ICANN director’s registry CEO job up for grabs

DotAsia is looking for a new CEO after 15 years of operation, DI understands.

Edmon Chung has been made Acting CEO and the board of the registry will start looking for a replacement by October 7, according to a source.

I’m told the board passed a resolution last week stating: “In pursuit of the fundamentals of transparency, accountability and fair competition, and in the DotAsia community best interests, the CEO contract should be put for open tender”.

Chung, who joined ICANN’s board of directors a year ago, will not be barred from reapplying for his job.

DotAsia, which of course runs .asia, was one of the successful registries in ICANN’s 2003 “sponsored” gTLD round.

The TLD launched in 2017 and currently has around 200,000 domains under management.

The DotAsia Organization in a non-profit entity with a complicated organizational structure involving several Asian ccTLDs.

.kids goes live, plans to launch this year

The long-anticipated .kids top-level domain has its first live site, and the registry has announced plans to start selling domains towards the end of the year.

The contractually mandated nic.kids is now resolving, leading to the registry web site of the DotKids Foundation.

Hong Kong-based DotKids, which has close ties to DotAsia and ICANN director Edmon Chung, said the plan is to start a sunrise period in the third quarter and go to general availability in the fourth quarter this year.

There’s also going to be a special registration period for children’s rights groups and a Q3 “Pioneer Program” for early adopters.

The idea behind the gTLD is to provide a space where all content is considered suitable for under-18s, though the exact policing policies have yet to be written. DotKids is using the UN definition of a child.

It will be a tough balancing act. My fifteen-year-old nephew isn’t happy with content that doesn’t involve the laser-beam dismemberment of tentacled beasts, but a decade ago was content to watch Peppa Pig on a loop for hours a day.

DotKids won the rights to .kids, somehow beating rival applicants Amazon and Google, in 2019. It signed a very strange Registry Agreement with ICANN last year.

Previous attempts at creating child-friendly domains have proven unsuccessful.

In the US, there was a government-mandated .kids.us brought in 20 years ago, aimed at under-13s, but it was a spectacular failure, attracting just a handful of registrations. It was killed off in 2012.

Russian speakers have their own equivalent gTLD .дети, a word that has taken on more sinister overtones in recent weeks, but that currently has only about 800 names under management.

DotKids has its work cut out to make .kids a commercial success, but it is a non-profit and it was the only new gTLD applicant to have most of its ICANN fees waived under the Applicant Support Program.

.spa registry relocates to .xyz

Newly installed .spa registry Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council has started using a .xyz domain for its official registry web site.

The organization last week had its IANA records updated to change its “URL for registration services” from aswpc.org to dotspa.xyz.

It currently resolves to a placeholder “Coming Soon” page.

Choosing a TLD other than its own, which entered the DNS root in September, is pretty unusual.

Most new gTLD registries activate nic.example pretty quickly after delegation, even if they ultimately use a domain such as get.example or register.example for their primary marketing sites.

Activating nic.example is actually an obligation under ICANN contracts. ASWPC has registered that domain, but only whois.nic.spa currently resolves.

The dotspa.xyz domain was registered about a year ago, about a month after ASWPC’s former business partner, DotAsia, washed its hands of its stake in the TLD.

Both the .com and .org versions have been registered for well over a decade, so perhaps .xyz was picked as the default third-choice generic.

But that still doesn’t explain why a registry would select a domain outside its own TLD for its primary site.

Angry investor sues for 30% of new .spa gTLD

Barely had the new gTLD .spa made it into the DNS root than it got sued by a company that claims it was stiffed out of a 30% stake in the domain.

Malaysia-based Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council, the newly minted registry, is being sued in Hong Kong by DotPH, the company that runs the Philippines ccTLD, .ph, over an eight-year-old investment deal DotPH says is being ignored.

It’s also named as defendants .asia registry DotAsia, DotAsia subsidiary Namesphere, and several DotAsia directors.

DotPH claims in its lawsuit that its CEO, Joel Disini, got together with DotAsia CEO Edmon Chung in early 2012 to come up with a deal whereby ownership of .spa, should its application be successful, would be split three ways.

ASWPC would hold half the shares, Namesphere 20%, and DotPH the remaining 30%, according to the complaint. DotPH claims it paid $60,000 for its stake in April 2012.

Now it claims that these shares were never formally issued, and it wants the Hong Kong court to force Namesphere to hand them over and force the original three-way ownership structure originally agreed.

But it turns out that DotAsia seems to have abandoned .spa anyway. Its board of directors a year ago voted to give ASWPC “sole rights” to the gTLD, enabling it to concentrate on .asia.

Disini, who was a member of the board at the time, claims he was only emailed about the vote a day before the meeting and did not see the email until it was too late.

He told DI: “the board of dotAsia moved to give away DotPH’s 30% equity in SPA”. He’s not happy about it. He reckons .spa could easily be a $2 million-a-year business.

The suit was filed October 19. You can read it here (pdf).

I’ve yet to receive a response to my request for comment from Chung, and will of course provide an update should he get back to me.

This is who won the .inc, .llc and .llp gTLD auctions

The winners of the auctions to run the gTLD registries for company identifiers .inc, .llc and .llp have emerged due to ICANN application withdrawals.
All three contested gTLDs had been held up for years by appeals to ICANN by Dot Registry — an applicant with the support of US states attorneys general — but went to private auction in September after the company gave up its protests for reasons its CEO doesn’t so far want to talk about.
The only auction won by Dot Registry was .llp. That stands for Limited Liability Partnership, a legal construct most often used by law firms in the US and probably the least frequently used company identifier of the three.
Google was the applicant with the most cash in all three auctions, but it declined to win any of them.
.inc seems to have been won by a Hong Kong company called GTLD Limited, run by DotAsia CEO Edmon Chong. DotAsia runs .asia, the gTLD granted by ICANN in the 2003 application round.
My understanding is that the winning bid for .inc was over $15 million.
If that’s correct, my guess is that the quickest, easiest way to make that kind of money back would be to build a business model around defensive registrations at high prices, along the lines of .sucks or .feedback.
My feedback would be that that business model would suck, so I hope I’m wrong.
There were 11 original applicants for .inc, but two companies withdrew their applications years ago.
Dot Registry, Uniregisty, Afilias, GMO, MMX, Nu Dot Co, Google and Donuts stuck around for the auction but have all now withdrawn their applications, meaning they all likely shared in the lovely big prize fund.
MMX gained $2.4 million by losing the .inc and .llc auctions, according to a recent disclosure.
.llc, a US company nomenclature with more potential customers of lower net worth, went to Afilias.
Dot Registry, MMX, Donuts, LLC Registry, Top Level Design, myLLC and Google were also in the .llc auction and have since withdrawn their applications.

DotAsia wants lower ICANN fees

As its active base of .asia domain name registrations continues to plummet, the DotAsia Organization wants to reduce its ICANN fees by a third.
CEO Edmon Chung has written to ICANN’s Kurt Pritz, asking if the annual transaction fee it pays per domain can be reduced from $0.75 to $0.50.
“A lower fee would enable DotAsia to invest further into meaningful community projects as well as to extend the awareness and adoption of the .ASIA domain,” Chung wrote. “The suggested amendment would also bring the fees into line with other gTLDs.”
I don’t expect the proposed changes to be especially controversial, but they do highlight how tough it is to launch a new TLD.
The .asia TLD has proved to be a bit of a damp squib, especially since the early-mover speculators started jumping ship, so the company could probably use being thrown a bone.
After .asia’s landrush, the company grew its registration base to a peak of 243,000 in April 2009, according to HosterStats.com, but it currently stands at around 183,000.