ICANN will be called to task over new top level domain names next week.

Next week The U.S. House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet will hold an “ICANN Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) Oversight Hearing”.

You can be assured that someone from ICANN will be asked to attend. Hopefully it won’t be the train wreck the non-profit experienced in June 2009.

In 2009 the same committee took then ICANN President/CEO Paul Twomey to task for a number of grievances. It was ugly. (You can read my coverage of that hearing here, here, and here.)

Frankly, Twomey wasn’t prepared. But ICANN was also paying for many years of not responding to the community.

Of course these meetings are a bit humorous and misguided to begin with. It’s basically a bunch of representatives reading aloud a briefing report their staff put together for them.

Question: Will ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom make a power play and suggest it wouldn’t be appropriate for ICANN to attend a U.S. government hearing? It would take some guts to do this right before the IANA contract comes up. But I wouldn’t put it past him.

Morning wine tasting, tapas classes, and backstage tour where FC Barcelona plays are on the agenda for DOMAINfest Barcelona.

I made the mistake of bringing my wife to DOMAINfest Prague last year.

Why was it a mistake? Because the second day of the conference was just fun networking events such as target shooting and go-carting. Now she thinks all domain conferences are like this and she cuts me less slack when I have to “go network at a domain conference”.

That said, it was a lot of fun last year.

DOMAINfest just announced its lineup of activities for the second day of this July’s event in Barcelona. Some highlights:

- Backstage tour of Camp Nou, the largest football stadium in Europe where FC Barcelona plays
- Tapas Cooking Class, including wine pairings
- Wine Tasting in Penedes (for some reason this is only offered in the morning. When in Europe…)
- Old Town & La Rambla Walking Tour

Early bird registration fees of $695 are still available through April 30.

Reports of traffic changes aren’t very accurate.

I’ve seen a number of reports estimating the damage to major content sites from Google’s so-called Panda updates.

I’ve come to one conclusion: none of them are more than directionally accurate.

Yes, we know that a lot of content sites have taken a beating, but by how much?

Early reports focused on the number of search terms the sites ranked for. This doesn’t have as much correlation to actual traffic as you might think.

Now we’re starting to see reports from metrics firms such as Hitwise.

My guess is the Hitwise data is being taken out of context. Or Hitwise is overstating the effects.

If I’m reading this spreadsheet the way the Forbes blog posts suggests I do, I’d think that traffic at eZineArticles is down 77%.

I suppose it’s possible. In March EzineArticles.com said it’s traffic was down 10%-30%. If you believe that most of its traffic came from Google, then this wouldn’t match up with Hitwise’ data. (I’m not putting it past any publisher to understate the hit it took.)

Same goes for many other sites on the list. Either they get a ton more traffic from non-Google sources than we think, or these estimates of traffic drops are wrong. Keep in mind that most of these estimates are based on profiling; few of them are directly measured.

My point: take all of these numbers as merely “directionally accurate”. Yeah, these sites have been hit. But these numbers may not give the right magnitude.

Bank sues alleged cybersquatters and phishers.

Morgan Stanley already has the domain names — but it wants more than that.

The bank has filed a lawsuit against the owners of five domain names that it says were used for cybersquatting and phishing.

The company already has possession of four of the five domain names thanks to proceedings at National Arbitration Forum last year. Through UDRP it picked up ms-ae-fund.com, morganstanleyae.us, morganstanleyae.com, and morganstanley-ae.com.

Yet the company has filed suit in Southern District of New York against the John Does that owned the domain names. Morgan Stanley wants to get their identities and hold them accountable. It alleges they provided false whois information, so the UDRP failed to uncover their true identity.

The bank demands a full accounting of how much the perpetrators made off their scheme and pay punitive damages.

You can read the entire suit here (pdf).

Popular clothing outlet finds Seventy-seven to be an unlucky number.

A National Arbitration Forum panel has found that clothing retailer American Eagle is not entitled to the domain name SeventySeven.com, despite the domain owner showing clothing pay-per-click links on the domain name.

Retail Royalty Company’s American Eagle stores have a clothing line with the 77 mark.

The decision came down to whether or not the domain name owner should have known about American Eagle’s mark when it registered the domain name and thus registered it in bad faith. The clothier filed its trademark before the domain was registered but the trademark wasn’t granted until a couple years later.

The panel ruled that this timeline, coupled with the respondent living outside the U.S., was enough to place more burden on American Eagle to prove that the domain name was registered in bad faith:

Complainant may thus draw comfort from the fact that the date of filing of its trademark registration application with the USPTO came before the registration of Respondent’s domain name. However, we must also consider that the filing date of Complainant’s trademark registration application was separated in time from the registration of Respondent’s domain name by only a matter of several months, taken together with the fact that Complainant is a United States company while Respondent does business half a world away in Hong Kong. These circumstances require that Complainant demonstrate by concrete proof that Respondent knew or had strong reason to know of its 77 mark rights at the time the domain name was registered…

Of course you could also argue that SeventySeven.com doesn’t look anything like the complainant’s mark for 77.

This isn’t the first “number” domain name to be decided in a UDRP. In fact, domain name attorney John Berryhill has won three of them himself: the present case, zero.us, and 187.com.