About 6,000 .au domains remain contested

Australia’s .au ccTLD has added about 25,000 direct second-level domains since the start of the year, according to auDA.

The registry said this week that it had 740,000 2LD .au names as of March. In its annual report for 2022, published in February, it said it had 716,000 at the end of the year.

auDA also revealed some statistics on its Priority Allocation Process, including the fact that some 6,000 .au domains remain unallocated because more than one registrant has staked a claim.

The process allowed registrants of third-level domains to claim their matching 2LD, but in some cases there’s a conflict because on person owns the .com.au and another owns the .org.au or .net.au.

The 3LD owners have to renew their application for the matching 2LD every year or risk losing it to their rival applicant. The first renewal is due this September.

Over 450,000 contention sets have been resolved so far. There are 4.2 million .au domains registered overall.

.food registry to dump four dot-brand gTLDs

A company controlled by Warner Bros Discovery is dumping four of its dot-brand gTLDs, but keeping hold of .food, which it has been sitting on, unused for the better part of eight years.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contracts for .foodnetwork, .travelchannel, .hgtv and .cookingnetwork, which are four of its US cable TV channels.

Unusually, the termination notice contains a bit of color explaining its decision:

Despite efforts over the years to develop a marketing strategy for deployment of these assets, the company has determined there is not a current use for them and therefore requests early termination of the ICANN Registry Agreements and to wind down these assets

The gTLDs have never been used, something that can also be said for the remainder of Lifestyle’s original portfolio of 11 gTLDs.

The registry was originally owned by Scripps Networks, but following a series of M&A since last year it’s been majority owned by media giant Warner Bros Discovery.

It also has current contracts for .food, .diy, .cityeats, .living, .frontdoor, .lifestyle, and the mysterious .vana (presumably a brand that Scripps was planning to launch in 2012 that never materialized).

The registry’s back-end was Verisign and its new gTLD consultant was Jennifer Wolfe.

Google to drop EIGHT new gTLDs

Google Registry has announced launch details for eight new gTLDs that it has been sitting on for almost a decade.

It plans to launch .foo, .zip, .mov, .nexus, .dad, .phd, .prof and .esq over the coming couple of months, with all eight following the same launch schedule.

Sunrise will begin this weekend, April 2, and run for a month. The Early Access Periods will run for a week up until May 10, when they’re all go into general availability.

The .zip and .mov spaces will be worth keeping an eye on, especially for those in the security space.

Both gTLDs match popular file extensions — for compressed data and video respectively — which could present opportunities for innovation among the internet’s more nefarious players, such as phishers and malware distributors.

.zip is for “tying things together or moving really fast”, Google said, while .mov is “for moving pictures and other things that move”.

All of the new spaces appear to be marketed at general audiences, with no registration restrictions.

.org back-end contract up for grabs

Public Interest Registry has started vetting potential registry service provider replacements for Identity Digital, ahead of a formal request for proposals later this year.

The company said this week that in order to run .org’s back-end, which would have to support almost 11 million domains, an RSP would have to hit a list of high-end criteria.

Candidates will have to have seven years experience running an RSP across multiple TLDs, with at least three registry clients, over 500,000 domains, and at least 25 ICANN-accredited registrars on its books, among other items.

That narrows the field down to probably fewer than a dozen companies. The likes of GoDaddy, CentralNic, Verisign, ZDNS, Tucows and Nominet would all presumably qualify, along with Identity Digital itself.

If a transition to a new RSP were to happen, it would be the largest TLD back-end migration in history by a considerable margin. The largest to date was the 3.1 million names that moved from Neustar (now GoDaddy) to Afilias (now Identity Digital) in 2018.

The .org migration from Verisign to PIR in 2003 was when .org was substantially smaller, at 2.7 million names.

According to PIR’s most-recent tax return, Afilias was paid $15.6 million in 2021 for registry services.

PIR said in 2021 that it expects to issue the RFP in the second half of 2023.

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.

.com was a drag on the industry in Q4

The .com gTLD was a growth drag on domain name registrations in the fourth quarter, if the latest figures in Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief are to be believed.

The industry closed out 2022 with 350.4 million domains all TLDs that the DNIB tracks (which excludes Freenom’s free ccTLDs), up half a million in the quarter and 8.7 million over the year.

But that was despite Verisign’s own .com, rather than due to it. The DNIB has .com down from 160.9 million to 160.5 million. Sister TLD .net was flat at 13.2 million.

It was left to new gTLDs and ccTLDs to pick up the slack.

ccTLDs accounted for 133.1 million names, up 700,000 sequentially and 5.7 million over the year. New gTLD registrations were up 100,000 sequentially and 2.7 million over the year.

A big driver in ccTLDs was Australia’s .au, where the launch of direct second-level registrations added hundreds of thousands of domains and let the ccTLD kick .xyz out of the top 10 TLDs by volume.

But the report has a pretty big discrepancy that could throw out the ccTLDs number, I believe. For some reason the DNIB has .eu increasing by 300,000 names to 4 million in Q4, which flies in the face of the registry’s own numbers, which have it basically flat at 3.7 million.

Identity Digital hit by failure of Silicon Valley Bank

Identity Digital, which runs hundreds of gTLDs, has warned its network of registrars not to send payments to its Silicon Valley Bank account.

SVB, America’s 16th-largest bank, was shut down on Friday by US financial regulators after a run on deposits. The failure has been described as the largest since the 2008 financial crisis.

Identity Digital told registrars yesterday that it was an SVB customer, but said “our exposure is very limited and we remain committed to serving our customers, employees, and vendors without interruption.”

Nevertheless, it asked partners to direct payments instead to its HSBC bank account.

SVB also provided ID, then Donuts, with a $110 million credit facility in 2017, which it used to fund its $213 million acquisition of Rightside.

The failure of SVB was so worrying that US President Joe Biden yesterday morning took to the airwaves to reassure customers that their deposits were safe and the banking system stable.

.art links DNS and alt-root ENS

UK Creative Ideas, the .art gTLD registry, has started offering its registrants the ability to register names on the blockchain-based alt-root Ethereum Name Service that exactly match their DNS names, for a one-time fee.

CMO Jeff Sass said that for $20, paid in Ethereum coin, registrants can secure their exact-match on the ENS, with no renewal fees.

There’s an authentication system using DNS TXT records to make sure only .art DNS registrants can obtain their matching ENS names, he said.

“We’ve married the two together, so there can’t be any confusion or collisions,” he said.

The benefit of this is that registrants will be able use their .art domains to address their cryptocurrency wallets. Web browsers that support ENS obviously already support DNS, so there’s no real benefit in that context.

.ART is also selling ENS .art names without matching DNS names — and these can include ICANN-prohibited characters such as emojis — but these are priced from $5 to $650, based on character count, and have annual renewal fees.

.art current has about 230,000 registered names, a pretty respectable number for a new gTLD, and Sass said about 60% of them are in the form of firstnamelastname.art, suggesting usage by professional and amateur artists.

gTLD registries selling matches in alt-roots has been a cause of concern at ICANN over recent years, due to legal concerns. Uniregistry’s sale of its portfolio was held up for months because of this.

Facebook sues free domains registry for cybersquatting

Facebook parent Meta has sued Freenom, the registry behind multiple free-to-register ccTLDs including .tk, claiming the company engages in cybersquatting.

Meta alleges that Freenom infringes its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trademarks over 5,000 domain names in the TLDs it operates.

While best-known for Tokelau’s .tk, which had almost 25 million registrations when Verisign stopped counting them a year ago, Freenom also operates .gq for Equatorial Guinea, .cf for the Central African Republic, .ml for Mali, and .ga for Gabon.

Apart from some reserved “premiums”, the company gives domains away for free then monetizes, with parking, residual traffic when the domains expire or, one suspects more commonly, are suspended for engaging in abuse.

Naturally enough, it therefore has registered, to itself, a great many domains previously used for phishing.

Meta lists these names as examples of infringers: faceb00k.ga, fb-lnstagram.cf, facebook-applogin.ga, instagrams-help.cf, instaqram.ml, chat-whatsaap.gq, chat-whatsaap-com.tk, and supportservice-lnstagram.cf, though these do not appear to be monetized right now.

It accuses the registry of cybersquatting, phishing and trademark infringement and seeks over half a billion dollars in damages (at $100,000 domain).

Today, Freenom is not accepting new registrations, but it’s blaming “technical issues” and says it hopes to resume operations “shortly”.

Facebook is one of the most prolific and aggressive enforcers of its trademarks in the domain space, having previously sued OnlineNIC, Namecheap and Web.com. OnlineNIC had to shut up shop due to its lawsuit.

(Via Krebs on Security)

Identity Digital to launch .watches this month

Identity Digital has announced the launch timetable for its .watches gTLD.

Sunrise will kick off on March 28, running for two months until May 27. This is the period where only registered trademark owners can apply for a name.

The Early Access Program, in which names carry a premium price that decreases every day for a week, will run from May 31 to June 7, immediately after which the gTLD will enter general availability.

Despite the fact that .watches has been live in the DNS since December 2015, there are no registered domains so far.

The original registry was luxury goods maker Richemont, an early proponent of new gTLDs that ultimately lost interest and offloaded its portfolio, including the Chinese version of .watches, over the years.

.watches was sold to Afilias in late 2020, shortly before that company is turn was acquired by Donuts, since rebranded Identity Digital.