ICANN ordered to freeze .hotel after “serious questions” about trade secrets “theft”

ICANN has been instructed to place the proposed .hotel gTLD in limbo after four applicants for the string raised “sufficiently serious questions” that ICANN may have whitewashed the “theft” of trade secrets.

The order was handed down last month by the emergency panelist in the Independent Review Process case against ICANN by claimants Fegistry, MMX, Radix and Domain Ventures Partners.

Christopher Gibson told ICANN to “maintain the status quo” with regards the .hotel contention set, meaning currently winning applicant Hotel Top Level Domain, which is now owned by Afilias, won’t get contracted or delegated until the IRP is resolved.

At the core of the decision (pdf) is Gibson’s view that the claimants raised “sufficiently serious questions related to the merits” in allegations that ICANN mishandled and acted less than transparently in its investigation into a series of data breaches several years ago.

You may recall that ICANN seriously screwed up its new gTLD application portal, configuring in such a way that any applicant was able to search for and view the confidential data, including financial information such as revenue projections, of any other competing applicant.

Basically, ICANN was accidentally publishing applicants’ trade secrets on its web site for years.

ICANN discovered the glitch in 2015 and conducted an audit, which initially fingered Dirk Krischenowski — who at time was the half-owner of a company that owned almost half of HTLD as well as a lead consultant on the bid — as the person who appeared to have accessed the vast majority of the confidential data in March and April 2014.

ICANN did not initially go public with his identity, but it did inform the affected applicants and I managed to get a copy of the email, which said he’d downloaded about 200 records he shouldn’t have been able to access.

It later came to light that Krischenowski was not the only HTLD employee to use the misconfiguration to access data — according to ICANN, then-CEO of HTLD Katrin Ohlmer and lawyer Oliver Süme had too.

HTLD execs have always denied any wrongdoing, and as far as I know there’s never been any action against them in the proper courts. Krischenowski has maintained that he had no idea the portal was glitched, and he was using it in good faith.

Also, neither Ohlmer nor Krischenowski are still involved with HTLD, having been bought out by Afilias after the hacking claims emerged.

These claims of trade secret “theft” are being raised again now because the losing .hotel applicants think ICANN screwed up its probe and basically tried to make it go away out of embarrassment.

Back in August 2016, the ICANN board decided that demands to cancel the HTLD application were “not warranted”. Ohlmer barely gets a mention in the resolution’s rationale.

The losing applicants challenged this decision in a Request for Reconsideration in 2016, known as Request 16-11 (pdf). In that request, they argued that the ICANN board had basically ignored Ohlmer’s role.

Request 16-11 was finally rejected by the ICANN board in January last year, with the board saying it had in fact considered Ohlmer when making its decision.

But the IRP claimants now point to a baffling part of ICANN’s rationale for doing so: that it found “no evidence that any of the confidential information that Ms. Ohlmer (or Mr. Krischenowski) improperly accessed was provided to HTLD”.

In other words, ICANN said that the CEO of the company did not provide the information that she had obtained to the company of which she was CEO. Clear?

Another reason for brushing off the hacking claims has been that HTLD could have seen no benefit during the application process by having access to its rivals’ confidential data.

HTLD won the contention set, avoiding the need for an auction, in a Community Priority Evaluation. ICANN says the CPE was wholly based on information provided in its 2012 application, so any data obtained in 2014 would have been worthless.

But the losing applicants say that doesn’t matter, as HTLD/Afilias still have access to their trade secrets, which could make the company a more effective competitor should .hotel be delegated.

This all seems to have been important to Gibson’s determination. He wrote in his emergency ruling (pdf) last month:

The Emergency Panelist determines that Claimants have raised “sufficiently serious questions related to the merits” in in relation to the Board’s denial of Request 16-11, with respect to the allegations concerning the Portal Configuration issues in Request 16-11. This conclusion is made on the basis of all of the above information, and in view of Claimants’ IRP Request claim that ICANN subverted the investigation into HTLD’s alleged theft of trade secrets. In particular, Claimants claim that ICANN refused to produce key information underlying its reported conclusions in the investigation; that it violated the duty of transparency by withholding that information; that the Board’s action to ignore relevant facts and law was a violation of Bylaws; and further, to extent the BAMC and/or Board failed to have such information before deciding to disregard HTLD’s alleged breach, that violated their duty of due diligence upon reasonable investigation, and duty of independent judgment.

The Emergency Panelist echoes concerns that were raised initially by the Despegar IRP Panel regarding the Portal Configuration issues, where that Panel found that “serious allegations” had been made188 and referenced Article III(1) of ICANN’s Bylaws in effect at that time, but declined to make a finding on those issues, indicating “that it should remain open to be considered at a future IRP should one be commenced in respect of this issue.” Since that time, ICANN conducted an internal investigation of the Portal Configuration issues, as noted above; however, the alleged lack of disclosure, as well as certain inconsistencies in the decisions of the BAMC and the Board regarding the persons to whom the confidential information was disclosed and their relationship to, or position with HTLD, as well as ICANN’s decision to ultimately rely on a “no harm no foul” rationale when deciding to permit the HTLD application to proceed, all raise sufficiently serious questions related to the merits of whether the Board breached ICANN’s Article, Bylaws or other polices and commitments.

It’s important to note that this is not a final ruling that ICANN did anything wrong, it’s basically the ICANN equivalent of a ruling on a preliminary injunction and Gibson is saying the claimants’ allegations are worthy of further inquiry.

And the ruling did not go entirely the way of the claimants. Gibson in fact ruled against them on most of their demands.

For example, he said their was insufficient evidence to revisit claims that a review of the CPE process carried out by FTI Consulting was a whitewash, and he refused to order ICANN to preserve documentation relating to the case (though ICANN has said it will do so anyway).

He also ruled against the claimants on a few procedural issues, such as their demands for an Ombudsman review and for IRP administrator the International Center for Dispute Resolution to recuse itself.

Some of their claims were also time-barred under ICANN’s equivalent of the statute of limitations.

But ICANN will be prevented from contracting with HTLD/Afilias for now, which is a key strategic win.

ICANN reckons the claimants are just using the IRP to try to force deep-pocketed Afilias into a private auction they can be paid to lose, and I don’t doubt there’s more than a grain of truth in that claim.

But if it exposes another ICANN cover-up in the process, I for one can live with that.

The case continues…

No .sex please, we’re infected!

MMX saw poorer-than-expected sales of porn-related defensive registrations in the first half of the year, the only blip in what was otherwise a strong period for the company.

The registry updated the market today to say that its domain name base grew by 31% year over year during the half, ending June with 2.38 million names under management. It only grew by 19% in the same period last year.

Billings for H1 were up 7% at $7.9 million, MMX said.

But because the mix shifted away from one-off brokered sales, which are registered on the earnings report as a lump sum, and towards regular automated registrations, which are recognized over the lifetime of the reg, MMX expects to report revenue 5% down on last year.

While that’s all fair enough, the company said that it didn’t sell as many defensive blocks in .xxx, .sex, .porn and .adult as it had expected, which it blamed on coronavirus:

Management also notes that expected H1 channel sales from the Company’s brand protection activity were held back due to the impact of COVID-19, but anticipates those brand protection initiatives that were delayed in Q2 will resume in H2.

It’s a reference to the AdultBlock and AdultBlock Plus services launched last year, which enable trademark owners to block (and not use) their marks in all four adult TLDs for about $350 to $800 a year.

The latest industry C-suite musical chairs

There have been several top-level hires at big new gTLD players in the last week.
Donuts has announced it has appointed Mina Neuberg as chief marketing officer. Neuberg appears to be a newcomer to the domain industry, having most recently worked at a learning software company called Revolution Math. It’s the first time has had a named top marketing exec on its web site since VP Judith McGarry left a year ago.
Her appointment follows February’s announcement that Donuts hired Randy Haas as chief financial officer. He was previously CFO of Rhapsody/Napster, the online music company.
Meanwhile, Shayan Rostam has moved from Intercap Holdings, the registry for .inc, .dealer and .box, where he was chief registry officer, to portfolio registry Uniregistry, where he will be chief growth officer, a newly created position.
And DNW is reporting that new gTLD registry MMX has made two new C-level hires, both coming from Uniregistry: Vaughn Lilely has been recruited as chief growth officer while Ben Anderson is coming in as chief operating officer.

Hacking claims resurface as .hotel losers force ICANN to lawyer up again

The fight over .hotel has been escalated, with four unsuccessful applicants for the gTLD whacking ICANN with a second Independent Review Process appeal.
The complaint resurrects old claims that a former lead on the successful application, now belonging to Afilias, stole trade secrets from competing applicants via a glitched ICANN web site.
It also revives allegations that ICANN improperly colluded with the consultant hired to carry out reviews of “community” applications and then whitewashed an “independent” investigation into the same.
The four companies filing the complaint are new gTLD portfolio applicants MMX (Minds + Machines), Radix, Fegistry, and Domain Venture Partners (what we used to call Famous Four).
The IRP was filed November 18 and published by ICANN December 16, but I did not spot it until more recently. Sorry.
There’s a lot of back-story to the complaint, and it’s been a few years since I got into any depth on this topic, so I’m going to get into a loooong, repetitive, soporific, borderline unreadable recap here.
This post could quite easily be subtitled “How ICANN takes a decade to decide a gTLD’s fate”.
There were seven applicants for .hotel back in 2012, but only one of them purported to represent the “hotel community”. That applicant, HOTEL Top Level Domain, was mostly owned by Afilias.
HTLD had managed to get letters of support from a large number of hotel chains and trade groups, to create a semblance of a community that could help it win a Community Priority Evaluation, enabling it to skip to the finish line and avoid a potentially costly auction against its rival applicants.
CPEs were carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an independent ICANN contractor.
Surprisingly to some (including yours truly), back in 2014 it actually managed to win its CPE, scoring 15 out of the 16 available points, surpassing the 14-point winning threshold and consigning its competing bidders’ applications to the scrap heap.
There would be no auction, and no redistribution of wealth between applicants that customarily follows a new gTLD auction.
Naturally, the remaining applicants were not happy about this, and started to fight back.
The first port of call was a Request for Reconsideration, which all six losers filed jointly in June 2014. It accused the EIU of failing to follow proper procedure when it evaluated the HTLD community application.
That RfR was rejected by ICANN, so a request for information under ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy followed. The losing applicants reckoned the EIU evaluator had screwed up, perhaps due to poor training, and they wanted to see all the communications between ICANN and the EIU panel.
The DIDP was also rejected by ICANN on commercial confidentiality grounds, so the group of six filed another RfR, asking for the DIDP to be reconsidered.
Guess what? That got rejected too.
So the applicants then filed an IRP case, known as Despegar v ICANN, in March 2015. Despegar is one of the .hotel applicants, and the only one that directly plays in the hotel reservation space already.
The IRP claimed that ICANN shirked its duties by failing to properly oversee and verify the work of the EIU, failing to ensure the CPE criteria were being consistently applied between contention sets, and failing in its transparency obligations by failing to hand over information related to the CPE process.
While this IRP was in its very early stages, it emerged that one of HTLD’s principals and owners, Dirk Krischenowski, had accessed confidential information about the other applicants via an ICANN web site.
ICANN had misconfigured its applicant portal in such a way that any user could very access any attachment on any application belonging to any applicant. This meant sensitive corporate information, such as worst-case-scenario financial planning, was easily viewable via a simple search for over a year.
Krischenowski appears to have been the only person to have noticed this glitch and used it in earnest. ICANN told applicants in May 2015 that he had carried out 60 searches and accessed 200 records using the glitch.
Krischenowski has always denied any wrongdoing and told DI in 2016 that he had always “relied on the proper functioning of ICANN’s technical infrastructure while working with ICANN’s CSC portal.”
The applicants filed another DIDP, but no additional information about the data glitch was forthcoming.
When the first IRP concluded, in February 2016, ICANN prevailed, but the three-person IRP panel expressed concern that neither the EIU nor ICANN had any process in place to ensure that community evaluations carried out by different evaluators were consistently applying the CPE rules.
The IRP panel also expressed concern about the “very serious issues” raised by the ICANN portal glitch and Krischenowski’s data access.
But the loss of the IRP did not stop the six losing applicants from ploughing on. Their lawyer wrote to ICANN in March 2016 to denounce Krischenowski’s actions as “criminal acts” amounting to “HTLD stealing trade secrets of competing applicants”, and as such HTLD’s application for .hotel should be thrown out.
Again, to the best of my knowledge, Krischenowski has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any criminal act.
Afilias wrote to ICANN not many weeks later, April 2016, to say that it had bought out Krischenowski’s 48.8% stake in HTLD and that he was no longer involved in the company or its .hotel application.
And ICANN’s board of directors decided in August 2016 that Krischenowski may well have accessed documents he was not supposed to, but that it would have happened after the .hotel CPE had been concluded, so there was no real advantage to HTLD.
A second, parallel battle against ICANN by an unrelated new gTLD applicant had been unfolding over the same period.
A company called Dot Registry had failed in its CPE efforts for the strings .llc, .llp and .inc, and in 2014 had filed its own IRP against ICANN, claiming that the EIU had “bungled” the community evaluations, applying “inconsistent” scoring criteria and “harassing” its supporters.
In July 2016, almost two years later, the IRP panel in that case ruled that Dot Registry had prevailed, and launched a withering attack on the transparency and fairness of the ICANN process.
The panel found that, far from being independent, the EIU had actually incorporated notes from ICANN staff into its CPE evaluations during drafting.
It was as a result of this IRP decision, and the ICANN board’s decision that Krischenowski’s actions could not have benefited HTLD, that the losing .hotel applicants filed yet another RfR.
This one lasted two and a half years before being resolved, because in the meantime ICANN launched a review of the CPE process.
It hired a company called FTI Consulting to dig through EIU and ICANN documentation, including thousands of emails that passed between the two, to see if there was any evidence of impropriety. It covered .hotel, .music, .gay and other gTLD contention sets, all of which were put on hold while FTI did its work.
FTI eventually concluded, at the end of 2017, that there was “no evidence that ICANN organization had any undue influence on the CPE reports or engaged in any impropriety in the CPE process”, which affected applicants promptly dismissed as a “whitewash”.
They began lobbying for more information, unsuccessfully, and hit ICANN with yet another RfR in April 2018. Guess what? That one was rejected too.
The .hotel applicants then entered into a Cooperative Engagement Process — basically pre-IRP talks — from October 2018 to November 2019, before this latest IRP was filed.
It’s tempting to characterize it as a bit of a fishing expedition, albeit not a baseless one — any allegations of ICANN’s wrongdoing pertaining the .hotel CPE are dwarfed by the applicants’ outraged claims that ICANN appears to be covering up both its interactions with the EIU and its probe of the Krischenowski incident, partly out of embarrassment.
The claimants want ICANN to be forced to hand over documentation refused them on previous occasions, relating to: “ICANN subversion of the .HOTEL CPE and first IRP (Despegar), ICANN subversion of FTI’s CPE Process Review, ICANN subversion of investigation into HTLD theft of trade secrets, and ICANN allowing a domain registry conglomerate to takeover the ‘community-based’ applicant HTLD.”
“The falsely ‘independent’ CPE processes were in fact subverted by ICANN in violation of Bylaws, HTLD stole trade secrets from at least one competing applicant, and Afilias is not a representative of the purported community,” the IRP states.
“HTLD’s application should be denied, or at least its purported Community Priority relinquished, as a consequence not only for HTLD’s spying on its competitors’ secret information, but also because HTLD is no longer the same company that applied for the .HOTEL TLD. It is now just a registry conglomerate with no ties to the purported, contrived ‘Community’ that it claims entitled to serve,” it goes on.
ICANN is yet to file its response to the complaint.
Whether the IRP will be successful is anyone’s guess, but what’s beyond doubt is that if it runs its course it’s going to add at least a year, probably closer to two, to the delay that .hotel has been languishing under since the applications were filed in 2012.
Potentially lengthening the duration of the case is the claimants’ demand that ICANN “appoint and train” a “Standing Panel” of at least seven IRP panelists from which each three-person IRP panel would be selected.
The standing panel is something that’s been talked about in ICANN’s bylaws for at least six or seven years, but ICANN has never quite got around to creating it.
ICANN pinged the community for comments on how it should go about creating this panel last year, but doesn’t seemed to have provided a progress report for the last nine months.
The .hotel applicants do not appear to be in any hurry to get this issue resolved. The goal is clearly to force the contention set to auction, which presumably could happen at Afilias’ unilateral whim. Time-to-market is only a relevant consideration for the winner.
With .hotel, and Afilias’ lawsuit attempting to block the .web sale to Verisign, the last round of new gTLD program, it seems, is going to take at least a decade from beginning to end.

MMX switches porn TLDs from Afilias to Uniregistry

Minds + Machines is moving its four porn-themed gTLDs to a new back-end provider.
MMX CEO Toby Hall confirmed to DI today that the company is ditching Afilias, which had been providing registry services for .xxx since 2011.
“We’re in the process of switching the back-ends from Afilias to Uni for the ICM portfolio,” he said.
This portfolio, which MMX acquired last year, also includes .porn, .adult and .sex. There are roughly 170,000 domains under management in total, but about half of these are sunrise-period blocks in .xxx, which could add a wrinkle to the transition.
It appears that Afilias is still providing DNS for the TLDs, but Uniregistry has been named the official tech contact.
It’s not currently clear when the handover will be complete. Hall was not immediately available for further comment.
It’s also not currently clear why Uniregistry was selected. All of MMX’s 27 other gTLDs — the likes of .vip, .work and .law — have been running on Nominet’s platform since MMX dropped its own self-hosted infrastructure a few years back.
During the same restructuring, Uniregistry took on MMX’s registrar business.
Uniregistry has also been working closely with MMX on its recently launched AdultBlock trademark blocking services, which could wind up accounting for a big chunk of MMX’s porn-related revenue.
These latest four gTLDs to switch providers are merely the latest in a game of musical chairs that has been playing out for the last several months, five years after the first new gTLDs started going live and registries shop around for better back-end deals.
Nominet picked up most of Amazon’s portfolio, replacing Neustar, earlier this year.
But Nominet has lost high-profile .blog to CentralNic, and Afilias lost a Brazilian dot-brand to Nic.br

Porn-block retail prices revealed. Wow.

The first retail prices for MMX’s porn-blocking AdultBlock services have been revealed, and they ain’t cheap.
The registrar 101domain yesterday announced that it has started offering AdultBlock and sister service AdultBlock+, and published its pricing.
Trademark owners wanting to block a single string across .sex, .porn, .adult and .xxx will pay $349 per year with the vanilla, renew-annually service.
If they want the AdultBlock+ service, which also blocks homographs, they’ll pay $799 a year or $7,495 for the maximum 10-year term.
Compare this to the Sunrise B offer that ICM Registry made to trademark owners in 2011, where a string in .xxx cost roughly $200 to $300 for a 10-year block.
The two services are not directly comparable, of course. AdultBlock covers three additional TLDs and the AdultBlock+ service covers confusingly similar variants.
But trademark owners are buying peace of mind that their brands won’t be registered as porn sites, and the cost of that peace of mind just increased tenfold.
AdultBlock domains don’t resolve, and are a lot cheaper than domain registrations.
Renewing a single string in all four gTLDs at 101domain prices would cost around $480 a year, so customers will pay about 27% less buying a block instead.
The cost of the first year for those four domains would be $360, just $11 more than the AdultBlock price, according to 101domain’s price list.
MMX, which acquired the gTLD portfolio from ICM last year, is offering a discount on the AdultBlock+ service for customers buying before the end of 2019.
101domain is offering 10 years of AdultBlock+ for $3,999, a saving of $3,500.
101domain is not known as a particularly expensive registrar, so prices elsewhere in the industry could go higher.

Porn blocks could be worth millions to MMX

Minds + Machines could find itself making millions of dollars a year out of non-resolving defensive registrations in its recently acquired portfolio of porn-themed gTLDs.
The company recently announced the launch of AdultBlock and AdultBlock Plus, which will enable trademark owners to prevent anyone else registering their marks, and variants thereof, for up to 10 years.
Running the numbers, and taking into account MMX’s already substantial established client base for such services, AdultBlock could bring in as much as $11 million a year. But it’s almost certainly going to be much less than that.
The company won’t disclose it’s exact pricing for AdultBlock, or its revenue estimates, but it’s possible to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations and come to some ball-park guesses.
MMX has said that it’s pricing the service such that customers should be able to see a 35% saving compared to the cost of registering a single string across all four of its porn TLDs
The company acquired .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex when it bought ICM Registry last year.
The wholesale fee for each of the four is believed to be about $68 a year. From this, we can calculate that the wholesale price of AdultBlock may well be around the $175-a-year mark.
There’s some room for error here, as MMX hasn’t revealed precisely how it came to its 35% number, but I think we can safely say we’re looking at $150 to $200 a year. For the purposes of this envelope, let’s split the difference and assume it’s $175.
It’s quite a high number, a bit like a recurring sunrise fee for a domain that you don’t even get to use.
But how many domains can MMX expect to be blocked?
A low-ball estimate could be modeled on the .porn/.adult/.sex sunrise periods.
.porn launched in 2015 and gathered 2,091 sunrise registrations, according to ICANN records, making it one of the largest new gTLD sunrise periods. The other two TLDs weren’t far behind.
If that’s a good guide for AdultBlock uptake, we’re talking about a piddling $360,000-a-year business.
But MMX has a secret weapon that it inherited from .xxx.
When .xxx launched back in 2011, it kicked off with two sunrise periods. Sunrise A was for trademark owners in the porn business who wanted to use their .xxx names. Sunrise B was for everyone else, who didn’t.
In Sunrise B, brand owners paid $162 (plus their registrar’s markup) to block their domains for a flat period of 10 years.
Customers couldn’t use their domains. They were registered to ICM and used specially designated ICM name servers to resolve to a standard, non-monetized placeholder page stating “This domain has been reserved from registration.”
There are over 80,000 domains using these name servers, but about 15,000 of those represent names of celebrities, cities, and religiously and culturally sensitive terms that ICM culled from Wikipedia and unilaterally reserved to help avoid a tabloid crucifixion if mileycyrus.xxx ever started bouncing children to something pornographic, such as one of her music videos.
(As an aside, I think it’s worth mentioning that the .xxx zone file only has 93,000 names in it. These means about nine out of 10 live .xxx domains are reserved by the registry.)
So we’ve got 65,000 trademarks that are currently blocked in .xxx, and they’re all going to expire in 2021 because ICM only sold blocks for the duration of its original 10-year ICANN contract.
If all 65,000 domains are upgraded to AdultBlock, the service would be worth over $11 million a year, to a company currently reporting annual revenue around $15 million.
But they won’t.
You don’t have to scroll too far down the .xxx zone file (and I didn’t) to discover some absolute garbage, no doubt the result of scaremongering around the 2011 .xxx launch.
I mean, seriously, look at some of this Sunrise B guff:

100percentwholewheatthatkidslovetoeat.xxx, 101waystoleaveagameshow.xxx, 1firstnationalmergersandacquisitions.xxx, 1stchoiceliquorsuperstore.xxx, 2bupushingalltherightbuttons.xxx, 247claimsservicethesupportyouneed30minutesguaranteed.xxx, 3pathpowerdeliverysystembypioneermagneticsinc.xxx

I think we’re going to be looking at a significant junk drop of blocked domains come 2021.
That said, I think MMX may have a psychological advantage here, when it comes to persuading Sunrise B users to “renew”.
Who hasn’t renewed a domain name they strongly suspect they will never use or sell, simply because they couldn’t bear the thought of somebody else owning “their” domain?
An additional consideration for brand owners is that these Sunrise B names are going to show up on drop-lists when they are eventually deleted from the .xxx zone file, perhaps giving inspiration to cybersquatters.
This is a fantastic opportunity for MMX and brand protection registrars to put the hard sell on its Sunrise B customers to “renew” their blocks by upgrading to the new and improved AdultBlock service, which could cost literally 10 times more than what they originally signed up for.
AdultBlock is of course more comprehensive than Sunrise B. It covers three additional TLDs, for starters, and customers can pay a little more for potentially thousands of potential homographs (non-Latin-script domains that look almost identical to the original) to also be blocked.
MMX isn’t waiting until 2021, however. It’s currently offering companies that buy a 10-year-block before the end of 2019 the AdultBlock+ service for the price of the vanilla, no-variants offering.
Existing Sunrise B customers have until the same deadline to purchase the new service without having to have their trademarks re-verified, which carries an additional fee.
For those that miss this early-bird offer, come December 2021, the holders of up 65,000 trademarks are going to face a stark choice: sign up to pay a couple hundred bucks a year, or risk their brands being snapped up by pornsquatters.

MMX to pay $5.1 million to get out of terrible .london deal

Minds + Machines will pay its partner on .london roughly $5.1 million in order to put the catastrophic deal to bed for good.
That’s a reduction from the $7.9 million liability it had previously estimated.
The company said last week that it will pay an unspecified partner the $5.1 million “as full and final settlement for any further liability or contractual spend” after renegotiating the contract.
In April, MMX said that the deal had cost it $13.7 million since the outset.
While MMX has never publicly fingered the contract in question, which has been a pair of concrete boots for years, its deal with .london’s London & Partners is the only one that fits the bill.
The registry secured L&P, the marketing arm of the London Mayor’s office, as a client during the mayoral reign of Boris Johnson, the man set to be anointed the UK’s next prime minister this week.
It agreed to make millions of dollars in guaranteed payments over the duration of the contract, because it expected to sell a shedload of .london domains.
That never happened. The gTLD peaked at 86,000 names in March 2018 and was down to 54,000 a year later, evidently a fraction of what MMX had planned for.
The renegotiated deal — I believe at least the second time the deal has been amended — is “in principle” for now, with formal approval expected soon.
In its trading statement last week, MMX also said that the first half of the year ended with a 19% increase in regs, ending June at about 1.82 million.
It said it has “stabilised” declining billings in its acquired ICM Registry portfolio of porn-themed TLDs at $2.8 million, and that it has a “clear pathway” to growth from the four zones.
It’s hoping “further new initiatives” — likely a reference to a new trademark-blocking service — will help out in the current half.
MMX also said that it’s spending $1 million of its cash reserves on a stock buyback.

After $30 million deal, is a .voice gTLD now inevitable?

Do big second-level domain sales translate into new gTLD success, and does the record-breaking $30 million sale of voice.com this week make a .voice gTLD inevitable?
The answers, I believe, are no and maybe.
Before the 2012 new gTLD application round, one way applicants picked their strings was by combing through the .com zone file to find frequently-occurring words that terminated the second level string.
This is where we get the likes of .site and .online from Radix and much of Donuts’ portfolio.
But applicants also looked at lists of high-priced secondary market sales for inspiration.
This is where we get the likes of .vodka, from MMX.
The latter strategy has seen mixed-to-poor results.
Five of the top domain sales, as compiled by Domain Name Journal, were not eligible for gTLD status are they are too short.
Of the remaining 15 strings, “sex” (which occurs twice), “fund”, “porn”, “toys” and “vodka” were all applied for in 2012 and are currently on sale.
The strings “clothes” and “diamond” do not appear as gTLDs, but Donuts runs both .clothing and .diamonds.
Not delegated in any fashion are “porno” (unless you count it as a derivative of “porn”), “slots”, “tesla”, “whisky” and “california”. A company called IntercontinentalExchange runs .ice as a dot-brand.
As well as .clothing and .diamonds, .fund and .toys are both also Donuts TLDs. None of them are doing spectacularly well.
At the lower end, .diamonds currently has fewer than 3,000 domain under management, but has a relatively high price compared to the the higher-volume TLDs in Donuts’ stable.
At the high-volume end, .fund has just shy of 16,000 names and .clothing has about 12,000.
Judging by their retail prices, and the fact that Donuts benefits from the economies of scale of a 240-strong TLD portfolio, I’m going to guess these domains are profitable, but not hugely so.
If we turn our attention to .vodka, with its roughly 1,500 domains, it seems clear that MMX is barely covering the cost of its annual ICANN fees. Yet vodka.com sold for $3 million.
So will anyone be tempted to apply for .voice in the next gTLD application round? I’d say it’s very possible.
First, “voice” is a nice enough string. It could apply to telephony services, but also to general publishing platforms that give their customers a “voice”. I’d say it could gather up enough registrations to fit profitably into a large portfolio, but would not break any records in terms of volume.
But perhaps the existence of voice.com buyer Block.one as a possible applicant will raise some other applicants out of the woodwork.
Block.one, which uses a new gTLD and an alt-ccTLD (.io) for its primary web sites, is certainly not out-of-touch when it come to alternative domain names.
Could it apply for .voice, and if it does how much would it be willing to spend to pay off rival applicants? It still apparently has billions of dollars from its internet coin offering in the bank.
How much of that would it be prepared to pay for .voice at private auction?
That prospect alone might be enough to stir the interest of some would-be applicants, but it has to be said that it’s by no means certain that the highly gameable application process ICANN deployed in 2012 is going to look the same next time around.

MMX makes $100,000 .luxe premium sale

MMX says it has sold a package of premium .luxe domain names for $100,000.
The registry announced this week that it has sold “a small number of .luxe names for a combined value of $100,000 in a single trade”.
Depending on what that “small number” is, the individual per-domain value may not be all that much.
MMX CEO Toby Hall would only tell DI that the package comprises fewer than 100 domains.
That would still put at least a four-figure price on each domain, which I’m sure many domainers would regard as near-miraculous for a string such as .luxe.
.luxe was originally intended to have a connection to luxury goods, but MMX has repurposed it as its inroad to the blockchain space.
Domains are being primarily sold to address cryptocurrency wallets, primarily in Asia, in the Ethereum blockchain.
There are currently over 5,700 domains in the .luxe zone file.