30,000 more domains to register in .fr
AFNIC released over 30,000 domains following the court decision that lifted the law prohibiting usage of several thousands of controversial domain names, including islam.fr, internet.fr, url.fr and many others.
France's constitutional court in October lifted the 2004 law banning the use of the French words for such terms as xenophobia, Satan, mosque, slave, Jew, brothel, church, cannabis and business. The decree authorising the new law was published on Wednesday. Mathieu Weill, AFNIC, points out that since July, 1, more than 6,100 requests have been made. "By far the most sought after are terms like 'internet.fr', 'url.fr' and 'entreprise.fr' (business)," Weill notes. For sensitive names such as those of religions, an applicant can be refused because of the risk of "disturbing public order," Weill said.
New domain names can be registered by anyone who can demonstrate a "legitimate interest" on a "first come, first served" basis.
Advertisers vs. ICANN
The Association of National Advertisers is threating to sue ICANN unless it "abandons" its new generic top-level domains program. In the letter addressed to Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's board chair, ANA is expressing its worries about cybersquatting, typosquatting, phishing, as well as the cost of defensive registrations and post-launch trademark enforcement. According to the letter, ANA represents 400 companies that spend $250 billion every year on their brands in summary. ANA's CEO, Robert Liodice, also thinks that ICANN failed to consider the economic impact of new gTLDs, and that it failed to develop the program in a transparent manner.
"ICANN must not ignore the legitimate concerns of brand owners and the debilitating effect on consumer protection and healthy markets its unsupervised actions will cause. Should ICANN refuse to reconsider and adopt a program that takes into account the ANA’s concerns expressed in this letter, ICANN and the Program present the ANA and its members no choice but to do whatever is necessary to prevent implementation of the Program and raise the issues in appropriate forums that can consider the wisdom, propriety and legality of the program", the letter says.
ICANN may as well see several letters of such kind — and some of them could definitely turn up as lawsuits. However, the organization has about 30% of the registrant fee allocated to various “risks”, and legal defense sure counts as a risk.
.xxx makes its first steps
.xxx, one of the first gTLDs to go live, is already expanding rapidly: first adult sites went online in the past weeks, and 1500 more are to follow.
Casting.xxx and orgasms.xxx are the first sites that are already online in new domain zone. The corresponding domain names were allocated as part of ICM Registry's Founders program, which was designed for early adopters from within the adult industry to secure and develop key .XXX domain names as showcase sites ahead of the official launch of .XXX on September 7, 2011. 35 companies from the adult industry from around the world were accepted into the Founders program, claiming approximately 1,500 premium .XXX domain names. As a result, ICM Registry made somewhere around $4 mln., and negotiated a seven figure deal with Frank Schilling, Cayman Islands-based domain investor.
ICM Registry's new gTLD, however, has certain problems that deal with universal gTLDs support. Skype, for example, fails to recognize the .xxx links, and Twitter's TweetDeck, an URL shortening service, won't make .xxx URLs shorter. There are also some reports about the same problems experienced by Android users. Email addresses form another concern: some sites don't accept emails in new domains. The issue definitely requires software developers to step up, or else the problem with new gTLDs and their compatibility could be even worse once a significant number of the domains is in the root.
