As pricey .new launches, Google reveals first set of big-name users including rapper Drake

Google Registry has opened up its .new gTLD for registration for the first time, but whether you get to buy one or not will depend on a team of Google judges.
The company opened up its “Limited Registration Period” on Monday, and it doing so revealed a bunch of early-adopter registrants including eBay, Bitly, Spotify, Github, Medium, Stripe and the Canadian musician Drake.
It’s not an open registration period. If you want a .new domain you’re going to need to present Google with a business case, showing how you intend to use your chosen domain.
These applications will be judged by Google in seven roughly month-long batches, the first of which ends January 5 and the last of which ends June 21 next year.
Competing applications for the same domain in the same batch will be decided in a beauty contest by Google itself. Needless to say, if you’re champing at the bit for a .new domain, you’ll be wanting to apply in as early a batch as possible.
If you’re lucky enough to get to register a domain, you’ll have 100 days to put it to its promised use, otherwise Google will suspend the name and keep your money.
Registry pricing has not been disclosed, but 101domain is listing .new names at $550 retail. You need the nod from Google before you get to buy the domain from a registrar.
Google says the pricing, which it acknowledges is “high”, is partly to pay for ongoing compliance monitoring. If you run a paid-for service in a .new domain, you’ll have to give Google a free account so it can check you’re sticking to your original plan.
It seems Google is going to be fairly strict about usage, which as I’ve previously reported is tied to “action generation or online creation flows”.
What this basically means is that when you type a live .new domain into your browser, you’ll be taken immediately to a page where you can create something, such as a text document, graphic design, auction listing, or blog post.
The only exception to this rule is when the web site needs a user to be logged in and redirects them to a login page instead. Most of the first tranche of registrants are currently doing this.
Google’s own .new domains include doc.new, which takes uses to a fresh sheet of blank paper at Google Docs.
The gTLD’s major anchors tenants have now been revealed at registry web site whats.new, and they include:

• eBay: type sell.new into your browser address bar and you’ll be taken to a page where you can create a new auction/sales page.
• Medium: story.new takes you to a blog post creation page.
• Spotify: create a new music playlist at playlist.new
• Webex: open up a web conference at webex.new or letsmeet.new.
• Bitly: create a shortened link at link.new.
• OVO Sound: this is a record label in the Warner Music stable, founded by Drake. It currently appears to be being used to plug two of OVO’s artists, which I think is a horrible waste of a nice domain. There’s no “content creation” that I can see, and I reckon it could be a prime candidate for deletion unless “listen to this crappy Drake song” counts as “action generation”.

There are a few more anchor tenants publicized at whats.new, but you get the idea.
.new will enter general availability next July.

Google quietly launches .new domains sunrise

Google Registry will allow trademark owners to register domains matching their marks in the .new gTLD from tomorrow.
While the company hasn’t made a big public announcement about the launch, the startup dates it has filed with ICANN show that its latest sunrise period will run from October 15 to January 14.
As previously reported, .new is a bit of a odd one. Google plans to place usage restrictions that require registrants to use the domains in the pursuit of “action generation or online contention creation”.
In other words, it wants registrants to use .new in much the same way as Google is today, with domains such as docs.new, which automatically opens up a fresh Google Docs word processing document when typed into a browser address bar.
From January 14, all the way to July 14, Google wants to run a Limited Registration Period, which will require wannabe registrants to apply to Google directly for the right to register a name.
During that period, registrants will have to that they’re going to use their names in compliance with .new’s modus operandi. It’s Google’s hope that it can seed the space with enough third-party content for .new’s value proposition to become more widely known.
If you’re wanting to pick up a .new domain in general availability, it looks like you’ve got at least nine more months to wait.

.bond domains could cost a grand each

Newish registry ShortDot has announced the release details for its recently acquired .bond gTLD, and they ain’t gonna be cheap.
The TLD is set to go to sunrise in a little under a month, October 17, for 33 days.
General availability begins November 19 with a seven day early access period during which the domains will be more expensive than usual but get cheaper each day.
The regular pricing is likely to see registrars sell .bond names for between $800 and $1,000 a pop, according to ShortDot COO Kevin Kopas.
There won’t be any more-expensive premium tiers, he said.
The gTLD was originally owned by Bond University in Australia, but it was acquired unused by ShortDot earlier this year.
The company hopes it will appeal to bail bondsmen, offerers of financial bonds and James Bond fans.
The business model with .bond is diametrically opposed to .icu, where names sell for under $2 a year (and renew for under $8, if indeed any of them renew).
That zone has inexplicably gone from 0 to 1.8 million names in the last 16 months, and ShortDot says it’s just crossed the two-million mark of registered names.
That second million appears to have been added in just the last three months.

.gay picks the absolutely perfect launch date

Top Level Design has announced the launch date for its forthcoming .gay gTLD, and the timing couldn’t be more symbolic.
It’s picked October 11 as the date for general availability, which also happens to be National Coming Out Day in the US.
National Coming Out Day, which has been observed by gay rights organizations since 1987, is meant to celebrate LBGTQ people “coming out of the closet” and publicly acknowledging their sexual identity.
It happens on the same date every year to commemorate a 1987 civil rights march in Washington, DC.
According to Wikipedia, the event is also celebrated in Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK.
Leading up to its GA launch, Top Level Design plans to kick off its sunrise period in August.
Given that .gay has not yet been delegated, and has not filed its startup plan with ICANN, I imagine there’s some flexibility to the launch timetable.
The registry has recently been brainstorming ideas about how to promote positive content and reduce the inevitable abuse in its new TLD.

Registry offers “$2,500” in sweeteners for .inc registrants

The newly launching .inc gTLD may be eye-wateringly expensive, but the registry is offering a package of incentives it reckons adds up to a $2,500 value to new registrants.
Intercap Registry’s .inc went into sunrise today. It’s expected to have retail price of $2,000 and up when it goes to general availability May 7. Sunrise registrants can expect to pay a couple thousand more.
Given the high price, and the fact that many businesses that end in “Inc” will likely view it primarily as an opportunity to waste yet more cash on defensive registrations, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of this particular gTLD.
But I’ve got to give the registry credit for at least making an effort to bump up its value proposition.
It’s currently listing 17 freebies, provided mostly by partners, that new .inc registrants can cash in to soften the dent in their wallets.
Registrants can get a free business formation package from LegalZoom and a free press release announcing their new business issued on GlobalNewsWire, for example. Together, that’s worth over a grand, Intercap says.
Most of the other benefits on offer are discounts on services such as telephony, shared office space, printing, accounting, payment processing and advertising services. Some require additional spending before they can be cashed in.
Partners include Google, Ting, Delta Airlines, Vistaprint and Quickbooks. Some of the offers look like typical affiliate marketing deals.
I imagine different registrants will find different benefits appealing. Some may use none at all. Intercap says more sweeteners will be added in future.
The registry says that its high pricing is there to deter cybersquatters. I imagine this will be successful to a large extent, but that it will probably attract a healthy defensive registration business also.

Google launches .dev with some big-name anchor tenants

Google is bringing .dev to general availability this week, and it’s already signed up some recognizable brands as anchor tenants.
Salesforce.com, GitHub and Cloudflare are among several outfits that have already developed web sites using pre-launch .dev domains granted to them by Google Registry.
Salesforce is offering developer tools at the catch crm.dev, GitHub is running a spin-off tool at github.dev and Cloudflare has workers.dev.
All are developed sites, among many more highlighted by Google’s “chief domain enthusiast” Ben Fried in a blog post yesterday.
Sites targeting female coders and offering advice on accessibility issues have also been launched.
.dev appears to have attracted over 500 registrations during its pre-launch periods, including sunrise.
Yesterday, it entered its Early Access Period, a week in which early birds can acquire .dev domains for a premium fee.
From five figures yesterday, prices decrease each day until they hit their .com-equivalent regular pricing on February 28.

XYZ reveals .monster gTLD launch dates

XYZ.com has quietly unveiled its launch plan for its recently acquired gTLD, .monster.
General availability, with no eligibility requirements, is due to begin April 1.
The 30-day sunrise period is due to begin in just a couple of weeks — February 18.
.monster was acquired late last year from recruitment web site Monster.com, which had intended to operate it as a dot-brand, for an undisclosed sum.
Before the acquisition closed, Monster and ICANN amended the registry contract to cut the special dot-brand terms that would have removed the need for a sunrise period and would have prevented the domain being sold to regular registrants.
XYZ also intends to run a week-long Early Access Period — where premium prices apply — starting March 21.
I quite like the idea of .monster as an open gTLD.
While it’s certainly not going to perform as well volume-wise as .xyz, say, I can see it fitting nicely into the “quirky” niche occupied currently but the likes of Donuts’ .guru and .ninja — not really viable as standalone TLDs, but decent enough as part of a portfolio.
The company is pitching the TLD as “a domain for creative thinkers, masters of their craft, and modern-day renegades.”

Failure to launch: 10 years-old gTLDs that are still dormant

Over six years after the last new gTLD application window closed, more than one in 10 new gTLDs have yet to launch, even though some have been delegated for over four years.
Once you filter out duplicates, withdrawals and terminations from the original 1,930 applications, there were a maximum of roughly 1,300 potential new gTLDs from the 2012 round.
But, by my calculations, 144 of those have yet to even get around to their sunrise period. Most of those haven’t even filed their launch plans with ICANN yet.
Here’s 10 from that list I’ve picked based on how interesting they appear to me, in no particular order.
Yes, DI is doing listicles now. Hate-mail to the usual address.
.forum
This one’s owned by Jay Westerdal’s Top Level Spectrum, the same company behind .feedback, .realty and others. I quite like the potential of this string — the internet is chock-full of forums due to the easy availability of open-source forum software — but so far nobody’s gotten to register one. It was delegated back in June 2015 and doesn’t have a published launch plan as yet. An FAQ reading just saying “Jay was here !!!!! Test deploy..delete me later…” has been up on its site since at least last September. TLS is also sitting on .contact and .pid (for “personal ID”) with no launch dates in sight.
.scholarships
Owned by Scholarships.com, there’s a whiff of the defensive about this one. It’s been in the root since March 2015 but its site states the registry “is still finishing launch plans and will provide updates as they become available”. Scholarships.com is a site that connects would-be higher education students to potential sources of funding. It’s difficult to imagine many ways the matching gTLD could possibly help in that mission.
.giving
JustGiving, the UK-based charity campaign aggregator, won this gTLD and had it delegated in August 2015, but seemingly still hasn’t figured out what it wants to do with it. It’s not a dot-brand, so it’s presumably mulling over ways to give .giving domains to fundraisers in a way that does not compromise credibility. Whatever its plans, it’s taking its sweet time over them.
.cancerresearch
This is a weird one. Delegated four years ago, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation rather quickly went live with a bunch of interlinked .cancerresearch web sites, using its contractually permitted allotment of promotional domains. Contractually, it’s not a dot-brand, but it’s basically acting like one, having never actually given ICANN any info about sunrise, eligibility, trademark claims, general availability, etc. Technically, it’s still pre-launch, and I can’t see any reason why it would want to budge from that status. Huge loophole in the ICANN rules?
.beauty
Another whiff of gaming here. International woman-shaming powerhouse L’Oreal still has no announced plans to launch .beauty, .skin or .hair, which it had originally wanted to run as so-called “closed generics” (presumably to keep the keywords out of the hands of competitors). Of its small portfolio of generic gTLDs, delegated in 2016, it has actually launched .makeup already, with a $6,000 retail price and a strategy seemingly based on registry-owned domains matching the names of makeup-focused social media influencers. At least it’s actually selling names, even if nobody’s bought one yet.
.budapest
One of three city TLDs that were delegated back in 2014 but have yet to start selling domains. MMX is to run it in partnership with the local government of the Hungarian city, if it ever gets off the ground. Madrid (.madrid) and Zurich (.zuerich) have both also yet to roll out, although Zurich has settled on early 2019 for its launch.
.fan
Regular DI readers won’t be surprised to see this one on the list. In what may turn out to be a shocking waste of money, .fans registry Asiamix Digital acquired the singular .fan from Donuts back in 2015 and promptly let it sit idle for the next three years. Currently, with .fans turning out to be a flop, Asiamix has money troubles and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it under new ownership before too long. It’s not a terrible string, so there’s some potential there.
.ком, etc
.ком is one of 11 internationalized domain name transliterations of .com — .कॉम, .ком, .点看, .คอม, .नेट, .닷컴, .大拿, .닷넷, .コム, .كوم and .קוֹם — that Verisign had delegated back in 2015. To date, only the Japanese .コム has launched, and the registry reportedly arsed it up quite badly. Records show .コム peaked at over 28,000 names and sits at fewer than 7,000 today. None of the remaining IDNs have launch dates attached.
Anything owned by Google or Amazon
When it comes to sitting on dormant gTLDs, you can’t top Google and Amazon for sheer numbers. Google has 19 strings in pre-launch states right now, while Amazon has a whopping 34. Amazon is letting the likes of .free, .wow, .now, .deal, .save and .secure sit idle, while Google is still stroking its chin on the likes of .eat, .meme, .fly and .channel. At the snail’s pace these companies roll out gTLDs, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these strings never hit the market.
.bom
Portuguese for “.good”, .bom was delegated to local ccTLD registry Nic.br in 2015 but has no published launch dates and no content on its nic.bom registry web site. I’d say more, but I expect a certain prolific DI commenter could do a better job of it, so I’ll turn it over to him…

Google’s $25 million .app domain finally has a launch date

One of the questions I get asked fairly regularly is “When is .app coming out?”, but until today I haven’t had a good answer.
Now I do. Google has finally released its launch timeline for the could-be-popular new gTLD.
.app will go to sunrise March 29, the company said last week.
Trademark holder exclusivity will end May 1, at which point a week-long Early Access Period will kick in.
There will be an extra fee, so far undisclosed, for EAP buyers.
Finally, on May 8, everyone will get access to the domain as it goes into general availability.
Registry pricing has not been disclosed.
Unusually for a new gTLD, Google plans to keep its Trademark Claims service — which notifies registrants and trademark owners when there’s a potential trademark infringement — open indefinitely, as opposed to the minimum 90-day period.
.app was delegated in early July 2015, so it’s been a loooong wait for people interested in the space.
Google paid $25 million for .app at an ICANN public auction in February 2015. At the time, that was a record-breaking price for a gTLD, but it’s since between dwarfed by the $135 million Verisign is paying for .web.
Google also said that it’s currently working on a launch plan for .dev, another gTLD that folk have been asking about, but that for now it’s focused on .app alone.

L’Oreal shows cards on former “closed generic” gTLDs

Want to register a .beauty or .makeup domain name? L’Oreal will get to decide unilaterally whether “you’re worth it”.
The cosmetics maker has released the registration policies for its first former “closed generic” gTLD, .makeup, and they’re among the most restrictive in the industry.
Free speech appears to be the first victim of the policy — “gripe sites” are explicitly banned in the same breath as cybersquatting, 419 scams and the sale of counterfeit goods.
Domain investors and those who would hide their identity behind Whois privacy services appear to be unwelcome, too.
But perhaps most significantly, L’Oreal has also given itself the right to decide, in its sole discretion, whether a would-be registrant is eligible to own a .makeup domain.
Its launch policy reads:

Registrant Eligibility Requirements
To support the mission and purpose of the TLD, in order to register or renew a domain name in the TLD, Applicants must (as determined by the Registry in its sole and exclusive right):

• Own, be connected to, employed by, associated with, or affiliated with a company that provides makeup and/or cosmetics related products, services, news, and/or content; or (ii) be an individual, association, or entity that has a meaningful nexus (as determined by the Registry in its sole discretion) with the cosmetics industry; and
• Possess a bona fide intention to use the domain name in supporting the mission and purpose of the TLD.

Would-be registrants have to submit an “application” for the domain they want, and L’Oreal gets to decide whether to approve it or not.
Whether L’Oreal chooses to apply liberal or conservative standards here remains to be seen.
Like most new gTLD registries, the company plans to reserve many domains for the use of itself, partners, or future release.
The policies also give L’Oreal broad discretion to suspend or terminate names it decides violate the terms of the registration policy, which it says it can amend and retroactively apply at any time.
Using the domain counter to the mission statement of the gTLD is a violation. The mission statement reads:

The mission and purpose of the TLD is first and foremost to promote the beauty, makeup and cosmetics segments, through meaningful engagement with manufacturers, beauty enthusiasts, consumers, and retailers, using a domain space intended for use by individuals and/or companies within or associated with the various industries that provide, utilize, or bear a recognizable connection to makeup and cosmetic products and/or services.

L’Oreal has defined gripe sites — sites established primarily to criticize — as a security and stability concern that “may put the security of any Registrant or user at risk”, banning

other abusive behaviors that appear to threaten the stability, integrity or security of the TLD or any of its registrar partners and/or that may put the security of any Registrant or user at risk, including but not limited to: cybersquatting, sale and advertising of illegal or counterfeit goods, front-running, gripe sites, deceptive and⁄or offensive domain names, fake renewal notices, cross gTLD registration scams, traffic diversion, false affiliation, domain kiting⁄tasting, fast-flux, 419 scams.

If you want to set up a .makeup web site to criticize, say, L’Oreal for “body shaming” or for its animal testing policy, lots of luck to you.
The gTLD is owned by L’Oreal but seems to be being managed primarily by its application consultant, Fairwinds Partners.
It was originally designated as a single-registrant space, a so-called “closed generic” or “exclusive access” gTLD, in which only L’Oreal could register names.
But the company was forced to change its plans, under pain of losing its application, after the Governmental Advisory Committee persuaded ICANN to perform a U-turn on the permissibility of closed generics.
.makeup is due to start accepting pre-launch requests for Founders Program domains next Monday. General availability will start October 19.
Sunrise will kick off September 8, though L’Oreal warns that it has withheld generic terms such as “shop” from this period.
The company also owns .beauty, and I expect its terms there to be similar.