The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has denied Tralliance Inc.’s request for a DNS wildcard for the .travel domain.

Tralliance is the registry in charge of the .travel domain, a rarely used top level domain name. The company requested clearance to introduce a DNS wildcard. A DNS wildcard would basically redirect any traffic to non-existent .travel domains to parking pages. This idea is similar to VeriSign’s (NASDAQ: VRSN) controversial SiteFinder service for .com and .net domains. The SiteFinder service was withdrawn after coming under fire from the internet community. SiteFinder became the basis for a lawsuit between Verisign and ICANN.

Tralliance tried to argue that the purpose of the program wasn’t advertising but instead ensuring people didn’t think .travel wasn’t there or was broken. As I pointed out in September, this idea is bogus. It’s not like people are typing americanairlines.travel into their browsers instead of americanairlines.com.

The official reason for ICANN’s denial was technical, not business. ICANN pointed out that the wildcards’ effects are not limited to web browsing. It can affect other applications including e-mail. It also could cause problems as non-English characters continue to be added to domain names.

The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is seeking public comments about the latest report from its Whois task force.

The public is invited to comment on the Preliminary Task Force Report on Whois Services, which discusses a number of findings and recommendations about the domain name Whois database. The report was issued on November 22. The public comment period will continue until January 15, 2007.

After the public comment period, the Whois Task Force will consider the public comments received and prepare a final task force report for submission to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council. The Council is expected to deliberate on the final task force report in early 2007, and work to achieve a super-majority vote on a recommendation to the ICANN Board. The GNSO Council will then submit a report to the ICANN Board, and the Board will then carry out its own deliberations and voting.

The task force was organized to address a number of issues involving the Whois database. Among the issues the task force has agreed on:

1. Many registrants do not understand the meaning or purpose of the different Whois contacts (billing contact, administrative contact, technical contact).
2. If changes are made to the Whois service, awareness-raising for registrants will be needed.
3. New mechanisms to restrict some contact data from publication should be adopted to address privacy concerns

The task force has not come to agreement on the purpose of Whois contacts and whether different data should be published in Whois.

One of the proposals outlined in the report is the Operational Point of Contact (OPoC). OPoC would deal with the issue that “the amount of data that ICANN requires registrars to display in the Whois is facilitating all sorts of undesirable behaviours like renewal scams, data-mining, phishing, identity theft, and so on.” The OPoC Proposal aimed to “rationalize the Whois data output and implement a new contact type called the ‘Operational Point of Contact’”.

The OPoC would replace the publishing of administrative and technical contacts for a domain name.

Changes to Whois requirements might affect a registrar cash cow called “domain privacy”. GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, recently received a patent related to domain privacy.

At the Morocco ICANN meeting in June FTC Commissioner John Leibowitz presented several examples of how Whois helped the FTC shut down fishers, scammers, and various illegal activities. At the April 2006 Domain Roundtable in Seattle ICANN CEO and President Paul Twomey cautioned domainers to take a long term view of the effects of Whois privacy.

You may view details and make comments here.

Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN) is reporting that over 112M domains have been registered as of the end of Q3 2006.

A record number of domain names are now registered, at 112 million, which is 30% higher than just one year ago and 6% higher than the previous quarter. The five largest TLDs remain .com, .de (Germany), .net, .uk (Britain), and .org.

9.4 million new domains were registered during Q3, the third highest number of registrations ever in a single quarter. New registrations actually decreased compared to Q2, but this is mostly because of the upsurge of .eu registrations in Q2.

ccTLDs (country domains) continued to see growth. There are 248 ccTLDs and five of them saw double digit growth compared to the previous quarter: .at (Austria), .es (Spain), .fr (France), .ru (Russia), and .us (United States).

.Us domains continue to sell in the aftermarket. This year’s biggest reported .us sales include Models.us for $30,000 and Jew.us for $29,500, according to DNJournal.

Domain registrations continue to be buoyed by investors that park domains. These parked domains generate revenue from pay-per-click ads, typically serviced by Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Approximately 24% of .com and .net domain names are parked according to Verisign.

Domain name giant Marchex may be holding up to $24M in trademark-infringing domains.

David Kesmodel’s expose on domain company Marchex (NASD: MCHX) continues to dig up dirt. After discovering that the company was monetizing a number of trademark typos through its parking program, Kesmodel has now uncovered a number of potentially trademark-infringing domains that the company actually owns. These include ibmlaptops.com, ibestbuy.com, chasemortgagega.com, cheapdisneytickets.com and carnivalsinglescruises.com.

After Kesmodel contact Marchex’s legal counsel and read through the company’s financial statements, he found out that the company acquired a substantial number of potentially trademark-infringing domains when the company bought the Ultimate Search portfolio in a landmark transaction. Marchex is holding $24M in escrow accounts pending resolution to the issue. The company might end up paying less for the portfolio acquisition if it is determined that a substantial number of the domains have legal issues. However, it is unclear if $24M represents the number of domains (about 1/6 the purchase price) or if it includes possible liabilities for infringing trademarks.

The domain name whois records show they are protected by Moniker’s privacy service. Regardless of whether the company was aware of these domains before, it will be interesting to see if they take action. By monetizing these domains they might be opening up the door to legal action. Marchex has not stopped monetizing the domains that Kesmodel brought to its attention a couple weeks ago.

NameMedia, owners of BuyDomains, have purchased Afternic.

NameMedia announced today that it is buying Afternic. This probably explains the recent Afternic push to eliminate adult domains from their system. NameMedia is a privately-held, venture-backed company headquartered outside Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts. Afternic is an auction-based marketplace for buying and selling domain names.

Afternic’s in-house parking service has used DomainSponsor as a preferred partner. They will be replacing DomainSponsor with ActiveAudience in the near future. Roger Collins of Afternic reported that they have been testing the new ActiveAudience feed and have seen higher revenue results that they believe will translate into higher payouts. Domains that were using DomainSponsor will be automatically switched to “Afternic House parking powered by ActiveAudience”.

This move places NameMedia in direct competition with Sedo, and they will now be offering the same range of services. More information will be available in the December edition of Name Monetizer which will be posted at ParkQuick.com.