XYZ hires .top guy as first China employee

XYZ.com has hired its first Beijing-based employee, as part of its ongoing plan to formally enter the Chinese market.
The company said yesterday that it has appointed Mason Zhang, until recently chief marketing office at .top gTLD registry Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co, as its new director of business development for China.
It’s part of XYZ’s seemingly interminable entry to the Chinese market, which is over a year old.
While the majority of .xyz’s registrations have been into China, the registry (along with pretty much every other Western registry) still does not have the necessary government permissions so that its customers can start using their names.
It kicked off a process to get ICANN approval for its Chinese gateway, operated by ZDNS, a year ago, and set up the mandatory Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise in January.
The company said in a blog post that it expects to get its Chinese accreditation “very soon”.
Zhang’s former employer, .top, is second only to .xyz in terms of new gTLD registration volume, also due to Chinese sales. It has about 3.7 million names in its zone file, compared to .xyz’s 6.1 million.

Root hits 1,500 live TLDs as US oversight ends

The DNS root saw its 1,500th concurrent live TLD come into existence on Friday, just hours before the US relinquished its oversight powers.
Amazon received its delegation for .通販 (.xn--gk3at1e, Japanese for “online shopping”) and satellite TV company Hughes got .dvr, meaning “digital video recorder”.
That took the number of TLDs in the root to exactly 1,500, which is where it still stands today.
Both went live September 30, which was the final day of ICANN’s IANA contract with the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which expired that night.
An ICANN spokesperson confirmed that the two new gTLDs “were the last ones requiring NTIA’s approval.”
From now on, the small clerical role NTIA had when ICANN wanted to make changes to the root is no more.
The fact that it hit a nice round number the same day as ICANN oversight switched to a community-led approach is probably just a coincidence.
Amazon’s .通販 was almost banned for being too confusingly similar to “.shop”, but that ludicrous decision was later overturned.
Hughes’ .dvr was originally intended as a single-registrant “closed generic”, but is now expected to operate as a restricted but multi-registrant space.

For $10,000, Donuts will block hundreds of typos and premiums for your brand

Donuts has announced an expansion of its domain-blocking service that will enable brand owners to cheaply (kinda) block misspellings of their trademarks.
Brand owners whose trademarks match “premium” generic strings will also be able to take matching domains out of circulation using the registry’s new DPML Plus service.
DPML, for Domain Protected Marks List, is Donuts’ way of giving trademark owners a way to bulk-block their marks across Donuts’ entire stable of gTLDs, which currently stands at 197 strings.
With typical sunrise period prices at $200+, registering a single string across almost 200 gTLDs during sunrise could near a $40,000 outlay. In general availability, it would often be about a tenth of that price.
But the original DPML, with a roughly $3,000 retail price for a five-year block, reduced the cost to protect a single string to about $3 per domain per year.
Now, with DPML Plus, Donuts is offering a premium service that adds the ability to block typos and premium names.
Typos and substring-based blocking were near the top of the intellectual property community’s wish-list when the new gTLD program was being developed, but those features were never incorporated into ICANN rights protection mechanisms.
But for $9,999 (suggested retail price), DPML Plus buyers get a 10-year block on the string that matches their trademark and three extra strings that are either typos of the trademark or contain the trademark as a substring, Donuts said.
So Google would for example be able to block android.examples, anrdoid.examples, androidphone.examples and googleandroidphone.examples using a single DPML Plus subscription.
Basically, they get to block up to 788 domains at $9,999 over 10 years, which works out to about $1.26 per domain per year.
It looks nice and cheap on that basis, but companies wishing to block dozens of base trademarks would be looking at six or seven-figure up-front payments.
DPML Plus also lifts the ban on blocking “premium” domains.
Under the old DPML, customers could not block a domain if Donuts had flagged it with a premium price, but under DPML Plus they can.
This opens the door to brand owners who have valuable trademarks on generic dictionary words to get them blocked across the whole Donuts portfolio.
A Donuts spokesperson said the company reserves the right to reject such strings if it suspects gaming.
Another benefit of the DPML Plus is the ability to prevent other companies with identical trademarks later unblocking and snatching blocked domains for themselves.
Currently, third parties with matching brands can “override” DPML blocks, but that feature is turned off for DPML Plus subscribers. They get exclusivity for the life of the block.
Donuts said the Plus offer will only be available to buy between October 1 and December 31.
As an added carrot, from January 1 the price of its vanilla DPML service is going to go up by an amount the company currently does not want to disclose.

Over 50,000 names sold as .shop has successful launch day

GMO Registry has recorded one of the most successful new gTLD launch days to date, selling over 45,000 .shop domain names in the first hours.
The company said it sold 45,427 .shop names in the first two hours after general availability started yesterday afternoon at about 1600 UTC.
The total at that point was 51,755, including about 5,000 that were registered during the Early Access Period, during which names carried higher prices.
The latest .shop zone file contains 46,419 domains.
The registry had sold 616 premium-priced names already, GMO said.
The volume is quite impressive given the retail price tags — .shop is not priced for budget Chinese domainers, it’s selling for $20 to $30 at the major Western registrars.
That’s double, triple or even 10 times as much as Minds + Machines’ self-consciously ‘non-freenium’ .vip domains were selling for when it racked up a six-figure volume during its first day of GA earlier this year.
West.cn, the leading Chinese new gTLD registrar, priced .vip at $3 but is selling .shop at $25.
GMO paid a then record-setting $41.5 million for the rights to .shop at an ICANN auction back in January.

“UDRP-proof” .feedback gTLD loses first UDRP

The first cybersquatting complaint against a .feedback domain name has resulted in a transfer, despite registry claims that the gTLD was “UDRP-proof”.
De Beers, the diamond merchant, won a UDRP case against the registrant of debeers.feedback earlier this month.
The registrant, who used a privacy service, registered the name back in January, when .feedback was in its unusual “Free Speech Partner Program” phase.
That took the place of an Early Access Program, but saw domains deeply discounted instead of premium-priced.
Buyers had to agree to point their domain to a registry-hosted social media platform and there was a $5,000 fee if they later decided to change name servers.
The registrant of debeers.feedback lost the UDRP largely because there wasn’t much actual feedback on the site until De Beers sent him a nastygram.
On March 24, the site only contained a single two-word post. Five more were added with apparently false earlier dates at a later time, the panelist found.
He wrote:

If the website were genuinely operating as a feedback forum, one would ordinarily expect the reviews to have appeared at or close to their respective dates. That they were not on the website on March 24 and did not appear until after the letter of demand was sent calls for explanation.

The panelist doesn’t mention it, but the reviews all seem to have been copied directly from Yelp!.
Basically, the registrant lost his domain for filling the site with bogosity rather than genuine free-speech griping.
It’s not a terribly surprising or worrying result, perhaps, but it does run counter to what Jay Westerdal, CEO of registry Top Level Spectrum, told us back in January.
“It is a great opportunity for domainers to register domains that will be UDRP proof,” he said at the time. “As free speech sites they are going to improve the world and let anyone read reviews on any subject.”
“I think they are UDRP proof,” he added back then, offering the services of his lawyers to registrants who found themselves served with UDRP complaints.
Today, Westerdal qualified his earlier remarks, telling DI: “I don’t think having a privacy service and also having a .feedback domain will hold up in the current UDRP system.”
Privacy services are discouraged by the registry, though explicitly permitted in its terms of service.
Westerdal said that because De Beers obtained the domain via UDRP, the company will not have to pay the $5,000 unlocking fee if it wants to point debeers.feedback’s name servers elsewhere.

CIRA becomes first new gTLD back-end since 2012

CIRA, the Canadian ccTLD manager, has become the first new registry back-end provider to enter the gTLD market since the 2012 application round closed.
The company today announced that it has signed Dot Kiwi, operator of .kiwi, as its first client.
.kiwi will become the first non-.ca TLD that CIRA runs the back-end for, according to VP of product development Dave Chiswell.
CIRA has already completed pre-delegation testing and technical evaluation with ICANN, he told DI today.
It is believed to be the first back-end provider not attached to any 2012-round application to go through the PDT process.
That would make CIRA essentially the first company to officially enter the gTLD back-end market since 2012, in other words.
The .kiwi contract was up for grabs due to the fact that Minds + Machines, its original supplier, decided to get out of the back-end business earlier this year.
All of M+M’s own stable of gTLDs are being moved to Nominet right now, but customers such as Dot Kiwi were not obliged to follow.
Chiswell said that CIRA’s system, which is called Fury, has some patent-pending “tagging” technology that cannot be found at rival providers.
He said that registry operator clients get a GUI through which they can manage pricing tiers and promotions based on criteria such as substrings and registration dates without having to fill out a ticket and get CIRA staff involved, which he said is a unique selling point.
CIRA’s goals now are to try to sign up more TLDs (cc’s or g’s) to Fury, and to attempt to get Canadian brands and cities to apply for gTLDs in the next round, whenever that may be.
The company also intends to migrate .ca over to Fury from its legacy infrastructure at some point, he said.

Watch: Hollywood actors trash Trump, promote .vote

Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, James Franco, that bloke who plays the Hulk, and a “shit-ton of famous people” are starring in a new anti-Trump attack viral that promotes a .vote domain name.
The video, put together by cult director Joss Whedon, gently spoofs quick-cut celebrity-ensemble appeals, while making a serious point about US presidential candidate Donald Trump being a threat to domestic race relations and global security.
It directs viewers to SaveTheDay.vote, where they are encouraged to register to vote in the November 8 poll.
Here it is:

It’s probably the highest-profile “in the wild” spotting of a .vote domain to date.
While I doubt it will work magic on .vote registration volumes, it’s certainly no bad thing for the visibility of new gTLDs in general.
At time of writing, the video had received about 1.2 million views on YouTube, less than 24 hours after its release.
.vote is an Afilias gTLD with post-registration usage restrictions. It currently has about 1,800 names in its zone file but only one domain in the Alexa one million most-visited sites.

Could ICANN reject Verisign’s $135m .web bid?

ICANN is looking into demands for it to throw out Verisign’s covert $135 million winning bid for the highly prized .web gTLD.
ICANN last week told the judge hearing Donuts’ .web-related lawsuit that it is “currently in the process of investigating certain of the issues raised” by Donuts through its “internal accountability mechanisms”.
Donuts is suing for $22.5 million, claiming ICANN should have forced Nu Dot Co to disclose that its .web bid was being secretly bankrolled by Verisign and alleging that the .com heavyweight used NDC as cover to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
ICANN’s latest filing (pdf), made jointly with Donuts, asked for an extension to October 26 of ICANN’s deadline to file a response to Donuts’ complaint.
It was granted, the second time the deadline has been extended, but the judge warned it was also the final time.
The referenced “internal accountability mechanism” would seem to mean the Cooperative Engagement Process — a low-formality bilateral negotiation — that Donuts and fellow .web bidder Radix initiated against ICANN August 2.
The filing states that the “resolution of certain issues in controversy may be aided by allowing [ICANN] to complete its investigation of [Donuts’] allegations prior to the filing of its responsive pleading.”
In other words, Donuts is either hopeful that ICANN may be able to resolve some of its complaints in the next month, or it’s not particularly impatient about the case progressing.
Meanwhile, fellow .web applicant Afilias has demanded for the second time that ICANN hand over .web to it, as the second-highest bidder, throwing out the NDC/Verisign application.
In a September 9 letter, published last night, Afilias told ICANN to “disqualify and reject” NDC’s application, alleging at least three breaches of ICANN rules.
Afilias says that by refusing to disclose Verisign’s support for its bid, NDC broke the rules and should have its application thrown out.
The company also confirmed on the public record for what I believe is the first time that it was the second-highest bidder in the July 27 auction.
Afilias would pay somewhere between $57.5 million and $71.9 million for the gTLD, depending on what the high bid of the third-placed applicant was.
In its new letter, Afilias says NDC broke the rule from the Applicant Guidebook that does not allow applicants to “resell, assign or transfer any of applicant’s rights or obligations in connection with the application”.
It also says that NDC was obliged by the AGB to notify ICANN of “changes in financial position and changes in ownership or control”, which it did not.
It finally says that Verisign used NDC as a front during the auction, in violation of auction rules.
“In these circumstances, we submit that ICANN should disqualify NDC’s bid and offer to accept the application of Afilias, which placed the second highest exit bid,” Afilias general counsel Scott Hemphill wrote (pdf).
Hemphill told ICANN to defer from signing a Registry Agreement with NDC or Verisign, strongly implying that Afilias intends to invoke ICANN accountability mechanisms (presumably meaning the Request for Reconsideration process and/or Independent Review Process).
While Afilias and Donuts are both taking issue with the secretive nature of Verisign’s acquisition of .web, they’re not necessarily fighting the same corner.
Donuts is looking for $22.5 million because that’s roughly what it would have received if the .web contention set had been resolved via private auction and $135 million had been the winning bid.
But Afilias wants the ICANN auction outcome to stand, albeit with NDC’s top bid rejected. That would mean Donuts, Radix, and the other applicants would still receive nothing.
There’s also the question of other new gTLD applications that have prevailed at auction and been immediately transferred to third-party non-applicants.
The most notable example of this was .blog, which was won by shell company Primer Nivel with secretive backing from WordPress maker Automattic.
Donuts itself regularly wins gTLD auctions and immediately transfers its contracts to Rightside under a pre-existing agreement.
In both of those cases, the reassignment deals predated, but were not disclosed in, the respective applications.
There’s the recipe here for a messy, protracted bun fight over .web, which should come as no surprise to anyone.

Chinese investor pumps $7 million into M+M as .vip pushes firm into profit

Minds + Machines made a profit, kinda, in the first half of the year, due to the popularity of .vip in China.
The company today announced a loss of $1.9 million for the six months to June 30, compared to a $1.6 million loss in the comparable 2015 period, on revenue that was up 115% at $7.4 million.
But factoring out discontinued operations — M+M started to close its registrar and registry back-end businesses during the half — it actually managed to sneak a profit of $56,000.
Its revenue was also unaffected by one-time gains from gTLD auction losses, something which had pumped up its top line regularly for the last few years.
Chairman Guy Elliot said in a statement to the markets that M+M “has successfully been navigated out of troubled waters”.
The turnaround is due in no small part to the success of .vip, which racked up over 400,000 registrations in its first month (back in May), the large majority of which were sold to Chinese investors.
The company said that $5.5 million of the $8 million in H1 billings were made in the first 21 days of .vip’s availability.
Having started 2016 with no sales in Asia whatsoever, it expects 45% of its revenue to come from China by the end of the year.
As a direct consequence of .vip’s sales, M+M has received a £5.5 million ($7.2 million) investment from Goldstream Capital Master Fund I, a Cayman Islands shell company owned by Chinese private equity firm Hony Capital.
Hony, which manages $10 billion in assets, is perhaps best known for owning the pizza restaurant chain Pizza Express, which it acquired for $1.54 billion in 2014.
According to its web site, Hony’s own investors include three large Chinese state-owned investment vehicles.
The investment deal includes clauses preventing Hony from trying to get a director on M+M’s board and/or launching a hostile takeover bid.
It will own 7.17% of M+M after buying 50 million shares at £0.13 each, assuming M+M’s simultaneously announced £13 million ($17 million) share buyback is fully subscribed.
M+M opened a subsidiary in China (a Wholly-Owned Foreign Enterprise) during the half, in order to better serve the Chinese market and comply with Chinese government regulations.
It simultaneously laid off 44% of its staff in the US — engineers no longer needed due to the shift into an almost entirely marketing-focused business — and expects to end the year with only 13 employees there.

Uniregistry to release 10 million domains on October 4

Uniregistry plans to release millions of registry-reserved domain names, many at standard registration fee, two weeks from now.
The company, which has about 25 new gTLDs in its stable, will release 10 million currently reserved names on October 4, CEO Frank Schilling told DI.
The revelation follows news that the company has started allowing thousands of registry-owned domains to expire and return to the available pool.
About 200,000 domains originally registered to North Sound Names, a separate Schilling-controlled company, are being made available via regular channels.
Those domains were registered (rather than reserved) so that Uniregistry could throw up landing pages inviting potential buyers to make offers. After they drop, they will no longer resolve.
But Schilling said a further 9.8 million names will also hit the market next month.
“It’s just a much better time because we have greater distribution and we are less likely to see all our names taken at land rush by one or two commercial registrants,” he said.
“We are unblocking and deleting 10 million domain names and making them available for registration through more than 200 registrars,” he said.
“Almost all will be standard reg [fee],” he said, when asked about pricing. Others will carry premium fees.
A web site publishing lists of newly released names will go live in about a week, he said.
DNW has previously reported that Uniregistry plans to release names that were initially blocked due to ICANN’s name collisions mitigation plan.
Those lists (which are usually mostly junk) are already published by ICANN and can be found accompanying the Registry Agreement for the relevant TLD linked from this page. Here’s the 35,000-name .link collisions list (.csv) for example.