GoDaddy’s GlobalBlock supports blockchain names

GoDaddy’s Brand Safety Alliance has finally released the list of TLDs supported by its new GlobalBlock brand protection service, and it’s notable for including a couple dozen extensions that aren’t real TLDs at all.

Formally announcing its launch today, the company said GlobalBlock will initially allow trademark owners and others to block their marks and variants in about 600 “extensions” and published the list on its web site.

The term “extension”, as opposed to “TLD”, is important, as the headline number seems to count zones where names are registerable at the third level — so .bar.pro and .cpa.pro and .com.cx and .net.cx, for examples, are individually counted.

I count a total of 457 TLDs on the currently published list, of which 27 are distinct ccTLDs.

But I also about 20 strings that aren’t real TLDs. As well as pseudo-gTLD .it.com, a lot of supported extensions appear to on blockchain naming systems such as Unstoppable Domains (proving, once again, that Unstoppable chose entirely the wrong brand for its service).

The blockchain TLDs currently listed are: .altimist, .anime, .binanceus, .bitcoin, .blockchain, .crypto, .dao, .go, .hi, .klever, .kresus, .manga, .nft, .polygon, .pudgy, .unstoppable, .wallet, .x and .zil.

About 270 of the real gTLDs on the list belong to Identity Digital, with GoDaddy Registry accounting for about 35.

Google Registry has 28 gTLDs on the list, seven of which aren’t even publicly available yet, such as .search and .map. This in either incredibly cheeky — selling blocks in TLDs in which cybersquatting is literally impossible — or a sign that Google plans to release more of its dormant gTLD inventory soon.

Other registries with multi-TLD representation on the list include Global Registry Services, GMO Registry, Internet Naming Co, ZACR and Nominet (though, while .wales and .cymru are currently listed, .uk is not).

Notable by their absence are portfolio registries Radix, XYZ and ShortDot.

UPDATE: This story was updated several hours after publication to remove the reference to Handshake. Unstoppable Domains is the only blockchain naming system to so far be in the GlobalBlock ecosystem.

Looks like the fight for .hotel gTLD is over

One of the longest-running fights over a new gTLD may be over, after three unsuccessful applicants for .hotel appeared to throw in the towel on their four-year-old legal fight with ICANN.

In a document quietly posted by ICANN last week, the Independent Review Process panel handling the .hotel case accepted a joint request from ICANN and applicants Fegistry, Radix and Domain Venture Partners to close the case.

The applicants lawyers had told ICANN they were “withdrawing all of their claims” and the panel terminated the case “with prejudice”.

They had been fighting to get ICANN to overturn its decision to award .hotel to HOTEL Top-Level-Domain (HTLD), formerly affiliated with Afilias, which had won a controversial Community Priority Evaluation.

CPE was a process under the 2012 new gTLD program rules that allowed applicants in contention sets to avoid an auction if they could show sufficient “community” support for their bids, which HTLD managed to do.

The Fegistry complaint was the second IRP to focus on this decision, which was perceived as unfair and inconsistent with other CPE cases. The first ran from 2015 to 2016 and led to an ICANN win.

Part of the complaints focused on allegations that an HTLD executive improperly accessed private information on competing applicants using a vulnerability in ICANN’s applications portal.

The IRP complainants had also sued in Los Angeles Superior Court, but that case was thrown out in July due to the covenant not to sue (CNTS) that all new gTLD applicants had to agree to when they applied.

The fight for .hotel had been going on for longer than that for .web, but unlike .web it appears that this fight may finally be over.

The first four new gTLDs have been unmitigated disasters

“Arabic ‘Dot Shabaka’ goes online, ‘Dot Com’ era nearing end”.

That was a headline from a Turkish news site in February 2014 when the first Arabic gTLD — شبكة. — went to general availability, having been delegated to the DNS root October 23, 2013, 10 years ago next week.

It was one of the first four gTLDs to go live from ICANN’s 2012 new gTLD application round. At the time, the registry very kindly documented its launch on the pages of this very blog.

A decade on, شبكة. — which transliterates as “dot shabaka” — has just 670 registered domains, a 2015 peak of 2,093 names, and barely any active web sites of note. The registrar arm of the registry that runs it, GoDaddy, doesn’t even support it.

شبكة. is the Arabic for “.web”. The dot goes to the right because Arabic is read right-to-left. A full domain looks like this فيمأمنمنالألغام.شبك in your address bar but in the DNS, the TLD is represented by the Punycode .xn--ngbc5azd.

Given the Latin-script version of .web auctioned off for $135 million, and that there are 274 million Arabic speakers in the world, you might expect there to be a thirsty market for dot shabaka domains.

Nope.

It added about 2,000 domains in its first three months, crept up to 2,093 over the next two years, and has been on the decline pretty much consistently ever since. It has 40 accredited registrars, but only 21 of those have any domains under management.

Notably, GoDaddy has zero dot shabaka names under management, despite GoDaddy Registry being the official registry due to a string of consolidation ending with its acquisition of Neustar’s registry business over three years ago.

Its largest registrar is Dynadot, which seems to have a pretty responsive, intuitive storefront for non-Latin domain names.

Doing a site search on Google reveals the registry’s NIC site as the top hit — never a good sign — and a first page dominated by broken, misconfigured, and junk sites. An anti-landmine organization and a reputation management service are among the legit sites that show up.

One of the first-page results is actually in Japanese, a page declaring “ドメイン「المهوس.شبكة」は、日本語では、「オタク.ネット」という意味です。” or “The domain ‘المهوس.شبكة’ means ‘otaku.net’ in Japanese.” (per Google Translate).

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the demand for Arabic script names. If a reasonably priced, .com-competitive, god-tier gTLD such as “.web” is a backwater neglected even by its own registry, what does that say about any long-tail internationalized domain name gTLDs that might be applied for in the next ICANN application round?

We don’t have to wait until then to get a sense, however. Dot shabaka was one of four gTLDs delegated on the same October 2013 day, and the others haven’t fared much better. The other three were:

• .xn--unup4y (.游戏) — means “.games” in Chinese. Operated by Identity Digital (formerly Donuts).
• .xn--80aswg (.сайт) — means “.site” in several Cyrillic languages, including Russian. Operated by CORE Association.
• .xn--80asehdb (.онлайн) — means “.online” in several Cyrillic languages, including Russian. Also operated by CORE Association.

You might expect .游戏 to do quite well. There are over a billion Chinese speakers in the world and gaming is a popular pastime in the country, but this TLD is doing even worse than dot shabaka.

While it was a day-one delegation, Identity Digital didn’t actually start selling .游戏 domains until early 2017, so it’s had a shorter amount of time to build up to the pitiful 318 domains recorded in the last registry transaction report. While its DUM number is lumpy over time, there’s an overall upward trend.

Compare to Latin-script .games (also Identity Digital) which had over 48,000 domains at the last count. Even comparing to premium-priced and XYZ-operated .game (Chinese isn’t big on plurals), which had 4,227 names, is unfavorable.

The two decade-old Cyrillic gTLDs aren’t doing much better, despite there being 255 million Russian-speakers in the world.

While .онлайн (“.online”) has a relatively decent 2,340 domains, the English version, run by Radix, has 2,732,653 domains. The Russian “.site” (.сайт) has just 829 domains, compared to Radix’s English version, which has 1,501,721.

The major Russia-based registrars, while they are understandably the biggest sellers of Cyrillic gTLD domains, are actually selling far more of their Latin-script, English-language equivalents.

Reg.ru, for example, has 99,716 .site domains under management, but just 249 in .сайт. It has 188,125 .online domains — where it is the fourth-largest registrar — but just 918 in .онлайн.

While there are certainly supply-side problems, such as the problem of Universal Acceptance, I suspect the abject failures of these four IDN gTLDs to gain traction over the last decade, despite their first-mover advantages, is based at least equally on a lack of demand.

ICANN has made UA — particularly with regards IDNs — one of its top priorities for the next new gTLD application round. Supporting a multilingual internet is one of the CEO’s goals for the current fiscal year.

But it had the same goals in the 2012 round too. The reason the first four to be delegated were IDNs was because IDN applicants, in act of what we’d probably call “virtue signalling” nowadays, were given priority in the lottery that decided the order in which they were processed.

Second time lucky?

Radix looking for a back-end

Radix is looking for a back-end registry services provider, possibly ending its 10-year relationship with CentralNic (now Team Internet).

The company announced an invitation-only RFP covering all of its stable of TLDs: .online, .store, .tech, .website, .space, .press, .site, .host, .fun, .uno, and .pw.

.online alone has 2.6 million names in its zone right now; should it switch to a different back-end it would be the largest migration since 3.1 million .au domains changed hands in 2018.

Radix says its portfolio contains seven million domains altogether.

The company has put a September 16 deadline on interested parties returning their RFP forms. It expects to make its decision by the end of November.

Radix sold almost $8 million of premiums last year

New gTLD portfolio Radix made $7.8 million from the sale of $100+ premium domains in 2022, over $5 million of which came from premium renewals.

The company this week released its second-half premiums roundup, showing $4 million in total premium retail revenue, $2.7 million of which came from renewals.

That follows first-half numbers of $3.8 million total and $2.5 million from renewals.

It made $1.3 million selling 1,458 first-year premiums, and $2.7 million renewing 2,483 names.

First year renewals were at 61%, second year at 79% and subsequent years, as we revealed in January, at a whopping 90%.

The best-performing TLDs were .tech, .store and .space.

The dollar values are at the retail level; Radix’s own share will be about 30% lighter.

Interview: Sandeep Ramchandani on 10 years of Radix and new gTLDs

It’s over a decade since ICANN’s last new gTLD application round, and naturally enough many companies in the industry are celebrating their 10th anniversaries too. Radix has been putting a lot of effort into promoting its own birthday, so a couple months ago I had a long chat with CEO Sandeep Ramchandani about the last decade and what the future holds.

We discussed Radix’s business model, rivalries, performance, blockchain-based alt-root gTLDs, the company’s plans for the next application round, and the TLDs he wishes the company had bought.

Measuring success

Radix is based in Dubai but has most of its 75-person headcount located in Mumbai, India. It also has satellites, mainly focused on registrar relations and marketing, in the US, South America (where it markets .uno) and Asia.

Across 10 gTLDs, it has amassed over 5.6 million registrations, according to its web site. If you exclude pre-2012 TLD .info, that’s more than Identity Digital, which has more than 20 times as many TLDs in its stable.

“Donuts went for the long tail, category-specific names,” Ramchandani said. “Our idea was to launch TLDs that had mass-market potential.”

More than half of the regs to date have been concentrated in two TLDs — .online and .site, each of which measure their volumes in seven figures. The TLD .store is approaching a million names also.

More than half of the company’s sales are coming from the US, with 20% to 30% from Europe. It’s pretty much the same mix across premium sales and basic regs, he said.

Radix has been focusing most of its marketing effort on .store, .tech and .online, but Ramchandani says he thinks .site, currently at around 1.2 million domains and the company’s second-biggest seller, has a lot of untapped potential.

“We have about six million domains right now, but I don’t think that’s the best metric, as you can easily spike volumes by selling cheap,” Ramchandani said.

“The real metric is domains that are renewing every year,” he said. “Our first year registration price is still fairly low, but we optimize it to maximize our renewals.”

There’s also the matter of live web sites, of course. Radix estimates there are over 725,000 live sites on its domains, according to its web site.

On premium renewals

If you’re a domain investor, imagine you have a portfolio of tens of thousands of domains that you price at between $100 and $10,000, and you get to sell them not once, but every single year.

That’s Radix’s “high-high” business model, where domains in premium tiers are priced for users and renew at premium prices.

Ramchandani says that between 10% and 15% of Radix’s revenue comes from premiums, but it’s growing faster than regular-price regs. So far, it’s sold about 5% to 6% of its premium inventory. Many thousands of domains remain.

But the problem with premiums is of course whether or not they will renew at all, particularly if they’ve been sold to a domain investor who failed to secure the quick flip.

Ramchandani said premium renewals have been running at about 55% for the first renew, 75% for the second and above 90% for the third. The second and third-time figures are very respectable indeed for any TLD.

Premiums are typically held by end-user registrants rather than investors, he said. Probably lower the one in 10 premiums are owned by domainers, he guessed.

“We don’t have a lot of domainer interest, because the holding cost is too high,” he said. “A lot of the best web sites we see on our TLDs are on premiums.”

On industry consolidation

One of Ramchandani’s regrets over that last decade is that Radix didn’t manage to pick up some of the gTLDs that changed hands as the industry began to consolidate.

“We could have gone a bit harder to acquire some of the larger TLDs that did sell over the last few years,” he said. He would have to loved to have gobbled up .club or .design, he said, but these were bought by deeper-pocketed GoDaddy.

He said Radix sees itself as a buyer rather than a seller “for sure”, but the problem is: “We are interested in buying, but there aren’t so many out there that are really good TLDs.”

The company is not interested in the business model of buying up a dormant dot-brand and repurposing it to mean something other than its original meaning, which other registries have tried.

Ironically, that was where Radix started out, selling Palau’s .pw ccTLD as a domain for the “professional web”, which was a hard sell.

On the next round and alt-root TLDs

The long-touted next application round has been in policy development hell at ICANN for a decade, and Ramchandani agrees that “it’s a couple years away at this point and could very well be longer than that”.

“We will participate,” he confirms, adding “we’ll have to look at which TLDs we think are worth going for.”

“I think the best ones are already on the market, but there may be a few — based on recent trends — that make really good TLDs that qualify to have the scale and global impact that we look for,” he says.

“But honestly if we end up with none I think we still think have a very, very exciting business opportunity ahead of us for the next 10 years at least with the TLDs we already have, so it’s not something we’re betting the business on,” he says.

But how big will the next round be? There were 1,930 applications in the 2012 round, and plenty of anecdotal evidence today about pent-up demand, particularly from brands. That said, many say the first round wasn’t as successful as some had anticipated, which could lower turnout.

“A lot depends on the barrier to entry,” Ramchandani says. “Last time there was an investment of $185,000 for an application so there was a decent barrier to entry, but there are talks about potentially reducing that spectacularly. If that happens, I think the floodgates will open.”

(I should note that our conversation took place before ICANN announced that applications fees will likely be closer to $250,000 in the next round.)

“Last time this process ran there was less confidence that there was a sustainable business around new gTLDS, but given how some of the domainers in that round have performed — there are a bunch of TLDs that have done substantially better than everyone’s expectations — there might a lot more coming in to fight for those in contention with us in the next round,” he said.

He’s expecting to see “really high numbers” in dollar terms when strings come up for auction, but “a dozen, max, that will be really highly contested”.

One factor that could push down applications are blockchain-based alt-roots, where the likes of Unstoppable Domains throwing its legal weight around to prevent versions its TLDs appearing in other roots.

That said, Ramchandani would not rule out applying for TLDs that exist in alt-roots.

Radix premium revenue hits $3.8 million in first half

New gTLD portfolio registry Radix this week gave its twice-yearly premium domain sales report, declaring first-half revenue of $3.8 million.

That figure includes $2.5 million in renewal revenue from premium-priced names, because Radix charges premium renewal fees.

For Radix, premiums sold through the registrar channel are arranged into eight tiers from $100 to $10,000 a year. While there were eight sales at the top end, most sales were concentrated in the $500-and-below tiers.

The average first-year revenue was $558 per domain.

There were 1,767 premiums sold across the stable of 10 gTLDs, compared to 1,378 in the second half of 2021 and 1,436 in H1 2021.

.tech is the highest-performing, with $643,825 of recurring retail renewal revenue reported.

Radix renewals drive growth as revenue hits $38 million

New gTLD registry Radix brought in revenue of $38 million in 2021, up 35% on the year before, the privately held company said today.

Profit was up 60% over the same period, Radix said, without disclosing the dollar amount.

It made almost as much in renewal revenue in 2021 as it made overall in 2020 — $27 million versus $17.9 million in the prior year. Last year 72% of revenue was standard-fee renewals versus 64% in 2020.

But the revenue from new regs was basically basically flat at $5.7 million versus $5.6 million — 15% versus 20% of overall revenue.

Revenue from premium-tier domains (both new regs and renews) was 12.5% of revenue, or $4.75 million, up from $4.5 million in 2020.

The customer country mix may be a little broader too. Radix said 47% of revenue now comes from the US, which is down from the 64% it reported for the previous year.

The company said .online is still the strongest performer in its portfolio.

Mutually assured destruction? Now Afilias faces .web disqualification probe

Afilias’ ongoing quest to have Verisign’s winning bid for the .web gTLD thrown out may have backfired, with ICANN now launching a probe into whether Afilias’ own bid should be disqualified.

Afilias and Verisign could now BOTH be kicked out of the .web fight, delivering the coveted gTLD into the hands of the third-placed bidder for a knock-down price.

There’s even the possibility that Verisign’s winning $135 million bid could be more than cut in half, taking tens of millions out of ICANN’s coffers.

ICANN’s board of directors on Thursday said it will investigate not only whether Verisign broke new gTLD program rules by using a Nu Dot Co as proxy to bid, but also whether Afilias broke the rules when an executive texted NDC during a pre-auction comms blackout period.

It’s the first time board has resolved to take a look at the allegations against Afilias, which so far have only come up in letters and arbitration filings from Verisign and NDC.

The .web auction in 2016 resulted in a winning bid of $135 million from NDC. It quickly emerged that its bid was bankrolled by Verisign, which had not directly applied for .web.

Afilias’ applicant subsidiary (now called Altanovo Domains, but we’re sticking with “Afilias” for this story) has been trying to use Verisign’s sleight-of-hand to get the auction overturned for years, on the basis that ICANN should have forced NDC to show its cards before the auction took place.

An Independent Review Process panel last year ruled that ICANN broke its own bylaws by failing to rule on Afilias’ allegations when they were first made, and told ICANN to put .web on hold while it finally formally decides whether Verisign broke the rules or not.

What the IRP panel did NOT do was ask ICANN to rule on Verisign’s counter-allegations about Afilias violating the auction blackout period. ICANN’s decided to do that all by itself, which must piss off Afilias no end.

The board resolved last week, with my emphasis:

Resolved (2022.03.10.06), the Board hereby: (a) asks the [Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee] to review, consider and evaluate the allegations relating to the Domain Acquisition Agreement (DAA) between NDC and Verisign and the allegations relating to Afilias’ conduct during the Auction Blackout Period; (b) asks the BAMC to provide the Board with its findings and recommendations as to whether the alleged actions of NDC and/or Afilias warrant disqualification or other consequences, if any, related to any relevant .WEB application; and (c) directs ICANN org to continue refraining from contracting for or delegation of the .WEB gTLD until ICANN has made its determination regarding the .WEB application(s).

I see four possible outcomes here.

• Nobody gets disqualified. Verisign wins .web and ICANN gets to keep its $135 million. Afilias will probably file another IRP or lawsuit.
• Verisign gets disqualified. Afilias gets .web and ICANN probably gets paid no more than $79.1 million, which was its maximum bid before the auction became a two-horse race. Verisign will probably file an IRP or lawsuit.
• Afilias gets disqualified. Verisign wins .web and then it has to be figured out how much it pays. I believe the high bid before the third-place bidder pulled out was around $54 million, so it could be in that ball-park. Afilias will probably file another IRP or lawsuit.
• Both Afilias and Verisign get disqualified. The third-placed bidder — and I don’t thinks its identity has ever been made public — wins .web and pays whatever their high bid was, possibly around $54 million. Everyone sues everyone else and all the lawyers get to buy themselves a new summer home.

The other remaining applicants are Donuts, Google, Radix and Schlund. Web.com has withdrawn its application.

The people who will decide whether to disqualify anyone are the six members of the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee who are not recusing themselves due to conflicts of interest (Edmon Chung has a relationship with Afilias).

Given that the board has already ruled that it has a fiduciary duty to dip into the new gTLD auction proceeds pretty much whenever it pleases, can’t we also assume that it has a fiduciary duty to make sure that auction proceeds pool is as large as possible?

Domain firms plan “Trusted Notifier” takedown rules

Domain name registries and registrars are working on a joint framework that could speed up the process of taking down domain names being used for behavior such as movie piracy.

Discussed last week at the ICANN 71 public meeting, the Framework on Trusted Notifiers is a joint effort of the Registrar Stakeholder Group and Registries Stakeholder Group — together the Contracted Parties House — and is in the early stages of discussion.

Trusted Notifiers are third parties who often need domain names taken down due to activity such as copyright infringement or the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and are considered trustworthy enough not to overreach and spam the CPH with spurious, cumbersome, overly vague complaints.

It’s not a new concept. Registries in the gTLD space, such as Donuts and Radix, have had relationships with the Motion Picture Association for over five years.

ccTLD operator Nominet has a similar relationship with UK regulators, acting on behalf of Big Copyright and Big Pharma, taking down thousands of .uk domains every year.

The joint RrSG-RySG effort doesn’t appear to have any published draft framework yet, and the discussions appear to be being held privately, but members said last week that it is expected to describe a set of “common expectations or common understandings”, establishing what a Trusted Notifier is and what kind of cooperation they can expect from domain firms.

It’s one of several things the industry is working on to address complaints about so-called “DNS Abuse”, which could lead to government regulations or further delays to the new gTLD program.

It obviously veers into content policing, which ICANN has disavowed. But it’s not an ICANN policy effort. Whatever framework emerges, it’s expected to be non-contractual and voluntary.

Trusted Notifier relationships would be bilateral, between registry and notifier, with no ICANN oversight.

Such deals are not without controversy, however. Notably, free speech advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been complaining about Trusted Notifier for years, calling it “content policing by the back door” and most recently using it as an argument against Ethos Capital’s acquisition of Donuts.