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?

Team Internet hires Nominet alum as domains CEO

Team Internet, formerly CentralNic, has named Simon McCalla as CEO of its domains-related business.

McCalla is formerly CTO of .uk registry Nominet, though he’s been taking a break from the domains industry for the last few years.

Team Internet said he is now CEO of its “Online” division, which I can only assume is the business it previously called “Online Presence”.

That’s the division encompassing the company’s registrars, registries and back-end business, as opposed to the traffic arbitrage business where it makes most of its money nowadays.

XYZ adds 35th gTLD to its stable

XYZ has acquired .ceo, making its portfolio of new gTLDs now 35-strong.

XYZ, judging by a blog post and press release, seems to the sticking to the original use case of yourname.ceo, highlighting a couple of CEOs that are using .ceo as their primary domain. But it seems that many of the .ceo domains with Google juice are generics.

The former registry was CEOTLD of Australia, originally affiliated with social media wannabe PeopleBrowsr.

When the gTLD launched a decade ago the plan was to issue registrants with their own template calling card style web sites, but the idea never really caught on.

.ceo had 3,789 domains at the end of June, according to the latest registry reports. GoDaddy and Namecheap were its largest registrars.

Wood company scraps its dot-brand

A Swedish wood-products company has become the latest company to ask ICANN to terminate its dot-brand gTLD registry agreement.

Svenska Cellulosa AB, which Wikipedia tells me makes almost $2 billion a year selling paper and wood pulp, is dumping .sca, which it has never used.

While ICANN will not transition the gTLD to another operator, there are plenty of other organizations in the world using the same abbreviation, so the string itself could show up in the root again in future.

The TLD was managed by Valideus on a Verisign back-end. Verisign is getting out of the dot-brand back-end business.

Assuming SCA’s request is not withdrawn, it will become the 120th dot-brand to self-terminate.

Nominet takes over Bounty mutineers’ ccTLD

Nominet has taken over management of the Pitcairn Islands’ ccTLD, .pn, judging by its web site and IANA records updated this week.

The site at nic.pn says UK registry Nominet is going to modernize the registry to use the EPP standard — this should make .pn accessible to thousands of registrars — and implement DNSSEC.

It’s estimated that there are fewer than 1,000 .pn domains today. It’s sometimes used for URL shortening services and the makers of the Hunger Games movies used it to represent their fictional nation of Panem.

Domains cost $100 a year in .pn at the second level and $50 a year in .co.pn, .org.pn and .net.pn.

Pitcairn, a British overseas territory, is a tiny island even by tiny island standards. The most recent population estimate is 47 people, mostly the descendants of nine mutineers of the famous “mutiny on the Bounty” of 1789.

The ccTLD’s sponsor is based in New Zealand, but Nominet has taken over administrative and technical management, according to IANA.

ICANN is starting to auto-renew new gTLD contracts

Almost 10 years have passed since ICANN delegated its first 2012-round new gTLDs and the Org has started to auto-renew their contracts.

As far as I can tell, the first delegated gTLD, شبكة. (Arabic “.web”, .xn--ngbc5azd) got its Registry Agreement renewed on July 13. The registry, dotShabaka, was informed all the way back in April.

That gTLD eventually made it to the DNS root in late October.

ICANN has this week informed Identity Digital’s subsidiaries that dozens of their RAs — the first Latin-script gTLDs from the round to go live — will auto-renew starting this month.

Under the base RA, registries get to run their TLDs for a decade and, unless they seriously screw up, there’s a presumptive right of renewal.

Nominet adds handcuffs clause to proposed new Articles

Nominet wants to add a new clause to its foundational Articles of Association that would prevent it adventuring into non-domain businesses without telling its members.

The proposal follows the scandal surrounding its CyGlass security business, which the company invested about $23.5 million in before eventually selling for a dollar.

“The Board will inform the Membership in advance of any proposed significant change in scope, together with an explanation as to how this relates to the Company’s objects for the public benefit,” the new Article 2 reads.

While there’s nothing requiring member approval of diversification, notice would at least give members time to organize resistance if it looked like history repeating itself.

Nominet chair told members the proposed article “creates an important constitutional safeguard to ensure Nominet remains aligned with its Members in future.”

Members will vote on the proposed new Articles at the company’s AGM next month, but Nominet has set a massive 90% majority threshold for the changes to be approved.

Green said that the current board plans to live by the spirit of the proposed Article 2 even if the vote fails, but noted that there can be no guarantee future boards would also do so.

Volkswagen ditches its dot-brand

Another major car-maker has thrown in the towel on its key dot-brand gTLD. This time it’s Volkswagen.

Referring to .volkswagen, the company has told ICANN: “This top level domain has never been utilized by Volkswagen of America and we do not intend to utilize it.”

The company had already ditched its secondary dot-brand, .大众汽车 (.xn--3oq18vl8pn36a), which is the Chinese version of its name.

Fiat Chrysler and Bugatti have both also previously terminated dot-brand contracts, while Seat and Audi each have thousands of names in their main dot-brand gTLDs.

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.

Verisign: 1.7 million domain industry growth in Q2

The DNS grew by 1.7 million domains in the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The quarter ended with 356.6 million domains across “all” TLDs, the company said. That’s up 1.7 million on the quarter and 4.3 million on the year.

I put “all” in quotes because it turns out Verisign hasn’t been including over a dozen TLDs in its calculations in previous reports.

Inexplicably, it hasn’t been counting 10 pre-2012 gTLDs — .aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .gov, .museum, .pro, .tel, .travel and .xxx — for which zone files have been readily available for years. It’s also added six small ccTLDs to its calculations.

The upshot of this is that while a comparison with the Q1 DNIB would suggest growth of 2.6 million domains, it’s not, it’s just 1.7 million.

The report shows that both .com and .net shrunk in the quarter — 161.3 million versus 161.6 million and 13.1 million versus 13.2 million.

New gTLDs and ccTLDs were left to pick up the slack. Total ccTLD names was up 1.1 million to 137 million and total new gTLD domains was up 0.8 million to 28.1 million.