Donuts wins .gifts, .sarl and .restaurant

Donuts has won the contention sets for three new gTLDs, at least two of which seem to have come as the result of an Applicant Auction auction.
It beat mySARL to .sarl, Lucy Ventures to .gifts and Uniregistry, Minds + Machines and Famous Four to .restaurant. All of these rival bidders have withdrawn their applications now.
.sarl is a company designator in some French-speaking countries, including France.
.restaurant is interesting because it will be competing against .rest. While I prefer .restaurant, .rest’s backers believe it has broader appeal in non-English-speaking nations.
.gifts will be competing against Uniregistry’s .gift, which currently has 5,781 registrations.
Since I was told that Applicant Auction had settled 10 contested gTLDs almost two weeks ago, 11 contention sets have been resolved by withdrawals.
I’m guessing one of these fights was settled by other means. Donuts has been known to make private deals on occasion.

.club now biggest-selling new gTLD

.club has overtaken .guru to become the top-selling new gTLD on the market.
According to today’s zone file report, .club now has 59,120 domains, having grown by 2,504 yesterday. That’s compared to .guru, which grew by 181 names to 58,791.
It’s been 12 days since .CLUB Domains predicted it would be at the top of the league table “within days”.
It’s taken 20 days for the gTLD to beat .guru, something the registry at first reckoned would happen within its first week of full general availability.
I don’t think yesterday’s spike has anything to do with the 50 Cent endorsement deal.
As far as I can tell, Fiddy has only been linking to his .com shop on Twitter since his .club domain went live and the deal does not seem to have generated any media coverage outside of domain blogs.
Taking the number one spot is only a relative success, of course. What’s important is that .club is still managing to move 2,500 names in a day three weeks after launch, something no other new gTLD has managed to date.

ICANN snubs Belgium, gives Donuts the all-clear for .spa

ICANN has rejected demands by the Belgian government by giving Donuts the go-ahead to proceed with its application for .spa, which Belgium says infringes on a geographic name.
Noting that the Governmental Advisory Committee had submitted no consensus advice that Donuts .spa bid should be rejected, the ICANN board’s New gTLD Program Committee said last week “the applications will proceed through the normal process.”
That means the two-way contention set is presumably going to auction.
The English dictionary word “spa” derives from Spa, a small Belgian town with some springs.
The other applicant is Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council, which has made a deal with Spa to donate some of its profits to local projects and give the city some control over the registry.
Donuts refused to sign a similar deal, leading to Belgium last month asking ICANN to delegate the gTLD to ASWPC and not Donuts.
The GAC’s last word on .spa was this, from the recent Singapore meeting:

Regarding the applications for .spa, the GAC understands that the relevant parties in these discussions are the city of Spa and the applicants. The GAC has finalised its consideration of the .spa string and welcomes the report that an agreement has been reached between the city of Spa and one of the applicants.

There’s no ICANN fudging here; if the GAC wanted to issue a consensus objection it could have.
The question is: why didn’t it?
Why does the string “amazon”, which does not exactly match the name of a place in its local languages, qualify for a GAC objection, while “spa”, which exactly matches the name of a city, does not?

Millions spent on new gTLDs as 11 auctions settled

New gTLD portfolio applicants settled at least 11 new gTLD contention sets last week, sharing the spoils of a private auction that looks to have totaled seven figures in sales.
Applicant Auction carried out auctions for 13 contested strings last week, which I believe lasted at least three days.
I’ve been able to determine that Donuts won six sets, Uniregistry won three and Minds + Machines won two. Radix seems to have lost at least five auctions, walking away with a great big pile of cash instead.

.hosting — Uniregistry won after Radix (which owns .host) withdrew.
.click — Uniregistry beat Radix.
.property — Uniregistry won after withdrawals from M+M and Donuts.
.yoga — M+M won, beating Donuts and Uniregistry.
.garden — M+M beat Donuts and Uniregistry again.
.娱乐 — Donuts won this string (Chinese for “.entertainment”) after Morden Media withdrew.
.deals — Donuts beat M+M and Radix.
.city — Donuts beat TLD Registry and Radix.
.forsale — Donuts beat DERForsale.
.world — Donuts beat Radix.
.band — Donuts beat What Box?

Minds + Machines disclosed this morning that the four auctions in which it was involved cost it $5.97 million.
It’s not possible to work out how much .garden and .yoga cost the company; the $5.97 million figure is net of the money it won by losing .property and .deals, ICANN refunds and auctioneer commissions.
However, it seems reasonable to assume that the average price of a gTLD, even not particularly attractive ones (.garden? Really?), has sharply risen from the $1.33 million I calculated from the first 14 auctions.
In January, M+M raised roughly $33.6 million for auctions with a private share placement. The company is listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market.
The company said it now has an interest in 28 uncontested applications.
Also today, the Canadian Real Estate Association withdrew its Community application for .mls, but this is not believed to be related to the auctions. It has a non-Community application for the same string remaining.

.guru first new gTLD to 50,000 names

Donuts’ pioneering .guru yesterday became the first new gTLD to surpass 50,000 domain name registrations, according to today’s zone files.
DI PRO makes today’s total 50,210, having added 209 names yesterday. Technically, that means .guru passed the 50k mark on Wednesday, but I’m excluding some infrastructural domains used by the registry.
The gTLD went into general availability January 29, so it’s passed this milestone in 78 days, therefore selling on average 643 names per day. That average is skewed obviously by the low-volume seven-day premium phase and a sharp spike when names hit baseline pricing on February 5.
If we assume that the average price for a .guru is $20 (which I’m guessing is probably not too wide of the mark), then the gTLD is already million-dollar business.
For a while it looked as if number-two new gTLD .berlin was going to overtake .guru and might have hit 50k first, but its relative growth compared to .guru slowed down a few weeks ago.
According to our zone file analysis, there are 556,063 new gTLD domains today.

Donuts buys out rival .place gTLD applicant

Donuts has won the .place new gTLD contention set after paying off rival applicant 1589757 Alberta Ltd.
The deal, for an undisclosed sum, was another “cut and choose” affair, similar to deals made with Tucows last August, in which the Canadian company named its price to withdraw and Donuts chose to pay it rather than taking the money itself.
1589757 Alberta has withdrawn its application for .place already.
The deal means Donuts now has 165 new gTLDs that are either live, contracted or uncontested.

.email sells almost 10,000 names on day one

Donuts new gTLD .email sold 9,636 registrations yesterday, its first partial day of general availability at standard registry pricing.
The TLD became the seventh largest by volume, with 11,286 names under management.
The other four new gTLDs — all Donuts’ — that hit the same pricing threshold yesterday fared less well, with between 5,391 (.solutions) and 909 (.builders) names registered.
Here’s a bit more data from DI PRO. Click to enlarge.

A total of 26,239 new names appeared in 147 new gTLD zone files this morning, of which 22,220 (about 85%) came from these five newly available options.

Donuts plays the genericide card in showdown with Belgian government over .spa

Donuts has asked ICANN to approved its .spa new gTLD application over the objections of the Belgian government, saying the town of Spa no longer has exclusive rights to the string.
As we reported at the weekend, Spa is asking Donuts and rival applicant Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council for an up to 25% cut of profits from .spa, as well as the right to help manage the TLD at the registry’s expense.
ASWPC has agreed to these terms, but Donuts has not. It says it offered Spa extra protections for sensitive names, but does not want to hand over any managerial control or profit.
Yesterday, Donuts wrote to ICANN (pdf) to say that “spa” is now so generic that no interest would be served by ICANN enforcing the city’s demands. Here’s the meat of it:

While the City of Spa maintains a historical link to the word “spa”, that word long ago evolved as a globally recognized generic term by people who have never even heard of the city of its origin. The public interest served by making that term available to a global community of spa users far outweighs any risk of confusion with the city of the same name. And for those names that may cause confusion, Donuts has provided a rigorous series of additional protections and controls.
The City of Spa gave the word “spa” to the world many centuries ago, and the world has done a great deal with it. Just as attorneys for the City of Spa don’t fly around the world handing cease-­and-desist notices to resort operators and hot-­tub manufacturers, we do not believe it is appropriate for them to overrun ICANN procedure to try to exert control over how that term is used in the Internet’s global addressing system.

I’m going to raise my hand to say that I’d never heard of Spa before this particular controversy arose, and I expect that goes for most of the people reading this article. Donuts surely has a point.
But that’s not to say Spa doesn’t have a point too. There are plenty of governments that managed to squeeze concessions out of applicants for gTLDs matching place names in their territories, with little complaint from applicants; it’s just that the line was drawn at capital cities, something which Spa is not.
Donuts urges ICANN to give no weight to the Spa-ASWPC deal and to move both applications forward to the next stage of the process — contention resolution.
We may see some progress at the ICANN meeting in Singapore next week, when ICANN will surely press the Governmental Advisory Committee for further advice on this string.

Belgians do want a piece of Donuts’ new gTLD action

The Belgian government is blocking approval of Donuts’ bid for the new gTLD .spa until the company agrees to hand over up to 25% of its .spa profits to the community of the city of Spa.
It emerged in a letter from Spa published by ICANN this weekend that the city is also demanding a role in managing the TLD at the registry operator’s expense.
The gTLD has been applied for by Donuts and the Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council.
Not only does the string .spa match the name of the city, but also the English dictionary word “spa” is actually named after Spa, which has been known for centuries for its “healing” springs.
Despite this, Spa is not a capital city — it has roughly 10,000 inhabitants — so it does not qualify as a protected geographic string under the rules of ICANN’s new gTLD program.
Spa nevertheless wants a role in the TLD’s management, in order to protect the interests of itself and its local community, and wants some of the profits to benefit its local businesses.
According to the letter (pdf) from Spa outside attorney Phillippe Laurent, ASWPC has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the city. That MoU, published with the letter, states:

The turnover generated by the exploitation of the .SPA registry will be used in priority to defray reasonable out-of-pocket expenses incurred by the City as a result of its participation in the SPARC or any other of its activity related to the management and governance of the .SPA extension.
Additionally, 25% of the net profit generated by the domain names registered in the .SPA registry by any Belgian, Dutch, Luxembourgish, French or German person or entity will be earmarks to be contributed towards Internet and spa & wellness activities development in and for the City of Spa and its region, especially as related to the scope of the “.SPA” TLD, to be directed by the City of Spa.

The deal would also see ASWPC reserve 200 .spa domain names (included potential premiums such as poker.spa and golf.spa) for the city to do with as it pleases.
Donuts has refused to sign the MoU, saying it’s inconsistent with the Applicant Guidebook and sets a “bad precedent”. Spa has therefore refused to endorse its application.
The city has its national government on its side. In the April 2013 Beijing communique of the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee, the GAC listed .spa as one of several bids needing “further consideration”.
This was reiterated in its Durban and Buenos communiques, with the GAC noting that “discussions” between “relevant parties” were “ongoing”.
Essentially, the GAC is delaying .spa from approval while Spa tries to get Donuts to agree to hand over part of its of .spa profits.
There was a somewhat testy exchange at the Buenos Aires meeting in November, after an ICANN director asked the GAC if it was appropriate for a governmental entity to try to get a financial benefit from an applicant.
The Belgian GAC representative responded later that “no money will flow to the city of Spa”, conceding that “a very small part of the profits of the registry will go to the community served by .spa”.
That now seems to be not entirely accurate.
The MoU sees Spa getting reimbursed for its self-imposed cost of inserting itself into the management of the registry, so some money will flow to it. But it will presumably be revenue-neutral to the city.
The issue of the 25% profit cut is a bit ambiguous though.
While the money would not flow directly into city coffers, the city would get the ability to direct how it was spent. Presumably, it could be spent on projects that Spa locals would otherwise look to the city to pay for.
With Donuts and Spa apparently at an impasse, ICANN recently told the GAC that it won’t sign contracts with either applicant, yet, but that it wants “a timeline for final consideration of the string”.
It also wants the GAC to “identify the ‘interested parties’ noted in the GAC advice.”
With Laurent’s letter and the MoU seemingly spelling out exactly what Spa wants and why, perhaps ICANN can move the issue closer to resolution at the Singapore meeting next week.
Is it a shakedown? Is it appropriate behavior for the GAC to hold an application hostage while it tries to obtain financial benefit for its local businesses? Or is Donuts unreasonably trying to exploit a city’s centuries-old cultural heritage for its own economic gain?

Donuts: “eco” registrants could get their names back

Registrants whose domains were deleted by Donuts this week could get their names back, should ICANN release them from its reserved lists in future, the company said today.
In an email to affected registrants, believed to number a few dozen, Donuts said:

We are actively lobbying ICANN to make the domain names you registered available to you. We hope to be successful and, though you are under no obligation to do so, we think it would be helpful if you voiced your opinion to ICANN about it directly.
To get these domain names to you as soon as possible, we are maintaining a record of your details in the event ICANN releases these names for registration. If and when ICANN does, we will contact you and have these names registered to you for free.

The only names affected by the screw-up were “eco” and “00” at the second level in any of Donuts new gTLDs.
The company had accidentally removed both strings from its list of reserved names, making the domains available for registration.
The string “eco” is reserved because it matches the acronym of the Economic Cooperation Organization, an intergovernmental organization, while “00” is reserved along with all two-character strings.
Whether “eco” is released will rather depend on whether the ICANN board of directors sides with the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which wants acronyms removed from the reserved list, or the Governmental Advisory Committee, which wants the protection to remain.
For “00”, it’s a slightly different story. There’s no move I’m aware of to relax the two-character rule, which is designed to protect current and future ccTLDs.
But it does seem a bit strange for numeric domains to be reserved in this way, given that there’s virtually no chance of a future nation being assigned a numeric country code by the UN.
It may not be impossible for “00” to be released, but I think it might take a bit longer.