Once I explain what it is I do for a living, people, particularly here locally in the Channel Islands often say to me “But which domain extension should my business or organisation be using for best effect?”.

What is interesting, is that the approach people have on the subject appears to be influenced by their age, length of time on the Internet and the locations where their business is targetting.

The thing to always bear in mind, is that a major (although not the only) use of a domain name, is as a brand.

A brand for a business, organisation or for a particular topic. You can see the thinking behind my choice of the nigel.je brand here.

Because of the Crown Dependencies’ close links, both geographic, constitutional and economic, with the United Kingdom, before 1996 it was very common for those few Channel Island organisations that were on the Internet at the time, to use .UK domain names, and as what we now call “gTLD” names. (Usually .NET since the .COM usually belonged to an American company).

15 years ago, when we created the Channel Islands’ domain registry, there were only two ISPs (GUERNSEY.NET in Guernsey, and SuperNet (ITL.NET) in Jersey

Back then, even the Islands’ governments used to use .GOV.UK or X.400. (In fact we still maintain a legacy registration of the name GUERNSEY.GOV.UK with JA.NET on behalf of the States). Also, despite Guernsey not being part of the UK, because of the integration with the UK forces, the police continue to use GUERNSEY.POLICE.UK as well as various .GG names for other purposes.

(It’s perhaps worth noting that to some people outside, the message which the use of that brand appears to send out is that despite the Islands’ complete domestic autonomy from the UK, the forces of law and order are under significant influence if not control from London.)

Following the creation of the .GG,  .JE and .IM country codes on the Internet in 1996, and adoption by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) as official territorial two-letter ISO codes in 2006, Guernsey and Jersey (and the Isle of Man) has started to appear in drop down lists on websites as options. If you don’t see Guernse, Jersey and the Isle of Man, the website developer is almost certainly using out-of-date libraries.

This is all part of what our politicians rightly call “the emerging international personality of the jurisdiction”.

What Montenegro did in a couple of years, we take 800 or so years to do!).

In general, this is A Very Good Thing.

But it’s left quite an interesting approach to using domain names.

Anyone who was at school after about 1998 naturally understands immediately that .GG  = Guernsey, and .JE = Jersey as they will have been familiar with .sch.gg and .sch.je email addresses.

However anyone older than that may be subscribe to have the school of thought that was common in the early days after the Internet arrived in the Islands and took the pragmatic view that “we aren’t part of the UK, the .COM is in use by an American company. so let’s use .NET”. An example of that, already mentions, is guernsey.net (now owned by Wave Telecom).

Furthermore people who came onto the internet around in the dotCOM boom (and bust!) think that .COM is the be-all and end all when it comes to online businesses.

And then of course, there are the deliberate branding exercises.

Some companies want to be seen to be a global enterprise. They feel they have to  use .COM (if they can find one available or more likely,  are forced to buy one in the ‘secondary market’)..

Surprising to some of us, but some companies want to downplay their Channel Island connections.

After all, we have UK +44 telephone numbers. We have Royal Mail standard postcodes and even though we have our own Postal Administrations, our mail, from outside the British Islands is addressed to the UK.

Therefore it’s understandable  enough that some Channel Island companies, particularly those taking advantage of using Low Value Consignment Relief, may not want to highlight, or even may wish to obscure their Channel Island connections. A .CO.UK domain name is the natural choice for companies who want to pretend to be in the UK.

But a choice of domain name can have major implications. In a little know ruling, the European Court of Justice ruled that what domain name a company used for its website, and even whether it put its phone number on that website in internationa (e.g. +44) rather than national dialling code format, could have an effect on whether it was considered to be targeting customers abroad.
So I guess it’s only a matter of time before the UK Inland Revenue decides that a conscious choice to use .CO.UK is one factor leading to a UK tax bill of some sort.

And using overseas domains has all sorts of jurisdictional risks. I’ve written already about the risks of using unstable countries’ domains (BIT.LY etc).
And Alderney-based Full Tilt Poker found itself in some difficulty when they realised that the fact that the registry for all .COM domains is the the US made their domain subject to seizure.

At the end of the day, local companies should be proud of their origin, and for practical reasons as well as sentiment, should use the local domain.

Last week a court in the USA seized control of the .COM domains belonging to several online poker sites, inlcuding Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker.

On the face of the registration records, these domain registration were owned by organisations outside the USA, although there seemed to be some suggestion that one or more of them may have been ultimately controlled by US citizens or residents.

On the one hand, it is entirely right that the courtroom is the right place for decisions like this. No excutive agency, or a law enforcement body, or even worse, domain vigilantes should have such powers.

And the face that these recent temporary seizures were done through a Court is actually good news.

Democratic countries have something called the Rule of Law which protects personal property (which the bundle of rights under a domain registration contract undoubtedly is) and it should take a court order to seize things.

On the other hand, it seems that removing something which in e-commerce terms is equivalent to both the brand and the shop window of a business, is fairly draconian, and should be resorted to in the most egregious of cases. The commercial harm that, if only for a short time, a notice is placed on a company’s website stating it has been shut down on the basis of alleged criminal activity will not be insignificant.

The question which a British or European Court would probably have asked itself before granting a Prohibitory or Mandatory Order, is whether the requested remedy was proportionate.

Now it seems that at least some those domain names have been returned to use.

At the time of writing pokerstars.com is forwarding to pokerstars.eu.

fulltiltpoker.com looks to be back to normal, although I understand from what I read at gamblingcontrol.org (Full Tilt is licenced here in Alderney) that they have suspended real-money play from the USA. Frankly, I’m surprised that an Alderney company ever allowed US players!

But there’s a big lesson in this episode.

And it’s something that has been obvious to those of us in the domain name industry for years, but self-evidently, it’s not something that the risk management people at online poker sites have ever considered before.

It’s not only ‘foreign’ ccTLDs like Libya that have jurisidictional legal risk to an online e-commerce business. Any company which uses a .COM, .NET or any other ICANN ‘gTLD’ domain name places itself at risk of losing its entire business and voluntarily puts itself within US jurisdiction.

And it’s not only criminal proceedings in above-average risk sectors (such as online poker) that are vulnerable.

Any non-country-code domain name can be disputed in an American court. And well established, legal businesses could find themselves on the end of an expensive, and inconvenient ‘reverse cyber hijacking’ attempt in a US court. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. In 1997the British owners of PRINCE.COM had to take swift  legal action in London’s High Court to keep their domain from an American company who, as an American company, believed they had a better right to it

Suddenly your local country-code domain name might seem like a much better to do business in.

And the long-awaited ICANN ‘new generics’ much less so.

Oh, and an amusing postscript and shameless piece of self-promotion.

The country-code for the Bailiwick of Guernsey, which includes Alderney, is actually ‘GG’ which is poker terminology for ‘Good Game’. I can hear Bruce Forsyth in my head already!

Related articles

• Two Poker Sites Can Use Domain Name (online.wsj.com)

Several weeks ago, in one of my first articles on Notes from a Small Island I noted that there was systemic risk in using domain names registered in foreign countries such as Libya.

And by ‘foreign’, I don’t mean overseas, I mean ‘different – culturally, linguistically, and jurisdictionally’.

Libya scores pretty high in all those categories, and in view of the recent problems experienced by LETTER.LY I am not above a passing ‘I told y’all so’.

In summary, because of communication difficulties caused by the Libyan civil war, it appears that  this particular .LY domain registration couldn’t be renewed and went off the air temporarily.

Now both .GG and .JE (the Channel Islands) have their own a small share of’ domain hack’ registrations.

GG has several different flattering meaning in Chinese internet slang. It also means ‘good game’ to computer gamers and Internet chess and poker players. There’s even a Tennessee religious group. JE means ‘I’ in French, and both ‘you’ and ‘little’ in Dutch.

The registry welcome overseas registrants — there are no artificial restrictions on registration at all, although it’s important to note that we are not advertising or promoting the domains as anything at all other than the local official two letter codes for the Channel Islands. It is clear in the Agreement, that the contract of registration is under our laws, and our courts have jurisdiction.

Fortunately, we have had a stable system of government and an independent judiciary for many hundreds of years – as a common-law jurisdiction under the English Crown. This gives registrants, in the same way as international banks and others in the finance industry who open branches of their businesses locally, a large amount of comfort that our system is logical and predictable and operates under the Rule of Law.

But if a third party raises a dispute over a GG or JE name, you will either have to resolve it in our equivalent of the UDRP, or hire a local Advocate to represent you in court.

And that might be an inconvenience, to say the least, depending on where you are from.

Sometimes, it seems, the capacity of apparently sane and rational individuals to hold irrational and self-inconsistent views reaches new heights.

Take the strange case of the .XXX domain which was finally approved a couple of hours ago, after many stops and starts over the last few years, though for people outside the rarified world of Internet Governance, it won’t have made much impact.

.XXX was a proposal, hotly debated for many years now, by British-born, Florida-based businessman Stuart Lawley to create a web address suffix (just like .COM for companies or .GG for Guernsey)  to allow content publishers in the euphemistically-named ‘adult entertainment industry’ to create website and email addresses ending in .XXX (e.g. www.se.xxx).

Let’s get one thing straight – whether or not there is such a new extension is a matter of amused indifferernce to me. — it’s somewhat unlikely I should ever want an XXX domain name, but you never know.

What I do see as important, are the rights of internet users to free expression without disproportionate interference in those rights.

Mr Lawley’s plan which he has been promoting for 6 or 7 years,  was fiercely opposed, as you might imagine.

But it was opposed by a most curious coalition.  An unholy alliance between religous and moralist fundamentalists and porn producers.

Yes, that right. Unbeleivably, a part of the industry that the new web address is planned to serve doesn’t want it. (Part does self-evidently).

Now I’ve recently been attending the international meeting at which .XXX was  finally approved.  (I’m not part of the group of people – the ICANN Board – which made the actual decision). Andt the whole meeting was picketed. Even those of us, like me, that werenot directly involved in the decision making process.

The group doing the picketing was the ironically-named ‘Free Speech Coalition’ whose sole message appeared to be ‘Ban .XXX’.

I kid you not, they were chanting ‘Free speech now- no to XXX‘.

Is it only me that can see the irony in a group calling itself the Free Speech Coalition trying to ban some one from using what, after all, is simply a short, three-letter string. They really are confusing labels with content. But that is par for the course in the internet naming industry.

There are well advanced plans for ‘.GAY‘.  Will the the African Bishops get together with Stonewall to oppose .GAY?

Or perhaps Alcoholics Anonymous will join with the Licensed Victuallers to ban .BOOZE

And this is deeply concerning for free speech. It is a fundamental right that we should be allowed to say what we like, within lawful, necessary and proportionate limits.

One of the opposing voices was an attorney and former pornographer, who through an impassioned speech opposing .XXX on free speech grounds, stated that he had the First Amendment tattooed on him.

We took up the argument in the lobby on the way out. Although measured and courteous, he was still impassioned — at one time partially disrobing to show me the actual tattoo.  It was on his bicep, for the curious, not the other place I’d imagined. And it was nothing like how you might imagine someone in the porn industry taking off the clothes in front of you might be

There is no compulsion whatsoever for pornographers to stop using .COM so can someone please tell me where is there any interference with their free speech rights. Yet, these so-called Free Speech advocates  are arguing, dangerously, in my opinion, to suppress a form of expression — the use of a three letter string as top-level domain name by Mr Lawley.

I still don’t get it.

I’ve just found the time to read the GAC  communiqué from the ICANN-Brussels meeting.

It’s a mark of the maturity of the whole private-public sector co-operation that is ICANN that in comparison to some of the similar documents I read in 1999 that it is so reasonable in tone.

In particular, the GAC’s observations on the Rule of Law and existing rights (a subject I’ve written on elsewhere on this site in respect to the Cybercrime Recommendations) are entirely sensible to include. While taking the time necessary to get things right is inconvenient, and costly to those who are investing time and money in new business models, NOT getting it right will be incredibly more costly and inconvenient.

Registrars and registries (existing and potential) must welcome public policy input in this fashion, since by working together (in the original spirit of the Internet) something much greater will be achieved than either sector (private industry on the one hand and Government on the other) could acheive alone.

Next week’s ICANN meeting promises to be quite interesting!

Today I’ve been presenting at the Cybercrime forum which was organised jointly by the US and the EU (the FBI and European Commission, Directorate-General Home Affairs).

I am heartened to see a spirit of cooperation between registries, registrars and police and other law enforcement agencies despite different approaches. We all want to see bad guys discouraged from doing bad things, and caught when they do.

I’ve also written a response to the ICANN 2009 Law Enforcement Recommendations, which was published on CircleID yesterday.

A properly formatted and typo-corrected article is available for download here.

ICANN-Law_Enforcement_Recommendations-Commentary

(Thanks to Dr Lisse for the typesetting assistance)

Related articles

• Cyber cops and domain name registrars meet to tackle net crooks
• On the Heels of Recent Domain Seizures, ICANN Insists “We Don’t Take Down Websites” (readwriteweb.com)
• ICANN Cancels Jordan Meeting Due to Middle East Turmoil (circleid.com)