Germany crosses 10,000 dot-brand domains milestone

The number of domains registered to Germany-based dot-brand registries crossed the 10,000 mark in the last few weeks, thanks to a handful of enthusiastic registrants.

That’s almost half of all the domains currently showing up in dot-brand zone files, which stands at just over 21,000, according to my database.

German companies have been the most-prolific users of dot-brands, with the financial services company Deutsche Vermögensberatung (DVAG) currently accounting for over 7,500 domains.

As well as having several corporate web sites on .dvag domains, DVAG gives out firstname-lastname.dvag domains to its network of financial advisors, with each domain redirecting to a personalized, template-driven digital business card on dvag.de.

Car-maker Audi, part of Volkswagen, is the second-biggest user, with over 1,700 current .audi domains connecting its network of dealerships and many domains for individual car brands. Its dealers also get template-driven brochureware web sites, but there’s no redirect to a different TLD.

Fellow car-maker BMW and retailer Schwarz Gruppe, owner of the Lidl supermarket chain, are among the other dot-brands with hundreds of domains to their name.

Comment Tagged: .audi, .dvag, .seat, bmw, dot-brands

Founders out as Com Laude gets equity injection

Corporate registrar Com Laude is losing four company founders as part of a new investment from the private equity firm PX3 Partners.

The company said last week that founders Nick Wood and Lorna Gradden will exit the firm, along with Penny Hearn and Andrew Lothian, who founded Demys, which Com Laude acquired in 2018. Wood will stick around to consult for a while.

The privately held, London-based registrar did not disclose the size of the investment or the new ownership structure, but it did say that former investor Vespa Capital is also out.

Com Laude focuses on the corporate market and brand protection services and has over 211,000 gTLD domains under management at the last count.

CEO Glenn Hayward said in a blog post that PX3 was picked for its “deep network of international relationships and experience in helping companies scale and internationalise”.

Comment Tagged: com laude, demys, px3

PIR’s Diaz to leave domain industry

Public Interest Registry is losing its long-serving policy veep Paul Diaz, who will leave the company and domain industry later this year.

Currently VP of industry affairs, Diaz has been with the .org registry for 12 years, and had 12 years at Network Solutions before that.

A quarter-century in the domain industry should be enough for anyone, and PIR said in a blog post that Diaz “will be retiring from the industry” when he leaves PIR in July.

With his policy role, Diaz has held leadership positions in various ICANN committees, stakeholder groups and working groups over the years.

Comment Tagged: .org, pir

Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment

ICANN’s two-year experiment in helping connect Whois users with registrars has grown its pool of participating registrars over the last few months, but it has lost a couple of not-insignificant companies along the way.

The Registration Data Request Service launched in November, promising to provide a hub for people to request the private data in Whois records, which is usually redacted. Monthly usage reports, first published in January, showed 72 registrars had joined the scheme at launch.

That number was up to 77, covering about 55% of all registered gTLD domain names, at the end of February, the latest report shows. Seven more registrars have signed up and two have dropped out.

The newbies include WordPress creator Automattic, which has 1.1 million names, PublicDomainRegistry, which has 4.4 million, Register.it, which has 666,000, and Turkiye’s METUnic, which has 235,000.

The two registrars quitting the project, apparently in January, are Combell (formerly Register.eu), which has 1.3 million domains, and Hong Kong’s Kouming.com, which has 57,000.

The latest data shows that RDRS returns a “registrar not supported” error 32.7% of the time.

The running total of requesters was up by 607 to 2937 in February, ICANN’s data shows. They filed 246 requests in the month for an RDRS total of 754 so far. Intellectual property owners were the main users, followed by law enforcement and security researchers.

There were 64 approved requests — where the registrar handed over the Whois data — to make a to-date total of 133. On 50 occasions requests were turned down because the registrar decided it could not turn over the data due to privacy law. These stats break down to 20% approval and 70% denial.

It took an average of 6.92 days to approve a given request — a steep incline from the 3.89 days in January — and 2.92 to deny one.

The full report, containing much more data, can be read as a PDF here.

Comment Tagged: gdpr, ICANN, privacy, rdrs, whois

ICANN opens $217 million Grant Program

Ten million bucks of ICANN’s money is up for grabs, starting today.

The Org has opened the application window for the first stage of its Grant Program, which it hopes to eventually see hand out over the $217 million that it raised auctioning off contested gTLDs during the 2012 new gTLD program application round.

In this first phase, up to $10 million will be distributed, in tranches of between $50,000 and $500,000, to projects that align in some way with ICANN’s technical and internet governance missions.

Only registered non-profits are allowed to apply.

The application window is open until May 24, and ICANN expects its board of directors to make its final decision in December, before grant contracts are signed early next year.

Successful applicants are expected to begin their funded projects, which should last no more than two years, within 60 days of receiving the money, so presumably the cash will start actually making a difference about a year from now.

In a blog post, ICANN CEO Sally Costeron urged readers to spread word of the program on social media, specifically naming Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WeChat, which appears to be a platform used primarily in China.

With ICANN occupying a rarefied, occasionally incestuous corner of the internet, there’s obviously a risk of the perception that the money will be doled out primarily to community insiders, but the rules ban anyone who was involved in crafting the program’s rules from participating.

The rules also ban applicants from using ICANN’s accountability mechanisms, such as the Independent Review Process, to challenge adverse grant decisions, and ICANN wants to change its bylaws to also ban third-party non-applicants from using IRP to appeal decisions they don’t like.

Details on the Grant Program can be found here.

Comment Tagged: grant program, ICANN

Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)

ICANN is set to loosen up its restrictions on single-character gTLDs in the 2026 application round, according to draft Applicant Guidebook language.

But the exemption to the usual rule applies only to gTLDs written in one script — Han, which is used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Applied-for Latin-script strings must be three characters and over (because two-letter strings are reserved for ccTLDs) and internationalized domain names in other, non-Han scripts have a minimum of two characters.

The exemption for Han is being put in place because it’s an ideographic script, where a single character can have a meaning that other, alphabetic scripts would require an entire string to express. Google tells me the Chinese for “water” is 水, for example.

The 2012 gTLD application round did not feature the Han carve-out, and no IDN gTLDs currently in the DNS have fewer than two characters.

The draft rules governing IDNs are expected to be part of the next batch of AGB components that ICANN releases for public comment. The comment period on the first batch ended this week with no particularly controversial issues emerging.

1 Comment Tagged: applicant guidebook, ICANN, idns, new gTLDs

.ai registry fights deadbeats with tweaked auction rules

With too many auction winners failing to hand over the loot, the .ai registry has changed its auction terms to make being a deadbeat more expensive.

The registry has increased its deposit requirement from 2% to 5% for bidders considered “high risk”, which basically means new customers, or $100, whichever is higher. The deposit is forfeit if the buyer fails to pay.

The move comes because too many winners are currently failing to pay. On Twitter, registry manager Vince Cate wrote yesterday:

On http://auction.whois.ai we have had too many cases of people not paying for domains they bid for so we are increasing the deposit requirement to 5% and the non-payment fee to 5% effective immediately.

The registry conducts monthly auctions of expired inventory on its own platform using park.io software and is mirrored at Dynadot. The highest-interest names regularly attract five-figure bids, due to the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence.

Sometimes, the same names show up in consecutive auctions because the previous winner didn’t pay up. In January, for example, dog.ai and insure.ai, which had both attracted bids over $20,000, returned to auction.

Comment Tagged: ai, auctions

Amazon and Google among .internal TLD ban backers

Google and Amazon have publicly backed ICANN’s plan to reserve the top-level domain .internal for private behind-the-firewall uses.

ICANN picked the string “internal” as the one that it will promise to never delegate to the DNS root, allowing network administrators and software developers to confidently use it with a lower risk of data leakage should the TLD come under a registry’s control in future.

The public comment period over its choice is coming to a close tomorrow, with a generally supportive vibe coming from the 30-odd comments submitted so far.

Notably, tech giants Amazon and Google have both filed comments backing .internal, with both companies saying that they already use the TLD extensively for internal purposes (Google in its Cloud services) and that to allow it to be delegated in future would cause big problems.

Some commenters niggled that .internal is too long, and that something like .local or .lan, both already reserved, might be better. Others wondered why strings such as .corp or .home, which are already effectively banned due to the high risk of name collisions, were not chosen instead.

Comment Tagged: .internal, amazon, google, iana, ICANN, name collisions, ssac

.ai registry advises buyers not to use GoDaddy

The manager of the increasingly popular .ai ccTLD has seemingly escalated his beef with GoDaddy, now advising registrants to not transfer their .ai domains to the market-leading registrar due to technical and operational issues.

The list of approved registrars on the .ai registry web site has contained a warning about problems transferring domains into GoDaddy for many months, but now it explicitly advises against such transfers. The site reads:

We have had several problems with transfers into GoDaddy. First, you have to use auth codes of 32 characters or less. Second they can take weeks and many email and phone calls to actually do the transfer. Anyplace else the transfer is nearly instant once the receiving party does the transfer with the auth code and the domain is unlocked. With GoDaddy the auth code is just the start of a long process. For years GoDaddy could not transer .ai domains at all. We do not advise transfering to go GoDaddy and if you do don’t ask us for help, the problem is all GoDaddy.

GoDaddy has also been removed from .ai’s list of supported registrars, but registry manager Vince Cate tells me he did this at the request of GoDaddy, which he said is a reseller of Team Internet’s 1API. He declined to comment further.

I asked GoDaddy for comment a few weeks ago but did not receive one.

An earlier version of Cate’s warning, from about a year ago as .ai domains started to fly off the shelf, read:

The company Godaddy will say “domains with this extension are not transferable” when someone tries to transfer a “.ai” domain to them when a more correct error message would be “Godaddy does not know how to transfer .ai domains even though it is done using the industry standard EPP transfer command”.

It was later updated to read:

The company Godaddy will say “domains with this extension are not transferable” when someone tries to transfer a “.ai” domain to them when a more correct error message would be “Godaddy does not know how to transfer .ai domains even though it is done using the industry standard EPP transfer command”. They will also say, “Technically .ai domains are not transferable between most registrars, but we have a dedicated team that transfers them manually.” This is so wrong. All other registrars have no trouble doing them automatically. The only technical failure is at Godaddy. Because of they way Godaddy is doing this, I get many people asking me, “Vince, why don’t you let people transfer .ai domains?”, as if I was doing something wrong and not Godaddy. I do let people transfer .ai domains. All of the above registrars can do it automatically without any trouble. Really.

While the .ai domain is managed by the Government of Anguilla, Cate seems to have substantial autonomy over the registry. Much of its bare-bones web site is written in the first person.

Comment Tagged: ai, godaddy

.post liberalizes with new sunrise period

The .post gTLD has opened a brand-protection sunrise period 12 years after it first launched, after liberalizing its registration policies to allow private businesses to buy domains.

.post is a “sponsored” gTLD run by the Universal Postal Union, a UN agency, and so far the space has been restricted to national postal agencies which are individually vetted before their domains can go live.

But the policies have been updated to allow the likes of private shipping and logistics providers and post-related technology vendors to also register names.

Registrants will still have their credentials checked and published for opposition when applying to register names, so it’s not going to be a speculative free-for-all when .post eventually goes to “general availability” on May 1.

The sunrise period will run until April 15, with only trademark owners able to apply.

The operation is being run largely by EnCirca, which is the only accredited registrar apart from the registry itself. It had just 430 registered names at the last count.

The .post ICANN Registry Agreement is up for renewal this year.

2 Comments Tagged: .post, sunrise, upu. encirca