Dot-brand fizzles out after acquisition
Another dot-brand gTLD has decided to terminate its ICANN contract, but this time it’s because the brand itself has been discontinued.
.ceb was applied for by the Corporate Executive Board Company, a consulting company, in 2012.
But the company was acquired by Gartner in 2017, and the CEB brand was discontinued the following year.
For some reason it’s taken Gartner a couple of years to remember it has a gTLD it doesn’t need, and it’s told ICANN it no longer wishes to operate it.
The .ceb dot-brand was never used.
It’s the 81st dot-brand to self-terminate, the 12th this year.
After Chapter 11 filing, JCPenney dumps its dot-brand
American retailer JCPenney has told ICANN it no longer wishes to own its dot-brand gTLD, .jcp.
The notice was filed just a month after the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced the permanent closure of hundreds of stores.
Like many retailers of non-essential goods, the company’s fortunes have been badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
I suspect the gTLD would have been scrapped eventually regardless — JCPenney never used it, and even the obligatory nic.jcp site merely redirects to the company’s primary .com.
It’s the 80th dot-brand to be dumped by its registry. the 11th this year.
ICANN washes its hands of Amazon controversy
ICANN has declined to get involved in the seemingly endless spat between Amazon and the governments representing the Amazonia region of South American.
CEO Göran Marby has written to the head of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization to say that if ACTO still has beef with Amazon after the recent delegation of .amazon, it needs to take it up with Amazon.
ACTO failed to stop ICANN from awarding Amazon its dot-brand gTLD after eight years of controversy, with ICANN usually acting as a mediator in attempts to resolve ACTO’s issues.
But Marby yesterday told Alexandra Moreira: “”With the application process concluded and the Registry Agreement in force, ICANN no longer can serve in a role of facilitating negotiation”.
She’d asked ICANN back in May, shortly before .amazon and its Japanese and Chinese translations hit the root, to bring Amazon back to the table for more talks aimed at getting ACTO more policy power over the gTLDs.
As it stands today, Amazon has some Public Interest Commitments that give ACTO’s eight members the right to block any domains they feel have cultural significance to the region.
Marby told Moreira (pdf) that it’s now up to ACTO to work with Amazon to figure out how that’s going to work in practice, but that ICANN’s not going to get involved.
$11 billion dot-brand blames coronavirus as it self-euthanizes
Another new gTLD you’ve never heard of and don’t care about has asked ICANN to terminate its registry contract, but it has a rather peculiar reason for doing so.
The registry is Shriram Capital, the financial services arm of a very rich Indian conglomerate, and the gTLD is .shriram.
In its termination notice, Shriram said: “Due to unprecedented Covid-19 effect on the business, we have no other option but to terminate the registry agreement with effect from 3lst March 2020.”
Weird because the letter was sent in May, and weird because Shriram Group reportedly had revenue of $11 billion in 2017. The carrying cost of a dot-brand isn’t that much.
Registries don’t actually need an excuse to terminate their contracts, so the spin from Shriram is a bit of a mystery.
Shriram had actually been using .shriram, with a handful of domains either redirecting to .com sites or actually hosting sites of their own.
It’s the 79th dot-brand to self-terminate. ICANN expects to lose 62 in the fiscal year that started three weeks ago.
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.
More dot-brands dump their gTLDs
A further three new gTLDs have applied to ICANN for self-termination over the last few months, bringing the total to 76.
They’re all dot-brands: .sbs, .rightathome and .symantec.
The most recent application came from the Australian broadcaster SBS, for Special Broadcasting Service. This seems to be a case of a brand owner briefly experimenting with redirects to its .au domain, then deciding against it.
.symantec is biting the dust because the security company Symantec recently rebranded as NortonLifeLock Inc.
.rightathome also appears to be a case of a discontinued brand, in this case formerly used by consumer products firm SC Johnson.
CSC removes reference to “retiring” new gTLD domain after retiring new gTLD domain
The corporate registrar and new gTLD management consultant CSC Global has ditched a new gTLD domain in favor of a .com, but edited its announcement after the poor optics became clear.
In a brief blog post this week, the company wrote:
We’re retiring cscdigitalbrand.services to give you a more user-friendly interface at cscdbs.com.
From the trusted provider of choice for Forbes Global 2000 companies, this more user-friendly site is filled with information you need to secure and protect your brand. You’ll experience a brand new look and feel, at-a-glance facts and figures, learn about the latest digital threats, access our trusted resources, and see what our customers are saying.
Visit the site to learn more about our core solutions: domain management, domain security, and brand and fraud protection.
But the current version of the post expunges the first paragraph, referring to the retirement of its .services domain, entirely.
I’m going to guess this happened after OnlineDomain reported the move.
But the original text is still in the blog’s cached RSS feed at Feedly.
It’s perhaps not surprising that CSC would not want to draw attention to the fact that it’s withdrawn to a .com from a .services, the gTLD managed by Donuts.
After all, CSC manages dozens of new gTLDs for clients including Apple, Yahoo and Home Depot, and releases quarterly reports tracking and encouraging activation of dot-brands.
Interestingly, and I’m veering a little off-topic here, there is a .csc new gTLD but CSC does not own it. It was delegated to a company called Computer Sciences Corporation (ironically through an application managed by CSC rival MarkMonitor) which also owns csc.com.
Computer Sciences Corporation never really got around to using .csc, and in 2017 merged with a unit of HP to form DXC Technology.
If you visit nic.csc today, you’ll be redirected to dxc.technology/nic, which bears a notice that it’s the “registry for the .dxc top-level domain”.
Given that the .dxc top-level domain doesn’t actually exist, I think this might make DXC the first company to openly declare its intent to go after a dot-brand in the next round of new gTLDs.
Four more dot-brands join the gTLD deadpool
Four big-brand gTLDs have asked ICANN to terminate their contracts so far this year, bringing the total number of voluntarily discontinued strings to 73.
Notable among the terminations are two of the three remaining gTLDs being held by luxury goods maker Richemont, both of them Chinese-language generics.
It’s dumped .珠宝 (.xn--pbt977c) which is “.jewelry”, and .手表 (.xn--kpu716f) which is “.watches”.
The company, which applied for 14 gTLDs in the 2012 round, has already gotten rid of nine dot-brands. Only the English-language .watches remains of its former portfolio.
Also being terminated is .esurance, named for an American insurance provider owned by Allstate. This appears to be related to Allstate’s plan to discontinue the Esurance brand altogether this year.
There is still one .esurance domain active and listed in Google’s index: homeowners.esurance.
Allstate continues to own .allstate, which has a few active domains (which forward to its primary .com domain).
Finally, French reinsurance giant SCOR wants rid of .scor, which it has not been using.
End of the road for Neustar as GoDaddy U-turns again and buys out its registry biz
GoDaddy has changed its mind about the registry side of the industry yet again, and has acquired the business of Neustar, one of the largest and oldest registries.
The deal will see GoDaddy purchase, for an undisclosed sum, all of Neustar’s registry assets, amounting to 215 TLDs and about 12 million domains.
It means the gTLD .biz is now under the new GoDaddy Registry umbrella, as are the contracts to run the ccTLDs .us, .in, and .co, 130 dot-brand gTLDs and 70 open gTLDs.
Neustar’s registry staff are also being taken on.
“We’re bringing the whole team aboard. One of the things we’re very excited about is bringing the team aboard,” Andrew Low Ah Kee, GoDaddy’s chief operating officer, told DI today.
He added that, due to coronavirus job insecurities wracking many minds right now, GoDaddy has promised its entire workforce that there will be no layoffs in the second quarter.
Nicolai Bezsonoff, currently senior VP of Neustar’s registry business, will run the new unit. He said for him the opportunity for “innovation” was at the heart of the deal.
“We’ve always been one step removed from the customer, so it can be hard to understand what customer wants to do,” he said. “This gives us huge customer insight into what customers want and how they want to use domains.”
Pressed for hypothetical examples of innovation, Bezsonoff floated ideas about selling domains for partial-year periods, or doing more to crack down on DNS abuse.
The deal is an example of “vertical integration”, which has been controversial due to the potential risk of a dominant registry playing favorites with its in-house registrar, or vice versa.
While registries such as Donuts, CentralNic and until recently Uniregistry vertically integrated with little complaint, the industry is currently nervous about Verisign’s newfound ability under its ICANN contract to own and run a registrar.
Because GoDaddy is the Verisign — the runaway market leader — of the registrar side of the industry, one might expect this deal (expected to close this quarter) to get more scrutiny than most.
But the company says it’s going to “strictly adhere to a governance model that maintains independence between the GoDaddy registry and registrar businesses”.
Low Ah Kee said that this means the registry and registrar “won’t share any information that gives or appears to given any unfair advantage” to the GoDaddy registrar, that their business performance will be assessed separately, and that they’ll be audited to make sure they’re not breaking this separation.
If GoDaddy appears to be preemptively expecting criticism, there’s a good reason why: the proposed acquisition of .org manager PIR by private equity group Ethos Capital has caused huge upset in recent months, and there are some parallels here.
First, like .org, pricing restrictions were lifted in Neustar’s .biz under a contract renewal with ICANN last year. It fell under the radar a little as .biz is substantially smaller, not a legacy gTLD as such, and not widely used.
Like the .org deal, the transfer of control of .biz will also be subject to ICANN’s approval before GoDaddy and Neustar can seal the deal.
Could we be looking at another big public fight over a gTLD acquisition?
But unlike Ethos with .org, GoDaddy says it has no intention of raising prices with .biz.
“We will not be raising prices, in fact we will look into reducing prices for some TLDs,” Bezsonoff said.
One TLD where one assumes prices won’t be going down is .co, where Neustar has just had its margins massively slashed by the Colombian government.
The acquisition was announced just days after the Colombian government announced that it has renewed its contract with Neustar to run .co for another five years, but under financial terms hugely more favorable to itself.
Whereas the initial 10-year term saw the government being paid 6% to 7% of the .co take, that number has soared to 81%, making .co — arguably Neustar’s registry crown jewel — a substantially less-attractive TLD to manage.
One assumes that the acquisition price would have fluctuated wildly based on the outcome of the .co renegotiation, but the GoDaddy/Neustar execs I talked to today didn’t want to talk about terms.
GoDaddy’s history with the registry side of the business has been changeable.
As far as ICANN contract is concerned, it is already a registry because it owns the .godaddy dot-brand. But that’s currently unused, with the registry functions outsourced to — cough — Neustar’s arch-rival Afilias.
Given Neustar’s religious devotion to the dot-brand concept, and the weirdness of using one of your primary competitors for a key function, one might expect both of those situations to change.
GoDaddy did also apply for .casa and .home back in 2012, but changed its mind and abandoned both bids fairly early in the process.
The sudden excitement about the registry business today begs the question of why GoDaddy didn’t buy Uniregistry’s registry business at the same time as it bought its secondary market and registrar earlier this year, but apparently it was not for sale.
Following the acquisition, Neustar is keeping its DNS resolution services and GoDaddy will continue to use them, so Neustar is not entirely out of the domain game, but it looks like the end of the road for Neustar as a brand I regularly report on.
The registry started life in 2000 as “NeuLevel”, a joint-venture between Neustar and Aussie registrar Melbourne IT formed to apply to ICANN for new gTLDs. It wanted .web, but got .biz, which now has about 1.7 million names under management, down from a 2014 peak of 2.7 million.
Amazon governments vow revenge for “illegal and unjust” ICANN decision on .amazon
The eight nations of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization are unhappy that ICANN is giving .amazon to Amazon the retailer and have vowed to spread the word that ICANN has acted “illegally”.
ACTO secretary general Alexandra Moreira has written (pdf) to ICANN CEO Göran Marby to say: “We consider this decision an illegal and unjust expropriation of our culture, tradition, history and image before the world.”
She said that ACTO is now “committed to disseminating news of this situation to all relevant groups”, adding:
the international community should be aware of the very real consequences or ramifications (be it economic, environmental, cultural or related to questions of sovereignty) of granting exclusive access to the domain “.Amazon” to a single company.
The delegation of .amazon to Amazon the company, “jeopardizes the continued well-being of the societies that live there”, she wrote, with no elaboration.
Amazon was last month told it could have the gTLD after a years-long battle with ACTO and the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee, which had advised ICANN by consensus to reject the .amazon application.
That consensus broke last year when the US government basically said enough was enough and refused to continue back the eight South American governments’ plight.
Under the terms of Amazon’s contract, it has to protect hundreds of culturally sensitive second-level domains of ACTO’s choosing, and to give each of its members a single domain that they can use to promote their portion of the Amazonian region.
ACTO had wanted more, basically demanding joint ownership of .amazon, which Amazon refused.
It remains to be seen whether ACTO’s reaction will be limited to harsh language, or whether its members will actively try to disrupt ICANN activities. The next GAC-ICANN face-to-face, set for Cancun in March, could be interesting viewing.
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