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.

Hindu god smites Chrysler gTLD

Car-maker Chrysler has withdrawn its application for the .ram dot-brand gTLD more than six years after receiving a government objection on religious grounds.
Ram is a brand of pickup trucks manufactured by Chrysler, but it’s also a variant spelling of Rama, an important deity in the Hindu pantheon.
Back in 2013, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee forwarded an objection from majority-Hindu India, later saying: “The application for .ram is a matter of extreme sensitivity for the Government of India on political and religious considerations.”
In a 19-page response (pdf), Chrysler said that Ram vehicles had been around for 75 years without offending Hindus, and that .ram was to be a restricted dot-brand that could not be used by third parties to post offensive content.
The objection appeared at a time when the GAC was not obliged to show its thinking and often deliberately obfuscated its advice. But ICANN placed .ram on hold anyway, where it has remained ever since.
Over the intervening time, Chrysler has rethought its dot-brand strategy, and last month called on ICANN to cancel five of the six gTLDs it already owns (but does not use) — .chrysler, .dodge, .mopar, .srt and .uconnect.
It’s still contracted to run .jeep, weirdly.

Radix acquires another gTLD

Radix has added the 10th new gTLD to its portfolio with an acquisition last month, bringing its total TLD stable to 11.
The company has acquired .uno from Missouri-based Dot Latin LLC for an undisclosed amount.
.uno, which of course means “one” in Spanish, has been around for over five years but has struggled to grow.
It’s current ranked as the 131st largest new gTLD, with 16,271 domains in its zone file. It peaked at about 22,000 about three years ago.
That said, it appears to have rather strong renewals, at least by Radix standards, with no evidence of relying on discounts or throwaway one-year registrations for growth.
.uno names can currently be obtained for roughly $12 to $20 per year.
Radix said its expects to migrate the TLD off its current Neustar back-end onto long-time registry partner CentralNic by “early 2020”.
The company appears to be excited that its only the second three-letter TLD in its portfolio.
It already runs .fun, along with the likes of .website, .tech and .online. It also runs .pw, the repurposed ccTLD for Palau.
.uno was Dot Latin’s only gTLD, though affiliated entity Dot Registry LLC signed its ICANN registry agreement for .llp (for “Limited Liability Partnership”) in August. That TLD has yet to launch.

.whoswho survives!

The registry running the failing new gTLD .whoswho has managed to avoid having its contract terminated by ICANN.
According to an update on the ICANN web site, Who’s Who Registry came back into compliance with its obligations earlier this week, meaning it can continue operating.
It had been under a cloud of uncertainty since January, when ICANN Compliance sent off a breach notice saying the company was overdue with its $25,000-a-year fees.
Who’s Who originally had until a date in February to pay up, but this deadline has been extended repeatedly over the course of the year.
Registry CEO John McCabe had told ICANN last November that the fee is “onerous” and “the single largest item in .whoswho’s budget”.
ICANN later rejected his request for a fee reduction.
.whoswho, which seeks to replicate the once-popular biography compilation books of the same name, has fewer than 100 real registrations to its name, most of which appear to be defensive, despite being live for five years.
At about $70 a pop, that’s still not nearly enough to cover ICANN fees, never mind other operating costs.
It sold barely a dozen names in the first half of this year.
I thought it was a goner for sure.
But it looks like it’s been saved from the axe for now, so maybe there’s time to turn things around.

Mediocre .vote gTLD drops restrictions

The .vote and .voto gTLDs have had their registration restrictions removed in a bid to increase numbers.
Both domains were previously technically restricted to those who could show they had a legitimate connection to democratic proceedings, and were sometimes used by political campaigns.
But it appears those post-registration restrictions were lightly enforced, and now they’ve been dropped entirely.
Neither gTLD has been particularly successful — .vote has been wobbling around the 3,000-domain mark for a while, while .voto (the Spanish version) has about a tenth of that figure.
Both renew at retail for about $60 a year, but first-year regs can currently be obtained for about half that amount.
They’re both managed by Afilias.
The highest-profile .vote domain I’m aware of to date was used in the spectacularly successful Hollywood-backed campaign to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016.

.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.

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

Sixty gTLD registries not monitoring security threats

Roughly 5% of gTLD registry operators have been doing no abuse monitoring, despite contractual requirements to do so, a recent ICANN audit has found.
ICANN checked with 1,207 registries — basically all gTLDs — between November 2018 and June, and found about 60 of them “were not performing any security threat monitoring, despite having domains registered in their gTLDs”.
A further 180 (15%) were not doing security checks, but had no registered domains, usually because they were unused dot-brands. ICANN told these companies that they had to do the checks anyway, to remain in compliance.
In all cases, ICANN said, the registries remediated their oversights during the audit to bring their gTLDs back into compliance.
ICANN does not name the non-compliant registries in the summary of the audit’s results, published yesterday (pdf).
Registries under the 2012 new gTLD base registry agreement all have to agree to this:

Registry Operator will periodically conduct a technical analysis to assess whether domains in the TLD are being used to perpetrate security threats, such as pharming, phishing, malware, and botnets. Registry Operator will maintain statistical reports on the number of security threats identified and the actions taken as a result of the periodic security checks. Registry Operator will maintain these reports for the term of the Agreement unless a shorter period is required by law or approved by ICANN, and will provide them to ICANN upon request.

It’s possible to keep tabs on abuse by monitoring domain blocklists such as SpamHaus, SURBL and PhishTank. Some such lists are freely available, others carry hefty licensing fees.
ICANN itself monitors these lists through its Domain Abuse Activity Reporting project, so it’s able to work out the differences between the levels of abuse registries report and what the empirical data suggests.
Registries typically either use these lists via in-house tools or license products provided by vendors such as Neustar, RegistryOffice, Knipp, CSC, DOTZON, Afnic, AusCERT, Shadowserver, Telefonica, Secure Domain Foundation and Netcraft, ICANN said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a bit of disagreement between ICANN and some registries about how the somewhat vague obligations quote above are be interpreted.
ICANN thinks registries should have to provide information about specific domains that were identified as abusive and what remediation actions were taken, but some registries think they only have to provide aggregate statistical data (which would be my read of the language).
The contracts also don’t specify how frequently registries much carry out security reviews.
Of the 80% (965) of registries already in compliance, 80% (772) were doing daily abuse monitoring. Others were doing it weekly, monthly, or even quarterly, ICANN found, all of which appear to be in line with contractual requirements.

Bumper batch of dot-brands off themselves for Friday 13th

It’s Friday 13th tomorrow, and to celebrate the occasion no fewer than 13 dot-brands have opted to take the easy way out and self-terminate.
ICANN has published a bumper list of contracted brand registries that have informed the organization that they no longer wish to run their gTLDs.
Adding themselves to the dot-brand deadpool are: .ladbrokes, .warman, .cartier, .piaget, .chrysler, .dodge, .mopar, .srt, .uconnect, .movistar, .telefonica, .liason and .lancome.
That brings the total of self-terminated new gTLDs to date to 66.
The imminent demise of .cartier and .piaget is perhaps notable, as it means luxury goods maker Richemont has now abandoned ALL of the nine dot-brands it originally applied for.
Richemont, an enthusiastic early adopter of the new gTLD concept, applied for 14 strings in total back in 2012.
The only ones it has left are generics — .watches along with the the Chinese translation .手表 and the Chinese for “jewelry”, .珠宝, none of which have been launched and in all likelihood are being held defensively.
It’s the same story with L’oreal, the cosmetics company. It also applied for 14 gTLDs, mostly brands, but abandoned all but .lancome prior to contracting.
With .lancome on its way out, L’oreal only owns the generics .skin, .hair, .makeup and .beauty, at least one of which is actually being used.
Also of note is the fact the car company Chrysler is dumping five of its six gTLDs — .chrysler, .dodge, .mopar, .srt and .uconnect — leaving only .jeep (unused) still under contract.
Clearly, Chrysler is not as keen on dot-brands as some of its European competitors, which have been among the most prolific users.
Telefonica’s abandonment of .movistar and .telefonica also means it’s out of the gTLD game completely now, although its Brazilian subsidiary still owns (and uses) .vivo.
Betting company Ladbrokes only ever owned .ladbrokes, though it did unsuccessfully apply for .bet also.
Rounding off the list is .warman, a brand of — and I’m really not making this up — industrial slurry pumps. The pumps are made by a company called Weir, which uses global.weir as its primary web site. So that’s nice.
As far as I can tell, none of the gTLDs that are being killed off had ever been used, though each registry will have paid ICANN six-figure fees since they originally contracted.

Another victory for Amazon as ICANN rejects Colombian appeal

Amazon’s application for .amazon has moved another step closer to reality, after ICANN yesterday voted to reject an appeal from the Colombian government.
The ICANN board of directors voted unanimously, with two conflict-related abstentions, to adopt the recommendation of its Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which apparently states that ICANN did nothing wrong when it decided back in May to move .amazon towards delegation.
Neither the board resolution nor the BAMC recommendation has been published yet, but the audio recording of the board’s brief vote on Colombia’s Request for Reconsideration yesterday can be found here.
As you will recall, Colombia and the seven other governmental members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization have been trying to stymie Amazon’s application for .amazon on what you might call cultural appropriation grounds.
ACTO governments think they have the better right to the string, and they’ve been trying to get veto power over .amazon’s registry policies, something Amazon has been strongly resisting.
Amazon has instead offered a set of contractual Public Interest Commitments, such as giving ACTO the ability to block culturally sensitive strings, in the hope of calming the governments’ concerns.
These PICs, along with Amazon’s request for Spec 13 dot-brand status, will likely be published for 30 days of public comment this week, Global Domains Division head Cyrus Namazi told the board.
Expect fireworks.
After comments are closed, ICANN will then make any tweaks to the PICs that are necessary, before moving forward to contract-signing with Amazon, Namazi .said.