Interim CEO gets two C-level roles at Go Daddy

Go Daddy’s management shake-up continues apace, with the news last night that former interim CEO Scott Wagner has been appointed COO and CFO.

Wagner comes from KKR, one of three major investors to take a big stake in the registrar in 2011.

He was CEO in the interregnum between Warren Adelman’s short-lived stint and the appointment of Yahoo alum Blake Irving this January.

Irving has been filling senior spots at the company ever since taking over. Many of his new recruits are former Yahoo colleagues.

GoDaddy said in a press release that its sales hit almost $1.3 billion last year and that it has more than 11 million customers.

Three more registrars get breach notices

ICANN has told three registrars that they’re in breach of their contracts and risk losing their accreditations.

Two of the companies in receipt of breach notices this week — Internet Solutions and DomainSnap — have no gTLD domains under management, but the other, Aregentinian registrar Dattatec, has over 90,000, making it the 112th-largest registrar.

The former two have simply not paid their fees, according to ICANN.

Dattatec, meanwhile, also stands accused of not adequately responding to Whois accuracy complaints on a handful of distinctly spammy-looking domain names in its care.

All three have been given until almost the end of the month to sort out the problems or face the possibility of termination.

Go Daddy building big new facility in Arizona

Go Daddy has “broken ground” on a new 150,000 square foot facility in Tempe, Arizona.

The new Global Technology Center will have room for 1,300 technology and customer care employees, the registrar said in a press release today. It expects to create 300 new jobs locally.

The construction project was ceremonially kicked off by CEO Blake Irving and Arizona governor Jan Brewer today.

Go Daddy is of course a native of the state, with its headquarters in Scottsdale.

The new two-story center will be located in Arizona State University Research Park, and is set for completion in 2014.

Web.com CEO talks “defensive” .web strategy

Number-three registrar Web.com applied for the new gTLD .web in order to protect a trademark, but it’s open to partnerships to secure and manage the string, according to its CEO.

But the .web contention set will take a “considerable amount of time to be resolved”, David Brown told analysts during the company’s first-quarter earnings conference call last night.

“The way we’ve always thought about .web is that given that we have a trademark on the name Web.com, we really needed to apply for .web in order to protect our trademark,” he said.

“In order to protect our trademark globally, we needed to basically defend ourselves by applying for .web, and we’re certainly interested in getting it, but it’s not our core business,” he added.

Web.com, which also owns Network Solutions and Register.com, is one of seven applicants for .web.

But the company did not file any Legal Rights Objections against its competitors, as its trademark may have permitted, reflecting a slightly relaxed attitude to the string that also came across in the yesterday’s call.

Brown said, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript:

We’ll be perfectly content if anyone gets .web because they’re going to distribute it through us, and it’s our name, and we’re advertising and building a brand in the marketplace, and we’re going to be a great deliverer of .web extensions, whoever gets it, whether it’s us or someone else.

He indicated that the ultimate winner of .web is likely to be some kind of cooperative arrangement between applicants. He said:

Our strategy has always been to cooperate. And so we’ve looked at the people who have applied, and we certainly are talking to all of them about who would benefit from this and which team would be the best team to provide services, and so that would be our strategy… We won’t bear the full load of the economics of acquisition ourselves likely. It’ll likely be shared.

To me, this screams “joint venture”, which has always been the way I’ve seen .web pan out. If you recall, when Afilias was formed to apply for .web in 2000, it was a joint venture of many leading registrars of the time.

Brown also said on the call that he expects to see the first new gTLDs get approved in the fourth quarter, but they’ll be the uncontested ones and therefore not particularly lucrative.

Web.com could also be the beneficiary of marketing dollars spent by new gTLDs to secure shelf space, he said.

Deadbeat registrar is also a massive new gTLD applicant

One of the latest three registrars to receive ICANN contract breach notices is also a new gTLD applicant involved in four applications, a helpful reader has pointed out.

A. Telecom S.A., which owes ICANN $10,863.67 in unpaid accreditation fees and is facing a May 14 de-accreditation if it doesn’t pay up, doesn’t have any gTLD domains under management.

It is, however, part of the Brazilian wing of Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications giant.

Telefonica Brasil SA has applied for .vivo while the corporate parent Telefonica SA is behind applications for .movistar, .telefonica and .terra. They’re all single-registrant dot-brand applications.

Telefonica had revenue of about $80 billion last year, and employs over 280,000 people, so I doubt a measly $10,000 would even cover its daily toilet paper bill.

I can only assume that its ICANN breach notice is a result of a paperwork problem.