Donuts loses five of the first six new gTLD auctions

The full results of the first six new gTLD auctions are now known. Donuts lost five of them, raising millions of dollars in the process.

Here are the winners of last week’s auctions, which were managed by Innovative Auctions:

• .club — .CLUB Domains.
• .college — XYZ.COM.
• .luxury — Luxury Partners.
• .photography — Donuts.
• .red — Afilias.
• .vote — Monolith Registry

Five of the six were a two-way battles between Donuts, which has applied for 307 gTLDs, and one other applicant. Each of the losing applicants has now withdrawn its application with ICANN.

The exception is .club, a three-way fight that included Merchant Law Group. Neither losing application has been withdrawn with ICANN yet, but the result it well-known.

Innovative revealed last week that the round raised $9.01 million in total. The winning bids for each auction were not disclosed.

Given that Donuts managed to lose five out of the six, it’s a fairly safe assumption that most of that money will have gone into its war chest, which can be used in future auctions.

Of the five applications it has now withdrawn, only .red had already passed its Initial Evaluation, so the company will have also clawed back a $130,000 ICANN refund on each of the other four.

The auctions mean that we now know with a high degree of certainty which companies are going to be running these six gTLDs.

Most of them have not yet passed IE, but with the success rate so high to date I wouldn’t expect to see any failures. None of them are subject to objections or direct GAC Advice.

14 Comments Tagged: .club, .college, .luxury, .photography, .red, .vote, donuts, ICANN, innovative auctions, new gTLDs

ICANN hires former ARI exec to head gTLD relations

Krista Papac, formerly chief strategy officer with AusRegistry and ARI Registry Services, has joined ICANN as gTLD registry services director.

It appears to be a newly created job title at ICANN, though it sounds a little similar to the gTLD “liaison” role vacated by Craig Schwartz a couple of years ago.

Papac, a familiar face to many in the ICANN community, has been in the industry for over a decade.

Prior to ARI, which she left to become a consultant last September, she had stints at MarkMonitor, Verisign and Iron Mountain. She joined ICANN last month.

ICANN is hiring like crazy at the moment as it simultaneously gears up for the launch of new gTLDs and executes on CEO Fadi Chehade’s ambitious drive to simultaneously professionalize and globalize the organization.

4 Comments Tagged: ari registry services, ICANN

Hong Kong telco drops dot-brand gTLD bid

Hong Kong Telecom has withdrawn its application for the new gTLD .香港電訊, the Chinese-script version of its brand.

The proposed single-registrant gTLD was uncontested, with no objections or Governmental Advisory Committee advice. It’s the 76th application to be withdrawn.

It was a defensive application. Under the heading “Goals”, HKT said: “An important goal of the TLD is the safeguard of the intellectual property right of the HKT and the 香港電訊 brand.”

The company hadn’t bothered to take advantage of the IDN bias in the prioritization draw and wasn’t due to have its Initial Evaluation finalized until the last two weeks of the process.

Comment Tagged: .香港電訊, dot-brands, ICANN, new gTLDs, withdrawals

Microsoft objects to Google’s dotless domains plan

Microsoft has strongly urged ICANN to reject Google’s plan for a “dotless” .search gTLD.

In a letter sent a couple of weeks ago and published last night, the company says that Google risks putting the security and stability of the internet at risk if its .search idea goes ahead.

David Tennenhouse, corporate vice president of technology policy, wrote:

Dotless domains are currently used as intranet addresses controlled by private networks for internal use. Google’s proposed amendment would interfere with that private space, creating security vulnerabilities and impacting enterprise network and systems infrastructure around the globe.

It’s a parallel argument to the one going on between Verisign and everyone else with regards to gTLD strings that may conflict with naming schemes on internal corporate networks.

While they’re subtly different problems, ICANN recently commissioned a security study into dotless domains (announced 11 days after Microsoft’s letter was sent) that links the two.

As Tennenhouse says in his letter, ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which has Google employees on it, has already warned about the dotless name problem in SAC053 (pdf).

He also claims that Google had submitted follow-up comments to SAC053 saying dotless domains would be “actively harmful”, but this is slightly misleading.

One Google engineer did submit such a comment, but it limited itself to talking about clashes with internal name certificates, a slightly different issue, and it’s not clear it was an official Google Inc comment.

The new gTLD Applicant Guidebook currently outlaws dotless domains through its ban on “apex A records”, but that ban can be circumvented if applicants can convince a registry services evaluation panel that their dotless domain plans don’t pose a stability risk.

While Google’s original .search application envisaged a single-registrant “closed generic”, it later amended the proposal to make it “open” and include the dotless domain proposal.

This is the relevant bit of the amended application:

Charleston Road Registry will operate a service that allows users to easily perform searches using the search functionality of their choice. This service will operate on the “dotless” search domain name (http://search/) and provide a simple web interface. This interface operates in two modes:

1) When the user has not set a preference for a search engine, they will be prompted to select one. The user will be provided with a simple web form that will allow them to designate a search engine by entering the second level label for any second level domain registered with in the TLD (e.g., if “foo.search” was a valid second level domain name, the user could indicated that their preferred search engine was “foo”). The user can also elect to save this preference, in which case a cookie will be set in the userʹs browser. This cookie will be used in the second mode, as described below. If the user enters an invalid name, they will be prompted again to provide a valid response.

2) If the user has already set a preferred search engine, the redirect service will redirect the initial query to the second level domain name indicated by the userʹs preference, including any query string provided by the user. For example, if the user had previously selected the “foo” search engine and had issued a query for http://search/?q=bar, the server would issue a redirect to http://foo.search/?q=bar. In this manner, the userʹs query will be consistently redirected to the search engine of their choice.

While Google seems to have preempted some concerns about monopolistic practices in the search engine market, approval of its dotless search feature would nevertheless have huge implications.

Make no mistake, dotless domains are a Big Deal and it would be a huge mistake for ICANN to treat them only as a security and stability issue.

What’s weird about Google’s proposal is that by asking ICANN to open up the floodgates for dotless domains, it risks inviting the domain name industry to eat its breakfast, lunch and dinner.

If ICANN lets registries offer TLDs domains without dots, the new gTLD program will no longer be about delegating domain names, it will be about auctioning exclusive rights to search terms.

Today, if you type “beer” into your browser’s address bar (which in all the cases I’m aware of are also search bars) you’ll be directed to a page of search results for the term “beer”.

In future, if “beer” is a domain name, what happens? Do you get search or do you get a web page, owned by the .beer registry? Would that page have value, or would it be little better than a parking page?

If browser makers decided to implement dotless domains — and of course there are plenty of reasons why they wouldn’t — every borderline useful dictionary word gTLD would be sold off in a single round.

Would that be good for the internet? I’d lean toward “no”.

Comment Tagged: dotless domains, google, ICANN, Microsoft, new gTLDs, search

Directi launches pre-reg site for .host gTLD

Directi is to offer preregistration for its uncontested gTLD applications, and it’s starting with .host.

The company will accept expressions of interest from potential registrants from June 17, where it has a booth at the HostingCon show in Austin, Texas, according to business head Sandeep Ramchandani.

Directi’s other two uncontested bids — .press and .space — will also get preregistration pages.

It’s the usual pre-reg deal: free and no-obligation.

While .host has not yet passed its Initial Evaluation, the company’s other applications have has a smooth ride so far so it’s a pretty reasonable assumption that this one will also pass.

The bid also has no objections and no special Governmental Advisory Committee advice.

While preregistration services have proved controversial in the past, they’re becoming increasingly common as new gTLDs start thinking about what a crowded market they’re walking into.

Comment Tagged: .host, directi, hostingcon, radix