.sx denies .sex gTLD objection rumor

The CEO of SX Registry has denied rumors that the company already plans to object to the two .sex new gTLD applications, but has not yet ruled out such a move.
The company runs Sint Maarten’s new ccTLD, .sx, and gossip at the ICANN meeting in Prague last month suggested that an objection or two against .sex might be made on confusing similarity grounds.
The rumors were fueled in part by SX Registry’s sexy launch marketing.
But in a recent email to DI, Normand Fortier wrote:

At this time SX Registry is still reviewing the impact of various gTLD applications and contrary to some published rumors, has not taken any official position or decision regarding a future course of action.

Existing ccTLD operators are allowed to file String Confusion Objections against gTLD applications, if they feel there’s a risk of confusion if the gTLD is approved.
And .sx/.sex is far from a unique case.
In fact, of the 375 applications for three-letter gTLDs in the first round, 304 have only one character variance with one or more existing ccTLDs, according to DI PRO’s string similarity analysis.
ICANN’s Sword algorithm, which compares the visual similarity of strings, gives .sex a score of 57% against .sx.
I’ve checked every three-character gTLD application against every existing ccTLD and found dozens of proposed gTLDs with much higher similarity scores when compared to ccTLD strings.
The full results are available to DI PRO subscribers over here.

Dispute over ‘confusing’ new gTLD company names

Is this the first “confusing similarity” fight to emerge from ICANN’s new gTLD program?
Two new UK outfits are involved in a dispute about their very similar company names, it has emerged.
TLD Registry Services seems to have come first. It’s an offshoot of Island Networks, the registry manager for the Channel Islands country-code TLDs .gg and .je.
According to co-founder Nigel Roberts, the company plans to offer registry services to existing TLDs using the CoCCA platform and has already made headway with a few potential clients.
TLD Registrar Services, on the other hand, is affiliated with CentralNic, the relatively successful new gTLD registry back-end provider.
Judging by its placeholder web site, this company plans to offer white-label registrar services to new gTLD operators such as dot-brands.
Roberts is irked that CentralNic picked a name for its company so similar to his own, particularly given that “registry” and “registrar” are often used interchangeably outside of the domain industry.
“We’ve recently asked the Secretary of State to look into how this situation came to pass,” he said. “It’s less than ideal for both parties. We are sure they are just as keen not to be confused with us, as we are keen not to be confused with them.”
Ben Crawford, CEO of CentralNic and chairman of TLD Registrar Services, said he was not aware of a dispute over the name.
“One of our employees was approached at Prague by someone from a company called TLD Registry Services – a company nobody in our business had ever heard of before,” he said.
“They expressed concern that our company names are too similar to each others’. We will consider their concerns and our options in due course.”
With both companies barely out of stealth mode, it’s probably something of a squall in a teacup at the moment, but it does highlight how tricky it can be to find a descriptive company name in this industry.
We could of course just be looking at a profound lack of imagination here, and I’m just as guilty as the rest.
DI is published by TLD Research Ltd, which appears directly after TLD Registrar Services Ltd and TLD Registry Services LLP in the UK’s Companies House register of companies.

First new gTLD registry hub provider launches

The first effort to provide a centralized “hub” between domain name registrars and new generic top-level domain registries has hit the market.
Norwegian new gTLD consultant/applicant CloudNames has launched The Registry Hub, and says it will offer more than 70% of its equity to the first companies that sign up for the service.
The problem it wants to address is that of complexity.
With hundreds of new mass-market gTLDs likely to appear over the next few years, it will be hard for registrars to keep track of them all.
The Registry Hub says it will provide a “technical, legal and commercial proxy” between registries and registrars.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to the business models of the reseller-oriented registrars that we see today.
One problem it hopes to tackle is paying registry fees.
It’s standard in the domain name industry today for registrars to pay their registry fees in advance – leaving a deposit with each of the registries they work with, which they chip away at over time.
That’s nice for the registry’s cash-flow, but it’s not going to be great for smaller registrars in a world with a few hundred new gTLDs they might want to sell.
These hub services – I’m expecting to see more announce themselves, soon — would consolidate deposits to make it commercially easier for smaller registrars to sell many more gTLDs.
Smart new gTLD registries will probably find market adoption easier if they can figure out ways to avoid this deposit problem entirely, perhaps by switching to a post-payment system.
The Registry Hub would take a small fee for each domain name registered through its service.

Three more digital archery services launch

Surely the market must be saturated by now?
With a little over a week left before ICANN shuts down its digital archery new gTLD batching mechanism, three more companies are vying for applicants’ business.
We’ve received three press releases from newcomers this week, which I believe brings the total to eight.
Of course, it’s looking somewhat possible that digital archery will prove to be irrelevant, should ICANN decide to abandon batching altogether next.
In no particular order, these are the new ones:
Timestamp Technology
American. Affiliated with Nations Media Partners, Timestamp says it will offer applicants a 150% refund if it fails to get them into the first batch. It costs $20,000 for a single application.
MySingleShot
Bulgarian. Affiliated with Uninet. Says 90% of its shots come within 10ms of target. It’s a software play, with licenses selling for $1,000. If you want somebody to take the shot for you, it’s an extra $100 per TLD.
Digital Archery Hotshots
British. Run by Vladimir Shadrunov, a former Telnic executive now gTLD consultant. Fees not disclosed on the web site, but claims to have a “guaranteed lowest price”.

How Uniregistry wants to make Whois “two-way”

If someone uses a Whois database to look up personal information such as your home address and phone number, wouldn’t it be nice to know a little something about them, too?
That’s the philosophy behind one of Uniregistry’s more interesting new gTLD policies, according to Frank Schilling, founder of the new new gTLD portfolio applicant.
Uniregistry has applied for dozens of gTLDs and says it has a “registrant-centered” outlook that extends to the mandatory thick Whois databases.
If its gTLDs are approved, the company will record the IP addresses of people doing Whois queries and make the records available to its registrants, Schilling said.
He suggested that Whois users may have to give up more info about themselves, in certain cases, too.
“To get certain pieces of information, you’ll have to agree to share some information about yourself,” Schilling said in an interview with DI yesterday.
Registrants would be able to view archived data about who’s been looking them up, which could help them during subsequent legal disputes about names, or during sales negotiations.
For domainers, this could be handy. Imagine you own the domain soft.drink and you receive a low-ball offer from a random stranger you suspect might be a proxy for a large corporation. Wouldn’t it be nice to know Coca-Cola has recently been checking out your Whois?
It’s going to be interesting to see how IP interests and law enforcement agencies – the two ICANN lobbies most deeply invested in Whois accuracy – react to Uniregistry turning the tables.

June .nxt conference canceled

The .nxt conference on new generic top-level domains, planned for London next month, has been postponed until later this year, the organizers have announced.
.nxt CEO Kieren McCarthy blamed the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the new gTLD program timetable following ICANN’s six-week TLD Application System outage.
McCarthy wrote on the .nxt web site:

Our main goal for this conference is to give a comprehensive overview of the new gTLD process, including: providing an understanding of this new market; assisting applicants in moving forward; learning lessons from the past; and giving everyone a significant new industry an opportunity to meet, debate and network. We just don’t feel this is going to be possible for the 20-22 June timeframe.
…
We gave serious consideration to running the conference despite the lack of information and tight timeline but decided in the end it would be better for everyone to hold a conference that was in a position to achieve its aims.

The conference had already signed up almost twice the number of attendees than the previous two San Francisco-based events (which were in the 150-200 range), according to McCarthy.
Tickets for the June event will be honored for the rescheduled .nxt, which is likely to happen in the late third or early fourth quarter, he said.
People who booked hotels through official channels will get a full refund, but those who made their own arrangements will have to make their own cancellations.

DomainDiction hires industry vets to market gTLDs

DomainDiction, a new marketing company set up to help new generic top-level domain registries, officially launches today.
The largely European company, headed by France-based CEO Jennie-Marie Larsen, says it is “the first marketing consultancy dedicated solely to Top Level Domains”.
Larsen started off her career in the domain name industry at NeuStar, and was most recently chief marketing officer at the new gTLD business management firm Sedari.
Fellow industry veteran Pinky Brand, who helped launch .mobi and was revealed last week to have left registry manager Afilias, is DomainDiction’s new chief strategy officer.
Larsen said in a press release:

DomainDiction´s expertise is multi-channel, international domain marketing. By utilizing a wide range of marketing tools, we are able to offer innovative strategies and outreach programs across each phase from sunrise, landrush, to renewals. We leverage our close registrar channel relationships, international PR, online marketing, and complex SEO & PPC strategies to ensure success for each TLD.

Also on the team: John Kirkham (formerly with HostEurope), Tina Lord (former CMO of EasySpace), Henry Lewington (Barracuda Digital) and Christoph Hausel (whose agency, Element C, has previously worked for Afilias and NeuStar).
Rob Rozicki, who a couple of years ago made a lot of noise about applying for five sports-based gTLDs (.skate, .ski, .board, etc) is on board as head of North American online marketing.
While DomainDiction is certainly the first pure-play new gTLD marketing outfit that I can think of, the company will face competition from traditional PR firms and other gTLD consultancies.
Architelos, which made over a million dollars consulting with new gTLD applicants over the application period, recently launched its own marketing service, Velocity.
DomainDiction is set to launch this afternoon.

Brands are Pool.com’s surprise digital archery clients

Companies applying to ICANN for “dot-brand” top-level domains are among those signing up for Pool.com’s new digital archery service, according to Rob Hall, CEO of parent Momentous.
The company launched its Digital Archery Engine last month, not too long after ICANN confirmed its controversial method of batching new gTLD applications for processing.
Now, Pool is receiving interest from not only mass-market generic string applicants, but also dot-brands.
“It’s a wider swath of TLDs that I thought originally,” said Hall. “At first I thought for sure the generics and the domains that might be in competition.”
“It’s amazing to me that a lot of people out there are saying the brands don’t care, the brands are doing this just defensively, the brands couldn’t care less about going first… but a lot of them do,” he said.
“A lot of them are saying ‘I want to be in that first batch’, which I wouldn’t have necessarily expected,” he added.
He said he had no idea what the motivations are for these brands.
“Our job is to get them in the first batch, not to ask them why they want to be there,” he said.
Hall said it wasn’t clear how many clients Pool would eventually sign up to the service, but said he expects it to be definitely much more than 50.
ICANN’s digital archery system – which will batch applicants according to which can most accurately send a message over the internet to a target time – was poorly received by most people.
Unsurprisingly, Hall is not one of those people.
Pool is one of several companies that have been competing to register expiring domain names for the better part of a decade, so its systems have been fine-tuned for sending messages over the internet quickly.
While the big registries such as .com use the EPP protocol, some of the registries Pool interacts with use HTTP, which seems to be ICANN’s preferred option for digital archery.
Hall said Pool aims for latency of less than 6 milliseconds. Its servers are positioned topologically close to registries – typically one or two hops – and the software measures monitors network conditions.
“The key is being able to detect what is the latency and to predict it, then factor that into the engine to say ‘When do I fire?’,” he said.
He does not anticipate the CAPTCHAs or other Turing tests presenting a problem – Pool would simply bring a human into the equation.
The Digital Archery Engine is not cheap. If Pool gets you into the first batch, you’re $25,000 out of pocket. If you’re in the top half of batches (batch three of five counts as top half) it’s $10,000.
The company was singled out recently by ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency as an “insider” exploiting the digital archery system as a “revenue extraction opportunity”.
A letter highly critical of the system from IPC chair Steve Metallitz said:

This arcane and seemingly arbitrary batching method will also reinforce the widespread impression that all ICANN procedures are dominated by “insiders” with contractual relationships to ICANN, who will surely know best how to manipulate this initiative to their own benefit, or that of their paying customers. It is difficult to reconcile such an outcome with ICANN’s obligation to act in the public interest.

Hall said was happy for the free advertising. “I’d like to thank them,” he said.
But he said Pool isn’t “manipulating” anything.
“They’ve called this ‘digital archery’,” he said. “It’s a game to see who’s best at it. That’s what they’ve designed. We’re not gaming anything. And we’re not offering this to insiders, we’re offering this to everyone.”

Sex.com relaunches as Pinterest for porn

The world’s most valuable domain name has gone all Web 2.0.
Sex.com, which sold for $13 million in 2010, officially relaunched today as the “Pinterest for Sex”, a social networking site for sharing porn.
I must confess I had no clue what “Pinterest” was until ten minutes ago. According to Wikipedia, it’s one of the world’s biggest social networking web sites, bigger than LinkedIn
Perhaps my ignorance can be excused. According to Sex.com’s press release, I’m not the demographic:

Analytics have indicated that women make up over 97% of accounts created on Pinterest. Because of its specific audience, most pictures are of weddings, decorations, recipes and fashion, which seem to be of very little interest to men.

Sex.com is about sharing images of porn, therefore. Man stuff.
I believe this will be the first time the domain name sex.com has been properly “developed” in this way.

The funniest ICANN new gTLDs video yet

No comment. Just watch.

The video was uploaded by YouTube user Bob Recstrum.