
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles was correct in 2013 in dismissing name.space’s antitrust lawsuit against ICANN on the new generic top-level domain (gTLD) program. Name.space had claimed ICANN’s gTLD program rules, which set the fee for new gTLD applications at $185,000, violated the Sherman Act and trademark laws. The 9th Circuit said Friday ICANN “is not a competitor” in the three markets name.space claimed ICANN had monopolized -- the TLD registry market, the international domain name market and the defensive registration services market. The 9th Circuit also said name.space’s trademark claims that ICANN accepted claims for TLDs that name.space was using on its “alternative” Internet were “not ripe for adjudication.” ICANN is “pleased that the Ninth Circuit agreed with the dismissal of the claims against ICANN in this matter,” General Counsel John Jeffrey said in a statement. “The rules and procedures governing the New gTLD Program were created through a global, inclusive, open and multistakeholder process, following a bottom-up policy development process leading to consensus-based policy recommendations.” Name.space didn’t comment.