As .spa launches, former partner pisses in the champagne

The world’s newest gTLD is due to hit its landrush launch phase tomorrow, but a disgruntled former business partner is warning that it plans to get all the registrations cancelled.

DotPH, the ccTLD registry for the Philippines, reckons it is owed half of the equity in .spa under a 2012 agreement, and has been warning registrars that to sell .spa domains would be to breach three injunctions it has secured through a Hong Kong court.

The latest such injunction (pdf), dated April 23, in part prevents the registry, Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council:

(whether directly or indirectly and whether by itself or via its agents or service providers (viz. registrars and registry backend) (“Agents/Service Providers”), employees and/or associated corporate entities whatsoever) be restrained from entering into any agreements for the sale, lease or other use or disposal of any .spa sub-domains (“Launch Agreements”) and/or causing, procuring or giving consent to the Agents/Service Providers to enter into any Launch Agreements

The injunctions are being interpreted differently by DotPH and ASWPC.

DotPH told participating registrars — there are at least 36 of them, according to the ASWPC web site — in a May 12 letter (pdf) from its lawyers:

ASWPC must stop selling .spa domains – by itself, or by or through its agents including Registrars… ASWPC cannot allow or permit any of its Registrars to sell any .spa domains.

It goes on to say:

Our clients will seek orders to cancel all registrations accepted by the .Spa Registry in breach of the Court order. You should alert any existing registrants, and any intending registrants of the Court order, and of the likelihood that any .spa domains registered are likely to be cancelled – unless they have a contract dating before 19 April 2021 requiring ASWPC, or you, to register their domains.

ASWPC’s interpretation appears to differ, in that it does not believe registrars are bound by the injunction, due to the chain of contracts between registry and registrant.

DotPH says that the Hong Kong High Court is next due to consider the case in August.

The .spa landrush phase is due to run from 1600 UTC May 26 until October 1. It’s ostensibly a community-based gTLD, but has eligibility policies that make it open to essentially anyone.

World’s youngest country launches its Nazi-risk TLD next week

South Sudan is gearing up to launch its controversial top-level domain, .ss, on Monday.

It’s being run by the National Communication Authority for the country, which was founded in 2011 after its split from Sudan and is the world’s youngest nation.

As I noted back then, while SS was the natural and obvious choice of ISO country code, it’s potentially controversial due to the risk of it being used by modern-day Nazis in honor of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel.

Arguably, the risk nine years later is even greater due to the rise of the populist, nationalist right around the world.

So some readers may be pleased to hear that the registry is playing its launch by the book, starting with a sunrise period from June 1 to July 15. Trademark owners will have to show proof of ownership.

I’m sure Hugo Boss already has an intern with a checkbook, trademark certificate and sleeping bag outside the registry’s HQ, to be sure to be first in line on Monday.

Sunrise will be followed by a landrush period from July 17 to August 17, during which names can be acquired for a premium fee.

Immediately after that there’ll be an early access period, from August 19 to August 29, with more premium fees. General availability will begin September 1.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the direction other ccTLDs have been taking over the last decade, South Sudan has opted for a three-level structure, with registrations possible under .com.ss, .net.ss, .biz.ss, .org.ss, .gov.ss, .edu.ss, .sch.ss and .me.ss.

The com/net/biz/me versions are open to all. The others require some proof that the registrant belongs to the specific category.

The registry says it plans to make direct second-level regs available “at a later date”.

Getting your hands on a .ss domain may prove difficult.

Trademark owners won’t be able to use their regular corporate registrar (at least not directly) as NCA is only currently accredited South Sudan-based registrars. So far, only two have been accredited. Neither are also ICANN-accredited.

One is rather unfortunately called JuHub. It’s apparently using a free domain from Freenom’s .ml (Mali) and is listed as having its email at Gmail, which may not inspire confidence. Its web site does not resolve for me.

The other is NamesForUs, which is already taking pre-registration requests. No pricing is available.

The registry’s web site has also been down for most of today, and appears to have been hacked by a CBD splogger at some point, neither of which bodes well.

Argentina will use a lottery to decide 2LD landrush

Argentina has become the latest country to allow its ccTLD registrants to register domains at the second level.
NIC Argentina announced last week that in addition to third-level domains such as example.com.ar and example.net.ar, you’ll be able to buy example.ar too.
While it’s following in the footsteps of the likes of .uk and .nz (and soon .au), Argentina is taking a slightly different approach to grandfathering and conflicts.
First, the priority registration period is pretty short, at least compared to the five years .uk registrants got.
If you already own a .ar 3LD, you only have until November 9 to get your application in for the matching 2LD.
In the event that more than one application is received from eligible registrants, the winner won’t be decided by auction, but by lottery.
The City of Buenos Aires Lottery will conduct the raffle, randomly assigning priority numbers to applicants to determine who gets first dibs on their domain of choice.
It’s the first time I’ve seen a domain contest settled by lottery since the process ICANN used to assign priorities to new gTLD applicants back in 2012.
From November 25 until January 23, the .ar process will enter a landrush phase, during which anyone can apply for any available 2LD they want by paying a non-refundable application fee.
The fee is ARS 200, the Argentine peso equivalent of $3.50, so the registry can hardly be accused of greed.
Again, competing bids will be settled by the same lottery process, with the winner having to pay the standard ARS 340 registration fee (the equivalent of $6) to claim their domain.
After February 23, it’s open season, with every domain in general availability.
.ar currently has just shy of half a million domains under management, and hasn’t seen any significant growth in a couple of years.
It will be interesting to see how popular the 2LD offer is, and what impact it has on domain growth in the industry overall.
Argentina allows .ar registrations from non-residents, but it does not appear to be a simple process.

XYZ relaunches .storage with $2,200 price tag

XYZ.com has reopened .storage to registrations with a new, much higher price tag.
A confusingly named “Trademark Holder Landrush” started yesterday and will run for three weeks.
It’s not a sunrise period — .storage already had its ICANN-mandated sunrise under its previous management — and it appears that it’s not actually restricted to trademark holders.
The .storage web site states that “neither registrars nor XYZ will validate trademarks during this period”. The registry says that all strings, including generic words, are available.
It basically appears to be just a way to squeeze a little extra cash out of larger companies and anyone else desperate for a good name.
There are not many registrars carrying the TLD right now, just five brand protection registrars and 101domain.
101domain prices the names at $699.99 with a $1,500 application fee during the trademark landrush.
XYZ says that the regular suggested retail price for .storage will be $79.99 per month which seems to be a roundabout way of saying $948 per year. There’s no option to register for less than a year.
.storage is designed for companies in the data storage and physical storage industries, so adopting a high-price, low-volume business model is probably a smart move by the registry.
It’s a similar model to that XYZ employs in its car-related gTLDs operated in partnership with Uniregistry.
XYZ does not appear to be relying entirely on defensive registrations to make its coin, however.
It’s offering a “complimentary” web site migration service, usually priced at $10,000, that it says can help early registrants switch to .storage in as little as 72 hours with no loss of search engine juice.
.storage was originally owned by Extra Storage Space, a physical storage company, but XYZ acquired the contract for an undisclosed sum in May.
The trademark landrush will be immediately followed by an Early Access Period, during which there will also be a sliding-scale fee (day one will be a whopping $55,000 at 101domain!), before general available starts a month from now.

.storage to have pricey second sunrise

The .storage gTLD is to get a second sunrise period after being acquired and repurposed by XYZ.com.
The registry will operate a “Trademark Landrush Period” for three weeks from November 7 as the first stage of .storage’s reboot as an open-to-all gTLD.
It’s not technically a “sunrise” period under ICANN rules — that phase was already completed under previous owner Extra Space Storage — nor is it restricted to trademark owners.
Basically anyone with the money will be able to buy a .storage domain during the period, but at a price.
One registrar is reporting that registrants will have to pay a $1,500 application fee on top of the soon-to-be-standard higher $699-per-year registration fee.
That’s considerably more than most new gTLDs charge during their regular sunrise phases.
There’s no need to own a matching trademark, so neither the registry, registrars or Trademark Clearinghouse have any trademark verification costs to bear.
But that also means anyone can pick up any generic, dictionary .storage domain they want without the need for paperwork. XYZ has previously said that all domains will be available at the same price, regardless of their previous “premium” status.
I can see some intellectual property interests being uneasy with how this relaunch is handling trademarks.
Under its former management, .storage was set to be tightly restricted to the physical and data storage industries, reducing the chance of cybersquatting, so some brands may have avoided the sunrise period.
After the relaunch — general availability starts December 5 — there will be no such restrictions. However, the high price of standard registrations is likely to deter all but the richest or dumbest cybersquatters.
XYZ.com acquired .storage for an undisclosed sum in May. There are currently about 800 domains in the .storage zone file.

Chinese to invade .africa? CEO thinks so

While .africa finally went on sale last week after years of legal fights, it seems Africans may find themselves in the minority of registrants.
A combination of awareness, pricing and anticipated interest from Chinese domain investors, means that Africans could account for as few as 1 in 10 .africa registrations, according to Lucky Masilela, CEO of .africa registry ZA Central Registry.
The domain went into its sunrise period last week, and has a multi-phased launch planned out that will last until July 1, 2018.
After the trademark owners have had their crack at the domain — Masilela tells us that South Africa brands such as Nando’s are among the first to grab theirs — there will be five phases in which domains will be open to all but priced at a premium.
Starting June 5 there will be five landrush periods of five day, each a kind of hybrid between the traditional landrush period and the kind of Early Access Period offered by Donuts and others.
Each landrush will see all names priced at a certain amount, with the amount going down at the start of each period — $5,000 to $2,000 to $1,000 to $500 (all USD).
In the event that any name is claimed by more than one registrant, there will be an auction for that name at the end of the period.
Then on July 4 comes the first period of “general availability”, from which point all domains will be first-come, first-served.
But for the first 28 days of GA, domains will be priced at $150, other than domains categorized by the registry as premium.
Domains then come down to a more affordable $18 wholesale.
But that’s not the end. ZACR has baked in a price reduction to $12.50 wholesale, due to kick in July 1 2018. From then on out, it’s business as usual.
Unlike similar TLDs such as .eu, there are to be no geographic restrictions on who can register .africa names, and Masilela said he expects registrants from Africa to be in a minority.
“I think were are looking at about 10% from the continent, growing gradually over the years,” Masilela said. “The next wave is going to be international registrars.”
“We have a big suspicion that we will probably see a huge uptake coming from the east, which is the China market,” he said. “They’ll probably come in and grab a large number of domain names.”
He said that Chinese investment in Africa offline is likely to be mirrored online.
Pricing is also likely to be a factor. While .africa will bottom out, ignoring periodic discounts, at $12.50, that’s still quite a lot more than you’d expect to pay for African ccTLDs. ZACR’s own .za costs about $4 per year.
The relatively high price of becoming ICANN accredited has also meant that while Africa has 50-something countries, there are currently only about half a dozen gTLD registrars based there.
ZACR proposes to counter this by offering a gateway service rather like the one it already offers in .joburg and .capetown, that would help bring its own .za registrars on board.

After shaky start, .blog launches today

The new gTLD .blog goes into general availability today, after some mild controversy about the way the registry allocated reserved domain names.
Knock Knock Whois There, the registry affiliated with WordPress maker Automattic, last week apologized to some would-be customers for declining to honor some landrush pre-registrations.
Some registrants had complained that domains that were accepted for pre-registration were subsequently added to KKWT’s list of registry-reserved names, making them unavailable for registration.
KKWT said in a blog post Thursday that the confusion was due to it not having finalized its reserved list until just before its landrush period kicked off, November 2.
Registrars, including those accepting pre-registrations, were not given the final lists until the last minute.
Landrush applications cost around $250 but were refundable.
KKWT also revealed the make-up of its founders program domains, the 100-strong list of names it was allowed to allocate pre-sunrise.
The founders program currently seems to be a bit of a friends-and-family affair.
Of the 25 live founder sites currently listed, about 20 appear to be owned by the registry, its employees and close affiliates.
The registry said in its blog post that 25 super-generic domains had been given to WordPress.com. It seems the blog host will offer third-level names in these domains for free to its customers.
.blog had 1,743 domains in its zone file yesterday.
General availability starts about 30 minutes from the time this post was posted, at 1500 UTC. Prices are around the $30 mark.

.london launch day biggest yet for new gTLDs, but did it miss targets?

Dot London Domains’ .london had just shy of 35,000 domains in its zone file this morning, after its first partial day of general availability.
That’s an addition of 12,421 domains over yesterday’s number, making .london the 11th most-registered new gTLD.
This makes .london — which in my opinion has had one of the best launch marketing campaigns we’ve seen this year — the most-successful gTLD, in volume terms, after its first GA day.
It has beaten the 33,012 names that .在线 (“.online” in Chinese) and the 31,645 names that .berlin had in their zone files at the end of their respective GA days.
.london domains are not particularly cheap, either. Minds + Machines sells at £30 ($48) a year and Go Daddy (which lists .london at the top of its UK home page today) sells at $59.99.
UK-based Domainmonster, part of Host Europe Group, performed well with a £34.99 ($56) annual fee.
There were 22,547 .london names claimed during the “London Priority Period”, a combined sunrise/landrush phase that gave first dibs on names to trademark owners followed by London residents.
The registry has not broken down the mix between sunrise and landrush, but I believe based on the paltry sunrise performance of every other new gTLD to date that the vast majority were landrush names.
The full priority period queue has not yet been processed — domains with more than one applicant are currently in auction.
Back-end provider Minds + Machines, recently told the markets that it expects about a quarter of landrush/sunrise names to go to auction, so we could be looking at something like 7,500 applications (as opposed to domains) currently in the auction queue.
What this may mean is that .london had roughly 30,000 applications during its priority period, about 20,000 less than it had predicted back in July.
Dot London Domains is closely affiliated with London & Partners, the PR machine for the Mayor of London, so it had resources and access to throw at an effective marketing campaign.

Radix’s first gTLD landrushes only risk-free if you shop around

Radix Registry has gone into landrush with its first new gTLDs, promising a “risk-free” experience for buyers who want to get into .website, .press and .host early.
But different registrars are handling the phase in different ways — with a staggering range of prices — so you could still lose money on domains you don’t get unless you shop around.
Business head Sandeep Ramchandani confirmed that while Radix does not have any nonrefundable components at the registry end, it’s up to the individual registrars to decide whether to follow suit.
Radix has set up a microsite to help would-be registrants compare prices and find a registrar with a refundable fee.
It’s a useful tool, because prices vary wildly by registrar.
For .website, the lowest-cost of the three gTLDs, you’ll probably want to avoid Go Daddy. Its “priority pre-registration” service costs a whopping $174.98 for a bog-standard domain, compared to landrush fees around the $40 mark at all the other listed registrars.
General availability pricing for .website appears to be in line with .com, with Name.com and Go Daddy both listing GA domains at $14.99.
.press and .host, which cater to rather more niche markets, have correspondingly higher base pricing. Both will hit GA with pricing ranging from $100 to $130, it seems.
To apply for names in either during landrush you can expect to pay between $250 and $360, depending on registrar.
You’re also going to have a harder time finding a registrar that will refund landrush fees in .press and .host; Radix currently lists four registrars doing this for .press and only two for .host.
For premium names, Radix is going the now fairly industry standard route of charging premium fees on renewals as well as the initial registration.
investing.website will set you back $3,125 a year at Name.com, for example, while whiskey.website will cost $312.50 a year.
Go Daddy is not yet carrying Radix premium names.
Some names have five-figure renewal fees attached, Ramchandani said.
But he added that Radix has only set aside “a few hundred” premium names in each of the three TLDs, a much lower number than most previous new gTLD launches.
The idea is to get domains out there and in the hands of users, he said.
The new microsite also carries a few downloadable spreadsheets of supposedly attractive names that are available at the basic, non-premium registration fee.
Seasoned domain investors might find some bargains there (assuming they don’t go to landrush auction), but there are also some oddities.
Is wellnessfinder.website worthy of a recommendation, just because the domain+website wellnessfinder.com sold for €300,000 in 2011?
And to what possible use could you put a vagina.press? I shudder to think…

Crazy housing market reflected in .london landrush

The world’s insatiable appetite for property in London is being reflected in applications for domain names during .london’s landrush, according to the registry.
Just a few days before the landrush ends, over 30 applications have been filed for properties.london, Dot London said, and apartments.london and houses.london “are among the most sought after” domains.
The registry said:

Trades that serve the property industry are also proving popular, with addresses such as removals.london and scaffolding.london receiving numerous applications, while there are three times as many applications for estateagent.london as for lettingagent.london.

The property market in London is utter madness right now. The average price of a house here is £567,392 ($963,275), up over 12% on a year ago, according to Zoopla.
I could buy a three-bedroom semi-detached house in the town of my birth for the price of a parking space in London.
Apartments literally smaller than a snooker table were selling for £90,000 ($152,000) two years ago.
It’s madness, I tell you, madness.
While much of the house price boom can be blamed on overseas investors, many of whom leave their properties vacant, Dot London is at least giving the city’s residents special treatment in .london.
The landrush is being carried out simultaneously with the sunrise period. Both commenced April 29 and end July 31.
Trademark owners get priority, followed by applicants with London addresses. In the event domains are contested by multiple applicants with the same priority, there’ll be a private auction.
Dot London says that the most-popular landrush domain is nightlife.london, completely unrelated to property. It has more than 40 applications.