Is .xxx really that crappy?

It’s not a huge secret that the new .xxx gTLD isn’t doing as well, five months after launch, as ICM Registry would have hoped, but how does it shape up against other top-level domains?
Domain Name News earlier this week published an analysis of the top one million most-trafficked web sites, according to Alexa rankings, and found that .xxx had just 61 entries.
Per DNN reporter Mike Cohen:

We would not have thought that only 61 domains in total would be ranking inside the top 1,000,000 most visited sites in the world. That number was suppose to be exponentially higher by all accounts even a few month’s in, which we now are well into 2012, however reality says otherwise.

I’m not sure what “all accounts” DNN is referring to — possibly ICM’s marketing hype — but I thought the analysis was interesting so I thought I’d try to replicate it.
This morning I parsed today’s Alexa top million sites list and came up with the following (sortable) table.
[table id=7 /]
These are quick and dirty numbers, based on Alexa data, and my code might be wonky, so please don’t place too much faith in them.
I only looked at the “new” gTLDs introduced since 2001, as well as two mass-market ccTLDs (.co and .me) introduced over the same period.
The .co numbers do not include third-level domains under .com.co and the ccTLD’s other legacy extensions.
The “Months Active” column is the number of months since the TLD was delegated into the DNS root, measured by the date of the first registry report it filed with ICANN or the IANA (re)delegation date, not the date of general availability.
The fourth column is the number of domains divided by the number of months. It’s a fairly arbitrary measure, presented merely to give you an idea of the “success” of the TLD over time.
You could possibly, loosely, think of it as “how many domains a TLD can expect to get into the Alexa 1 Million per month”.
By that measure, .xxx isn’t doing too badly.
It’s even beating .jobs and .tel in absolute terms.

ICANN cancels Fridays. Bad for transparency.

ICANN’s next public meeting, and all its public meetings thereafter, will be a day shorter than usual, following a decision to cancel the regular Friday morning program.
No Friday means no public meeting of the board of directors.
While the move is being characterized as an effort to enhance the effectiveness of ICANN’s board – a particular concern, frequently voiced, of chairman Steve Crocker – it’s also a perplexing shift away from ICANN’s core tenet of transparency.
One of the effects could be to mask dissent on the board.
From now on, it appears that all of ICANN’s top-level decision-making will happen in private.
Instead of wrapping up each public meeting with a board session at which resolutions get voted on, each meeting will instead be book-ended by less formal “community sessions”.
During these sessions, the board will apparently report to attendees about what it has been doing since the last meeting and what it plans to do before the next meeting.
Crocker said in a statement:

We believe that the removal of the Friday public Board meeting and its replacement with two Board community sessions will improve the effectiveness of both the Board and the staff and increase the time that the Board has to interact with the community.

That may well be true — time will tell — but let’s look at what the ICANN community is almost certainly losing.
First, there will be no more transcripts of board meetings at all.
Today, only the public meetings have published recordings and transcripts. Intersessional meetings are minuted, but not transcribed. If recordings are made, they are not published.
Killing off transcripts completely is a pretty obvious step backwards for an organization committed by its bylaws to “operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner”.
Second, if there is dissent on the board, it will be essentially shielded from the community’s view for some time after the fact.
Take, for example, the approval of the new gTLD program or the approval of ICM Registry’s .xxx contract – the two most controversial decisions ICANN made in 2011.
In both cases, certain directors read prepared statements into the record harshly criticizing the majority view.
In March 2011, for example, George Sadowsky stated that ICM’s purported community support for .xxx was “illusory” and that approving the TLD could lead to DNS Balkanization.
And with new gTLDs last June, Mike Silber abstained in the belief that the program was incomplete and that the vote had been scheduled “based on artificial and ego-driven deadlines”.
In both cases, the ICANN community heard the dissenting views – in person, webcast, recorded and transcribed – moments before the vote actually took place.
With no public board meetings, it seems likely that in future that we’re going to have to wait a week to read the voting record for any given resolution and a month or more to read directors’ statements.
Under ICANN’s bylaws, the voting record, which breaks down who voted for and against resolutions, is contained in a preliminary report that is not published for seven days after the vote.
Also under the bylaws, directors’ voting statements are not published until the minutes of the meeting are approved at the board’s next meeting, typically one to two months later.
If the new procedures had been in effect last year, the statements of Sadowsky and Silber would not have been published for over a month after they were made.
With that in mind, it’s clear that killing off the public board meetings could in no way be seen as a positive step for transparency at ICANN.
It’s true that these meetings have for several years been pure theater, but it was theater with value.

Did a university just pay $3,000 for its .xxx domain?

The domain name sju.xxx has changed hands for $3,000 on Sedo.
It’s the first .xxx domain I recall popping up in Sedo’s sales feed.
However, I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s a damage-mitigation move by an American university.
SJU is the acronym used by Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA. The college uses sju.edu as its primary domain.
Knowing how paranoid universities have been about protecting their reputations in .xxx, and given that the sale came in just below the price of a cheap UDRP, I suspect we’re looking at a defensive move.
The Whois record for the domain is currently under privacy protection. Until recently, it belonged to one Jay Camina. It resolves to a suggestive Go Daddy parking page.

ICM confirms three porn gTLD bids

ICM Registry has applied to ICANN for the new gTLDs .sex, .porn and .adult.
If its applications are successful, the company plans to automatically block any second-level domain that is already registered in .xxx, including the Sunrise B defensive registrations.
This means if you own example.xxx, the equivalent .sex, .porn and .adult domains would be reserved until you pay a “nominal” activation fee to activate them.
As well as trademark owners, that would probably be pretty good news for owners of “premium” .xxx domains.
According to ICM, the four domains will not be permanently linked, so if you own a good .xxx you’ll be able to pay a normal registration fee then activate and sell off the three “freebies”.
Because the domains would be permanently reserved, there would be no renewal fees until you choose to activate them, which could well be the same day you sell them.
There’s a good chance these gTLDs will be contested by other applicants and objected to by governments, of course.
I’ve written more on the announcement for The Register here.

YouPorn’s .xxx settlement talks extended

YouPorn owner Manwin, .xxx manager ICM Registry and ICANN have asked a California court for a few more weeks to settle Manwin’s antitrust lawsuit.
According to a court filing yesterday, the three want to extend ICANN and ICM’s window to respond to Manwin’s complaint extended from April 17. The submission reads:

The parties’ settlement discussions have not yet finished. In order to complete those discussions, the parties stipulate to extend, by an additional about three weeks until May 8, 2012, the deadline for Defendants to respond to Plaintiffs’ First Amended Complaint.

By May 8 the world is going to know whether ICM and/or Manwin have applied to ICANN for other adult-oriented gTLDs (.sex, .porn, etc), which could change the picture considerably.
Manwin sued ICANN and ICM in November, alleging that they colluded on .xxx to deliver “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices”.
ICM and ICANN have denied the allegations.

NAF loses UDRP market share again

If UDRP forum shopping is a real phenomenon, the market share statistics don’t bear it out.
The National Arbitration Forum today announced a sequential decrease in the number of cybersquatting cases it handled in 2011, widening the gap between itself and the World Intellectual Property Organization for at least the second year in a row.
NAF said it handled 2,082 complaints last year, down 4% from 2010. That’s over the same period WIPO saw a 2.5% increase to 2,764 cases.
NAF is occasionally accused of being the more complainant-friendly of the two major UDRP dispute resolution providers, which some say encourages “forum shopping”.
While that may or may not be true in certain fringe cases, it’s certainly not helping NAF win a flood of business. WIPO is still handling more cases, and growing its share while NAF’s shrinks.
As Mike Berkens observed over on The Domains, NAF’s press release attempted a bit of lame spinning, comparing 2011 to 2009 in order to lead with an 18% increase stat.
The release also includes the following quote from director of internet and IP services Kristine Dorrain, which seems to be designed to subtly address the “complainant-friendly” allegations.

Our experience tells us parties, particularly domain name registrants, prefer the National Arbitration Forum because documents are easily accessible in our online portal. Complaint or Response filing is accomplished in just a couple of minutes.

It’s a somewhat irrelevant statement, given that it’s the complainant who gets to choose the venue.
One of NAF’s 2011 highlights was being picked as exclusive provider of Rapid Evaluation Service cases by .xxx manager ICM Registry. It processed 10 RES complaints in 2011.
RES cases, as well as 73 .us cases, were counted in its headline statistics.

Sunrise .xxx domains get 1.3 million hits a day

Domain names blocked by trademark holders during the .xxx sunrise period get 1.3 million hits per day, according to ICM Registry president Stuart Lawley.
The number refers to DNS queries arriving at the name servers ICM uses to serve up its standard blocking placeholder page.
I estimate that this works out to about 20 queries, on average, per domain per day.
The placeholder is displayed whenever a web user visits a domain that was registered during the Sunrise B launch phase last October.
A million DNS queries does not necessarily indicate a million page views, of course. Spiders and other automated processes likely account for some of the query traffic.
ICM does not monetize the pages, and because the names resolve to a standard placeholder ISPs don’t get to monetize the error traffic either.

NTIA says ICANN “does not meet the requirements” for IANA renewal

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has dealt a stunning blow to ICANN in its bid to carry on running the internet’s critical IANA functions.
The NTIA said this hour that it has canceled the RFP for the new IANA contract “because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community”
NTIA thinks that ICANN’s bid was unsatisfactory, in other words.
The NTIA said:

Based on the input received from stakeholders around the world, NTIA added new requirements to the IANA functions’ statement of work, including the need for structural separation of policymaking from implementation, a robust companywide conflict of interest policy, provisions reflecting heightened respect for local country laws, and a series of consultation and reporting requirements to increase transparency and accountability to the international community.
The government may cancel any solicitation that does not meet the requirements. Accordingly, we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community. The Department intends to reissue the RFP at a future date to be determined (TBD) so that the requirements of the global internet community can be served.

However, it has extended ICANN’s current IANA contract until September 30, 2012.
This means ICANN still has its IANA powers over the DNS root zone, at least for another six months.
While the NTIA has not yet revealed where ICANN’s bid for the contract fell short, it is known that the NTIA and ICANN’s senior management did not exactly see eye to eye on certain issues.
One of the key sticking points is the NTIA’s demand that the IANA contractor – ICANN – must document that all new gTLD delegations are in “the global public interest”.
This demand is a way to prevent another controversy such as the approval of .xxx a year ago, which the Governmental Advisory Committee objected to on the grounds that it was not the “the global public interest”.
Coupled with newly strengthened Applicant Guidebook powers for the GAC to object to new gTLD application, the IANA language could be described as “if the GAC objects, you must reject”.
If the GAC were to declare .gay or .catholic “not in the global public interest”, it would be pretty tough for ICANN to prove otherwise.
But ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom has previously stated that he believed such rules imposed by the US government would undermine the multistakeholder process.
He told the NTIA last June that the draft IANA contract language stood to “rewrite” ICANN’s own process when it came to approving new gTLDs.

The IANA functions contract should not be used to rewrite the policy and implementation process adopted through the bottom-up decision-making process. Not only would this undermine the very principle of the multi-stakeholder model, it would be inconsistent with the objective of more clearly distinguishing policy development from operational implementation by the IANA functions operator.

Since then, language requiring ICANN to prove “consensus” on new gTLD delegations was removed, but language requiring it to demonstrate the “global public interest” remains.
The game is bigger than petty squabbling about new gTLDs, however.
The US government is worried about International Telecommunications Union treaty talks later this year, which many countries want to use to push for government-led internet governance.
A strong GAC, backed by an enforceable IANA contract, is one way to field concerns that ICANN is not responsive enough to government interests.
It’s tempting to view the deferral of the IANA renewal as an attempt to wait out Beckstrom’s tenure as CEO – he’s set to leave at the end of June – and deal with a more compliant replacement instead.

How many defensive registrations is too many?

How will ICANN measure the success of its new top-level domains program, and how many defensive registrations is too many?
These questions are now firmly on the ICANN agenda, following the publication of 37 draft recommendations for how to measure the success or otherwise of new gTLDs.
The advice of the Consumer Trust Working Group, published last night and now open for public comment, is a must-read for anyone interested in the emerging new gTLD market.
The recommendations describe myriad ways ICANN could benchmark the performance of new gTLDs three years from now, to fulfill its promise to the US Department of Commerce to study the effect of the program on consumer choice and competition.
While it’s a broad document covering a lot of bases, I’m going to be disappointingly predictable here and immediately zero in on the headline wedge issue that I think will get most tongues wagging over the coming weeks and months:
Defensive registrations.
The working group decided to recommend that, as a measure of success, domain name registrations in new gTLDs should be no more than 15% defensive* three years after launch.
Defensive in this case would mean they were registered during the mandatory Sunrise period.
The idea is that consumer choice can be demonstrated by lots of registrations in new gTLDs, but that defensive registrations should not count toward that goal.
The 15%-Sunrise baseline number was chosen fairly arbitrarily – other suggestions were 20% and 12% – and is designed to spur community discussion. It’s not final.
Still it’s interesting.
It implies that if a registry has 15,000 Sunrise registrations, it needs to sell another 85,000 domains in three years to be seen as having made a successful contribution to consumer choice.
By way of an example, if it were to be retroactively applied to .xxx, the most recent gTLD to launch, ICM Registry would have to get its total registrations up to 533,000 by the end of 2014.
Is 15% too low? Too high? Is it even a useful metric? ICANN wants to know.
Whatever the ultimate number turns out to be, it’s going to be handy for plugging into spreadsheets – something opponents of new gTLDs will find very useful when they try to make the case that ICANN endorses a certain dollar value of trademark extortion.
Because many registries will also accept defensive registrations after Sunrise, two more metrics are proposed.
The group recommends that domains in new gTLDs that redirect to identical domains in legacy TLDs – strongly implying a defensive registration – should be no more than 15% after three years.
It also recommends that ICANN should carry out a survey to see how many registrants own matching second-level domains in legacy TLDs, and that this should also be lower than 15%.
I’ve only outlined three of the working group’s recommendations here. Many of the other 34 are also interesting and will be much-debated as the new gTLD program continues.
This is vitally important stuff for the future of new gTLDs, and applicants would be well advised to have a good read — to see what might be expected of them in future — before finalizing their applications.
* It should be noted that the recommendation as published confusingly reads “Post-Sunrise registrations > 15% of total registrations”, which I think is a typo. The > operator implies that non-defensive registrations only need to be over 15% of total registrations, which I’m certain is not what the working group intended to say.
(UPDATE: this typo has now been corrected).

ICM offers free .xxx domains to porn stars

ICM Registry and Name.com have teamed up to give a free one-year .xxx domain name registration to 3,500 selected porn stars.
It’s part of ICM’s Adult Performer Program, which saw these performers’ names initially reserved.
According to ICM, Name.com has pre-paid for the first year’s registration, valid until February 3 next year, but participating individuals will of course be free to move to another registrar if they choose.
That works out to $210,000 in registry fees, if I’m understanding the deal correctly, which seems like a bit of a risk given the general hostility to .xxx from the mainstream porn industry.
Name.com charges $84.99 for .xxx domains.
The Adult Performer Program came in for a bit of criticism last year, when some actresses tried to defensively register their names not realizing they had been reserved.