Really the objective is to pull together whatever statistical information can be gathered and communicated to help inform.

@shane Not intending to minimize any of the very valid points which were made about addressing illegal activity (which is obtuse to some extent to the UDRP research and the topic of the post), but I have not seen anyone present a compelling case, supported by facts and data, that points to new TLDs increasing illegal activity through copycat sites or otherwise.

We would like to have some hard facts to present, but are faced with purely anecdotal responses and/or stonewalled when we ask for facts to support the claims, or someone realizes once we discuss the circumstances with them that their anecdotal experience(s) were talking about a scenario surrounding a .COM, .NET, or .ORG (CNO) domain and realize that newTLDs have nothing to do with their story.

So we’ve stuck to using data. And it shows that statistically, the number of UDRPs are significantly lower in new TLDs. The latest study we did looked at registrations in CNO contrasted against .BIZ and .INFO, and then against other new TLDs that are also available to brands for registration.

The facts point towards registration activity being reduced in the newer TLDs. Brands and/or other parties simply didn’t register in the newer TLDs. Most if not all of the domains that were registered or unavailable were in .COM, then in ORG/NET.

We provide the support data along with the report, and we had the data validated by DomainTools.com, operators of the whois.sc website.

Hope this helps.

To say that by looking at UDRP filings you can estimate what the impact to companies is really does not understand the issues. Outside of the tremendous cost to consumers who are duped and companies who have intangible loss, the UDRP process is time-consuming and expensive with virtually no impact on the illicit conduct.

If it is supposed to be a process that addresses illegal use of domains to facilitate illegal conduct, then it does not work. Say for example a criminal puts realbrand.com on-line today. After the real owner of “brand” successfully argues through UDRP to have the URL transferred (at significant cost/delay and usually because the “registrant” rarely responds to UDRP demands) the site comes back up with no material differences only hours later as real-brand.com. THAT to me is the real problem.

1- The number of total new domains registered for new gTLDS
2- How many of these new domains are not active
3- How many of these new domains were registered during Sunrise phases (as a % of total registered)
4- How many of the Sunrise phase registered domain names are inactive.
5- How many of the gTLDs that have launched in the past 5-10 years are still widely used/promoted (or even still remembered by the general public)?

My company spends upwards of $1000s during new gTLD Sunrise registrations, and then park the domains. Cheaper than fighting later, but if there are 10 new gTLDs each year, that adds up.