Its been an interesting couple of weeks for the .XYZ registry.
Since the Domainincite post, several publications and organizations jumped on .XYZ for seemly to agree to ban domain names at the request of China.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), published a post on October 22, entitled “By Accepting Chinese Censorship of Domains, Registry xyz.com Invites More”
In its post the EFF said in part:
“”Domain registry xyz.com has put in a proposal to ICANN [PDF] that would see it automatically censoring new domain names that match a Chinese government blacklist. Industry news site Domain Incite has reported that this puts perhaps close to 12,000 banned words and expressions onto the blacklist, thereby preventing terms such as the Chinese words for “democracy” and “human rights” from being registered within any of the company’s top-level domains—which include .xyz, .college, .rent, .theatre, .protection and .security. This will apply not only to Chinese registrants, but to registrants worldwide.”
“”xyz.com’s casual acceptance of Chinese censorship of its domain space provides an open invitation to China and other governments to apply more pressure on registrars and on ICANN itself to further limit the expression of speech through domain names. In the long term, this will only further erode the ability for users to express themselves online, by registering domain names that describe or complement speech hosted at that domain, or are a short and pithy speech act in themselves.””
However today the XYZ registry put out a post of its own entitled; “XYZ Stands for Democracy”
“”Starting this weekend, there have been a number of articles published with inaccurate information regarding our upcoming accreditation in China. Speculation exists that there is some kind of banned list being driven by the Chinese government. This is not true. There is no banned list. There are no restrictions to registering a .xyz domain, with the exception of Specification 5 of the Registry Agreement, which all new domain extensions are bound to.”
After the statement from .XYZ registry, The EFF updated their post with the following:
“Update, November 4: The CEO of .xyz has written to deny that any domains would be blocked by their registry, as their proposal had suggested. Whether this had been a miscommunication in the proposal, or is a reversal of their previous position, we welcome the now unambiguous statement by .xyz that Internet users in China and worldwide will be free to register strings that offend the Chinese government in any of the .xyz registry’s top-level domains.”
Fortune jumped on the band wagon with a post of its own published today November 4th entitled; “Google Faces New China Censorship Problem” which said in part:
“A new domain service called “.XYZ” is under fire over an alleged censorship contract with China that will forbid anyone around the world from registering thousands of words like “liberty,” “1989” and “democracy.” The controversy highlights a growing trend of countries finding ways to censor the Internet across national borders and could create an ethical dilemma for Google which uses the XYZ domain for its holding company Alphabet. (ABC.XYZ)
However later today Fortune updated their story after the .XYZ Registry statement:
“Update: On Tuesday afternoon, XYZ published a blog post vigorously denying the allegation. The post states in part: “This is not true. There is no banned list. There are no restrictions to registering a .xyz domain, with the exception of Specification 5 of the Registry Agreement, which all new domain extensions are bound to.”
The Wall Street Journal published an editorial on November 1st, entitled “China Censors Your Internet”
In that story WSJ states in part:
“In October, Los Angeles-based XYZ.com, which operates several new Internet domains, made a deal with the Chinese government under which it will enforce Beijing’s censorship globally. The registry will let China ban domain names everywhere based on Beijing’s blacklist that includes “freedom,” “liberty” and “democracy,” as well as any reference to the Tiananmen massacre.”
The WSJ post went on to say:
“Here’s how that will work in practice: Liberty University can use liberty.edu, but not liberty.xyz. Likewise, the foundation that funds the statue can use statueofliberty.org, but not statueofliberty.xyz.”
Well tonight I got copied on an email from a domain investor, Joy Antony of India, who owns the domain name Liberty.xyz along with what he says are over 2,000 other .XYZ domain names.
Mr. Antony says in the email “for your information, I am a domain name investor with 2000+ .xyz names and I sold 36 numbers of .xyz names until now for total $18,500. I got big profit from .xyz investment. (one of my sold name, rally.xyz for $2,000 mentioned on today’s DNjournal.com sales report).
Also I plan to develop more websites using my .xyz domain names.”
As for the other example’s of domain names that would be blocked by .XYZ from being registered cited by both the Wall Street Journal in its editorial and Fortune in its post; Freedom.xyz has been registered since May 2014 under privacy.
The domain name Democracy.xyz has been registered since June 2014, and is owned by Davit Gasparyan of Glendale, CA.
Statueofliberty.xyz is owned by someone in Texas and was registered in June of this year.
It looks like neither Fortune nor the WSJ checked to see whether these domain names were already registered before publishing its scathing editorial on the .XYZ registry blocking domain names on the request of China.
Stay Calm Internet, Stay Calm.
And check the whois first.
China should have its own policy and system to keep social order and feed its 1.4 billion people. I agree that if a person wants to do business in a certain country whatever it is, he/she should follow the country’s laws and regulations. Then there will be no problem at all. Very simple.
In other news: Chinese domain registrar, Chengdu, gained 250k domains since October 30th, per https://ntldstats.com/registrar/1556-Chengdu-West-Dimension-Digital-Technology-Co-Ltd
That number seems to match the .XYZ gains during the same period, of roughly 200k domains:
https://ntldstats.com/tld/xyz
Thoughts?
Finally some truth. Pretty shameful if you ask me to go and put an article up like that, these are big names too. It doesn’t get any more cut throat than this.
The EFF article links to this request proposing the creation of a Chinese Gateway:
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/request-2014154-multiple-09oct15-en.pdf
Scroll down to page 9 of this PDF, where it states:
“XYZ will reserve names prohibited for registration by the Chinese government at the registry level internationally, so the Gateway itself will not need to be used to block the registration of of any names.”
Continue reading through page 10.
Acro
Regarding your first comment:
In other news: Chinese domain registrar, Chengdu, gained 250k domains since October 30th, per https://ntldstats.com/registrar/1556-Chengdu-West-Dimension-Digital-Technology-Co-Ltd
That number seems to match the .XYZ gains during the same period, of roughly 200k domains:
https://ntldstats.com/tld/xyz
Thoughts?
Well my thoughts are that Chengdu is now the world’s largest registrar for new gTLD’s domain and since .XYZ is the most registered new gTLD is seems to make sense.
The domain world continues to shift to the East
What are your thoughts?
Chengdu in China is now the largest .XYZ registrar, surpassing GMO. It is therefore safe to assume the recent 200k+ XYZ registrations were achieved via some form of promotion via Chengdu. I’m using the data ntldstats provides and have not cross-referenced it to the other record-keeping web site.
I find it ironic that XYZ was accused of using Chinese blocklists when it’s obvious it wants as big of a footprint in China as possible.
That being said, read pages 9/10 on that PDF.
Acro
I read the pdf as you requested, however this post is about the three stories that were posted and the examples of xyz domains they used in the story all of which are already registered and none of them to anyone in China.
“On another note the Chinese government announced that registries and registrars will have to meet a number of conditions and obtain the approval of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) before being allowed to engage in commercial and operational activities in China. With just 14 top-level domains (TLDs) approved to date, it means that the race is on to ensure that offerings are not shut out of the Chinese market. Crucially, the rules also apply to existing TLDs such as ‘.com’, which has not yet been approved.”
http://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=6696e6c5-2412-498e-ac35-c09d07cbcb6f
This issue if there is one is not going to be limited to .xyz domains
At least one of the stories references the EFF response, which links to the PDF. On pages 9 & 10, it’s crystal clear that there will be a prohibition of certain words that are deemed illegal by the Chinese government. The procedure of actions depend on the whether the registrant is in China or not, and supplementary ownership information will be provided at query time, depending on exactly that difference. It further states that action upon those domains – when registered – will depend on the local laws of the country (China) that requests it.
I agree that there is no list of 12,000 domains and that the examples used in the other two publications don’t support that notion.
“The procedure of actions depend on the whether the registrant is in China or not”
I think the RSEP was poorly written. Because if you read on, it seems to describe a gateway for Chinese registrars through which registrations would be made, instead of direct connections to the registry; but the .xyz zone will resolve normally. Most of the RSEP seems to focus on the application of Chinese law to Chinese registrants.
If a US court orders a domain taken down, or if the FBI seizes a domain, it’s not as if the domain resolves to the original site outside of the US.
Acro
GMO is a Japanese company, headquartered in Tokyo not China
http://www.gmoregistry.com/en/company/
They are publicly traded
I didn’t say GMO is in China; just that it’s not the top XYZ registrar any longer.
Acro
and every registry that wants to sell in China will have to comply with its rules including .com or not get the license.
Probably more reason that Chinese registrants love numbers and letters.
Words can be dangerous it seems
That is accurate also, the TLD/gTLD game is even in China.
You’re 100% correct on that last statement as well. 😀
And registrars better look out for AlpNames.com which is creeping up on Godaddy with its $1 or less domain names.
Interesting discussion. I can’t comment on the veracity of the claims by DomainIncite.com or any of the secondary news sources, because I don’t know enough. But I’d like to share a good article on journalistic responsibilities in the digital world. In one of the better posts I’ve read this year related to responsible journalism, Blake Ross, former Head of Product at Facebook, wrote “Don’t Outsource Your Thinking.”
https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-ad825a9b4653
In sum, he says,
“One of the most useful lessons I learned from working at Facebook had nothing to do with technology: Doubt the media. Always doubt the media. Many journalists are superb, but certain reporters would publish plainly inaccurate information about our products on a regular basis. And if they got our tech wrong, what were they getting wrong in that science story? That war piece?”
He finishes with, “Don’t outsource your thinking. Not to the government, not to the media, not to me. Confront the world skeptically … organizations we lean on for oversight may sometimes abdicate their responsibility. Educate yourself until alarm bells ring in your mind when you read observation masquerading as journalism. We are lucky to live in a time when we are all so empowered.”
He provides a case study, showing what 10 minutes worth of research yielded, using some standard internet tools (all used daily by domainers). Perhaps domainers have a role to play in educating journalists in the use of a subset of our toolkit?
If you missed it, it’s worth a read.
Bob
Thanks for sharing
My view is that XYZ.com has carried out a U-turn in response to the WSJ, EFF and Fortune articles, but instead of admitting that, it is pretending that we all simply “misinterpreted” its RSEP.
For the record, after I published my original article on this topic the only correction I got from anyone associated with XYZ was to say the size of the list was roughly 12,000 strings rather than the 40,000 that I originally reported.
I encourage everyone to read the RSEP, starting at the bottom of page 9. It’s perfectly clear what the company was/is planning to do. Not even ambiguous.
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/request-2014154-multiple-09oct15-en.pdf
I’m appalled at the way the company is now trying to extricate itself from this bad publicity.
It could have simply thrown its hands up and said “Oops, we made a mistake, but now we’ve changed our mind.”
Instead, it seems to be lying about what its intentions are/were.
I’m very disappointed in them.
That portion of the RSEP was drafted by a technical person who had an incomplete understanding of the specific policy plans. The rest of the document is more specific. It was added into the second iteration of the RSEP in response to a specific concern ICANN had about names registered in China being treated differently than names registered anywhere else. Specifically, ICANN was concerned that if we received an order from the Chinese government in relation to a name under Chinese jurisdiction, that resolution of the name would be locally affected, instead of resolving names consistently and globally. We wanted to clarify that, just as when we respond to a US court order relating to a name under US jurisdiction, any legal action relating to a Chinese name under Chinese jurisdiction would be taken at the registry level.
The sentence in question is: “XYZ will reserve names prohibited for registration by the Chinese government at the registry level internationally, so the Gateway itself will not need to be used to block the registration of of any names.” You are understandably interpreting that to mean that XYZ is preemptively banning a pre-defined, specific list of domain names. We understand that sentence, read in isolation from the rest of the document, certainly reads that way. That sentence, and the whole paragraph, was meant to convey that at the time the gateway launches, any existing, registered domain names under Chinese jurisdiction that have already been the subject of legal action in China would continue to be unavailable at the registry level. In other words, the gateway would not be used to create a situation where a domain name under Chinese jurisdiction which had been taken down in China would resolve or be available for registration outside of China. It would have been much clearer if the RSEP had said something along the lines of “XYZ will implement Chinese legal actions at the registry level, so that the Gateway will not be used to block names locally for names under Chinese jurisdiction.” ICANN’s concern was an initial impression that the gateway would be implementing some sort of differential resolution of names whether inside or outside of China. Our clarification of that point has, I agree, been misunderstood.
So, as an example, if we receive a Chinese legal order tomorrow (before the gateway has launched) which requires disabling a domain name registered in China and properly under Chinese jurisdiction, then it will be disabled at the registry level, and not by the gateway. When the gateway launches the name will continue to be unavailable, and the gateway will not implement the action on a localized basis only in China. The normal registry system would continue to be the only system used to resolve the name globally. Again — the specific stability concern ICANN had was that we would use the Chinese gateway to make .xyz names resolve differently, depending on what country you are in. I completely agree that our re-draft to address that concern came out in a way that can be read in a way that we sincerely did not intend.
There is no list of names for which the Chinese government is coercing us to pre-empt registration. We’ve had no discussions with them whatsoever on this topic, and that kind of preemptive banning of names is plainly not part of the Chinese requirements here. There have been .xyz names which have been the subject of legal actions such as URS and UDRP, etc., and any name subject to a legal action in a jurisdiction relevant to that name (such as the country of the registrant) will be treated the same way that names in other TLDs are treated when those situations occur. Those names will continue to resolve or not resolve globally by the registry, in the manner required by the applicable law bearing on those names.
-Daniel
Portions are food, your technical writer’s gateway is a dungeon.
Draft a new gateway based on portability, strip out the country names.
If you won’t string out logic, leaving the country names blank, then it’s not a portable gateway.
For your Gateway Circuit, Draw two overlapping circles. One circle represents the Country in question, the other circle equals the Remaining Countries. The 25% overlap of each circle is the Jurisdiction of TheRegistry”. When A country in question outlaws said domain, the name goes into Redemption with TheRegistry for a period No longer than it takes to Return Availability to the Pool of Remaining Countries.
Basic electricity Dan, no circuit diagram needs to articulate each and every combination of misunderstanding in order to demonstrate functionality. Prove you gateway works thru completing it’s own circuit, not by insulting ICANN’s intelligence every which way from SUNDAY.
I just registered 法轮功.xyz
If you look that up, Kevin, it is guaranteed to be on any “Chinese banned list of names”.
A few hours ago I was tooling around trying to register 民主.xyz (“democracy”).
Whois showed it as available, but I was unable to register it at any of the registrars I tried.
Assuming this was evidence it was being blocked, I asked Daniel what was going on, and he told me it was already registered.
Ten minutes later I managed to register it for a buck at NameCheap.
Available but unregisterable one moment, registerable the next.
Funny that.
I got the Chinese word for “porn” too. I’m sure the previous registrant just let it drop, right?
Joke time: A Chinese man and his wife are watching a Communist government sponsored propaganda film.
Half way through the movie, the wife gets up to go to the bathroom. It took longer than expected, and the husband got nervous. After a while, he stats whispering, ever so raising his voice:
“Bitch! BITCH! BITCH!!!”
A government official walks up to him asking what’s going on, and the man explains.
“Your wife has no name, you have to call her bitch???” says the official, clearly upset.
The man says, “She has a name but I can’t say it out loud, it’s Zìyóu.” (freedom)
😀
@Michael
As you mentioned and as I paraphrase — crazy times in the world of domains.
The above PDF is dated October 9, 2015 and the domain was registered September 3rd…. XYZ did state that all previous registrations would be honored… https://gwhois.org/Liberty.xyz+dns