Ukraine won’t delete domains until war is over

Hostmaster, the Ukrainian ccTLD registry, has indefinitely paused domain deletions due to the ongoing war with Russian.

The company said its domain redemption period, which usually lasts 30 days after a registration expires, will now run until the end of martial law, which was brought in by the government shortly after the invasion.

The registry had previously, and perhaps optimistically, extended the window to 60 days. But the war continues, and many registrants are still unable to renew their names.

Since the first extension, registrars have already recovered over 300 names that were not renewed in time, Hostmaster said.

The price to restore an expired .ua name is the same as a renewal, the registry said.

Vox Pop defends its favorite cybersquatter

The .sucks registry, Vox Populi has complained to ICANN about the fact that its biggest customer keeps losing cybersquatting cases.

In its submission to ICANN’s recently closed public comment period on UDRP reform, Vox Pop bemoans the fact that panels keep finding that Honey Salt, a shell company based in a tax haven, isn’t really engaging in non-commercial free speech.

Honey Salt was the registrant of thousands of .sucks domains, all matching famous trademarks, that redirected visitors to a wiki-style gripe site, populated with content scraped from third-parties, at Everything.sucks.

After a long series of lost UDRP cases, Honey Salt started allowing its domains to expire and zone files suggest only a couple hundred or so remain today.

Neither Honey Salt nor Everything.sucks responded to ICANN’s public comment period, which was seeking input on possible changes to UDRP.

But Vox Pop did on their behalf, complaining bitterly that “forum shopping and bias obstruct free speech” and citing mostly Honey Salt’s lost UDRP cases to evidence its arguments:

Despite 4(c)(iii) of the UDRP stating “noncommercial or fair use” is legitimate use of a domain name – numerous UDRP decisions contradict the Policy’s express recognition of fair use and free speech rights in favor of trademark owners. Several recent UDRP decisions have jeopardized free speech rights for all domain name registrants because of the lack of guidance from ICANN and/or a misapplication of free speech rights and/or bias as it relates to criticism sites.

Honey Salt had consistently argued, UDRP decisions show, that Everything.sucks was non-commercial free speech and as such was not cybersquatting under UDRP precedent and WIPO guidance.

But panels repeatedly pointed out that Everything.sucks was in fact commercial.

At first, the site hosted banners linking directly to sales landers for the domains in question — basically asking the brand owners or others to fork out hundreds or thousands of dollars to claim their matching domains.

When panelists got wise to that, the site started instead publishing the transfer authorization codes for the domains in question, so literally anyone could initiate a transfer and take ownership of the name without even asking Honey Salt’s permission — if they were willing to pay the transfer fee.

Everything.sucks and Honey Salt would not have benefited financially from these transfer fees, which often were thousands of dollars, but Vox Pop, and sometimes its registrar sister company Rebel, which sells .sucks names at cost, would.

Everything.sucks has removed the AuthCodes, but in the most-recent .sucks UDRP case Eutelsat v Honey Salt, the panel called the AuthCode scheme “little more than a ruse to generate registration fees in the thousands of dollars range”.

Vox Pop is now complaining to ICANN, I’m guessing with a straight face, that transfer fees are ICANN-mandated and therefore registrants cannot be blamed if registrars charge for transfers:

The panelist, in an unfounded grasp, used the ICANN-mandated transfer fee, charged by the registrar as rationale to find commercial use by the registrant and hence bad faith by the registrant. Other UDRP panels have similarly disingenuously blamed registrants for ICANN-mandated transfer and renewal fees imposed by registrars; panelists argue that the ICANN-mandated transfer is bad faith even though the registrant has no say or participation.

It’s an incredibly ballsy complaint by Vox Pop, given that it is Vox Pop, as the registry, that sets the price for transfers and renewals in .sucks, and that it is Vox Pop, as the Eutelsat panel noted, that has flagged many trademarks as “premium”-tier names that costs thousands of dollars to transfer and renew.

Vox also argues that it is possible for trademark-owners to “forum shop” between the various UDRP providers, in the hope of finding a panel more favorable to intellectual property interests over free speech rights.

It’s certainly not the only ICANN commenter to make this point, but it’s a pretty thin argument in the case of Honey Salt and .sucks.

Vox argues that WIPO repeatedly favors IP rights over free speech rights, and the outcome of Honey Salt’s UDRP cases may indicate why it holds that view.

Of the 20-odd UDRP cases Honey Salt has defended, most were filed with WIPO and all those filed with WIPO resulted in a complainant win. Three were filed with the National Arbitration Forum and three were filed with the Czech Arbitration Court.

The only case Honey Salt won on the merits was Miraplex v Honey Salt, one of the first cases, filed with the Czech Arbitration Court. That panel bought the defense that Everything.sucks was non-commercial free speech.

But one of the panelists in that case later sat on another Czech Arbitration Court case, Cargotec v Honey Salt, which decided in favor of the complaint. The same guy ruling two different ways on almost identical facts does not suggest panelist bias.

While at least one UDRP panel has suggested Honey Salt is just a front for the .sucks registry, Vox Populi has previously denied any connection exists.

GoDaddy and XYZ sign away rights after UNR’s crypto gambit

ICANN has started asking registries to formally sign away ownership rights to their gTLDs when they acquire them from other registries.

GoDaddy and XYZ.com both had to agree that they don’t “own” their newly acquired strings before ICANN would agree to transfer them from portfolio UNR, which auctioned off its 23 gTLD contracts a year ago.

GoDaddy bought .photo and .blackfriday for undisclosed sums in the auction, it emerged last week. XYZ bought 10 others and newcomer Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop.

All three transfers were signed off March 10 (though GoDaddy’s were inexplicably not published by ICANN until last Thursday, when much of Christendom was winding down for a long weekend) and all three contain this new language:

The Parties hereby acknowledge that, notwithstanding anything to the contrary in any marketing or auction materials, documentation or communications issued by Assignor or any other agreements between the Parties or otherwise, nothing in the Registry Agreement(s) or in any other agreements between Assignor and Assignee have established or granted to Assignor any property or ownership rights or interest in or to the TLDs or the letters, words, symbols or other characters making up the TLDs’ strings and that Assignee is not being granted any property or ownership rights or interest in or to the TLDs or the letters, words, symbols or other characters making up the TLDs’ strings.

The Parties represent that they understand the scope of ICANN’s Consent, which: (A) does not grant Assignee any actual or purported property or ownership rights or interest in or two the TLDs or the letters, words, symbols or other characters making up the TLDs’s strings; (B) is solely binding and applicable to the assignment of rights and obligations pursuant to the Registry Agreement(s); (C) solely relates to the operation of the TLDs in the Domain Name System as specified in the applicable Registry Agreement(s); and (D) does not convey any rights to the letters, words or symbols making up the TLD string for use outside the Domain Name System.

The TL;DR of this? Registries don’t “own” their gTLDs, ICANN just allows them to use the strings.

The new language is in there because UNR’s auction had offered, as a bonus, ownership of matching non-fungible token “domains” on the blockchain-based alt-root Ethereum Name Service.

Alt-roots arguably present an existential threat to ICANN and a risk to the interoperability of the internet, so ICANN delayed authorization of its approvals for many months while it tried to figure out the legalities.

Dot Hip Hop, for one, has said it couldn’t care less about the Ethereum NFT, and has had it deleted.

Separately, the .ruhr contract has been transferred from regiodot to fellow German geo-TLD operator DotSaarland, a subsidiary of London-based CentralNic, which announced the acquisition in February.

This assignment agreement was signed March 31 — after GoDaddy’s and XYZ’s — and does not include the new ownership waiver language, suggesting that it’s unique to UNR’s auction winners.

However, the friction between blockchain alt-roots is likely to be an issue when the next new gTLD application round opens.

It’s being said that a great many “TLDs” are being registered on various blockchains specifically in order to interfere with matching ICANN applications, and that blockchain fans are attempting to delay the next round to give their own projects more time to take root.

GoDaddy’s two acquisitions bring the total known outcomes of UNR’s auctions to 13 out of 23 gTLDs. At least four more are being processed by ICANN, according to a now month-old statement.

Verisign wipes free TLDs from the world stats

The number of domain names registered globally dropped by over 25 million in the first quarter, but only because Verisign has stopped tracking .tk and its free sister ccTLDs in its quarterly estimates.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief says that 2021 ended with 341.7 million registrations across all TLDs, substantially fewer that the 367.3 million it reported at the end of the third quarter.

But this is only because Verisign has decided to no longer count the six Pacific and African ccTLDs managed by Freenom, notably .tk, which had contributed 24.7 million names to the Q3 tally.

The report says: “the .tk, .cf, .ga, .gq and .ml ccTLDs have been excluded from all applicable calculations, due to an unexplained change in estimates for the .tk zone size and lack of verification from the registry operator for these TLDs.”

It sounds rather like there’s been another weird fluctuation in .tk’s numbers that threw off the overall trend picture again, and Verisign’s basically said “to hell with it” and decided to exclude Freenom from its reports from now on.

This means the normalized numbers for Q4 2021 — ignoring Freenom in all applicable quarters — are 341.7 million, up 3.3 million or 1.0% sequentially and up 1.6 million or 0.5% year over year, the DNIB states.

The Freenom business model is to give domains away for free, mostly, in the first instance. It makes its money by retaining and monetizing domains that either expire or, frequently, which it suspends for abuse.

.tk domains never get deleted, in other words, so counting them alongside TLDs with the industry-standard business model could give a misleading impression of the global demand for domain names.

It’s not so much that counting spam domains is bad — every TLD has a spam problem to a greater or lesser extent — but the lack of deletions can create faulty assumptions.

It’s also never been clear how Verisign and its third-party researcher, ZookNic, acquires its data on Freenom TLDs. Its .tk figure would often remain static for quarters on end, suggesting the data was only sporadically available.

I also tracked .tk’s published numbers independently for many years, and the last figure I have, from March 2019, is 41.3 million. It’s never been clear to me why the Verisign/ZookNic number has always been so much lower.

Verisign has always flagged up any oddities caused by .tk in its DNIB, and every edition has contained a footnote describing Freenom’s unusual practices.

The latest DNIB (pdf) says that .com had 160 million names, up 1.2 million, and .net had 13.4 million, down about 100,000, compared to Q3.

ccTLDs overall had 127.4 million, up about 700,000, a 0.6% sequential increase.

The ccTLD number was down by 5.3 million, or 4.0%, compared to the end of 2020, but that was due to a 9.4 million-name deletion by China’s .cn, which I noted in the second quarter and which Verisign calls a “registry-implemented zone reduction”.

Ignoring China, ccTLD names were up 4.1 million or 3.8%, the DNIB says.

Verisign only breaks out the top 10 ccTLDs separately, so the removal of .tk means that Australia’s .au is now in the top 10 list in tenth place with 3.4 million at the end of Q4. It will likely move up the ranks in the first quarter due to the release of second-level names, which has sped up its growth rate.

France’s .fr, with 3.9 million names, has now entered the overall top 10 TLDs due to .tk’s removal.

New gTLDs grew by 1.2 million names or 5.1% sequentially, but were down by pretty much the same amount annually, ending 2021 with 24.7 million names.

.kids goes live, plans to launch this year

The long-anticipated .kids top-level domain has its first live site, and the registry has announced plans to start selling domains towards the end of the year.

The contractually mandated nic.kids is now resolving, leading to the registry web site of the DotKids Foundation.

Hong Kong-based DotKids, which has close ties to DotAsia and ICANN director Edmon Chung, said the plan is to start a sunrise period in the third quarter and go to general availability in the fourth quarter this year.

There’s also going to be a special registration period for children’s rights groups and a Q3 “Pioneer Program” for early adopters.

The idea behind the gTLD is to provide a space where all content is considered suitable for under-18s, though the exact policing policies have yet to be written. DotKids is using the UN definition of a child.

It will be a tough balancing act. My fifteen-year-old nephew isn’t happy with content that doesn’t involve the laser-beam dismemberment of tentacled beasts, but a decade ago was content to watch Peppa Pig on a loop for hours a day.

DotKids won the rights to .kids, somehow beating rival applicants Amazon and Google, in 2019. It signed a very strange Registry Agreement with ICANN last year.

Previous attempts at creating child-friendly domains have proven unsuccessful.

In the US, there was a government-mandated .kids.us brought in 20 years ago, aimed at under-13s, but it was a spectacular failure, attracting just a handful of registrations. It was killed off in 2012.

Russian speakers have their own equivalent gTLD .дети, a word that has taken on more sinister overtones in recent weeks, but that currently has only about 800 names under management.

DotKids has its work cut out to make .kids a commercial success, but it is a non-profit and it was the only new gTLD applicant to have most of its ICANN fees waived under the Applicant Support Program.

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.

GoDaddy formally signs .tv registry contract

GoDaddy has formally taken on the contract to run .tv, the ccTLD for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, according to the company.

GoDaddy Registry said that the deal was signed with the Tuvalu government at the Dubai Expo 2020 trade show on March 30.

The company won a tender process last December in which incumbent Versigin, which has been running .tv for 20 years, did not participate.

Tuvalu is expected to get a much bigger share of the revenue than it did under Verisign, which paid $5 million a year, but terms have not been disclosed.

GoDaddy senior director of business development George Pongas said in a press release that the parties are “convinced that together we can position the .tv ccTLD for significant worldwide growth and a new era of brand awareness and community engagement”.

GoDaddy is substantially more customer-facing than Verisign, and controls the registration path, so it’s not difficult to see how this could boost .tv’s sales.

The deal comes at an opportune time, as user-created video content is experiencing something of a boom.

War fails to stop .ua domains selling

Ukraine’s ccTLD has maintained what appears to be a healthy level of new registrations, despite the Russian invasion.

The company today reported that between February 24 and March 25, it saw over 3,000 new .ua domain regs, over 2,000 of which were in .com.ua. The ccTLD offers names in a few dozen third-level spaces.

February 24 was the day Russia invaded, and the day Ukraine went into martial law.

“The com.ua domain is mostly used by commercial organizations. Therefore, the presence of registrations shows that Ukrainian business continues to operate under martial law,” Hostmaster wrote (via Google Translate).

.ua had a total of 534,162 domains under all 2LDs today, according to the registry’s web site.

While Hostmaster has not yet published its end-of-month stats for March, it appears that the new adds suggest an improvement on typical monthly performance, or at least business as usual.

The registry has come under denial-of-service attack dozens of times since the war started, but says it has so far continued to operate without interruption.

2LDs boost .au’s growth

Australian ccTLD registry auDA has been reporting registration volumes growing much faster than usual in the days since it started selling .au domains directly at the second level.

The company is currently reporting a grand total of 3,492,366 domains, which is up by almost 78,000 since March 24, when 2LDs went on sale.

Normally, .au rarely grows by more than about 500 domains per day.

Right now and for the next six months, all 2LDs have been reserved for the owners of their exact-match third-level domains, so there’s not the same kind of rush you might expect in a first-come, first-served scenario.

With mystery auction winner, .sexy prices go from $25 to $2,500

UNR is increasing the annual price of a .sexy domain from $25 to over $2,000, according to registrars.

The price increase will hit from April 30, according to registrars, but will not affect renewals on domains registered before that date.

French registrar Gandi said its retail price for a .sexy name will increase from $40 to $2,750. That’s after its mark-up. Belgian registrar Bnamed said in January prices were about to get 100 times more expensive.

The current wholesale price for .sexy is believed to be $25 a year. I’m guessing it’s going up to about $2,500, which is a price tag UNR has previously experimented with for its car-related gTLDs.

UNR CEO Frank Schilling has previously defended steep price increases for TLDs that under-perform volume-wise.

.sexy had barely 6,000 names under management at the last count, having peaked at about 28,000 in 2017.

The question is: who’s decided to increase the prices? Did .sexy actually sell when UNR tried to offload its portfolio last year, or is UNR keeping hold of it?

.sexy was among the 23 gTLD contracts UNR said it sold, mostly at auction, about a year ago. But it’s not one of the ones where the buyer has been yet disclosed.

The gTLDs UNR said it sold were: .audio, .blackfriday, .christmas, .click, .country, .diet, .flowers, .game, ,guitars, .help, .hiphop, .hiv, .hosting, .juegos, .link, .llp, .lol, .mom, .photo, .pics, .property, .sexy and .tattoo.

Of those, a new company called Dot Hip Hop bought .hiphop and XYZ.com bought .audio, .christmas, .diet, .flowers, .game, .guitars, .hosting, .lol, .mom and .pics.

ICANN has approved those 11 contract reassignments — after some difficulty — and said that there are six remaining in the approval process.

That only adds up to 17, meaning there are six more that UNR said it sold but for which it had not, as of a week ago, requested a contract transfer.

But in May last year, UNR “announced gross receipts of more than $40 million USD for its 20+ TLDs”, said there had be 17 participating bidders, and that 10 to 20 had “came away as winners, including six who will be operating TLDs for the first time”.

That leaves with at least five as-yet undisclosed winners from outside the industry, six contract transfers outstanding, and six gTLDs with an unknown status.

Neither UNR nor ICANN have been commenting on the status of pending transfers.