ICANN decision to cancel Hamburg was NOT unanimous

Surprisingly, ICANN’s decision last week to cancel its Hamburg annual general meeting in favor of Zoom did not receive the unanimous support of its board of directors.

Two directors — Ihab Osman and Ron da Silva — voted against the majority in the June 11 resolution, minutes published last night show.

The resolution noted that the global path of the coronavirus pandemic is currently too unpredictable to ensure that an in-person ICANN 69 could go ahead safely or legally in October.

But the two directors dissented, pushing instead for a “hybrid” model meeting, with a greatly reduced in-person attendance propped up with online participation.

According to the minutes:

Ron expressed concerns that the decision to conduct ICANN69 as a purely virtual meeting is premature and indicated a preference for the President and CEO to explore with the SO and AC leadership the implications, costs and logistics around a hybrid approach for ICANN69. Ihab expressed concerns that the proposed resolution does not allow for the possibility of some sort of physical hybrid model for ICANN69.

Osman went further, arguing that ICANN should set an example by going ahead with Hamburg:

Ihab Osman pointed out that large parts of the world are moving towards opening up, and that ICANN, as global community and global player, has a responsibility to do its part to bring the world back to some level of normalcy.

While CEO Göran Marby came back with a bunch of reasons a physical meeting would be impractical and potentially unsafe, both directors were unconvinced and voted against the 13-person majority anyway.

Notes released alongside the minutes reveal that ICANN stands to save a lot of money by remaining online-only.

Not only will it not have to pay for hundreds of flights and hotel rooms for staff and subsidized community members, but it had not yet signed contracts with the venue or local hotels, so it won’t be losing any deposits either.

ICANN confirms Hamburg cancellation

With ICANN 68 due to start online next Monday, ICANN has confirmed that its annual general meeting in October is going to be online-only also.

ICANN 69 will now be held on Zoom, instead of at Hamburg’s new convention center, the organization confirmed on Friday.

It’s because of coronavirus, of course. ICANN’s taking the depressing yet realistic view that mass gatherings of international travelers will still be inadvisable and maybe even illegal four months hence.

It’s bad news for ICANN’s core staff in Los Angeles who, if ICANN sticks to the Hamburg time zone as it has with canceled meetings in Cancun and Kuala Lumpur, will start their working day at 0130 local time for a week straight.

It’s particularly bad news for me. I had a whole range of Ombudsman-enraging jokes lined up related to “sausage fests”, “69s”, etc.

Still, I suppose it could be wurst.

Will ICANN swap Hamburg for Zoom for 69?

ICANN’s board of directors is meeting this week to discuss arrangements for ICANN 69, and I think there’s a reasonable chance it will decide to take the meeting online-only.

The last official word from ICANN was that it is working on the assumption that normality will have resumed by September, and that October’s meeting could go ahead in Hamburg, Germany as planned.

But will it?

Current German coronavirus-related travel restrictions, which have been in place since March, forbid non-citizen incoming travelers from pretty much anywhere, even elsewhere in the EU.

Some travelers are being asked to self-quarantine for 14 days upon entry, which is obviously impractical for conference travel.

However, German is loosening its rules next week for EU travelers and will treat countries on a case-by-case basis, based on how many infections they’re recording at the time.

Americans will still not be allowed to travel to Germany and there’s no word on when the ban will be lifted.

German guidelines also currently prohibit any large gatherings of people, including conferences, until at least the end of August.

ICANN’s obviously going to have to do a bit of crystal ball-gazing, to guess whether business travel is going to be safe and permitted in October.

It’s also going to have to guess whether a large enough number of people will actually want to attend to make an in-person meeting worthwhile.

With many medical experts predicting a third-quarter resurgence of the pandemic, the so-called “second wave”, inviting guests from every continent to gather in the same room might be seen as risky.

Conferences in other industries that had been due to take place in Germany in October have been canceled or postponed.

Notably, Oktoberfest in Munich (which starts in September but runs into October) is not going ahead this year, but I’ve found examples of conventions in publishing, gaming and catering sectors that have also been canceled.

However, some events due to take place in March and April have been postponed UNTIL October, suggesting a level of confidence that the virus will be low-risk by that time.

Verisign says its coronavirus fee waivers have saved businesses millions

Verisign has decided to extend the temporary fee waiver it introduced in April for another two months, declaring the scheme a success so far.

On April 2, the company said it would no longer charge a fee when a registrant restores a domain in the period between expiration and deletion. Many registrars passed this on to their customers.

The stated goal of the offer was to help out registrants laid low by coronavirus.

“We estimate these restore fee waivers have already saved several million dollars for registrants of all types, including hard hit small businesses,” Verisign said in a blog post yesterday.

The service typically retails for around $80, so we’re talking about tens of thousands of domains that have been restored post-expiration for free over the space of two months.

Now, Verisign says the offer, which had been due to expire at the start of June, will end on August 1.

The company added that it will also waive the restore fees for names in .cc, .tv, .name and its four IDN gTLDs effective June 1.

Aussie ccTLD surges under coronavirus lockdown

Australia’s .au ccTLD may have been in decline recently, but it saw a surge in new domain registrations during its coronavirus lockdown, according to registry stats.

auDA said that 48,754 new .au domains were registered in April, a more than 23% increase on its April 2019 number.

The registry called this leap “the biggest month for new domain name creations we’ve seen in a while”. It averages about 40,000 per month, with seasonality.

The overall number of extant registrations was down a bit to 3,168,883, but auDA chalks this up to the expiration of domains registered during registrar promotions a year ago.

Australia was under its lockdown, which was less severe than in other countries, for the whole month of April. The measures were put in place March 21 and relaxed last week.

Numbers for March show a year-over-year decline of 1.4% in new adds.

While auDA does not attribute its April growth to lockdown, I think the numbers show that the movement restrictions imposed certainly didn’t hurt .au’s business.

Portugal ccTLD says growth better than expected during pandemic

The Portuguese ccTLD operator has become the latest registry to say that it is still seeing growth despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Associação DNS.PT recently said (via Google Translate) that “the registration in .pt is increasing considerably, we would even say above the expected”.

For the period of January 1 to April 27, .pt added 32,671 new domains, DNS.PT said.

However, that appears to be a considerable drop in regs when compared to the first quarter of 2019 (almost a month shorter period), when it saw 36,930 new registrations. It added 121,359 in the whole of 2019.

The registry said that 359 of these domains — about 1% — appeared to be directly related to the pandemic. About half a dozen have been deleted for violating DNS.PT’s terms of service.

The whole .pt space comprised over 1.2 million domains as of February.

Coronavirus has had a relatively small impact on health in Portugal, compared to other European countries. So far, it’s recorded a little over 1,000 deaths from the disease, from a population of 10.8 million.

ICANN may scrap its $0.18 reg tax in coronavirus “solidarity”

ICANN is thinking about whether to temporarily waive the $0.18 it charges registrars (and therefore registrants) whenever a gTLD domain name is registered.

Execs said the idea was being considered during a conference call explaining ICANN’s new budget this afternoon.

The idea was floated by GoDaddy policy head James Bladel during the call, and supported by others, but it appears it had already also occurred to ICANN.

Bladel suggested that it might not make a big impact on registrants’ wallets, but that it would be a show of “solidarity” with registrars and registries that have waived domain recovery fees to help registrants that have been hit by coronavirus.

ICANN said it was looking at the idea but did not commit one way or the other.

Should such a waiver come into effect, it’s not clear whether it would be uniformly passed on to registrants.

Domain industry likely to suffer from coronavirus as ICANN slashes budget by 8%

ICANN is predicting a miserable time for the domain name industry due to the coronavirus pandemic, today announcing that it’s slashing its revenue outlook for the next year by 8%.

The organization expects to receive revenue of $129.3 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1. That’s $11.1 million lower than its previous estimate, which was made in December.

ICANN’s budget is based on projections based on previous industry performance and its accountants’ conversations with registries and registrars, so this is another way of saying that it expects the industry to suffer due to the pandemic.

ICANN said in its newly revised budget:

ICANN org funding may be impacted because the economic crisis stemming from the pandemic has the potential to impact the funding from domain name registrations and contracted parties through the end of FY20 and into the first months of FY21. ICANN org also anticipates there may be long-lasting effects of such impacts. At the time this document is published, the impact cannot yet be quantified.

The drill-down is not great, showing that ICANN expects registries and registrars in both legacy and new gTLDs to be hit.

New gTLDs are predicted to be hit hardest, with revenue from registry transaction fees dropping by a full 33% from its FY20 forecast. That’s a drop from $6.7 million to $4.5 million.

Extrapolating from its $0.25 registry fee, that means ICANN thinks there will be 8.8 million fewer billable transactions — registrations, renewals and transfers in new gTLDs with over 50,000 names — for the year ending June 30, 2021.

Expected revenue from registrars selling new gTLDs has also been slashed by a third, down from $5.3 million this year to $3.5 million next year.

Legacy gTLDs are expected to fare a little better.

ICANN predicts transaction revenue from legacy gTLDs to decrease over the period, down to $47.7 million in FY21 from $49 million in FY20. Registrars selling legacy gTLDs are expected to bring in revenue of $29.7 million, down from $33.3 million.

That also represents shrinkage measured in the millions of domains.

It gets worse. ICANN is also expecting the number of registries and registrars to decrease even faster over the course of the next year.

It thinks it will end June with 1,174 fee-paying registries, but for this to decrease by 62 in FY21. It decreased by 29 in FY20. Many of these will probably be unused dot-brands having their contracts cancelled.

On the registrar side, it expects to lose 380 accreditations in FY21, compared to a loss of 104 this fiscal year, to end FY21 with 1,977 registrars.

ICANN does not expect its voluntary contributions from ccTLDs and Regional Internet Registries to decrease, but it does expect to lose a few hundred thousand bucks from the absence of sponsorship of its in-person meetings.

This overall predicted decrease in funding has led to a matching decrease in planned expenditure, with ICANN saying it will operate with “increased prudence, frugality, and with heightened conditions of necessity”.

It’s going to save 20% less on travel — $12.4 million — due to coronavirus-related restrictions, but seems to still be planning to take the industry to Hamburg in October for ICANN 69 (even though Munich has cancelled Oktoberfest this year).

ICANN also plans to delay some projects and to reduce its average headcount by 15 to 395.

The lower budget projections come even as some registries —including CentralNic, which looks after some very large new gTLDs — have said they expect the financial impact of coronavirus to be minimal.

The revised budget is published here and ICANN’s board may approve it as early as next week.

CentralNic does not expect big coronavirus impact as it posts almost-doubled revenue for 2019

CentralNic has added its name to the list of domain name companies not expecting to see a significant financial hit from coronavirus.

The company this morning posted its full 2019 results and first-quarter 2020 trading update, saying it expects to be “resilient” to the pandemic.

For 2019, the company saw revenue grow by 95% to $109.2 million. Profits at the adjusted EBITDA level was $17.9 million, again almost double the 2018 results.

Pre-tax loss was $8.2 million, compared to $5 million for the previous year. At the operating level, CentralNic lost half a million bucks, but that was smaller than the $3.6 million it lost in 2018.

The first quarter trading update was even rosier. It expects revenue to come in at $56 million — the same revenue figure as for the whole of 2018 — with adjusted EBITDA of $8.1 million.

The growth is of course all coming from recent acquisitions. CentralNic sees itself as an industry consolidator. It has recently integrated the reseller-focused businesses Key-Systems, Hexonet, PartnerGate, TPP Wholesale and Toweb, as well as retail registrar Ideegeo and domain monetization outfit Team Internet.

The company said it has delayed a planned shareholder dividend — its first — in order to keep more cash on hand for even more acquisitions.

On coronavirus, CentralNic said:

Despite [the pandemic], trading for the Group in Q1 2020 was in line with expectations, despite the global business restrictions to slow the progress of COVID-19… As a profitable provider of online subscription services with high cash conversion and solid organic growth, we do not expect CentralNic to be severely affected by COVID-19, but we will take the necessary precautions to preserve our cash and review our acquisition pipeline and financing plans to ensure that we maintain stability and optimise our business strategies in the new global climate.

It’s the third domain company in recent days, after Verisignafter Verisign and Dutch ccTLD registry SIDNDutch ccTLD registry SIDN, to say that they don’t expect to be badly hit by the pandemic.

Coronavirus lockdown is working out great for at least one registry

The Dutch ccTLD registry has revealed that its volume of new registrations has been growing rapidly since the Netherlands implemented its coronavirus lockdown measures.

“Since the measures came into effect, Dutch entrepreneurs and private individuals registered over 85,000 .nl domain names, 10,000 more than in the same period in 2019,” SIDN said today (translated from the Dutch by Google).

Only about 2% to 3% of these names relate directly to the pandemic, the registry said.

There were 5,930,715 .nl domains registered as of April 20, an increase of about 17,000 from the start of the month.

A survey of registrants carried out for SIDN found that 100% of them intended to use their domains for online-only activities, as opposed to using them to promote a bricks-and-mortar business, for the first time.

SIDN’s good luck may not be shared by all in the industry, however.

ICANN, which is funded by a tax on registration fees, is to host a call next week in which it will explain how it will have to adapt its budget to respond to the impact of the pandemic.

If we take Verisign’s .com as a benchmark, its zone file has grown by roughly 383,000 domains since the end of March. In the same period last year, the increase was 434,000.

Tonight, Verisign is due to report its first-quarter numbers, and no doubt we will get some color on how its bosses think the virus will affect the market.