Right to reply: new gTLD applicant hits back at my “delusional” comments

You may recall that I recently referred to Nameshop, a rejected new gTLD applicant, as “delusional” for attempting to get ICANN to grant it .internet to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.

I’ve not really pulled my punches reporting on the company’s attempts to get its rejected applied-for string, .idn, converted to .internet over the last few years. Nameshop is fighting a losing battle, I believe, and would be best served by pulling its application and getting a full refund.

Nameshop owner Sivasubramanian Muthusamy recently asked for a right to reply, and as that seemed like an easier option than getting into a pointless decade-long argument, I obliged.

Below the break, he tries to convince me and you that I’m wrong. Other than formatting, I’ve not edited it. Read it, and draw your own conclusions. Leave a comment if you wish.

By Sivasubramanian M

This brief article is primarily in response to the Domain Incite article about the Nameshop application for the .Internet Top Level Domain, titled World’s most deluded new gTLD applicant makes coronavirus pitch, and “Just give up!” ICANN tells its most stubborn new gTLD applicant, — but it is also in response to ICANN’s treatment of the Nameshop application.

Domain Incite has graciously allowed me the space here to respond, for which I am very thankful.

In reporting on the Nameshop proposal to delegate .internet in a way that can be used as a trusted communications space during the global pandemic, Domain Incite posits:

I don’t know whether Nameshop is motivated by a genuine desire to do good — as so many are during the pandemic crisis — or a sneaky strategy to shame ICANN into giving it its string change. Either way, the plan is pure delusion.

It is difficult for me to answer your question, because that would require a self-proclamation of merit, which by definition is something conferred, not claimed. However, I must seek in some way to dispel the doubts that you have expressed.

As Domain Incite has indicated in previous articles, Nameshop’s original application was for .IDN (more about that later). Although not finalized, the “IDN” moniker included a significant
element of usefulness and some sense of purpose with regard to making the Internet more accessible to all. There was always a sense of doing good. This goal was expanded and clarified in 2012 when the application was changed to .Internet and included Public Interest Commitments (that were ahead of the PIC process).

The inspiration for the original good and the idea to serve the Covid-fighting community is derived directly from my interactions with several good men and women who live purposeful
lives unseen and unknown, some of whom are involved in the Internet Governance processes.

A “sneaky strategy” would be the last thing to move them.

At this time of the COVID pandemic, some readings that came my way and my consultations encouraged the idea of a good deed to defer the business aspects of the .Internet application
and offer to utilise the TLD space with a near total focus on being of use in managing the crisis and to further use the TLD space for collaboration on renewal, with ample involvement from the ICANN Community. This is what Nameshop has offered. There is no delusion here.

Nameshop is not making a “pitch”; this is an idea to utilise the DNS for global benefit, one of the stated, yet unrealised goals of the new gTLD program.

As to Domain Incite’s characterisations of me as “most deluded” and “most stubborn”: I might be accepted to accept those descriptions if by “deluded,” you mean that I continue to believe
in the ICANN model and its propensity for doing good, and if you mean by stubborn, it is my persistence in not letting the idea of a purposeful TLD fall by the wayside.

Does my letter (pdf) reads like one that shames ICANN or instead like one that expresses a very high opinion of ICANN and deep trust in the ICANN Community? When Domain Incite and others next consider the Nameshop application, please understand that:

• While Nameshop’s original application for .idn (disqualifiable because it is Indonesia’s country code) might be considered a mistake, consider that Google and Donuts made the same error (although it was not an existential mistake for them). This shows that the process was Byzantine even to the intellectual elites of our space – yet harmful only to
  entities the size of Nameshop.
• While ICANN could have easily, immediately and appropriately informed me that .idn appeared on a list, ICANN took months to do so – timely response would have enabled Nameshop to correct the error at or almost at the time the application; Nameshop learnt about .idn being an alpha3 country code from others and informed ICANN, and requested to be allowed to change the string by the “Change Request” process which became an extended part of the application process.
• After all the delays related processes of evaluation, and gaps in review processes that stymied substantive review, ICANN invited Nameshop to enter into an IRP, a review process prohibitively expensive and burdensome to be exercised by the type of applicant the new gTLD program supposedly encouraged; we have so far engaged in the cooperative engagement process. It is not our desire to engage in adversarial litigation on this matter.
• A few other TLD applicants were permitted to change their string, after the “reveal day”. So, this issue is not black and white, it is a situation of ICANN being fair to many others but being selectively unfair concerning the string .Internet.

Where Domain Incite cites ICANN that there was, “careful review of the application,” that review was to verify if process routines were followed on paper, but with a firm resistance to
review the substance of the issue placed before ICANN. This is made clear in the various reports ICANN submitted where the reviewing parties did not perform a substantive review
either in its Board Reconsideration or even in the Ombudsman processes.

ICANN contends that it followed the due process, but following “a process” for the sake of documentation does not mean that “due process” was accorded. As observed by the Board
Governance Committee, “the reconsideration process does not allow for a full-scale review of a new gTLD application.” All of this amounts to a process severely limited by design, severely
limited in independence, and with limited notions of accountability.

Nameshop, as the applicant for the TLD .Internet, is not a large business corporation of a size typical of ICANN’s new application process. Nonetheless, Nameshop continues to contend that
it is well within ICANN’s processes to address these very process gaps to delegate .Internet; this has been an ongoing and amicable conversation.

One of the goals of the new gTLD program was to facilitate DNS usage and DNS usage for good in new areas of the globe. Delegating .Internet to Nameshop would achieve a significant milestone in ICANN’s new gTLD program. The current global health crisis amplifies ICANN’s role several fold, and in this context, Nameshop offers this proposal to present a clean TLD namespace to address multiple issues arising out of the pandemic situation, to use the space with a focus on being of help in managing the crisis, and more in causing ideas for renewal, not by Nameshop’s own strengths, but by the collective strengths and merits of the ICANN community.

4 Comments Tagged: .internet, ICANN, idn, nameshop, new gTLDs

One.com takes big chunk of Danish market with third acquisition this year

European registrar One.com says it is now the biggest player in the Danish market after acquiring rival Larsen Data, which does business as GratisDNS, for an undisclosed sum.

One.com says that the deal means it now sponsors over 400,000 of the 1.3 million extant .dk domains, making it the largest local registrar.

GratisDNS has been around since 2001. It’s not a big player in gTLDs, with only 550 names under management at the last count.

It’s the third announced acquisition by One.com this year. It also bought Dutch hosting provider Hostnet and Norwegian registrar SYSE.

The company also recently said that, like so many other registrars, business has been booming during the coronavirus pandemic as bricks-and-mortar businesses relocate online.

Interestingly, sales were up 55% year-on-year in locked-down Denmark, but only up 7% in quarantine-free Sweden.

One.com also runs the .one gTLD, which has almost 78,000 names in its zone file right now. The registrar has been offering first-year regs for free recently.

GratisDNS had planned to apply for a city gTLD for Copenhagen back in 2012, but failed to secure governmental interest.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, consolidation, coronavirus, gratisdns, larsen, one.com

Web.com acquires another of the original five registrars

Consolidation in the domain industry continues apace, with Web.com bringing one of the remaining original five competitive registrars into its stable for AUD 12.2 million ($8.3 million) in cash.

It’s acquiring an Australian company called Webcentral Group, which until last month was known as ARQ Group and before that as Melbourne IT.

Webcentral also runs the retail registrars Netregistry and, in New Zealand, Domainz. It has about 330,000 customers, though not all are registrants.

Web.com says the deal gives it a deeper footprint in the Aussie, Kiwi and Southeast Asian markets.

My records show that Webcentral had about 130,000 domains under management at the end of March on its Melbourne IT tag, down by about 6,000 year over year. That’s not counting regs in ccTLDs such as .au.

Netregistry had another 113,000 gTLD domains, down from 129,000 a year earlier.

After the deal closes, Web.com will own the three oldest active registrars as measured by IANA ID — Network Solutions, Register.com and now Melbourne IT. The latter two were among the first five to go live after ICANN introduced competition at the registrar level in 1999.

For Webcentral, the deal marks the conclusion of a three-stage sell-off that started over a year ago when it sold its TPP Wholesale business to UK consolidator CentralNic.

Then, this February, it announced the sale of its enterprise unit to private equity for AUD 36 million ($25 million). It had been publicly looking for a buyer for its remaining SMB registrar business for many months.

The root cause of the sell-offs appears to be the company’s crippling debt.

Webcentral had expected to be hit unfavorably by the coronavirus pandemic, but that was largely due to its exposure to the digital marketing market, via its WME brand, rather than dwindling domain sales.

GoDaddy blamed the same problem for its recently announced layoffs.

Webcentral is currently listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Web.com itself fell into private equity hands in a $2 billion deal in 2018.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, arq, consolidation, domainz, melbourne it, netregistry, netsol, web.com, webcentral

Mucho weirdness as Google “forgets” to renew major domain

Google has lost control of a key domain name, breaking millions of URLs used by its customers.

It emerged today that the domain blogspot.in expired in May and was deleted around June 24.

It was promptly re-registered via a non-ICANN registrar based in India called Domainming and put up for sale on Sedo for $5,999.

Blogspot is the brand used by people using Google’s Blogger platform. While the .com is the primary domain, the company localizes URLs to the ccTLD of the visitor’s home country in most cases.

There are currently over four million blogspot.in URLs listed in Google’s index.

Most of the reports I’ve read today chalk the loss of the domain down to corporate forgetfulness, but it appears to be weirder than that.

Google uses MarkMonitor to manage its portfolio, so if it is a case of the registrar forgetting to renew a client’s domain, it would be hugely embarrassing for whoever looks after Google over there.

However, historical Whois records archived by DomainTools suggests something odder is going on. It looks like MarkMonitor would have been prevented from renewing the domain by the .in registry.

These records show that from June 1, 2018, blogspot.in has had a serverRenewProhibited status applied, basically meaning the registry won’t allow the registrar to renew the domain.

ICANN describes the code like this:

This status code indicates your domain’s Registry Operator will not allow your registrar to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion.

Often, this status indicates an issue with your domain that needs to be addressed promptly. You should contact your registrar to request more information and resolve the issue. If your domain does not have any issues, and you simply want to renew it, you must first contact your registrar and request that they work with the Registry Operator to remove this status code. This process can take longer than it does for clientRenewProhibited because your registrar has to forward your request to your domain’s registry and wait for them to lift the restriction.

The domain was placed into clientDeleteProhibited, clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, serverDeleteProhibited, serverTransferProhibited, and serverUpdateProhibited statuses at the same time.

Basically, it was fully locked down at both registrar and registry levels.

All of those status codes apart from serverRenewProhibited were removed in the first week of May this year, after almost two years.

The registry for .in is government-affiliated NIXI, but the back-end provider is Neustar.

At the time the domain was locked down, Afilias ran the back end, and there was a somewhat fractious battle going on between the two companies for the .in contract.

Judging by the changing status codes, it appears that two years ago somebody — Google, MarkMonitor, NIXI or Afilias — put the domain into a state in which it could not be renewed, transferred or deleted.

For some reason, the domain stayed like that until just a couple of weeks before it expired, when the prohibitions on deletion and transfer were removed.

I’ve been unable to find any information about legal trouble Google had in India two years ago that would have led to this unusual state of affairs.

It doesn’t seem to be a simple case of forgetfulness, however.

Comment Tagged: blogger, blogspot, domainming, expiration, google, markmonitor

First deadbeat dot-brand ripped from the root

ICANN has terminated a dot-brand gTLD contract for non-payment of fees for the first time.

The unlucky recipient of the termination notice is aigo, a privately held Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer.

ICANN first hit the company with a breach of contract notice in March 2018, noting its non-payment and a litany of other infractions.

The two parties have been in mediation and arbitration ever since, but the arbitrator found aigo was in fact in breach in late May.

ICANN issued its termination notice June 25 and IANA yanked .aigo from the DNS root servers a couple of days later.

While aigo is not the first dot-brand registry to be hit with a non-payment breach notice, it is the first to have it escalated all the way to involuntary termination.

Also recently, .intel and .metlife — run by the chipmaker and insurance company respectively — both decided to voluntarily their dot-brand registry agreements.

The total number of voluntary terminations is now 78.

4 Comments Tagged: aigo, breach, dot-brands, ICANN, intel, metlife, termination

Coronavirus helps .nl beat 6 million regs

Dutch ccTLD .nl passed the six-million-domains milestone recently due in part to a surge in registrations during coronavirus lockdown.

According to SIDN, the registry, the six millionth domain was deyogiclub.nl and it was registered June 18.

According to my data, .nl has grown by about 100,000 domains since the start of 2020, and by about 80,000 names in the second quarter.

SIDN said (Google-translated from the original Dutch):

The number of registrations rose so rapidly during the corona crisis in recent months that the 6 million .nl domain registrations were reached much earlier than expected on the basis of the growth development.

The Netherlands entered its strongest period of lockdown March 15 and started easing restrictions in mid-May.

Comment Tagged: .nl, coronavirus, sidn

NamesCon Online ticket prices and name change revealed

NamesCon has published the ticket price list for its upcoming virtual conference, and the first hit’s for free.

Standard tickets start at $59 — which includes a schwag bag delivered to your door if you register before the end of July — but the price is expected to go up after the end of August.

NamesCon has also entered into a promo deal with Michael Cyger’s DNAcademy, an educational service for domainers. If you buy a $399 annual subscription, the NamesCon ticket is free.

Finally, there’s a rather generous offer of a free ticket for those who have never attended a NamesCon event before.

Newcomers have to take a short survey, but there doesn’t appear to be any identity verification going on, so it seems to me there’s a possibility of its generosity being abused.

The conference also said last week that it’s changed its name from NamesCon 360° to NamesCon Online, after .online registry Radix became a sponsor. The domain is now namescon.online.

The conference will run 24/7 from September 9 to September 11 in your bedroom.

Comment Tagged: dnacademy, namescon, namescon online

GoDaddy domains doing just fine during pandemic, lays off hundreds anyway

GoDaddy has announced hundreds of lay-offs as part of a restructuring made necessary by the coronavirus pandemic, but it says its domain name business is still doing pretty well.

The market-leading registrar late last week announced changes that will affect 814 of its US-based employees.

Hundreds will be laid off. Others will be offered jobs in states a thousand miles away from home.

But at the same time, GoDaddy increased its estimates for second-quarter revenue, saying its domain business is doing okay.

The main victims of the restructuring are those in outbound sales, employees who cold-call customers to up-sell them on high-margin products such as GoDaddy Social, a social media management service.

Because GoDaddy Social isn’t selling well any more, apparently due to the pandemic, 331 staff are losing their jobs.

There are another 213 employees, currently based in GoDaddy’s native Arizona, that will be moved into customer support roles — which for GoDaddy is also a up-sell role — instead.

Another 135 sales staff based in Iowa will be told to move to Arizona — well over 1,000 miles away — or lose their jobs.

GoDaddy will be closing both of its two offices in Austin, Texas.

Despite the carnage, the company seems to be treating its affected employees quite well by American standards.

They’ll all get paid until at least September 1, and get healthcare benefits (because this is America, where healthcare is a privilege that has to be earned by phone-jockeying) up to the end of the year.

GoDaddy had previously promised it staff that there would be no layoffs in Q2.

The company also said last week that it will make 1% more revenue that it had previously expected.

It now expects $790 million in Q2, up 1% on its previous guidance.

That increase is, according to GoDaddy, due to sales of domains and web sites.

This coincides with other industry evidence that domain sales are doing okay right now.

3 Comments Tagged: godaddy

I was wrong, rejected “racist” web site didn’t go to Epik

Vdare.com, the domain for a US-based right-wing news blog that was jettisoned from Network Solutions last week under a cloud of racism allegations, did not, as expected, wind up at Epik.

Rather, Whois records reveal that the domain is now under the wing of PublicDomainRegistry.com, a unit of Endurance, having been transferred at the weekend.

Perhaps ironically, PDR is based in India, where white supremacy has been out of style for many decades. How very patriotic.

Unlike NetSol, PDR does not have an explicit ban on racist content in its acceptable use policy.

But Vdare’s editors think there’s a risk they’ll be moved on again, regardless, writing:

The number of ICANN accredited registrars has shrunk significantly in recent years as a result of consolidation. Many consumer-level registrars are not independent, but repackage services from larger companies. These larger companies are increasingly Woke. So while an individual registrar retailer may claim a freedom of speech mission-oriented corporate value, they operate solely at the pleasure of their supply chain.

In other words, we don’t know how long we’ll be tolerated by the new registrar either.

NetSol ejected Vdare earlier this month under pressure from civil rights groups in the wake of the reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and worldwide anti-racism protests.

Vdare in unapologetically anti-immigration and has described its role as to “defend the interests of American whites”, which has led to allegations of a white supremacist agenda.

I’d predicted that its domain would be welcomed by Epik, which has built up a bit of a reputation for working with domains kicked out of other registrars.

But when you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I was wrong, at least for now.

2 Comments Tagged: blm, endurance, epik, netsol, pdr, publicdomainregistry.com, racism, vdare

World’s most deluded new gTLD applicant makes coronavirus pitch

Indian new gTLD applicant Nameshop, which still refuses to accept defeat eight years after its application for .idn was rejected, has a new coronavirus-related pitch to try to persuade ICANN to please, please, give it a gTLD.

You may recall that this company applied for .idn in 2012, overlooking the fact that IDN was banned as the reserved three-letter country code for Indonesia.

Ever since the mistake was noticed, Nameshop has been trying to convince ICANN to let it change its string to .internet, which nobody else applied for, requests that have been repeatedly rejected.

The newest Nameshop plea to ICANN (pdf) pitches .internet as a space where IGOs, NGOs and others could build or host web sites dedicated to coronavirus-related activities.

The company says it wants to:

temporarily — for the length of the pandemic crisis — operate the TLD with a request for heightened involvement of ICANN and the ICANN Community in the interest of making use of the DNS technologies, to help Government Agencies and Communities involve, increase and optimize their efforts to manage the Crisis and the ensuing recovery and renewal.

It wants to offer:

a clean new space for IGOs and NGOs to come together in their efforts to communicate, collaborate, generate solutions and expeditiously resolve the health crisis while also enabling organizations to collaborate on reconstruction efforts

The company says it would not make any money on .internet until after coronavirus is solved.

It’s also offering to set aside a quarter of its profits for good causes.

I don’t know whether Nameshop is motivated by a genuine desire to do good — as so many are during the pandemic crisis — or a sneaky strategy to shame ICANN into giving it its string change. Either way, the plan is pure delusion.

The reason ICANN has continually rejected Nameshop’s request for a string change from .idn to .internet for the last eight years is that it would set a precedent allowing any applicant to apply for any nonsense string and later change it to a desirable, uncontested string.

That hasn’t changed.

But while Nameshop has been tilting at windmills, ICANN has been earning interest on its $185,000 application fee, which I’m sure could be put to a far better use if Nameshop simply requested the full refund ICANN has offered.

1 Comment Tagged: .internet, coronavirus, covid-19, ICANN, idn, nameshop, new gTLDs