Blockchain startup gets $5 million to apply for gTLDs

A company backed by some familiar industry names has raised $5 million in seed funding to apply to ICANN for new gTLDs and, it says, bridge the gap between the traditional DNS and blockchain alternate roots.

Las Vegas-based D3 Global is being led by Fred Hsu, one of the founders of aftermarket pioneer Oversee.net. Among its listed founders are Paul Stahura, one of the triumvirate that launched Donuts, now Identity Digital, to apply for hundreds of gTLDs in 2012.

Also listed as founders are Shayan Rostam, who’s currently building Internet Naming Co into a prominent new gTLD portfolio player, former Network Solutions engineer Shay Chinn and investment banker Michael Ho.

These are people with domain industry experience going back in some cases to the 1990s and track records of building successful disrupters, so it’s worth paying attention no matter what you think of blockchain stuff.

D3 says it plans to apply to ICANN for traditional TLDs but will also introduce interoperability with blockchain-based “Web3” naming systems.

Hsu said in a press release: “We are committed to driving forward the convergence of the traditional DNS system and Web3 to make domain names more versatile, secure, and universally accessible.”

It also talks of introducing a marketplace that combines traditional DNS names with blockchain to “significantly reduce the friction traditionally seen in domain name transactions, such as low transparency, high broker fees, transfer delays, and escrow services.”

The funding round was led by Shima Capital with participation from Lightshift, Dispersion Capital, VentureSouq, Infinite Capital, MZ Web3 Fund, Kestrel0x1, Nonagon, C² Ventures, Arthur Hayes’ Maelstrom, Stahura himself.

CentralNic rebrands as Team Internet

Another well-known domain industry firm has rebranded itself around a forgettable, search-resistant company name.

CentralNic is now Team Internet, though it will continue to use “CentralNic” in its domains business.

The company has changed its primary domain from centralnic.com to teaminternet.com (a redirect is already in place) and its AIM ticker symbol from CNIC to TIG.

The brand comes from Team Internet the parking company, which CentralNic acquired for $48 million in 2019.

The change makes sense — CentralNic doesn’t even make a quarter of its revenue from domains any more. Today, most of its money comes from social media marketing arbitrage and domain monetization.

Even if it were still laser-focused on domains, the registrar side of the business is bigger and “Nic” doesn’t make much sense there.

The company started off selling third-level domains in pseudo-gTLDs such as uk.com and gb.com, before enthusiastically embracing new gTLDs as a back-end provider and subsequently getting into the registrar game.

As its 10-year IPO anniversary approaches this month CEO Michael Riedl observed in a press release that the company has grown from a $4 million annual business in 2013 to a $728 million business last year.

Also of note, Gavin Brown, who was with the company since pretty much the start and held various C-level positions on the technical side of the house over the years, left the company last week to join ICANN.

.ai sells 100,000 domains in a year

The registry managing the .ai ccTLD grew its business by over 100,000 domains in the last 12 months, according to its web site.

The company that manages the domain for the Government of Anguilla, DataHaven.net, typically does not disclose its reg numbers — its plain text web site is extremely bare bones and it lets its registrars do the marketing — but that changed when it recently updated its FAQ with the lines:

What is the total number of domains?
As of July 20, 2022 the total was 143,737 domains.
As of June 14, 2023 the total is 248,609 domains.

According to a Bloomberg interview this week, the number is now 287,432. It seems the rise of ChatGPT, which launched at the end of last year, and large language model AIs has spurred interest in the domain.

Bloomberg reckons .ai may account for 10% of Anguila’s GDP. The Caribbean British territory has a population of just 16,000 and makes most of its money from tourism and offshore banking.

Google to launch two fun new gTLDs next month

Google Registry is continuing its piecemeal rollout of new gTLDs with the launch of .ing and .meme this September.

Both TLDs will go to sunrise for a month from September 20, with general availability from December 5.

While both will have more-expensive Early Access Period phases, .meme is also getting a Limited Registration Period where “only content creation platforms specializing in the creation and distribution of internet memes may apply”.

While .meme is a pretty self-explanatory regular TLD with standard amount of long-tail potential, I think .ing might be the first TLD ever to launch with domain hacks as the primary envisaged use case.

Google gave “design.ing or writ.ing, ink.ing or row.ing” as potential domains.

There are a finite number of English verbs that would work well with a .ing suffix, potentially limiting registrations. I doubt the TLD will pass the 50,000 name threshold at which ICANN starts charging transaction fees, unless some other use cases are found.

Domainers not welcome as .music readies September launch

The long-awaited .music gTLD finally has a set of launch dates, but it looks like actually registering and keeping hold of a name is going to be painful, especially for domain investors.

DotMusic has filed its registry launch plans with ICANN, kicking off with a two-month sunrise period on September 11. General availability seems to be slated for April 9 next year.

Before the floodgates open, there’s going to be a “Community Organization Phase” from October 16 to March 10. Judging by registry policy documents, this phase looks like an extended sunrise for “music community” members that may not necessarily qualify for regular sunrise.

It looks like applying during this phase will be free, but there will be auctions for contested names.

At all stages including GA, it looks like people will be able to register .music names as usual via registrars, but then DotMusic will carry out a post-registration check that the registrant has sufficiently high musical street cred and the name closely matches their brand.

It will delete registrations that fail to meet these criteria. Indeed, it does not consider names truly “registered” until they have past these verification checks.

The registry has come up with something called a “Music Score” — I don’t know whether that’s an intentional pun — to determine whether a registrant is eligible for a .music domain.

It’s not really clear whether this is a numerical score with a pass/fail threshold, but calculating it requires the registrant to submit evidence of intellectual property, awards, social media activity, streams, and so on — 73 categories in total.

Registrants also have to demonstrate a nexus to their domain, so Napalm Death couldn’t register justinbieber.music, for example.

These verifications will be handled by a third-party company called ID.music (the domain does not currently resolve) which is also based in DotMusic’s home nation of Cyprus.

If all of this palaver isn’t enough to deter casual registrants and domainers, there’s a strict prohibition on “domain warehousing”. The policy states “the buying and holding of MTLD domain names as assets for resale, especially in bulk is prohibited”.

Record companies will be able to register their acts in bulk, if they’re approved by DotMusic, but domainers are not welcome.

The policy also bans privacy/proxy services.

Another six dot-brands self-terminate (two are very strange)

Three companies have asked ICANN to turn off a total of six dot-brand gTLDs. Two each.

Lifestyle Domain Holdings no longer wants to run .cityeats and .frontdoor, Paramount-owned CBS Domains wants out of .cbs and .showtime, and chocolate maker Ferrero wants rid of .kinder and .rocher.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Lifestyle Domains is done with .cityeats and .frontdoor, given that they were never used. What is surprising is that the brands themselves have been defunct for many, many years.

The registry was a part of Scripps Networks, an American cable TV company that owned HGTV and the Food Network. It’s now part of Warner Bros Discovery. CityEats.com and FrontDoor.com were part of its online empire.

But both sites were sold off to third parties in 2015 — the same year Lifestyle signed its two registry agreements with ICANN. In the case of .cityeats, the brand seems to have been sold off months before the contract was signed.

The registry appears to have been paying ICANN $50,000 a year for two TLDs is has absolutely no need for — it owned the dot-brands but not the matching brands. Very weird.

The case of CBS is little more typical. The company has three active domains in .cbs — one just a redirect to a privacy policy — and none in .showtime. It’s a case of not knowing what to do with the TLDs.

The Ferrero case is similar — the domains were not used and the company doesn’t want them any more.

I’ll give the chocolatier honesty points for the message on both nic. sites, which basically admits they were defensive registrations: “This domain is registered and protected by BARBERO & Associates Ltd”.

As both of these strings are non-English dictionary words, they could come up for grabs in the next round. “Kinder” is German for “children”, so it’s not impossible someone might want it as kid-focused generic.

Four more years for Identity Digital in Oz

Identity Digital has won another fours years as .au registry back-end provider.

Australian ccTLD manager auDA said the reappointment was decided after an open Request for Tender process that started in May.

It’s not clear how many other registries responded, but there’s a limited pool of companies that have a proven track record of handling such a large zone.

When .au moved from Neustar (now part of GoDaddy) to Afilias (now part of Identity Digital) in 2018 it was the largest back-end migration in the history of the DNS.

Back then, .au had 3.1 million domains under management. Now, following the release of second-level names last year, it’s closer to 4.3 million. Another migration would have been another record-breaker.

auDA said dentity Digital’s next four-year contract begins July 1 next year, with a two-year extension option.

Ukrainian domains slide as war becomes the new normal

Ukraine’s ccTLD is starting to see a decline in its total domains under management as emergency policies related to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 are relaxed.

According to local registry Hostmaster, .ua’s total was down 1.5% at the end of the first quarter at 612,778 domains, due to the fact that expiring domains that were frozen in 2022 have now started to drop.

Hostmaster said the effect will become more noticeable in coming quarters. Stats show a decline of about a thousand domains since the end of June.

When the war started, .ua had about 558,000 domains. It peaked at around 614,000 in early June.

Early in the conflict, Hostmaster had said that expired domains would be held in a redemption period status. Many registrants were assumed to have been drafted into the military or refugees.

Since then, the registry says a “significant number” of expired domains have been restored.

However, the policy was rolled back this June; expired domains now have the antebellum standard 30 days to be restored. Domains that were not renewed in 2022 still have a November deletion date, Hostmaster said.

Meanwhile, WIPO has recently restarted its UDRP services for Ukraine, having paused them in May 2022 in response to the war. Decisions that were paused in early 2022 have now been executed and published.

Huge telco dumps gTLDs after rebrand

e&, a major telecoms company in the Middle East, has told ICANN to scrap its two dot-brand gTLDs following a partial corporate rebrand last year.

The Abu Dhabi-based company, which operates in 16 countries and has turnover of over $7 billion, said it no longer wishes to operate .etisalat and its Arabic equivalent, اتصالات. (.xn--mgbaakc7dvf). It’s never used the domains.

The company last year said it was rebranding as e&, the ampersand perhaps demonstrating that its marketing folk have little interest in intuitive domain names. “Etisalat by e&” is still used in some territories.

The firm uses eand.com as its primary web site domain.

As dot-brands with no domains and no customers, ICANN will quietly drop them from the root in due course.

A second new gTLD has FAILED and will be sold off

A second commercial, non-branded new gTLD has thrown in the towel after failing to sell many domains and ICANN will seek out a new registry operator to take over.

Desi Networks has told ICANN it wants to unilaterally terminate its contract to run .desi, which as of the end of March had 1,425 domains under management after almost a decade in the root. It peaked at 4,330 domains in December 2018.

ICANN said it will invoke its Registry Transition Process to find a new registry operator. That’s essentially an auction, though if Desi Networks has so far failed to find a buyer privately one wonders how much attention it will attract.

The term “desi” broadly refers to people of South Asian residence or descent, usually Indians and the Indian diaspora. With over 1.5 billion potential registrants, on paper it looks like a winner.

But a Google search for .desi sites reveals just a handful of active domains, all related to porn sites.

The registry seems to have given up on approving zone file requests some time last year, so I have no insight into the kinds of domains currently registered, but ICANN says they are registered to third parties.

None of the registry’s own web sites, save nic.desi, appear to be working, and its Twitter account has been dormant since 2018.

The failure of the business doesn’t appear to be from a lack of channel opportunities. The gTLD is available through most of the major registrars, according to transaction reports, and runs on CentralNic’s back-end.

ICANN said it may transition .desi to an Emergency Back-End Registry Operator while it sorts everything out.

The Registry Transition Process has been invoked just once before, in 2021, after Atrgon’s .wed failed. That gTLD has been using an EBERO, Nominet, for six years.

Most registries that have terminated their gTLD contracts have been dot-brands with no third-party registrants. ICANN just removes those from the root.