Third .app gTLD applicant revealed

A Ukrainian software developer has become the third company to publicly reveal that it has applied for the .app top-level domain.
MacPaw’s main business is developing software for Apple platforms, as the name suggests. It’s formed a new company, Dot App Inc, based in California, to manage the gTLD bid.
The application imagines a very pro-developer space. Domainers, it appears, will not be welcome.
Some policies from its web site:

– Only application developers or publishers will be able to register domain names in this zone
– Misused domains will be analyzed and repurposed if found to violate the Registration policy
– No need to pay a small fortune for a great but squatted .com or .net domain.
– The rights of app creators will be protected in the same way trademark rights are

Top Level Domain Holdings and Directi both last week announced plays for .app among their large portfolios of gTLD applications.
More applicants will no doubt be revealed next week.

5 Comments Tagged: .app, directi, dot app, macpaw, tldh

Afnic working with 16 gTLD applicants in France

Sixteen French new top-level domain applicants have selected .fr manager Afnic to provide the back-end registry for their applications, according to the company.
The applicants are from “local public authorities, companies and associations”, Afnic said in a press release. An application for .paris is thought to be among them.
The announcement puts Afnic in the customer-win lead in terms of European ccTLD operators branching out into the gTLD back-end market.
Austria’s Nic.at is involved with 11 applications, while .uk’s Nominet is involved with seven.

2 Comments Tagged: afnic, ICANN, new gTLDs

Hilton Prague screws over ICANN delegates

Lots of people attending ICANN’s public meeting in Prague later this month are complaining that the venue, the Hilton Prague Hotel, has rebooked them into hotels miles away.
It’s not clear how widespread the problem is, but I’d guess dozens of people are affected, judging by the chatter.
Amusingly, given recent events, it appears that a technical glitch with the hotel’s booking system is to blame.
One attendee, who was bumped to a hotel an hour’s walk away from the venue, was told the rebooking was “due to the unexpected circumstances with the reservation system”.
The Hilton is the venue and the first-choice hotel for the week-long meeting. ICANN had negotiated a special rate for attendees.
It’s not the first snafu to hit a meeting hotel recently. Last October, the venue one of the hotels chosen for the meeting in Dakar, Senegal, was slammed as smelly, dirty and insecure by many delegates.
However, with regard to the Prague snafu, I’ve been unable to confirm whether ICANN has filed an official complaint with the Czech minister of telecommunications yet.
While DI is attending Prague, your humble reporter is not affected by the mix-up. I’ll be sleeping on public transport and doing my morning ablutions in McDonald’s as usual.

15 Comments Tagged: hilton, ICANN, prague

Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock can now be removed

One of Go Daddy’s most unpopular practices – the infamous 60-day domain name transfer lock – has essentially come to an end.
From today, customers will be able to unlock their domains before the period is up, by contacting a special support team, according to director of policy planning James Bladel.
For many years Go Daddy has blocked domains from being transferred to other registrars if changes have been made to the registrant contact information within the last 60 days.
The company alerts users to the lock before they make changes to their Whois data, but that hasn’t stopped the policy bugging the hell out of domainers and regular registrants.
It’s designed to prevent domain hijackings – something Go Daddy says it does very well – but when false positives occur it often looks like a nefarious customer retention strategy.
“It’s a very effective tool for preventing harm, but it does catch out a lot of folks who want to legitimately change registrant data,” Bladel said.
Under the new policy, if Go Daddy blocks a transfer because of the 60-day lock, registrants will be given an email address to contact in order to appeal the block.
According to Bladel, after a human review the locks will be lifted and the Whois data will revert to its original state, unless the Go Daddy support team suspects a hijacking is in progress.
“The bad guys are not going to call and ask us to take a second look at this,” he said. “The bad guys want it to happen under the radar.”
The changes come thanks largely to a new revision of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which came into effect today and specifies that transferring registrants need to be given a way to remove the locks on their domains within five days.
But Bladel said the way the policy is written gave Go Daddy a lot of leeway in how to interpret it – it could have kept the locks in place as before – but it decided to revise its policy to improve the customer experience.

17 Comments Tagged: 60-day lock, go daddy, inter-registrar transfer policy, irtp, transfers

TLDH applies for 92 gTLDs, 68 for itself

Top Level Domain Holdings is involved in a grand total of 92 new generic top-level domain applications, many of them already known to be contested.
Sixty-eight applications are being filed on its own behalf, six have been submitted via joint ventures, and 18 more have been submitted on behalf of Minds + Machines clients.
Here’s the list of its own applications:

.abogado (Spanish for .lawyer), .app, .art, .baby, .beauty, .beer, .blog, .book, .casa (Spanish for .home), .cloud, .cooking, .country, .coupon, .cpa, .cricket, .data, .dds, .deals, .design, .dog, .eco, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .flowers, .free, .garden, .gay, .green, .guide, .home, .horse, .hotel, .immo, .inc, .latino, .law, .lawyer, .llc, .love, .luxe, .pizza, .property, .realestate, .restaurant, .review, .rodeo, .roma, .sale, .school, .science, .site, .soccer, .spa, .store, .style, .surf, .tech, .video, .vip, .vodka, .website, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .zulu, 网址 (.site in Chinese), 购物 (.shopping in Chinese).

There’s a lot to note in that list.
First, it’s interesting to see that TLDH is hedging its bets on the environmental front, applying for both .eco (which we’ve known about for years) and .green.
This puts it into contention with the longstanding Neustar-backed DotGreen bid, and possibly others we don’t yet know about, which should make for some interesting negotiations.
Also, both of TLDH’s previously announced Indian city gTLDs, .mumbai and .bangaluru, seem to have fallen through, as suspected.
Other contention sets TLDH is now confirmed to be involved in include: .blog, .site, .immo, .hotel, .home, .casa, .love, .law, .cloud, .baby, .art, .gay, .style and .store.
The company said in a statement:

During the next six months, TLDH will focus its efforts on marketing and operations for geographic names such as dot London and dot Bayern where it has the exclusive support of the relevant governing authority, as well as any other gTLDs that TLDH has filed for that are confirmed to be uncontested on the Reveal Date. Discussions with other applicants regarding contested names will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

10 Comments Tagged: .abogado, .app, .art, .baby, .beauty, .beer, .blog, .book, .casa, .cloud, .cooking, .country, .coupon, .cpa, .cricket, .data, .dds, .deals, .design, .dog, .eco, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .flowers, .free, .garden, .gay, .green, .guide, .home, .horse, .hotel, .immo, .inc, .latino, .law, .lawyer, .llc, .love, .luxe, .pizza, .property, .realestate, .restaurant, .review, .rodeo, .roma, .sale, .school, .science, .site, .soccer, .spa, .store, .style, .surf, .tech, .video, .vip, .vodka, .website, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .zulu, tldh, top level domain holdings, 网址, 购物

Will India’s biggest dot-brand be blocked?

TATA Group, the $83-billion-a-year Indian conglomerate, has confirmed to local media that it has applied for the new dot-brand top-level domain .tata.
Reporting on the approximately 50 new gTLD applications known so far to originate in India, the Business Standard confirmed the .tata bid.
But the company may find itself on the receiving end of nasty surprise — Tata is a protected geographical string under ICANN’s new gTLD rules.
Tata is also a Moroccan province listed in the ISO 3166-2 standard and the string is therefore recognized as a “sub-national place name” that gets special privileges.
Such strings are “considered geographic names and must be accompanied by documentation of support or non-objection from the relevant governments or public authorities”, according to the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
While it will be up to the Geographic Names Panel to make the call, “tata” looks to me like a pretty straightforward case of a protected string.
Has Tata obtained this consent from Morocco already? I guess we’ll find out on June 13, when ICANN reveals the public portions of all 1,900-plus new gTLD applications.
Tata also colloquially means “boob” in American.

3 Comments Tagged: .tata, geographic names, ICANN, new gTLDs, tata group

Directi expects all 31 of its gTLDs to be contested

Directi has applied for 31 new top-level domains and expects all 31 of them to be contested, according to CEO Bhavin Turakhia.
The company has budgeted $30 million for its unashamedly mainstream portfolio of applications – which includes the likes of .web – but that’s not including what it expects to spend at auction.
“I expect there to be contention in all of them,” he said. “Whether they will end up going to auction… we’re completely open to strategic partnerships with other industry players who we believe can add value and join hands with us, based on merit. We’ll be evaluating this on a case by case basis.”
“Something like a .web, there’ll be enough competitors out there that it will certainly go to auction, no matter what,” he said, adding that he expects at least 10 rivals for .web.
Directi has applied for: .web, .shop, .bank, .law, .music, .news, .blog, .movie, .baby, .store, .doctor, .hotel, .play, .home .site, .website, .click, .online, .one, .ping, .space, .world, .press, .chat, .city, .deals, .insurance .loans, .app, .host, and .hosting.
The company is applying via its new business unit, Radix, using ARI Registry Services as its back-end registry provider.
Turakhia said he expects to use a traditional registry-registrar model for most of the domains, assuming Directi wins its contention sets.
“The strings that we have gone for are strings that are relevant to all registrars so we expect there to be significant adoption,” he said.
“If eNom were to apply for .web and .shop – and they probably will – and if they were to win those TLDs, then our registrar businesses would definitely carry them irrespective of the fact that we have our own TLDs,” he said. “There are only so many good viable strings out there.”
Most of Directi’s gTLDs, if approved, will be completely unrestricted.
For .movie, .law, .doctor and .bank there will be some tight restrictions, Turakhia said. (UPDATE: he later added that .insurance and .loans will also be restricted).
Some will also have additional rights protection mechanisms that go above and beyond what ICANN mandates in its standard registry contracts.
But none of its applications are “community” applications, the special category of application defined by ICANN.
Turakhia said he doesn’t think some of the applicants trying to “sneak through” as community applications will be successful.
“We’re treating these as all generic strings for anyone to register domains in,” he said. “.music for me does not represent a community. I could be a bathroom singer and want a .music domain name.”
“If you treat music lovers as a community then 100% of the world is part of that community.”

12 Comments Tagged: .app, .baby, .bank, .blog, .chat, .city, .click, .deals, .doctor, .home .site, .host, .hotel, .insurance .loans, .law, .movie, .music, .news, .one, .online, .ping, .play, .press, .shop, .space, .store, .web, .website, .world, ari registry services, directi, hosting, ICANN, new gTLDs

Google has applied for .lol gTLD

Google is the first company to announce that it has applied for the new top-level domain .lol.
It’s one of several new gTLDs Google has applied for — including .google, .youtube and .docs — according to a blog post from chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf:

we decided to submit applications for new TLDs, which generally fall into four categories:
– Our trademarks, like .google
– Domains related to our core business, like .docs
– Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified
– Domains we think have interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

Cerf, a former ICANN chairman, also promises “sensible rights protection mechanisms” and said that security will be a “high priority”.
The full list — and number — of Google’s applications does not seem to have been released yet.
UPDATE: According to AdAge, Google has applied for more than 50 gTLDs.

1 Comment Tagged: .docs, .lol, google, youtube

Momentous’ .sucks bid “about creating dialogue”

The CEO of Momentous’ .sucks new gTLD applicant reckons smart brands will embrace the cheeky concept.
I chatted to John Berard, CEO of Momentous subsidiary Vox Populi Registry, this afternoon for a piece in The Register, and he reckons .sucks isn’t the money-grubbing scam many people will say it is.
“If some people think this is just a way to get registration money out of corporations, then those people are either unaware or are being short-sighted about their marketing effectiveness,” he said.
Berard believes smart companies nowadays are embracing social media interactions as a way to improve their marketing, and that .sucks will be a way to facilitate that.
That said, the policies governing .sucks are still not clear.
Momentous is also applying for .design, .rip and .style.

5 Comments Tagged: momentous, sucks, vox populi registry

Blacknight now .co accredited

Irish registrar Blacknight Solutions has been approved as a .co registrar, according to the company.
It’s one of the ongoing second wave of .co registrars following the initial 10 used by .CO Internet at launch.
Judging by .CO’s web site, Blacknight will be the 18th registrar to get approval to sell directly (13th if you don’t count the jointly owned registrars on the list), as well as the smallest.
Previously, the company was like so many others a reseller of My.co, the Colombian channel-oriented registrar.

Comment Tagged: .co, blacknight