.pw claims 50,000 domains registered in three weeks

Directi’s recently relaunched .pw top-level domain has racked up 50,000 domain name registrations after just three weeks of general availability, according to the company.
The number, which will put a smile on the faces of many new gTLD applicants, relates to GA only and does not include defensive registrations made during the ccTLD’s sunrise period, Directi confirmed to DI.
“Our goal was 100,000 names for the first year,” Directi CEO Bhavin Turakhia said in a press release. “The feeling of achieving 50% of the goal within the first three weeks is surreal.”
As previously reported, there were 4,000 .pw domains registered during the first half hour of GA.
Directi (running .pw as .PW Registry and/or Radix Registry) signed up 120 registrars to sell .pw names, which it brands as “Professional Web”.
It’s really the ccTLD for Palau, a small nation in the Pacific.
The registry is going for budget buyers, with registry fees and retail prices coming in a little lower than .com.

NameJet and Afternic sign another gTLD launch

NameJet and Afternic will provide launch auctions and premium name distribution for the .build gTLD, should it be approved, the two companies have announced.
The deal was inked with applicant Plan Bee LLC, which is affiliated with Minardos Group, a construction company.
The two companies will handle auctions under the sunrise and landrush phases, according to a press release.
It’s the second such deal to be announced by the Afternic/Namejet partnership to date, after WhatBox’s .menu. The companies are also working with Directi’s .pw registry.
Plan Bee has also applied for .expert and .construction, but these are both contested so there’s less certainty that they’ll end up approved.
The applicant reckons it will be able to bring .build to market in the fourth quarter of this year.
With a prioritization number of 1,049 in ICANN’s queue, this may prove optimistic, depending on how the remaining portions of the program — such as predelegation testing and contracting — pan out.

Tucows, Directi and Namecheap to combine .online gTLD bids

Three applicants for the .online gTLD appear to have settled their differences in what I believe is the first public example of new gTLD contention set consolidation.
Tucows, Directi and Namecheap said today that that they plan to “work together to manage the .online registry.” From the press release:

applicants for the same TLDs have begun to compete, negotiate, and, in some cases, join forces to ultimately produce one winning bid.
The first such alliance was revealed today, when domain industry veterans Directi, Tucows and Namecheap announced that they would work together to manage the .online registry.

The companies are of course three of the most successful domain name registrars out there.
The press release does not specify how the combination will be carried out. Under ICANN rules, two of the applicants would have to drop their applications. It’s not possible to resubmit as a joint venture.
It also does not acknowledge that there are three other applicants for .online — Donuts and smaller portfolio applicants Dot Online LLC and I-REGISTRY Ltd — which are not party to the agreement.

Directi sells 4,000 .pw domains in first half hour

PW Registry, the Direci unit looking after the .pw registry, said it received orders for 4,000 domain names in its first 30 minutes of general availability today.
Disappointing? It’s certainly not up to the standard of, say, .co, which was well into six figures in the same period when it launched a few years ago.
But .pw’s ambitions weren’t quite as lofty as .co’s. It’s the ccTLD for Palau, and its chosen meaning of “professional web” isn’t nearly as intuitive or valuable as .co’s “company”.
Still, it’s early days, and Directi says it saw a reasonable amount of domainer action during its landrush phase.
Landrush and sunrise period numbers have not been disclosed, but the company said that Apple, Pfizer, Volkswagen and Nokia obtained their trademarks during sunrise.
PW Registry has 110 registrars, including many of the big ones, selling its names.

Go Daddy cozies up new gTLD players, drops its own .home and .casa bids

Go Daddy has changed tack in its new gTLD strategy, dropping its own applications and positioning itself strongly as a registry-neutral channel to market.
The company spent yesterday wooing new gTLD applicants at a specially convened meeting in its native Arizona; there were representatives from about half of the applied-for gTLDs in attendance.
But apart from the fact that Go Daddy has withdrawn its applications for .home and .casa — and symbolically dropped the “.com” from its logo — the company is playing its strategy pretty close to its chest.
Director of policy planning James Bladel told DI that the meeting was more about “starting a conversation” with registries, rather than laying out Go Daddy’s specific plans for new gTLDs.
The company will be a hugely important channel to market for many gTLDs, and competition for store-front space on the Go Daddy home page is expected to be fierce.
Existing big-volume “new” TLDs, such as .info and .co, can attribute much of their success to Go Daddy.
It’s responsible for well over half of all .info domains registered today and .CO Internet’s success to date can no doubt be attributed in no small part to its strong relationship with the company.
But Bladel would not be drawn on Go Daddy’s specific plans for the next wave of gTLDs.
While the company has a patent on a method of allocating shelf space via an Adsense-style bidding technology, Bladel said Go Daddy has not yet decided whether to use that system.
The company could also use other methods, algorithmic rather than commercial, for selecting which TLDs to display to users, such as geographic location, he said.
Another conversation that needs to happen relates to launch timing.
Ideas may include staggering launches to benefit from joint marketing efforts, or pooling launches into big-draw “launch day” events, Bladel speculated, noting that the company is more interested in hearing ideas from gTLD applicants right now.
While Go Daddy will continue to push its application for .godaddy dot-brand, with the loss of .home and .casa it will no longer be in the mass-market gTLD registry game.
Registry-neutral registrars may actually be a rarity in the new gTLD era.
eNom will certainly walk away with interests in more than a few gTLDs, directly and via its deal with Donuts. Tucows, Web.com and Directi will also have some, depending on contention set results.
Apart from Go Daddy, the only other top-ten registrars without their own gTLDs could be United and FastDomains.

How .pw signed up more launch registrars than .xxx

Directi has signed up more registrars for its launch of the .pw top-level domain than .xxx managed a year ago, crediting pricing and “operating in new gTLD mode” for its progress.
Sandeep Ramchandani, business head of .pw at the company, said that over 90 registrars are currently accredited. That’s compared to the about 80 that ICM Registry launched .xxx with in December 2011.
The ccTLD for the tiny nation of Palau (pop. 20,956), .pw isn’t what you’d call an intrinsically exciting string, despite Directi’s attempt to rebrand it as “Professional Web”, making its relatively strong launch channel a bit of a head-scratcher.
The fact that Directi also runs registrar-in-a-box provider LogicBoxes has helped it add some registrars, no doubt.
But Ramchandani reckons a combination of low pricing, open registration policies, a focus on developing markets, and attractive registrar incentives, are helping the TLD gain channel traction.
“There’s going to be a massive shift in power from registries to registrars,” he said. “We’re basically operating .pw in the new gTLD mode.”
I had assumed that many registrars might have wanted to plug in to .pw in order to ease the need for integration work with Directi’s registry if/when the company launches the 30-odd gTLD it has applied for, but Ramchandani pointed out that this is not the case.
The company is using CentralNic as the back-end for .pw, but it’s signed up to use ARI Registry Services for its gTLDs.
“This is not something related to our gTLD business, because we’re working off a completely different platform,” Ramchandani said.
But with the imminent launch of new gTLDs, there’s recently been an increased industry focus on how registrars should be paying their registry fees. Typically, they prepay each TLD registry before they sell domains to registrants, tying up capital that they could be using for other purposes.
That model may work in a world of 1,700 registrars and 18 gTLDs, but it will become increasingly cumbersome and uneconomical for registrars as the number of TLDs approaches 1,000.
Some say it will make more sense for registries to scrap the prepay model, if they want to attract more registrars.
While Directi has stopped short of offering blanket post-pay to its registrars, Ramchandani said it will offer the model in some cases (unlike ICANN-contracted gTLDs, .pw has leeway to treat registrars differently).
“We will be asking for prepayment, but if a registrar is doing significant volume… If they feel they’re blocking a lot of capital and require a more convenient and flexible model we could offer post-payment,” he said. “But it’s not something we can offer every registrar.”
It’s also offering what it says is a more attractive way of handling promotional pricing.
Typically, if a gTLD registry runs a pricing promotion today it will rebate its registrars the difference between the promo price and the regular fee monthly or quarterly based on their sales volumes.
Ramchandani said the .pw model is more attractive to registrars: “With our programs, we will charge the discounted amount up-front, as opposed to charging the full amount and rebating later.”
“We will be coming up with some very, very aggressive promotions that will bring down the first-year registration cost a lot,” he added.
In contrast to SX Registry’s .sx (for the new nation of Sint Maarten), which is launching with prices of around $50 a year, Directi is selling .pw domains with a registry fee “sub-.com” before discounts.
Exact registry pricing for .pw domains has not been publicly disclosed, and Ramchandani declined to give out that information, but given current .com prices we can estimate a ceiling of about $7.85.
Directi reckons the low prices will drive volumes in developing markets, such as its native India.
The .pw launch is currently in the last few days of sunrise — which like so many other recent sunrise periods has been extended to cope with last-minute filings — during which trademark holders can defensively register their brands as domain names for a higher fee.
Not ever registrar is participating in sunrise; eNom, for example, which is .pw’s biggest registrar signing to date, does not plan to get involved until landrush.
Directi has something interesting planned for landrush, which begins next Monday, too.
According to Ramchandani, the registry will release and promote a list of unreserved “premium” domains that are available for registration during the landrush period.
This is slightly different to the standard registry practice of holding back premiums for auction. The names .pw will promote will not be “reserved”, they’ll just be examples of decent strings picked out of the available pool.
Each could technically be sold for the basic landrush fee if only one registrant attempts to register them. In practice, due to the promotion, there’s a higher likelihood of the domains going to auction, however.
“We’re making available a much larger set of premium names during landrush,” Ramchandani said. “We think it will help raise awareness to say: ‘Hey, these are the top picks.'”
“Since those names are generally reserved by the registry, we think it’s important to say: these are available,” he added.
The full list of registrars participating in .pw’s launch is available here.
Directi is promoting those registrars that have committed some marketing resources to the TLD, such as by creating dedicated landing pages.
It has not yet signed up Go Daddy, which is typically responsible for a quarter or more of all sales in gTLDs it sells, but Ramchandani said he expects more “top five” registrars to follow eNom in supporting .pw soon.

Sunrise for .pw extended by a week

The sunrise period for the liberalizing ccTLD .pw has been extended by a week until February 15.
.PW Registry said that the extension comes due to demand; it will allow further time for trademark owners to defensively register their brands.
The company, owned by the Directi, has about 80 accredited registrars listed on its web site, many of them specialists in brand protection.
It also recently signed up some big mass-market registrars, including volume number two eNom. Market leader Go Daddy has yet to accredit, judging by the .PW web site.
While .pw is the ccTLD for Palau, the registry is positioning it as a competitor to .pro, meaning “Professional Web”. Unlike .pro, however, there are no registration restrictions.
Directi is an applicant for over 30 new gTLDs, almost all contested, so the .pw launch could in some respects be seen as a test run for its bigger TLDs, should it win any of its contention sets.

Afilias doubles .pro registrations in a year

Afilias says it has managed to grow .pro by 100% just one year after acquiring RegistryPro, despite an abuse crackdown and a tightening of registration policies.
RegistryPro president Karim Jiwani, speaking to DI earlier this month, said that .pro currently has roughly 160,000 domain names under management, compared to 120,000 at the time of the deal.
However, .pro lost about 40,000 domains — all Zip codes registered to former registry owner Hostway — six months ago. Excluding these names, domains leaped from 80,000 to 160,000.
Jiwani said that steep discounting and the on-boarding of a few big new registrars — notably Directi — are mostly responsible for the growth.
It’s all organic growth — regular registrations — he said, with none of the dubious type of big one-off deals that gTLD registries often rely on to show adoption.
The growth has come despite the fact that Afilias is cracking down on loopholes that have previously enabled registrars to sell .pro names to people without professional credentials.
At the time of the acquisition, registrars were accepting business licenses as credentials, but Jiwani said that this should no longer be possible.
“We’ve been trying to get to the registrars and let them now that a business license is not acceptable as a verification tool,” he said, “and we will continue to reach out to registrars and let them know.”
With some profession-specific new gTLDs (such as .doctor and .lawyer) likely to be approved by ICANN over the next year or two, Afilias wants it to be known that .pro has a broader customer base.
“What we did was try to get out to registrars and explain to them that you don’t just have to be a doctor or a lawyer to get a .pro domain,” Jiwani said.
“We explained to them that there are many, many professions in the world — from massage therapists to radiologists to tour guides,” he said. “It opened up the mindset of the registrars a little bit and they were promoting it to a wider array of professionals.”
Our full interview with Jiwani, in which he discusses the challenges of growing a restricted registry, fighting abuse, and how legacy gTLDs can compete with new gTLDs can be read on DI PRO:
Interview: RegistryPro president Karim Jiwani on the challenges of growing a restricted gTLD

New gTLD “strawman” splits community

The ICANN community is split along the usual lines on the proposed “strawman” solution for strengthening trademark protections in the new gTLD program.
Registrars, registries, new gTLD applicants and civil rights voices remain adamant that the proposals — hashed out during closed-door meetings late last year — go too far and would impose unreasonable restrictions on new gTLDs registries and free speech in general.
The Intellectual Property Constituency and Business Constituency, on the other hand, are (with the odd exception) equally and uniformly adamant that the strawman proposals are totally necessary to help prevent cybersquatting and expensive defensive registrations.
These all-too-predictable views were restated in about 85 emails and documents filed with ICANN in response to its initial public comment period on the strawman, which closed last night.
Many of the comments were filed by some of the world’s biggest brand owners — many of them, I believe, new to the ICANN process — in response to an International Trademark Association “call to action” campaign, revealed in this comment from NCS Pearson.
The strawman proposals include:

• A compulsory 30-day heads-up window before each new gTLD starts its Sunrise period.
• An extension of the Trademark Claims service — which alerts trademark owners and registrants when a potentially infringing domain is registered — from 60 days to 90 days.
• A mandatory “Claims 2” service that trademark owners could subscribe to, for an additional fee, to receive Trademark Claims alerts for a further six to 12 months.
• The ability for trademark owners to add up to 50 confusingly similar strings to each of their Trademark Clearinghouse records, provided the string had been part of a successful UDRP complaint.
• A “Limited Preventative Registration” mechanism, not unlike the .xxx Sunrise B, which would enable trademark owners to defensively register non-resolving domains across all new gTLDs for a one-off flat fee.

Brand owners fully support all of these proposals, though some companies filing comments complained that they do not go far enough to protect them from defensive registration costs.
The Limited Preventative Registration proposal was not officially part of the strawman, but received many public comments anyway (due largely to INTA’s call-to-action).
The Association of National Advertisers comments were representative:

an effective LPR mechanism is the only current or proposed RPM [Rights Protection Mechanism] that addresses the critical problem of defensive registrations in the new Top Level Domain (gTLD) approach. LPR must be the key element of any meaningful proposal to fix RPMs.

Others were concerned that the extension to Trademark Claims and proposed Claims 2 still didn’t go far enough to protect trademark rights.
Lego, quite possibly the most aggressive enforcer of its brand in the domain name system, said that both time limits are “arbitrary” and called for Trademark Claims to “continue indefinitely”.
It’s pretty clear that even if ICANN does adopt the strawman proposals in full, it won’t be the end of the IP community’s lobbying for even stronger trademark protections.
On the other side of the debate, stakeholders from the domain name industry are generally happy to embrace the 30-day Sunrise notice period (many will be planning to do this in their pre-launch marketing anyway).
A small number also appear to be happy to extend Trademark Claims by a month. But on all the other proposals they’re clear: no new rights protection mechanisms.
There’s a concern among applicants that the strawman proposals will lead to extra costs and added complexity that could add friction to their registrar and reseller channel and inhibit sales.
The New TLD Applicant Group, the part of the Registries Constituency representing applicants for 987 new gTLDs, said in its comments:

because the proposals would have significant impact on applicants, the applicant community should be supportive before ICANN attempts to change such agreements and any negative impacts must be mitigated by ICANN.

There’s a concern, unstated by NTAG in its comments, that many registrars will be reluctant to carry new gTLDs at launch if they have to implement more temporary trademark-protection measures.
New registries arguably also stand to gain more in revenue than they lose in reputation if trademark owners feel they have to register lots of domains defensively. This is also unstated.
NTAG didn’t say much about the merits of the strawman in it comments. Along with others, its comments were largely focused on whether the changes would be “implementation” or “policy”, saying:

There can be no doubt that the strawman proposal represents changes to policy rather than implementation of decided policy.

If something’s “policy”, it needs to pass through the GNSO and its Policy Development Process, which would take forever and have an uncertain outcome. Think: legislation.
If it’s “implementation”, it can be done rather quickly via the ICANN board. Think: executive decision.
It’s becoming a bit of a “funny cause it’s true” in-joke that policy is anything you don’t want to happen and implementation is anything you do.
Every comment that addresses policy vs implementation regarding the strawman conforms fully to this truism.
NTAG seems to be happy to let ICANN mandate the 30-day Sunrise heads-up, for example, even though it would arguably fit into the definition of “policy” it uses to oppose other elements of the strawman.
NTAG, along with other commenters, has rolled out a “gotcha” mined from a letter then-brand-new ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade sent to the US Congress last September.
In the letter, Chehade said: “ICANN is not in a position to unilaterally require today an extension of the 60-day minimum length of the trademark claims service.”
I’m not sure how much weight the letter carries, however. ICANN could easily argue that its strawman negotiations mean any eventual decision to extend Claims was not “unilateral”.
As far as members of the the IPC and BC are concerned, everything in the strawman is implementation, and the LPR proposal is nothing more than an implementation detail too.
The Coalition for Online Accountability, which represents big copyright holders and has views usually in lock-step with the IPC, arguably put it best:

The existing Rights Protection Mechanisms, which the Strawman Solution and the LPR proposal would marginally modify, are in no way statements of policy. The RPMs are simply measures adopted to implement policies calling for the new gTLD process to incorporate respect for the rights (including the intellectual property rights) of others. None of the existing RPMs is the product of a PDP. They originated in an exercise entitled the Implementation Recommendation Team, formed at the direction of the ICANN Board to recommend how best to implement existing policies. It defies reason to assert that mechanisms instituted to implement policy cannot now be modified, even to the minimal extent provided in the current proposals, without invoking the entire PDP apparatus.

Several commenters also addressed the process used to create the strawman.
The strawman emerged from a closed-doors, invitation-only event in Los Angeles last November. It was so secretive that participants were even asked not to tweet about it.
You may have correctly inferred, reading previous DI coverage, that this irked me. While I recognize the utility of private discussions, I’m usually in favor of important community meetings such as these being held on the public record.
The fact that they were held in private instead has already led to arguments among even those individuals who were in attendance.
During the GNSO Council’s meeting December 20 the IPC representative attempted to characterize the strawman as a community consensus on what could constitute mere implementation changes.
He was shocked — shocked! — that registrars and registries were subsequently opposed to the proposals.
Not being privy to the talks, I don’t know whether this rhetoric was just amusingly naive or an hilariously transparent attempt to capitalize on the general ignorance about what was discussed in LA.
Either way, it didn’t pass my sniff test for a second, and contracted parties obviously rebutted the IPC’s take on the meeting.
What I do know is that this kind of pointless, time-wasting argument could have been avoided if the talks had happened on the public record.

In major snub, Verisign refuses to let ICANN audit .net

Verisign has delivered a significant blow to ICANN’s authority by refusing to take part in its contractual compliance audit program.
The snub runs a risk of scuppering ICANN’s plans to make compliance a cornerstone of its new management’s strategy.
In a letter to ICANN’s compliance department this week, Verisign senior vice president Pat Kane said that the company has no obligation to submit to an audit of .net under its ICANN contract.
Kane wrote:

Verisign has no contractual obligations under its .net Registry Agreement with ICANN to comply with the proposed audit. Absent such express contractual obligations, Verisign will not submit itself to an audit by or at the direction of ICANN of its books and records.

The company is basically refusing to take part in ICANN’s Contractual Compliance Audit Program, a proactive three-year plan to make sure all gTLD registries and accredited registrars are sticking to their contracts.
For registries, the plan calls for ICANN to look at things like compliance with Whois, zone file access, data escrow, monthly reporting, and other policies outlined in the registry agreements.
Verisign isn’t necessarily admitting that it thinks it would not pass the .net audit, but it is sending a strong signal that it believes ICANN’s authority over it has limits.
In the program’s FAQ, ICANN admits that it does not have explicit audit rights over all contracted parties, stating:

What’s the basis for including all contracted parties, when the ‘Right to Audit’ clause isn’t present in 2001 RAA and Registry Agreements?
One of ICANN’s responsibilities is to conduct audits of its agreements in order to ensure that all contracted parties are in compliance with those agreements.

If Verisign is refusing to participate, other registries may decide they don’t want to cooperate either. That wouldn’t look good for ICANN, which has made compliance a key strategic priority.
When Fadi Chehade started as CEO last September, one of his first moves was to promote compliance boss Maguy Serad to vice president, reporting directly to him.
He told DI that he would be “bringing a lot more weight and a lot more independent management from my office to the compliance function”.
At his inaugural address to the community in Prague last June, he spoke of how he planned to bring IBM-style contract management prowess to ICANN.
Compliance is also a frequently raised concern of the Governmental Advisory Committee (though generally geared toward rogue registrars rather than registries).