Registrars sought as Pool.com shuts down drop-catching business

ICANN is looking for new homes for approximately 67,000 domain names, after a decision by Momentous to dump 85 of its domain name registrar accreditations.
The accreditations were used primarily for drop-catching, according to an email sent to registrars last Friday, and each has between 200 and 3,000 gTLD domains under management.
While most affected domains are recently caught drops, there may be some regular registrants scattered throughout the customer base, according to ICANN.
Momentous, owner of Pool.com, announced that it was getting rid of its drop-catching registrars in an email to customers late last year, as several domainer blogs reported at the time.
Pool plans to “refocus its business away from an emphasis on the secondary market”, the email said.
The company wanted to consolidate all of the domains in its NameScout registrar with the transfer fees waived, but ICANN declined its request, according to the email.
Some customers are not happy with how Pool has handled the situation.
The domainer “Acro” is currently pursuing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau in Momentous’ native Canada, according to a recent blog post.
The 85 accreditations are due to expire January 10. Registrars wishing to take over the portfolios had a deadline of this afternoon to express an interest with ICANN.

Name.com “will carry as many TLDs as possible”

Demand Media executive vice president Taryn Naidu said newly acquired registrar Name.com plans to carry as many TLDs as possible, but urged new gTLD applicants to start distribution talks with registrars as soon as possible.
“It’s going to be challenging to offer all of them,” Naidu told DI today. “We’re asking registries to come talk to Name.com early and often to make sure they get the shelf space.”
“They have to come with a plan, and make sure they’re ready to go to market,” he said.
Demand Media announced the acquisition of Name.com earlier today. The deal, for an undisclosed amount, will see the 30-strong Denver, Colorado-based company join number two registrar eNom in the Demand stable.
Name.com is almost 10 years old and has almost 1.5 million domains under management, the majority of them in gTLDs. eNom has over 12 million domains spread across scores of registrar accreditations.
Naidu said that the forthcoming new gTLD market was a major reason for the deal.
While eNom is primarily a channel player, Name.com is all about the customer-facing retail side of the registrar business.
Owning Name.com could give Demand Media a faster way to market the dozens of new gTLDs that it has itself applied for, as well as the 300 it has partnered with uber-applicant Donuts on.
Naidu declined to comment on details of the Donuts relationship, but I’d be quite surprised if a commitment to carry its TLDs is not part of the deal.
He also said he’s not too worried about alienating eNom’s existing reseller channel, pointing out that main retail rivals such as Go Daddy and Tucows also have extensive reseller networks.
“In many regards having access to a retail player like this will help us serve our resellers by better understanding their needs,” he said.

Vietnamese registrar on the ICANN naughty step

ICANN has issued a broad breach notice against Vietnamese domain name registrar Mat Bao.
The company hasn’t escrowed its registrant data as required since February, according to ICANN, and it owes over $4,500 in accreditation fees.
It also hasn’t given ICANN a URL for its registrar web site, nor is it providing Whois service, according to the breach notice.
The registrar has fewer than 1,000 gTLD domain names under management, according to the latest registry reports.
ICANN has given it until January 17 to resolve its problems or risk losing its accreditation.

Another deadline missed in registrar contract talks

ICANN and domain name registrars will fail to agree on a new Registrar Accreditation Agreement by the end of the year, ICANN has admitted.
In a statement Friday, ICANN said that it will likely miss its end-of-year target for completing the RAA talks:

While the registrars and ICANN explored potential dates for negotiation in December 2012, both sides have agreed that between holidays, difficult travel schedules and the ICANN Prioritization Draw for New gTLDs, a December meeting is not feasible. Therefore, negotiations will resume in January 2013, and the anticipated date for publication of a draft RAA for community comment will be announced in January as well.

The sticking point appears to still be the recommendations for strengthening registrars’ Whois accuracy commitments, as requested by law enforcement agencies and governments.
At the Toronto meeting in October, progress appeared to have been made on all 12 of the LEA recommendations, but the nitty-gritty of the Whois verification asks had yet to be ironed out.
Potentially confusing matters, ICANN has launched a parallel root-and-branch Whois policy reform initiative, a community process which may come to starkly different conclusions to the RAA talks.
Before the LEA issues are settled, ICANN doesn’t want to start dealing with requests for RAA changes from the registrars themselves, which include items such as dumping their “burdensome” port 43 Whois obligations for gTLD registries that have thick Whois databases.
ICANN said Friday:

Both ICANN and the registrars have additional proposed changes which have not yet been negotiated. As previously discussed, it has been ICANN’s position that the negotiations on key topics within the law enforcement recommendations need to come to resolution prior to concluding negotiations on these additional areas.

Registrars agreed under duress to start renegotiating the RAA following a public berating from the Governmental Advisory Committee at the ICANN Dakar meeting October 2011.
At the time, the law enforcement demands had already been in play for two years with no substantial progress. Following Dakar, ICANN and the registrars said they planned to have a new RAA ready by March 2012.
Judging by the latest update, it seems quite likely that the new RAA will be a full year late.
ICANN has targeted the Beijing meeting in April next year for approval of the RAA. It’s one of the 12 targets Chehade set himself following Toronto.
Given that the draft agreement will need a 42-day public comment period first, talks are going to have to conclude before the end of February if there’s any hope of hitting that deadline.

Go Daddy gets its fourth CEO in a year

Go Daddy has appointed Blake Irving, formerly of Microsoft and Yahoo, as its new CEO.
He’s the fourth man to take the top spot at the market-leading registrar in the last 12 months.
Founding CEO Bob Parsons stepped aside for his protege COO Warren Adelman a year ago, but he too was replaced in August by the company’s new investors.
Irving was most recently chief products officer at Yahoo, but has spent most of his career as a Microsoftie, heading up the Windows Live platform at the tail end of his 15-year tenure.
He will take over from interim CEO Scott Wagner of KKR Ventures on January 7 next year.
Domain Name Wire has a few quotes from the new guy over here.

Senior Demand Media exec “fired for suing ICANN”

Long-time Demand Media software architect Chris Ambler claims he was fired when his own company, Image Online Design, sued ICANN over the .web gTLD.
Ambler says he was canned by Demand October 26, eight days after IOD sued ICANN over its unsuccessful 2000-round application for .web.
He told DI on Friday that he believes he was fired unfairly and illegally and, after negotiations with Demand Media broke down last week, has retained a lawyer to explore his options for redress.
“You can’t say you’re firing somebody because they’re suing somebody,” he said. “There are legal options open to me and I am pursuing them.”
Ambler says he was hired by eNom’s then-CEO Paul Stahura in 2003 as its chief software strategist, a role in which he took a lead role in creating NameJet’s proprietary domain name drop-catching software.
When the company was acquired by Demand Media, he took the role of senior software architect.
But in the 1990s, as founder of IOD, he ran .web in an alternative DNS root system. His application to move the gTLD into the official ICANN root in 2000 was not approved.
In October he sued ICANN claiming it was “improper, unlawful and inequitable” for ICANN to solicit more applications for .web while IOD’s bid was still “pending” and unrejected.
While Demand Media is not directly applying for .web, it has an extremely tight relationship with Donuts — the portfolio gTLD applicant founded by Stahura and other former Demand executives — which is.
Demand is Donuts’ back-end registry provider and is believed to have an interest in Covered TLD LLC, the parent company of about 100 of Donuts’ new gTLD applicants, including .web.
Ambler’s contract with Demand Media acknowledged his IOD work and allowed him to pursue it, he claims.
“They’ve known for the past ten years that I was working on this,” he said.
A Demand Media spokesperson said the company does not comment on legal matters.

Melbourne IT may sell off businesses as ICANN delays hit bottom line

Melbourne IT is looking into selling some of its business units after warning the Australian markets today that 2012 profit is likely to come in below 2011 levels.
The brand protection registrar, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, partly blamed delays to ICANN’s new gTLD program for an expected 10% dip in earnings before interest and tax.
The company said it is “in the process of pursuing possible ownership alternatives for its current portfolio of businesses”, and that overseas buyers have already been identified.
While Melbourne did not specify which units face the chop, my hunch is that it’s not talking about its domain name business.
Digital Brand Management services, which includes its registrar, is performing “strongly” despite the delays, the company said.
However, its small business, enterprise and legal content management businesses are suffering from competition and spending freezes among government clients, the company said.
Even the registrar business is facing challenges. In the first half of 2012, its total domains under management dropped 8%. The brand management side of that business is now bigger.

Tucows abandoned two new gTLD bids

Tucows originally applied for six new gTLDs but withdrew two of the applications, it emerged yesterday.
During a conference call with analysts, announcing the company’s third-quarter financial results, CEO Elliot Noss said that Tucows’ cash-flow statement had benefited from a $370,000 ICANN refund.
That works out to two full $185,000 refunds, meaning the applications were withdrawn before June’s Big Reveal.
The fact that the money was not recorded until the third quarter is likely due to the delays ICANN subjects applicants to when they request refunds.
Tucows, via a subsidary, has live gTLD bids for group, .marketing, .media and .online, all of which are contested.
Noss reiterated during the earnings call that he does not expect the company to see serious revenue from new gTLDs until 2014, though he speculated that some uncontested geographic gTLDs may start contributing the the second half of 2013.

ICANN says EU registrars could be exempt from stringent new Whois rules

Registrars based in the European Union could be let off the hook when it comes to the Whois verification requirements currently under discussion at ICANN.
That’s according to ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, who this week responded to privacy concerns expressed by the Article 29 Working Party, a EU-based quasi-governmental privacy watchdog.
The Working Party said last month that if ICANN forced EU registrars to re-verify customer data and store it for longer than necessary, they would risk breaking EU privacy law.
Those are two of the many amendments to the standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement that ICANN — at the request of governments and law enforcement — is currently pushing for.
In reply, Chehade noted that ICANN currently plans to give registrars an opt-out:

ICANN proposes to adapt the current ICANN Procedures for Handling Whois Conflicts with Privacy Law, to enable registrars to seek an exempton from these new RAA WHOIS and data protection obligations in the even that the obligations would cause registrars to violate their local laws and regulations.

He also said that the Governmental Advisory Committee has “endorsed” the provisions at question, and encouraged the Working Party to work via the GAC to have its views heard.
I understand that registrars based in the US and elsewhere would not respond favorably to what would essentially amount to a two-tier RAA.
Some of the RAA changes would have cost implications, so there’s an argument that to exempt some registrars and not others would create an un-level competitive playing field.
The Article 29 Working Party is an advisory body, independent of the European Union, comprising one representative from the data privacy watchdogs in each EU state.
Some GAC representatives said during the ICANN meeting in Prague this June that they had already factored privacy concerns into their support for the RAA talks.
It’s going to interesting to see how both registrars and the GAC react to the Article 29 developments at the Toronto meeting, which begins this weekend.

RRPproxy and Hexonet offering new gTLD pre-regs

Two reseller-oriented registrars this week have enabled their resellers to start taking new gTLD pre-registrations.
Key-Systems said its RRPproxy API and web interface now support pre-regs for hundreds of applied-for gTLDs, noting that the transactions are “an expression of interest without any commitment”.
The company seems to have filtered out the obvious dot-brands, but it’s still offering some gTLDs — such as .antivirus and .lifeinsurance — whose applicants are planning single-registrant models.
Separately today, Hexonet launched its Expressions Of Interest offering to enable its resellers to take “non-binding requests” for domains in possible forthcoming gTLDs.
Opinions are mixed about whether these kinds of services are good for the industry’s reputation. There’s no guarantee that these gTLDs will launch, or whether these registrars will qualify to sell them.