Is gold.co.uk the most expensive .uk name sale yet?
The domain name gold.co.uk has reportedly changed hands for £600,000 ($940,000), potentially making it the biggest .uk domain sale ever.
The new owner of the domain is Jewellery Quarter Bullion, a Birmingham, UK-based online gold seller.
The deal was announced by press release yesterday.
Whois records archived by DomainTools show that the company has actually owned the domain since at least November last year, and the oldest available record shows that .uk registry Nominet verified the buyer’s identity in December 2012.
So it’s not a recent sale. The press release seems to have come out to plug the new web site at gold.co.uk, which only went live in the last couple of months.
It’s also debatable whether it’s the biggest sale, depending on the currency you use.
Six hundred grand in GBP would be £40,000 more than was paid for cruise.co.uk, the current DN Journal .uk record holder.
But DNJ, the industry touchstone for secondary market sales leagues, compiles its rankings based on the USD value at the time of the sale. At the time cruise.co.uk sold in 2008, it was worth $1,099,798.
New gTLDs growing faster than .com, latest Verisign data shows
New gTLDs grew faster than .com in the last 12 months.
That seems to be one of the conclusions that can be drawn from Verisign’s Q2 Domain Name Industry Brief, which was published (pdf) yesterday, if you dig into the numbers a little.
The headline number is that the number of all domains across all TLDs was 296 million, up sequentially by 2.2 million domains. That’s annual growth of 16.4 million domains, Verisign said.
I thought it might be interesting to see where that growth came from, so I plugged the numbers from Verisign’s last five DNIB reports into a spreadsheet, reproduced in this table.
[table id=35 /]
From these numbers, we can calculate the quarterly sequential growth, measured in domains, for the whole DNS, for .com, for new gTLDs and for ccTLDs.
That table looks like this:
[table id=37 /]
It appears from this table that .com grew by more domains than new gTLDs over the last year — 4.8 million versus 4.36 million — but the numbers are a bit misleading due to the way Verisign sources its data.
For most ccTLDs, Verisign has always used the third-party research outfit ZookNic, which has its own way of estimating registration volumes.
For new gTLDs, Verisign uses the zone files as published daily by ICANN — the same source DI and others use to measure volume.
However, for .com Verisign uses its own in-house data source. It is, after all, the .com registry.
The numbers for .com you find in the DNIB reports are exactly the same as the numbers Verisign gives financial analysts and investors when it reports its quarterly earnings.
And the company changed the way it reports those numbers in Q1 this year.
See that unusually high addition of 2.2 million names in .com in Q1 in the above table? That reflects the addition of very nearly 750,000 hidden .com names in March this year.
At that time, Verisign started counting domains that are on “hold” statuses, largely due to new ICANN policies on unverified Whois information.
The last two DNIB reports have sourced .com numbers with this disclosure:
The domain name base is the active zone plus the number of domain names that are registered but not configured for use in the respective Top-Level Domain zone file plus the number of domain names that are in a client or server hold status.
The actual Q1 growth number for .com should in the 1.4 million to 1.5 million range, which would bring .com’s total growth over the last four quarters down to roughly 4.1 million names.
An apples-to-apples comparison of extant zone-file domain growth would show new gTLDs beating .com, in other words.
But is this a fair measure of demand?
No. It’s fairer to say that .com still outsells its competition by a long way.
New gTLDs had yet to experience any significant churn by Q2 this year, as most had been on the market for under a year, so the growth numbers are more or less untempered by the renewal cycle.
While Verisign’s .com growth is net, for new gTLDs it’s almost all gross.
Verisign says in the latest DNIB has it had 8.7 million new registrations across .com and .net in the second quarter, which would be roughly eight times as many as new gTLDs — all several hundred of them combined — managed to move.
XYZ to rethink China gateway plans
XYZ.com has withdrawn its request to start selling .xyz and .college domains into China via a local gateway service provider.
The company has said it will amend and resubmit its plan to ICANN, which had told it the idea “might raise significant Stability or Security issues”.
The registry wants to be one of the first non-Chinese registries to be able to comply with government regulations, which require all domain firms to have an official license.
As we reported last week, it had signed up with local registrar ZDNS, which would proxy for registrations made by Chinese registrants.
However, it has now withdrawn its Registry Services Evaluation Process request after ICANN said it would have to refer it up the chain to a special technical committee for review.
XYZ said in a letter to ICANN:
We are withdrawing this request because our gateway model is changed since the submission of the registry request and so the request is no longer accurate. We will shortly submit a new registry request to cover the updated gateway model.
It’s not clear what the specific “security and stability” concerns were.
.sexy may be blocked in Iran
Some networks in Iran appear to be systematically blocking Uniregistry’s .sexy gTLD.
That’s one of the conclusions of a slightly odd experiment commissioned by ICANN.
The newly published An Analysis of New gTLD Universal Acceptance was conducted by APNIC Labs. The idea was to figure out whether there are any issues with new gTLDs on the internet’s DNS infrastructure.
It concluded that there is not — new gTLDs work just fine on the internet’s plumbing.
However, the survey — which comprised over 100 million DNS resolution attempts — showed “One country, Iran, shows some evidence of a piecemeal block of Web names within the .sexy gTLD.”
The sample size for Iranian attempts to access .sexy was just 30 attempts. In most cases, users were able to resolve the names with DNS, but HTTP responses appeared to be blocked.
The survey did not test .porn or .adult names, but it might be safe to assume similar behavior in those gTLDs.
APNIC also concluded that Israel’s .il ccTLD, included in the report as a known example of TLD blocking at the national level, is indeed blocked in Iran and Syria.
The study also found that there may be issues with Adobe’s Flash software, when used in Internet Explorer, when it comes to resolving internationalized domain names.
That conclusion seems to have been reached largely because the test’s methodology saw a Flash advertisement discretely fetching URLs in the background of web pages using Google Ads.
When the experimenters used HTML 5 to run their scripts instead, there was no problem resolving the names.
The study did not look at some of the perhaps more pressing UA issues, such as the ability for registrants and others to use new gTLD domain names in web applications.
Sunrise accounts for under 1% of new gTLD regs
New gTLD registries can expect just 125 sunrise registrations on average, according to statistics just released by ICANN.
The new data, current as of May 2015, also shows that there have been just 44,077 sunrise registrations in total, over 417 new gTLDs.
That’s less than 1% of the total number of new gTLD domain registrations to that date.
The numbers were published in a revised version of ICANN’s Revised Report on Rights Protections Mechanisms, a discussion paper on mechanisms such as sunrise, Trademark Claims and URS.
It also contains the first authoritative breakdown of sunrise regs by TLD, though it’s limited to the 20 largest.
Many of these numbers match closely what DI has previously reported, but .porn and .adult are substantially lower because ICM Registry only revealed consolidated numbers that took account of its unique non-TMCH sunrise periods.
None of the ICANN figures include .sucks, which hit sunrise after the numbers were compiled in May.
GoDaddy did not cybersquat the Oscars, court finds
In a landmark decision, a US court has ruled that GoDaddy’s practice of parking unused domains with Google advertising does not count as cybersquatting.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the annual Oscars awards, sued the registrar five years ago after seeing that GoDaddy had parked hundreds of names containing its mark.
Under UDRP, registrar parking is controversially often taken as a sign of the registrants bad faith by panelists.
But the California court ruled that GoDaddy’s actions did not amount to trademark infringement due to the unique circumstances of the case.
GoDaddy did not select the advertisements — Google’s algorithms did — nor did it manually review which domains were being parked.
Domain Name Wire has a pretty good breakdown of the key points in the 129-page ruling.
What’s going to be interesting is whether UDRP panelists — which sometimes take their cues from US legal precedent — will start to adjust to view registrar parking in a more benign way when judging registrant bad faith.
ICANN throws lifeline to flopping new gTLDs
New gTLD registries with lower than expected sales will now be able to reduce the amount of their “failure bond”.
ICANN has introduced a new Continued Operations Instrument Amendment Service, which will enable registries to raise or lower the amount of their COI depending on how business is going.
A COI is a letter of credit or cash in escrow that registries must secure in order to fund three years of emergency operations in the event that their businesses fail.
The amount of the COI is calculated from sales projection and ranges from $18,000 (for under 10,000 names) to $300,000 (over 250,000 names).
Let’s face it, at the moment the amendment service must surely be targeted largely at companies that over-estimated their future sales and secured a COI much larger than they needed.
If they’ve escrowed cash, the new service will allow some of that money to be freed up to spend on more useful activities.
ICANN said that if it determines that a registry has under-projected its sales, it will be able to refer it to the new service in order for the COI to be increased.
Currently, only four new gTLDs have over 250,000 names under management, judging by zone files.
Retail sales see CentralNic over double revenue
CentralNic saw a huge 171% increase in revenue and a tripling of billings in the first half of the year, based on its newly acquired retail business and the sale of premium names.
For the six months to the end of June, the London-based firm saw revenue of £4.4 million ($6.8 million) compared to £1.6 million ($2.5 million) a year earlier.
It moved into profit during the period, netting £287,000 ($442,000) after tax compared to a loss of £599,000 in the 2014 period.
CentralNic broke down its numbers into segments, showing that its new business areas were responsible for most of the growth, while the core registry business was relatively slow.
Registry was up 13% to £1.6 million ($2.5 million).
The new registrar business, which is lead by its $7.5 million Internet.bs acquisition, leaped from £180,000 to £1.8 million (£2.8 million), while its premium name sales business was £1.1 million compared to a negligible £50,000 a year earlier.
The company noted in a statement that Google was the first “megabrand” to use a .xyz domain name and expressed optimism that this may increase awareness of new gTLDs in future.
CentralNic is the second-largest new gTLD back-end, as measured by registration volume, largely due to its .xyz contract.
It also acts as back-end for .online, which left the blocks very quickly earlier this month, racking up over 57,000 names so far.
Neustar shoots the corpse of .kids.us
The ill-conceived, barely used .kids.us domain is to stay dead, Neustar confirmed last night.
The .us registry operator said that its Stakeholder Council met August 17 and:
carefully considered the report on the kids.us domain and unanimously recommended that the requirement be suspended for the life of the .us contract.
Neustar had been forced into making a call about reintroducing .kids.us by its current .us contract, which it signed in March 2014.
One October 2014 expert report and May 2015 comment period later, and the decision has been made to keep the idea suspended.
.kids.us was introduced via US legislation as a way to make politicians look like they were doing something create a friendly space for the under 13s.
But the zone wound up with reg numbers that make new gTLDs look popular, so the decision was made in 2012 to kill it off.
Neustar’s .us contract lasts another two to four years, and that’s how long the suspension will last, at least.
ICANN just gave a company a new gTLD for free
The Tor Project Inc, a Massachusetts non-profit software maker, just got a new gTLD reserved for its own exclusive use, by ICANN, for free.
Tor did this without engaging in the ICANN new gTLD program, paying any ICANN application fees, or following any of the rules in the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
It basically circumvented the entire ICANN process, and it only took six months from asking.
Neat trick, right?
Tor develops the software that creates the Tor “anonymity network” used by people who wish to obfuscate their internet usage (legal or otherwise) by routing their traffic via a series of proxies or relays.
The free software, which plugs into browsers, uses meaningless, hashed “.onion” domains because the routing method is known as “onion routing”.
IANA, an ICANN department, last night placed .onion on its list of Special Use Domains, meaning it cannot be delegated to the DNS.
If anyone were to apply for it today — assuming that were possible — they’d be out of luck. It seems .onion now has the same protected status as .example and .localhost.
The reservation was made at the instruction of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which published a new Internet Draft reserving the .onion gTLD for use with Tor.
An Internet Draft is a “work in progress” standards track document with a six-month shelf life, not yet a finalized Request For Comments (RFC).
This one was written by engineers from Tor and Facebook.
The Internet Engineering Steering Group, the IETF’s coordinating body, approved the draft last week.
Of the 13 IESG members who voted on the document, the first draft of which was published six months ago, five voted “Yes”, seven offered “No Objection” and only one abstained.
The abstainer, Barry Leiba, standards guru at Huawei Technologies, wrote:
I believe the IETF shouldn’t be involved with registering special-use TLDs for things that were used outside of IETF protocols, and should not be wading into territory that belongs to ICANN. I know there are a bunch of other such TLDs that people/organizations would have us snag for them, and I very much want to avoid doing a batch of others.
That said, I well understand the deployed code involved and the importance of keeping things working in this case, and I don’t want to stand in the way. So I’m standing aside with an “Abstain” ballot.
The logic behind the reservation is that if ICANN were to delegate .onion to somebody else (for example, The Onion) there would be a risk that the improved privacy offered by Tor would be compromised.
Voting in favor of the draft, Cisco engineer Alissa Cooper wrote:
Registering this name seems warranted in light of the potential security impact. We need to make our processes work for the Internet, not vice versa.
Another affirmative vote came from Oracle engineer Ben Campbell. He wrote:
This one took some soul searching. But I think the arguments have been made, and that on the whole this registration does more good than harm.
A number of IESG members suggested that the IETF should revisit and possibly amend the RFC in which it originally granted itself the power to reserve gTLDs.
That’s RFC6761, entitled “Special-Use Domain Names”, which dates to February 2013.
RFC6761 lays out a seven-point test that a string must pass before it can be considered “special use” and thereby reserved.
The tests cover whether humans, applications and various types of DNS software are expected to handle the string differently to a regular TLD.
The RFC also notes:
The IETF has responsibility for specifying how the DNS protocol works, and ICANN is responsible for allocating the names made possible by that DNS protocol… Reservation of a Special-Use Domain Name is not a mechanism for circumventing normal domain name registration processes.
I think reasonable people could disagree on whether that’s what has just happened in the case of .onion.
Indeed, there was some discussion on the IETF’s “dnsop” working group mailing list about whether Tor was “squatting” .onion, and whether it was appropriate to reserve its chosen TLD string.
I wonder what kind of precedent this could set.
The Tor Project Inc is a Massachusetts non-profit company. It’s primarily funded by US government grants, according to its 2013 financial statements, the most recent available. It doesn’t sell .onion domains — they’re auto-generated by the software.
Part of the argument in favor of allowing the new Internet Draft is that .onion substantially pre-dates the creation of RFC6761 — it’s not an attempt to game the RFC.
Why wouldn’t that same argument apply to, for example, alternate root operator Name.Space, which has been offering hundreds of pseudo-gTLDs since 1996?
Name.Space could argue that its strings pre-date .onion by eight years, and that the security of its registrants and users could be compromised if ICANN were to delegate them to the DNS.
What about NameCoin, another alternate root provider? It also pre-dates RFC6761 and, like Tor, uses browser software to work around the DNS.
I don’t know enough about the IETF’s processes, to be honest, to say whether it would be forced to apply its .onion logic to these other namespaces. But it’s an interesting question.
And as somebody who has spent the last five years immersed in the minutiae of the rules ICANN has created to govern the allocation of words, it’s jarring to see those rules circumnavigated so completely.
Recent Comments