We recentlywrote about the troubled Registerfly domain name registrar.

On Friday, ICANN announced the preliminary injunction issued by a Federal Court on April 26, 2007 which now gives ICANN the right to terminate RegisterFly's accreditation as soon as possible. The Court noted RegisterFly's failure to comply with its April 16, 2007 TRO (temporary restraining order).

RegisterFly was ordered under the April 16, 2007 TRO to turn over all registrant data to ICANN. ICANN contends RegisterFly failed to do so, stating that what data they did receive was incomplete and outdated.

Customers of Registerfly have been caught in the cross fire between founders Kevin Medina and John Naruszewicz. Amidst allegations of fraud and mismanagement, the company's servers were allegedly hacked and an attempt was made to move registrant data to new servers.

Customers found their domain accounts locked and were unable to move or renew their domains. Some customers contended they paid for domain renewals that didn't take place. A class action suit is said to be in the works, with many customers claiming they lost valuable domain names due to being unable to act upon the expiring registrations.

ICANN is requesting Registrars interested and financially able to become the new registrar for the approximate 700,000 domain name registrations, apply to ICANN using the outlined procedures.

ICANN has recently released a toolkit for web site developers and those who create forms or other applications that verify email or web site addresses.

When ICANN released the latest round of TLDs (top level domains), some software applications which allow validation of this type of data haven't been recognizing the new TLDs.

The Toolkits are still in beta, now testing version 3. If you are a web developer or design forms that require email or web site address validation, you can download a toolkit here. Once the toolkit is installed, it automatically updates itself when a new TLD is released.

The U.S. District Court in New York ruled this week that Zales may have infringed on the trademark of John Hamzik, holder of "The Dating Ring" trademark.

Zales has used "Dating Ring" in paid advertisement on Google so that when someone searches on that phrase, Dating Ring-Zales is one of the paid ad results.

Judge Thomas J. McAvoy denied dismissal, reasoning that this case differed from other past trademark claims that have failed, with the court stating: "In this case there may be facts demonstrating that plaintiff's trademark does appear on the displays associated with the goods or documents associated with the goods or their sale," because the trademark appears in the ad copy. More

On March 16, 2007, ICANN issued registrar RegisterFlya formal notice of termination of RegisterFly.com's Registration Accreditation Agreement (RAA). RegisterFly was ordered to give customers immediate access to their domain registrations.

Yet as of April 26th, 2007, over 900,000 holders of domain names registered with RegisterFly continue to be locked out of their accounts. The lockout prevents registrants from either renewing expiring domains or moving them to another accredited registrar for renewal.

Over 75,000 domain names were lost in January 2007 alone due to the lock out. Though customers of RegisterFly first started complaining in numbers to ICANN in 2005. Instead of getting better, things seem to have gone from bad to worse.

Some customers of RegisterFly started their own site to keep customers updated. The site is called RegisterFlies. Since RegisterFly continues a "business as usual" appearance without any updates to customers and even continues to offer .info domain name registrations.

On April 16, 2007, ICANN won a temporary restraining order (TRO) against RegisterFly, who was ordered to turn over all its' customer data to ICANN. ICANN indicated that it has received some data from RegisterFly which appeared very out of date and doubts that it is complete. A hearing was scheduled for today to determine if the TRO would be extended.

Today the RegisterFlies site reports that RegisterFly owner, Kevin Medina is attempting to sell RegisterFly (including the very unhappy customer base with locked domain registrations) for $1 million.

F-Secure, an security services firm, has requested that ICANN approve a top level suffix for banking and financial institutions. One major purpose of creating the TLD is to prevent the current phishing scams targeting banking institutions.

Phishing is the act of sending emails representing that the sender is a financial institution and requesting an action of the customer. The action requested is usually to follow an included link and sign in. The phisher has created a web site that appears to be the financial institution (perhaps even stealing their images, logos and content)but really is merely gathering the information entered by capturing usernames and passwords in a database. Of course this information is later used to access the user's bank account.

Internet financial fraud continues to increase rapidly. The U.S. receives the most phishing incidents and while the incidents reported fell from January to February of this year, 26,310 incidents were reported in February.

F-Secure believes a .bank TLD should be priced beyond the means of the average person who currently can register domain names for $8 to $10 per year, suggesting a figure of $500,000. Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer for F-Secure also suggests that the .bank suffix only be handled by one registrar, unlike current suffix which are handled by multiple registrars. :

A .bank registrar would thus also have the responsibility of confirming that anyone who wants a .bank domain name really is a legitimate bank. More specifically, the registrar would also have to confirm that theyre entitled to use the trademarked name.

To implement a new TLD, the requester must go through specific procedures outlined by ICANN.

One of the reasons for the failure of the .xxx suffix was because the community meant to utilize this suffix was not behind the creation - one of the requirements of the ICANN procedures.

Those who disagree with need of the .bank suffix point out the phishers rarely actually register a domain name similar to the financial institution their emails pretend to represent. Rather the phisher disguises the link in the email and the user rarely notices they are being sent to a different URL than represented in the email.

Currently the .gov suffix is controlled by the same method being suggested for .bank.

The bottom line, pointed out by CastrTroy at Slash Dot is:

"As long as people continue to click on links they get in emails, and not verify that they are actually at their bank's website, then there's going to be problems with phishing. It doesn't matter if the url ends in .com, or .ca, or .safe, or .xxx. If you're clicking on links in emails and getting scammed, then changing the domain name won't help anything. I'm surprised there's not more worms out there that change your hosts file, to show you a phishing site when you type in the actual url of your bank. I guess it really is that easy to get somebody to click on a link in an email, because they haven't resorted to more complicated methods."

So while a new TLD reserved just for financial institutions might help the battle against phishing, the most important protection is for consumers not to click links in email, but open a browser and go to the web site instead. If one does click a link (whether in an email or on a web site), always make sure the result is what you expected by checking the address bar of your browser.

In early April, 2007 we learned that the prices charged to domain registrars would be going up for top level suffixes, .com and .net managed by VeriSign.

The annual levy for ".com" will increase 7 percent to $6.42, and the ".net" fee will go up 10 percent to $3.85.

Today we learn that NeuStar Inc. who controls the top level suffix .biz will also implement a rate hike to registrars in October 2007.

VeriSign gave their reasoning for the hike, saying that their servers now receive approximately 30 billion requests a day, up for 1 billion several years back. In addition, VeriSign cites the need to additional security.

The good news is that owners of registrations can renew their registrations before the rate hikes in October 2007 and still receive the old pricing. After the rate hikes go into effect for registrars, rates to consumers will probably increase by the same percentage.

Tina Arena, an Australian singer, has won the domain name TinaArena.com.au in a decision handed down by an Australian Internet Tribunal. As of this writing, it appears the domain name still is not under the control of Arena since the front page claims to have no connection to her.

The alleged cybersquatters were a Melbourne-based business, Enigmatic Minds. Arena reportedly satisfied all conditions of Australian domain policy necessary to enact a transfer of the site name to her.

Other entertainers hope this decision will advance their fights to obtain domain names containing their famous names.

For additional information see the Australian Herald Sun.

A recent flub by The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reminds us of the importance of keeping track of domain name registrations.

EPIC filed a legal challenge to the purchase of DoubleClick by Google, Inc. on April 20, 2007. The following day, the EPIC.org web site was dark, showing only a default page put up by many hosts with advertisement.

The first thought was of foul play. Perhaps EPIC.org had been hacked. Or perhaps Google did something in reprisal of the filing!

Nothing so nefarious happened. Instead, EPIC simply allowed their domain name registration lapse. Checking the Whois Database, EPIC discovered their domain name registration simply lapsed on April 19, 2007. Details of the story can be found at ComputerWorld.