Hi George, Not parody at all. I think it was important for you to raise the issue of how far the Georgia Tech report goes and keeping us aware of where it doesn't go. By you extrapolating the unlikely worst case scenario (e.g. nearly all domain names are abusive), you encourage us to deal with the problem as identified by the Georgia Tech report (which is bad enough) and keeps us focused on trying to draw reasonable extrapolations from the data as applied to the other marks not mentioned in the study rather than running off and viewing the problem through a strictly apocalyptic lens. In other words, the problem is bigger than just the data set that Georgia Tech came up with, but smaller than "all domains." This is an important thing to keep in mind as we try to work together to build constructive solutions to deal with the problem. Best, Paul -----Original Message----- From: gnso-rpm-wg [mailto:gnso-rpm-wg-bounces@icann.org] On Behalf Of George Kirikos Sent: Friday, November 17, 2017 7:57 AM To: gnso-rpm-wg <gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [gnso-rpm-wg] Article on Combo-squatting study conducted by Georgia Instutute of Technology and Stony Brook University affecting our discussion of Trademark + Industry Terms in the TMCH, Sunrise and Claims (among other RPMs that it may also implicate) Hi Paul, I'm not sure if that was a parody post, or whether the point I was making was missed. If one reasonably extrapolates and gets to a point where one has to claim that more than 100% of all domains are abusive, that implies something is wrong with one's starting point (i.e. the claimed abuse for the small sample was likely overstated; or as Zhou Heng noted earlier, was unrepresentative, just like the poorly done INTA study). To get a sense of scale, 268 marks is less than 1% of just the TMCH-listed marks. And the set of TMCH-listed marks (what was it, 40K or 50K total?) are a small subset of all TMs. Another data point was the number from Nominet released earlier this week: https://www.nominet.uk/collaboration-keeps-uk-safe-record-16000-domains-susp... "The criminality report shows that the number of .UK domains suspended between 1 November 2016 and 31 October 2017 has once again doubled year on year to 16,632, which represents around 0.14% of the more than 12 million .UK domains currently registered." I think that's perhaps a more realistic metric of the incidence of criminality (0.14%), and those suspensions *include* IP-related crime. Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/ On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 8:29 AM, icannlists <icannlists@winston.com> wrote:
Hi George,
You raise a fair point. With just 268 US based marks examined, the abuse is beyond rampant. If we are to extrapolate to other well-known marks, for example the excellent examples you mention - pharma, childrens toys, the abuse moves from beyond rampant to just plain old staggering, even without assuming (as you did in your note) of a 1 to 1 ration of abuse between the 268 noted examples and the remaining marks in the world.
Unfortunately for the abusers in the domain name industry, it will not be possible to un-shine the light that the Georgia Tech study has shown on them. It is up to all of us to deal with the head on. Glad to see you joining in that effort!!
Best, Paul
-----Original Message----- From: gnso-rpm-wg [mailto:gnso-rpm-wg-bounces@icann.org] On Behalf Of George Kirikos Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2017 5:49 PM To: gnso-rpm-wg <gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [gnso-rpm-wg] Article on Combo-squatting study conducted by Georgia Instutute of Technology and Stony Brook University affecting our discussion of Trademark + Industry Terms in the TMCH, Sunrise and Claims (among other RPMs that it may also implicate)
P.S. Where the math really starts to break down is if one attempts to extrapolate this to the larger population of all markholders and marks worldwide. Remember, this was just 268 *US* ones. Even "Lego" wouldn't have been on the list (famous for their voluminous UDRP filings), since their Alexa rank is around 2647 worldwide, 1,785 in the USA (see https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lego.com ), and thus not in the top 500. Many of those pharma brands that are famous and see a lot of cybersquatting aren't in the Alexa top 500 either (I won't name them, lest they trigger spam warnings).
What % of worldwide marks is 268? Far below 1%. But, let's suppose that they represent 1% of cybersquatting. Would it be argued that 2.7 million "bad" domains for that subset of 268 marks means that the number of "bad" domains classified as "combosquatting" must be 100 times 2.7 million, or 270 million? Depending on how one extrapolates, one might even generate a claimed total abuse (just from combosquatting, not even counting all the other types of typosquatting, etc.) that exceeds the actual total number of domain name registrations quite easily (which is absurd).
Sincerely,
George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/
On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 5:23 PM, George Kirikos <icann@leap.com> wrote:
The numbers appear overstated. After a first pass, I don't see the complete list of all 268 of the marks they studied (maybe I missed it), but several (Amazon, Adobe, Delta, Yahoo) still appear to be dictionary words where it would be false to claim that Mark+Dictionary word is automatically "bad." Indeed, when you look at table 7 at the top right of page 11, they classify 86.6% of the so-called "combosquatting pages" as "Unknown", and only 13.39% as "Malicious". And of those alleged "malicious" ones, 69.9% were an ambiguous "trademark abuse" (not phishing, social engineering, or "affiliate abuse"), which seems likely to yield even more false positives.
Their attempt at detecting "false positives" leaves much to be desired, i.e. whitelisting only the top 10,000 Alexa domains (see page 4, Alexa list). My company's math.com domain name wouldn't get white-listed by that standard (and it gets millions of visitors/year). Neither would school.com. Alexa Top 10,000 sites get enormous traffic --- many legitimate but lower traffic sites wouldn't be whitelisted by their methodology.
Importantly, they didn't seem to use WHOIS or Zone Files in their data sets (see page 4, section 3.2). i.e. they trumpet the "468 billion DNS records" (many DNS requests and website visits are generated by bots, not human beings, these days), but there are perhaps roughly 150 million gTLD domain names for which ICANN makes policy.
And it would seem, by their methodology, that they might even count defensive registrations by brand owners themselves as "combo squatting". e.g. if Microsoft owns MicrosoftOffice.com, does that get accounted for properly? 2.7 million domains divided by 268 marks equals 10,074 domains/mark, which sounds like a lot, but Microsoft already owns tens of thousands of domains, according to DomainTools:
https://whois.domaintools.com/microsoft.com
as do many of the other markholders like Google, Yahoo, etc. I hope those weren't counted improperly.
I think seeing the results by TLD would also be useful (e.g. .TK domains are free, and openly abused), as well as what effect the "promos" from new gTLDs has had (e.g. domains under $1/yr), and whether historic domain tasting might have also accounted for some of the measurements.
Not saying the problem doesn't exist, as there are lots of bad actors. But, if it was a "growing threat" as claimed, the evidence would be directly observable via increased lawsuits, increased UDRP filings, etc. More important would be to discern whether there is an increase in the number of bad actors, rather than just measuring things by domains. e.g. 2.7 million bad actors registering one domain name each is a lot different than 10 bad actors registering 270,000 bad domains each. I think the latter situation is to be preferred, from a policy perspective (i.e. better to have tools to handle the industrial-cybersquatter, where the incidence of false positives and collateral damage from policymaking will be lower). Others might correct me, but it's my sense from media reports that more of the bad actors have shifted their focus to social media and apps abuse, rather than domain abuse, to generate traffic (e.g. Facebook, Android apps, etc.). Due to tools like Chrome "Safebrowing" blacklists, rarely do I ever actually encounter abusive domains these days.
Sincerely,
George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/
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