.xxx sunrise on track for 50,000 domains

ICM Registry has seen over 42,000 sunrise applications since September 7, with “thousands more pouring in each day”, according to the company.
With a last-minute rush possible by porn-scared brand owners before the process closes this Friday, .xxx may well hit 50,000 sunrise applications.
The 42,000 number seems to cover all three sunrise phases – the ‘B’ process for non-porn companies and the AT and AD processes for pornographers.
Sunrise B applications cost $162 at the registry level and over $200 from registrars. ICM’s breakeven point was 10,000 applications, so it will be profitable to the tune of several million dollars.
Because Sunrise B applications incur a one-time fee, ICM has essentially made a windfall now at the expense of recurring revenues from renewals.

Comment Tagged: icm registry, sunrise, xxx

GAC slams registrars over “silly” crime domain moves

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is seriously annoyed with domain name registrars over what it sees as a failure to take the demands of law enforcement seriously.
The first official day of ICANN’s 42nd public meeting in Dakar, Senegal, was highlighted by a fractious discussion between the GAC and the Generic Names Supporting Organization.
Governments are evidently losing patience with the industry over what they see as incessant foot-dragging and, now, halfhearted bone-throwing.
The US, which is easily the most influential GAC member, was harshly critical of recent efforts by registrars to self-regulate themselves some law enforcement cooperation policies.
US GAC representative Suzanne Radell, saying she was speaking on behalf of the GAC, described a registrar move to start publishing legal service addresses on their web sites at some point in the future as as “paltry”, “mind-boggling” and “silly”.
She heavily implied that if the industry can’t self-regulate, the alternative is governments doing it for them. She was backed up by her counterparts from the UK, Australia and the European Commission.
Registrars have been talking to law enforcement for a few years about how to more effectively work together to prevent crime online.
In October 2009, agencies including the FBI and the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency publish a set of 12 recommendations about how to clean up the industry.
A lot of it was pretty basic stuff like a prohibition on registrar cybersquatting and an obligation to publish an abuse point of contact.
Despite a lot of talking at ICANN meetings, up until a couple of weeks ago there had not been a great deal of tangible progress.
The GNSO passed a resolution, proposed by registrars, to ask for an Issue Report to discuss whether registrars should be forced to post on their sites: a physical address for legal service, the names of key executives, and an abuse contact.
In ICANN’s world, an Issue Report usually precedes a Policy Development Process, which can take a year or more to produce results.
While the GNSO motion passed, it was opposed as inadequate by factions such as the Intellectual Property Constituency, which has close ties to the US government.
As the IPC seemed to correctly predict, the GAC was not amused.
“It is simply impossible for us to write a briefing memo for our political managers to explain why you need a policy to simply put your name on your web site,” Radell told the GNSO Council yesterday. “It is simply mind-boggling that you would require that.”
She pointed out that at a session during the Singapore meeting, registrars had indicated a willingness to address more of the law enforcement demands.
“That’s the context in which we are now coming to you saying this looks pretty paltry and actually it looks a little silly,” she said.
Mason Cole from the registrar constituency denied that they were “roadblocking” law enforcement’s demands, saying that a PDP is the fastest way to create a policy binding on all registrars.
“I think law enforcement was very clear when they made their proposals to us that what they were looking for was binding, enforceable provisions of policy that could be imposed on the registrars,” he said. “A code of conduct or a voluntary method would not arrive at binding, enforceable policy and therefore probably wouldn’t achieve the outcomes that law enforcement representatives were seeking.”
The debate didn’t end yesterday. Radell said she intends to take it up with the ICANN board of directors, presumably at their joint meeting tomorrow.
The implicit threat underlying the GAC’s protest is a legislative one, and Radell and other GAC members made it pretty clear that their governments back home regard domain names as a crucial tool in fighting online crime.

2 Comments Tagged: cybercrime, dakar, gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, law enforcement, seizures

New gTLDs: no advantage to applying early

ICANN has confirmed that new top-level domain applications filed early in next year’s application window will not get priority over those filed right at the end.
The subject of “batching” – the way ICANN plans to divide applications into more easily managed chunks of 500 – has seen some debate recently.
Some applicants and consultants have said that filing your application January 12 rather than April 12 would be a wise move, despite the evidence to the contrary.
Now ICANN senior vice president of stakeholder relations Kurt Pritz has busted the myth, during a session on new gTLDs with the Generic Names Supporting Organization in Dakar today.
“There’s no advantage to applying early or later in the process,” he said. “As long as your application is in by the due date it has the same chance of being in any batch.”
It doesn’t come much clearer than that.
ICANN has said that it only plans to process 500 applications at a time. If there are significantly more than 500, then it will process them in batches.
Due to the length of time it is expected to take to process an application, finding yourself in dumped into the second batch could add a few quarters to your go-live runway.
If you’re a commercial gTLD applicant, there could be a significant first-mover advantage to being in the first batch. Revenues from speculative and defensive registrations could be higher, before the novelty of new gTLDs gives way to fatigue.
Applicants in that position are going to use every trick in the book to streamline their process through ICANN and maximize their chances of being in the first batch.
While ICANN has not yet decided how to create the batches, it has ruled out filing time from the criteria. Pritz talked the GNSO through some of its current thinking today.
The preferred option is random selection. The problem with this idea is that it may fall foul of US gambling laws if it fits the definition of a lottery.
It sounds stupid, but it’s happened before: when Neustar introduced a random element to its launch of .biz, it would up having to pay $1.2 million to settle claims that it ran an illegal lottery.
“The issue of random selection is that we just have to make sure it complies with all possible applicable laws,” Pritz said. “Our initial legal research points out that this is real risk… but it is the most attractive form of selection because it is objective and fair.”
The other option under consideration is a “secondary time stamp”, Pritz said. This unhelpful label caused some head-scratching during the GNSO session today.
Pritz explained by analogy: imagine every applicant was asked to send a letter to ICANN, and the order of the batches would be determined by the order in which the letters are received.
The important thing to note is that this secondary time stamp would not be based on the date the application itself was submitted to ICANN.
Pritz said that ICANN had also discussed a “charity auction” batching method, but that this idea has now been ruled out.
Whatever mechanism is decided upon, it seems that applicants will have the opportunity to opt in or opt out of the first batch. Some .brand applicants currently clueless about how to use their gTLD may not be super-interested in getting priority processing, for example.
“We think those numbers are non-negligible,” Pritz said.

1 Comment Tagged: batching, dakar, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs

Will ICANN approve cheap gTLDs for poor applicants?

One of the big questions at ICANN’s 42nd public meeting in Dakar next week is whether the board of directors plans to approve subsidized new gTLD application fees for worthy applicants.
A volunteer working group known as JAS came up with a set of recommendations last month that would lower the $185,000 fee for applicants from developing nations with public benefit missions.
It was a wide-ranging set of proposals that would stretch beyond the scope of the $1 million to $2 million ICANN approved for applicant support initiatives at its last meeting in June.
Chiefly, JAS wants the application fee reduced to $45,000 for qualified developing-world applicants, meaning ICANN would have to find the funds to cover the $140,000 shortfall elsewhere.
In addition, JAS wants ICANN to set up a fund to loan money to these same applicants. It also wants these applicants to be able to pay fees on a staggered schedule.
Whether it was deliberate or not (I suspect it was semi-deliberate), the JAS wish-list seems to me to go above and beyond the support the ICANN board said it was prepared to offer in June.
I don’t think the board will grant those wishes when it meets next Friday, and here’s a few reasons why.
First, CEO Rod Beckstrom has already basically ruled out blanket fee reductions, even for poorer applicants, and he did so after the board had already discussed them.
At an ICANN panel on new gTLDs in London last month, Beckstrom was asked by an audience member if the application fee could be reduced before January.

At roughly 32 minutes into the embedded video, this is what he said:

There’s no plans to reduce the fee and I could not contemplate that happening before the program opens. The fees have been determined and there’s no process to review them, and there would be no basis at the present time because the costing estimates in the program appear to be reasonably accurate.

He went on to say that economies of scale may lead to a reduction in fees in future rounds, but did not mention the JAS recommendations at all.
As I was also on the panel, I called him on the omission later in the discussion, roughly 45 minutes into the video above. He said:

The board of directors did make a directional indication in Singapore to set aside up to a million to two million dollars for financial support for applicants…
However, it’s not a repricing of the fees, it would be some type of support for those applicants. A reduction in the application fee or effectively subsidizing the application fee is one possible concept, but what I can tell you as the CEO and as a board member is that board’s indication is one to two million dollars, not an unlimited number, so can do math and figure out what might be possible and what might not.
We’re not going to change the program fees, it just means there might be some benefit to or some support for some applicants, but it may not come in the form of that subsidy for the fee.

What we have here is JAS asking for a fundamental restructuring of the application fee in certain circumstances, and ICANN’s CEO saying that’s not likely to happen.
At that time, the JAS report had not been formally submitted to the board, but it had nevertheless been seen and discussed by the board at its two-day retreat in mid-September.
The GNSO, which had been frustrated with the cross-constituency structure of the JAS for some time, didn’t even formally approve the report before forwarding it to the board, due to time constraints.
Another indication of the board’s thinking on the JAS recommendations comes from the minutes of its Finance Committee meeting, September 15. Here’s an extract:

Staff has initiated efforts to be ready for implementation if and when approved. Establishment of a fund – a short-term mechanism for earmarking funds for applicant support, and a long-term formal mechanism for several purposes. Meeting community expectations: Board had approved US $2mm, while the JAS/GAC-ALAC recommendations would be more costly. Four tasks: developing criteria based on the JAS report plus practical concerns, developing procedures, entity for considering applications, and mechanism for holding the funds. Discussed the need to stay within the mission and purpose of ICANN and the ability to set-up special funds.

There’s no mention of application fees, but there is an acknowledgment that the JAS recommendations would be more expensive to implement than just the $2 million ICANN has already set aside.
There’s also talk of “practical concerns” and the “need to stay within the mission and purpose of ICANN”, all of which says to me that there’s a worry JAS asked for too much.
We’ll have to wait until next Friday to find out for sure, but my guess is that the board will likely side with ICANN’s bean-counters and that the JAS will not get much of what it asked for.

3 Comments Tagged: dakar, ICANN, jas, new gTLDs

Rumor mill: three stories we expect to write soon

File these rumors under: unconfirmed, but plausible.
Sometimes the gossip is impossible to confirm to the extent that I’m comfortable reporting it as fact, but interesting enough that I think it could use a wider airing.
Here are three examples of Stuff We’ve Heard Recently. Take it all with a great big pinch of salt.
Go Daddy to become a registry
The world’s largest registrar is poised to make an entrance into the registry market, it is whispered.
The rumors don’t go as far as to whether the company plans to apply for some new gTLDs itself, or whether it plans to become a back-end registry services provider, or something else.
But if ICANN’s new relaxed stance on vertical separation means its competitors plan to join the registry space, it seems likely that Go Daddy will want a piece of the action too.
It is already a joint-venture partner in .me registry Domen, though I believe Afilias is responsible for the technical heavy lifting at the back end.
It’s too early to speculate too much, but I’ve written before that Go Daddy is possibly the only registrar likely to catch the attention of competition watchdogs if it decides to vertically integrate.
The official word from Go Daddy when I asked for confirmation a few weeks ago was: “We have no comment and we have no formal announcement pending.”
.pro to be liberalized
Multiple sources say that the restricted .pro gTLD, which has been around but seriously under-used since 2004, is set to begin to undergo a significant liberalization soon.
I’m expecting to see operator RegistryPro, which is now owned by HostWay, file a Registry Services Evaluation Process request with ICANN in the next few weeks.
Details are sketchy, but I would not be surprised if the company says it wants to do away with its restrictive registration policy entirely.
Currently, registrants have to provide evidence of professional credentials if they want to register a .pro name, although there’s a huge loophole that allows registrations via credentialed proxies.
RegistryPro hired itself a new CEO, Karim Jiwani, in May, and it’s been broadly predicted that he plans to shake up .pro to make it more of a commercial success.
Its parent may have already put in some of the groundwork for a .jobs-style directory service – HostWay, via a shell company, registered over 40,000 US zip codes in .pro in August 2010.
MarkMonitor gets acquired
This is more speculation than rumor.
There’s a wave of M&A activity in the domain name industry, as companies prepare for introduction of new gTLDs, and one of the potential growth areas is brand management.
With hundreds of new gTLDs likely to launch over a relatively short space of time, companies such as MarkMonitor could find their services in more demand than ever.
Whenever I ask anyone which registrars they think are likely to be hit by the consolidation bug, MarkMonitor is always on the shortlist.
The private company is backed by venture capitalists which will no doubt be looking to execute an exit strategy sooner or later, but the list of potential buyers is quite small.
Consider it a hunch, for now.

1 Comment Tagged: go daddy, hostway, markmonitor, registrypro

What’s At Stake conference bans new gTLD consultants

A conference in New York next month has been set up for marketers to discuss ICANN’s new top-level domains program without pitches from consultants.
What’s At Stake, scheduled for November 1, is for new gTLD skeptics, primarily marketers from large companies that will be impacted by the program.
It’s going to discuss the implications of the program and a few ways ICANN could tweak it to make it less daunting for large corporate applicants.
The conference, found at whatsatstake.com, is being organized by New York marketing pro Judy Shapiro, in conjunction with CADNA, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse.
Former ICANN chair Esther Dyson, who has recently emerged as a fierce critic of the program, is scheduled to keynote the event.
The goal is not to “bash ICANN”, Shapiro told DI in an interview yesterday.
Unlike the Association of National Advertisers and other trade groups, the conference will focus on changes that could be made to the program, rather than its outright suspension, she said.
Primarily, Shapiro wants to see ICANN name the date for a second round of applications.
“If they just said they’re going to do another auction in so many months time, it would be a thousand times better right away,” she said, referring to a second application round rather than an actual “auction”.
Currently, the first application window is scheduled to run from January 12 to April 12 next year. There’s no fixed date for a second round, and some say it could be five years before we see one.
This has economically incentivized new gTLD consultants and registry service providers to play up the “clock is ticking” and “it may be your only chance to apply” memes.
While accurate, this has arguably helped cast the domain name industry yet again as a bunch of borderline extortionists focused primarily on pumping defensive registrations.
It also could mean that some large companies fire off applications for far more gTLDs than they could conceivably need or use, just in order to “defensively” own a keyword related to their industry.
If that happens, it’s quite possible that we’ll see a bunch of dormant or otherwise half-assed extensions go live, substantiating the view that new gTLDs are a waste of time and that .com is king, etc. etc. etc.
The ICANN program as it stands today is “brilliantly constructed to force everyone to buy everything they want in one fell swoop,” Shapiro said.
The problem with naming a second-round date is of course that the first one is likely to take years to run its course. Everybody is expecting some kind of litigation, which could delay any schedule.
Shapiro herself expects that there will be a lawsuit designed to delay the program at some point between now and January.
Shapiro’s background is in corporate brand management for companies such as AT&T, Lucent and CA. She currently runs the online marketing company engageSimply.
“I was very familiar with ICANN. It was not a mystery to me,” she said, explaining her decision to launch the conference. “But I found I was clueless [about the new gTLD program] and I was shocked that I was clueless. I did a survey of 40 friends at top companies, and they were clueless too.”
She decided to offer a conference after she read an August 16 AdAge op-ed by Alexa Raad, CEO of the consultancy Architelos, which she said many marketers dd not understand.
But What’s At Stake is an invitation-only event, and new gTLD consultants are not welcome.
“I am paying for it, I do not want any pitches,” said Shapiro.
While she is trying to secure the attendance of an ICANN executive, she said the organization is being “not so forthcoming”, even maybe a little “defensive”.
If true, this is a pity. It strikes me that these the kinds of people ICANN needs to be reaching out to, even if it means one of its regular expository go-to guys has to squirm in his chair for a few hours.
“They’ve done such a bad job reaching out to this community,” Shapiro said. “Everyone I’m talking to has said: Why are they doing this?”
I put it to her that the new gTLD program has been in development for several years, and that literally anybody was able to participate in the creation of the Applicant Guidebook.
“The problem has been that the issue of domain management falls usually under the technical and legal sides of the house,” she said. “There’s been no collaboration between the IT, legal and marketing folks.”
Marketing people, usually focused on making short-term numbers, are only just waking up to the possibilities and potential problems that new gTLDs will create, she indicated.
The message that the new gTLD program is a cross-disciplinary challenge is also one that many new gTLD consultants have been preaching since even before ICANN approved the program in June.
There’s a convergence of views, to an extent, here. The problem seems to be the apparent disconnect between what the domain name industry thinks marketers should think and what they do think.
Marketers have been far more focused recently on the “local/mobile/social triad” of disruptive advertising technologies, rather than on new gTLDs, Shapiro said.
“The ICANN industry is completely disconnected from the realities of marketing industry,” she said.
The other demand Shapiro/CADNA has for ICANN is for the program to be made more corporate-friendly, but this appears to be very much a secondary concern.
The program currently requires applicants to disclose personal information about their company principals, which sits uncomfortably with many senior executives at large brands, for example.
The Continued Operations Instrument, a financial bond designed to fund failover support for defunct registries, is also a concern. As I noted earlier in the week, it seems unnecessary to impose this on single-registrant .brand applicants.
There are already at least two special provisions in the Applicant Guidebook that exclude .brand registries from certain commitments, so creating more would not be unprecedented.
The problem of course is that as soon as ICANN starts giving extra privileges to certain classes of applicant, it runs the risk of creating loopholes that can be gamed by other applicants.
What’s At Stake starts at 8.45am local time November 1. Shapiro said she’s hoping to webcast it and possibly even allow questions from people not able to attend in person.

Comment Tagged: ana, cadna, engagesimply, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs

The DI Dakar Drunk-Dial Domain Dirt Dropbox

For the first time since DomainIncite launched, I’m skipping an ICANN meeting.
While many regular readers will be landing in Dakar, Senegal, over the next few days, I’ve decided this time to cover the meeting remotely.
For a reporter, in many ways remotely participating in ICANN meetings is a far easier proposition than actually being on the ground.
There’s no running around looking for power points to charge the laptop, no sweltering heat or icy air-con to contend with, no risk of almost getting mugged because you could only afford a hotel in the cheap end of town, very little danger of being forced to speak French.
The drawback of course is that the true value of an ICANN meeting isn’t in the uniformly webcast or magically transcribed sessions themselves.
It’s in the furtive hallway conversations, the over-the-shoulder whispered comments, the drinking banter and the passionate after-hours debates in the hotel bar.
I’m going to miss all that this time around.
To compensate, I’d like to announce the launch of the DI’s very own “remote participation” mechanism.
Let’s call it the DI Dakar Drunk-Dial Domain Dirt Dropbox or, if you like acronyms, the DIDDDDDD.
Hear a bit of good gossip in the bar? Maybe there’s a rumor about a new gTLD applicant, rumblings about disquiet in the GAC, a potential new ICANN CEO candidate…
Simply email your nugget to drunkgossip@domainincite.com and I’ll treat it every bit as confidentially as I would if I was standing right next to you with a bottle of Bière la Gazelle in my hand.
To make things more interesting, for every email sent to this address during Dakar, I’ll chug two fingers or down a shot.
Day or night, I promise.

2 Comments Tagged: dakar, didddddd, ICANN

Orange sponsors ICANN 42

The telecoms firm Orange has become a platinum sponsor of ICANN’s 42nd public meeting in Dakar, Senegal next week.
It’s a rare example of a company from outside the domain name industry handing over the big bucks to associate itself with ICANN.
While the company says it’s doing it for branding purposes, I’m sure it’s likely to set tongues wagging that Orange is a potential candidate for a .brand top-level domain.
If .apple is the no-brainer that is constantly used in articles to illustrate what a .brand is – and to highlight possible contention/objection issues – then .orange surely falls into the same category.
Platinum sponsorship for the Dakar meeting, which kicks off at the weekend, starts at $75,000. There are no takers for any of the other more-expensive sponsorship tiers this time.
Others paying up at this level are VeriSign, as usual, and the Public Interest Registry, which is publicizing its .ngo (non-governmental organizations) gTLD application.

3 Comments Tagged: dakar, ICANN, orange

Aussies to apply for four geo-TLDs

The Australian state governments of New South Wales and Victoria have put out a tender for a registry provider for up to four new top-level domains.
They want to apply to ICANN next year for geographic gTLDs including .victoria, .sydney, .melbourne and possibly .nsw, according to the RFP.
The new gTLDs would be self-funded commercial ventures, with some names reserved for public use, it says. Revenue would be shared between the government and the operator.
If a local presence is taken into account then ARI Registry Services, which recently changed its name from AusRegistry International to dilute the perception that it was too Australia-focused, could be considered a likely front-runner for the gigs.
The tender closes November 15.

1 Comment Tagged: .melbourne, .nsw, .sydney, .victoria, ari registry services, ausregistry, ICANN, new gTLDs, new TLDs, rfp

Paris.hilton? CentralNic pitches gTLDs at super-rich

Just when you thought you’d seen everything, CentralNic is angling for the wallets of the “ultra-wealthy” with its new pitch for .familyname top-level domains.
The alternative TLD registry today launched dotFamilyName, a companion to its dotBrandSolutions site designed to give “prominent families” an “online legacy” in the form of a new gTLD.
Think .hilton, .kennedy, .rockefeller.
If own a squadron of private jets, if you’re a card-carrying member of the Illuminati, if you have your own parking spot outside the Bilderberg Club, then CentralNic wants to hear from you.
The company is basically proposing to apply to ICANN for and manage a .familyname gTLD on behalf of the more-money-than-taste crowd for a start-up fee of about $500,000.
Here’s the pitch from the press release:

Your dotFamilyName TLD can be used in a variety of ways:
1) To create a network of private family websites – a discreet, centralized destination for use by family members containing classified content and images.
2) To create an authenticated source of family information for public consumption.
3) To establish a legacy for generations to come, ensuring that the bond between generations will be kept alive.
4) To ensure that you remain amongst a privileged few in owning a personalized TLD on the World Wide Web.
5) To maintain control over your official web presence, acting as a state of the art security system for your personal reputation.
6) To ensure that, among the families sharing your name, your family controls it.

A commenter on one of my articles for The Register recently joked that new gTLDs could create confusion between hilton.paris, the hotel, and paris.hilton, the heiress.
But it’s not April 1, so I guess this is for real.
ICANN has a ban on individuals applying for new gTLDs, but there’s no particular prohibition on personal-use extensions, as long as they have a corporate entity behind them.
Could it work?

3 Comments Tagged: centralnic, dotfamilyname