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DropCatch raises antitrust concerns about Donuts’ Dropzone proposal

Kevin Murphy, September 8, 2021, 17:27:09 (UTC), Domain Registrars

TurnCommerce, the company behind DropCatch.com and hundreds of accredited domain name registrars, reckons Donuts’ proposed Dropzone service would be anticompetitive.

Company co-founder Jeff Reberry has written to ICANN to complain that Dropzone would introduce new fees to the dropping domains market, raising the costs involved in the aftermarket.

He also writes that Donuts’ ownership of Name.com, a registrar that DropCatch competes with in the drop market, would have an “unfair competitive advantage” if Dropzone is allowed to go ahead:

Donuts is effectively asking every entity in the ICANN ecosystem to bear the costs of introducing a new service with no benefit outside of a financial benefit to itself, while forcing all registrars to spend more money and resources to register available domain names.

Donuts is proposing Dropzone across its whole portfolio of 200+ gTLDs. It’s a parallel registry infrastructure that would exist just to handle dropping domains in more orderly fashion.

Today, companies such as TurnCommerce own huge collections of shell registrars that are used to ping registries with EPP Create commands around the time valuable domains are going to delete.

Under Dropzone, they’d instead submit create requests with the Dropzone service, and Donuts would give out the rights to register the domains in question on a first-come, first-served basis.

While ICANN had approved a similar request from Afilias before it was acquired by Donuts, the Dropzone proposed by Donuts has one major difference — it proposes a new fee for accessing the system.

No details about this fee have been revealed, which has TurnCommerce nervous.

Donuts is asking for Dropzone via the Registry Services Evaluation Process and ICANN has not yet approved it.

Reberry says ICANN should consult with the relevant governmental competition authorities before it approves the proposal.

You can read Reberry’s letter here (pdf) and our original article about Dropzone here.

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Comments (3)

  1. Anonymous says:
    September 8, 2021 at 5:40 pm

    Boo-hoo

    Reply
    • Snoopy says:
      September 9, 2021 at 6:02 am

      Yep, who cares, Donuts basically owns those tlds (unlike .com/.net/.org). They can make up whatever rules they like.

      Reply
  2. king says:
    September 16, 2021 at 3:42 pm

    Donuts’ Dropzone service is a shameful monopoly.

    Reply

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