Dead dot-brands hit 50

Two more dot-brands are on their way out, bringing the total to fall on their swords to date to a nice round 50.
Both of the new departures appear to be brands belonging to the Saudi telecommunications company Etihad Etisalat, which does business as Mobily and has annual revenue approaching $1.8 billion.
The gTLDs in question are .mobily and موبايلي., the Arabic version of the brand, which sits in the root as .xn--mgbb9fbpob.
As is usual in cases of dot-brand self-termination, neither TLD had actually been put to any use beyond the obligatory nic. site.
Despite Mobily being based in Saudi Arabia, the registry is actually a Bahrain company, Greentech Consulting, apparently being run by a US-based new gTLD consultancy called WiseDots.
I’ve never heard of this outfit or its point man before today and its social media activity seems to have dried up shortly after the new gTLD application window closed in 2012.
The registry was hit by a breach of contract notice in December 2016 after it apparently forgot to pay its ICANN fees for a while, but it managed to resolve the issue without further action.

These five TLDs contain 80% of all child abuse images

Online child abuse watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation has released its 2018 annual report, and it fingers the five TLDs that host four in five cases of child sexual abuse images and videos.
The TLDs in question are Verisign’s .com and .net, Neustar’s repurposed Colombian ccTLD .co, Russia’s .ru and Tonga’s .to.
IWF found the illegal content in 3,899 unique domains, up 3% from 2017’s 3,791 domains, in 151 different TLDs.
Despite the apparent concentration of illegal web pages in just five TLDs, it appears that this is largely due to the prevalence of image-hosting and file-sharing “cyberlocker” sites in these TLDs.
These are sites abused by the purveyors of this content, rather than being specifically dedicated to abuse.
It would be tricky for a registry to take action against such sites, as they have substantial non-abusive uses. It would be like taking down twitter.com whenever somebody tweets something illegal.
In terms of domains being registered specifically for the purpose of distributing child abuse material, the new gTLDs created since 2012 come off looking much worse.
IWF said that last year it found this material on 1,638 domains across 62 new gTLDs. That’s 42% of the total number of domains used to host such content, compared to new gTLDs’ single-figures overall market share.
The number of URLs (as opposed to domains) taken down in new gTLD web sites was up 17% to 5,847.
IWF has a service that alerts registries when child abuse material is found in their TLDs.
Its 2018 report can be found here (pdf).

Another five Amazon TLDs move to Nominet

Another five gTLDs owned by Amazon have made the back-end switch from Neustar to Nominet.
According to changes to IANA records this week, Nominet is now the registry services provider for .bot, .zappos, .imdb, .prime, and .aws.
This brings the number of Amazon TLDs to migrate from Neustar to Nominet recently to 40.
Amazon has 52 gTLDs in its portfolio. It moved 35 of them to Nominet a couple weeks ago.
Neustar told us at the time:

in an effort to diversify their back-end support, Amazon has chosen to move some, but not all, of their TLDs to another provider. Neustar will still manage multiple Amazon TLDs after the transition and we look forward to our continued partnership.

Moving .bot is notable as it is one of only six Amazon TLDs currently accepting registrations. It’s still many months away from general availability, but it has about 1,500 names in its zone. The other four movers are currently pre-launch.
It may or may not be significant that no non-Latin-script TLDs belonging to Amazon have made the transition.
According to IANA records, Neustar is still managing 12 Amazon strings, only three of which — .song, .coupon and .zero — are not internationalized domain names.
If those three TLDs were to also make the jump to Nominet over the coming weeks, I would not be in the least bit surprised.
Nominet does not currently handle IDN TLDs for any client.

Dot-brand early adopter becomes 48th to disappear

A Singaporean telecommunications company has become the latest gTLD registry to voluntarily drop its dot-brand.
StarHub, which had 2018 revenue equivalent to $1.73 billion, told ICANN it no longer wished to operate .starhub in February and ICANN opened its request up for a month of public comment last week (a formality).
It’s the 48th of the several hundred original dot-brand applications to change its mind after delegation.
Notably, StarHub was one of the first companies to announce its participation in, and tout the expected benefits of, the new gTLD program.
Back in February 2012, when most applicants were playing their cards close to their chest because the application window was still open, Oliver Chong, assistant vice president of brand and marketing communications at StarHub, said:

We believe the ‘.starhub’ Top-Level Domain will deliver clear marketing and advertising benefits to StarHub, such as improved online brand recall and a more intuitive consumer experience with easy to remember domain names such as ‘mobile.starhub’. We also anticipate potential Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits by operating a more targeted and relevant naming system that is clearly matched with our website content.

Yeah… so, none of that actually happened.
Like all the other dot-brands to self-terminate, StarHub never actually used .starhub, other than the obligatory nic.starhub placeholder.
As an aside that may counterbalance this bad news for the perception of new gTLDs, one of StarHub’s competitors in the Singapore mobile market is called Circles.Life. It uses circles.life as its primary domain and has apparently performed respectably since its launch in 2016.
Imagine that! A mobile phone operator being successful using a new gTLD domain!

Donuts acquires its 242nd gTLD

Donuts, the registry with the largest stable of new gTLDs, has added its 242nd string to its bow.
The company seems to have acquired .contact from, nominally at least, smaller portfolio rival Top Level Spectrum.
The ICANN contract for the gTLD was transferred to one of Donuts’ subsidiaries a couple weeks ago.
According to TLS CEO Jay Westerdal, while TLS was the signatory of the contract the “economic owner” of the TLD was Whitepages.com, an online directory services provider, which paid for the original uncontested .contact application.
Whitepages.com doesn’t appear in the application, the registry agreement, or the IANA records. I was unaware of the connection until today.
Despite being in the root since December 2015, .contact never actually launched. Donuts has not yet filed its launch dates with ICANN either, but it’s usually fairly speedy about pumping out strings.

Oh, the irony! Banned anti-Islam activist shows up on “Turkish” new gTLD domain

Tommy Robinson, who has been banned from most major social media platforms due to his anti-Islam “hate speech”, is now conducting business via a domain name that some believe rightfully belongs to the Muslim-majority nation of Turkey.
The registration could add fuel to the fight between ICANN and its governmental advisers over whether certain domains should be blocked or restricted.
Robinson, the nom de guerre of the man born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is the founder and former leader of the far-right English Defence League and known primarily for stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK for the last decade.
He’s currently, controversially, an adviser to the UK Independence Party. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, also a thoroughly unpleasant bloke, considers Robinson so far to the right he quit the party in response to the appointment.
Over the last year, Robinson has been banned from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and had his YouTube account placed under serious restrictions. This month, he was also banned from SnapChat, and the EDL he used to lead was among a handful of far-right groups banned from Facebook.
Since his personal Facebook page went dark in February, he’s been promoting his new web site as the primary destination for his supporters.
It features news about his activities — mainly his ongoing fights against social media platforms and an overturned contempt of court conviction in the UK — as well as summaries of basically any sufficiently divisive anti-Islam, anti-immigration, or pro-Brexit stories his writers come across.
The domain he’s using is tr.news, a new gTLD domain in a Donuts-owned registry. It was registered in December via GoDaddy.
Given it’s a two-character domain, it will have been registry-reserved and would have commanded a premium price. Other two-character .news domains are currently available on GoDaddy for between $200 and $10,000 for the first year.
It will come as no surprise at all for you to learn that the domain was transferred out of GoDaddy, which occasionally kicks out customers with distasteful views, to Epik, now de facto home of those with far-right views, a couple of weeks after the web site launched.
The irony of the choice of domain is that many governments would claim that tr.news — indeed any two-character domain, in any gTLD, which matches any country-code — rightfully belongs to Turkey, a nation of about 80 million nominal Muslims.
TR is the ISO 3166-1 two-character code for Turkey, and until a couple of years ago new gTLD registries were banned from selling any of these ccTLD-match two-letter domains, due to complaints from ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
Many governments, including the UK and US, couldn’t care less who registers their matching domain. Others, such as France, Italy and Israel, want bans on specific domains such as it.pizza and il.army. Other countries have asked for blanket bans on their ccTLD-match being used at all, in any gTLD.
When new gTLDs initially launched in 2012, all ccTLD matches were banned by ICANN contract. In 2014, ICANN introduced a cumbersome government-approval system under which governments had to be consulted before their matches were released for registration.
Since December 2016, the policy (pdf) has been that registries can release any two-letter domains, subject to a provision that they not be used by registrants to falsely imply an affiliation with the country or registry with the matching ccTLD.
Robinson is certainly not making such an implication. I imagine he’d be as surprised as his readers to learn that his new domain has a Turkish connection. It’s likely the only people who noticed are ICANN nerds and the Turkish themselves.
Would the Turkish people look at tr.news and assume, from the domain alone, that it had some connection to Turkey? I think many would, though I have no idea whether they would assume it was endorsed by the government or the ccTLD registry.
Would Turkey — a government whose censorship regime makes Robinson’s social media plight look like unbounded liberalism — be happy to learn the domain matching its country code is being used primarily to deliver divisive content about the coreligionists of the vast majority of its citizens? Probably not.
But under current ICANN policy it does not appear there’s much that can be done about it. If Robinson is not attempting to pass himself of as an affiliate of the Turkish government or ccTLD registry, there’s no avenue for complaint.
However, after taking the cuffs off registries with its December 2016 pronouncement, allowing them to sell two-letter domains with barely any restrictions, ICANN has faced continued complaints from the GAC — complaints that have yet to be resolved.
The GAC has been telling ICANN for the last two years that some of its members believe the decision to release two-character names went against previous GAC advice, and ICANN has been patiently explaining the process it went through to arrive at the current policy, which included taking GAC advice and government comments into account.
In what appears to be a kind of peace offering, ICANN recently told the GAC (pdf) that it is developing an online tool that “will provide awareness of the registration of two-character domains and allow for governments to report concerns”.
The GAC, in its most-recent communique, told ICANN its members would test the tool and report back at the public meeting in Montreal this November.
The tool was not available in December, when tr.news was registered, so it’s not clear whether Turkey will have received a formal notification that its ccTLD-match domain is now registered, live, and being used to whip up mistrust of Muslims.
Update April 30: ICANN informs me that the tool has been available since February, but that it does not push notifications to governments. Rather, governments can search to see if their two-letter codes have been registered in which gTLDs.

KPMG dumps .com for dot-brand gTLD

KPMG has become the latest company to dump its .com domain in favor of its dot-brand gTLD.
The company recently announced that it is now using home.kpmg as its primary web site domain, replacing kpmg.com.
The migration appears to be complete already. URLs on the old .com address now bounce users to the equivalent page on .kpmg. Web searches for KPMG return the .kpmg domain as the top hit.
KPMG said in a press release:

The move enhances the KPMG brand through a strong, simplified name, and provides end users with a level of assurance that any site that ends with .kpmg is owned and operated by KPMG.
Since the top level domain can only be used by KPMG, visitors to sites that use the new top level domain can easily confirm its authenticity and be assured that the information they contain is reliable and secure.

The company said that it is the first of the “Big Four” professional services firms to make the switch.
This is technically correct. Rival Deloitte uses several .deloitte domains, but it has not bit the bullet and migrated from its .com.
Of the other two, Ernst & Young does not have a dot-brand, and PricewaterhouseCoopers does not use its .pwc extension beyond a single experimental domain that redirects to pwc.com.
KPMG had revenue just shy of $29 billion last year and is one of the most recognizable brands in the corporate world.

David and Goliath? DotMusic confirms .music win

Cyprus-based registry upstart DotMusic Ltd has confirmed that it has secured the rights to the .music gTLD.
Founder and CEO Constantinos Roussos tweeted the news overnight.

Excited to announce that after more than a decade, DotMusic has prevailed and will be the .MUSIC registry 🙂 https://t.co/XSnCkQVn28 #ICANN #DotMusic #DavidandGoliath #Music #Domains pic.twitter.com/tQX14eYyKu

— Constantine Roussos (@mus) April 11, 2019

It is not known how much DotMusic paid for the string, which I believe was auctioned in late March.
DotMusic fought off competition from seven other applicants, including some heavy-hitters: Google, Amazon, Donuts, Radix, Far Further, Domain Venture Partners and MMX.
MMX’s application was the last to be withdrawn, last night.
It’s not impossible that .music could launch before the end of the year, after DotMusic has completed the remaining pre-delegation steps such as signing its ICANN registry contract.
There will also be a couple of launch phases that give priority to members of the music industry.
Even when it goes to general availability, it won’t be a free-for-all, however.
DotMusic, in its efforts to secure support from the piracy-fearful music industry, proposed relatively strict “enhanced safeguards” for .music.
Registrants will have to verify their identity by phone as well as email in order to register a domain. They’ll also be restricted to strings matching their “their own name, acronym or Doing Business As”.
I don’t think the policies as outlined will be enough to prevent speculation, but they will add friction, possibly throttling sales volume.
In other news, it turns out Dewey did in fact defeat Truman.

Neustar loses most of its Amazon back-end biz to Nominet

Amazon has switched two thirds of its large portfolio of new gTLDs over to Nominet’s back-end registry services, replacing Neustar.
Judging by changes to IANA records this week, Amazon has moved 35 gTLDs to Nominet, leaving 17 at Neustar.
A Neustar spokesperson confirmed the changes, telling DI:

in an effort to diversify their back-end support, Amazon has chosen to move some, but not all, of their TLDs to another provider. Neustar will still manage multiple Amazon TLDs after the transition and we look forward to our continued partnership.

The switch more than doubles Nominet’s number of TLDs under management. Its biggest customer to date was MMX, which pushed 20 of its TLDs to the .uk registry in a restructuring a few years ago.
The Amazon loss, and a few others recently, also mean that Neustar is by my back-of-the-envelope calculation no longer the largest back-end when measured by the number of TLDs under management.
Those bragging rights would go to Donuts, which self-manages its own rather large portfolio of 241 TLDs. Neustar would remain the largest provider in terms of service provided to third-party clients.
The Neustar-to-Nominet technical migration appears to have kicked off a couple of weeks ago and emerged Wednesday when Nominet’s Technical Contact information replaced Neustar’s in most of Amazon’s IANA records.
Customers will not have noticed, because the TLDs in question barely have any customers.
The only one of the 35 affected TLDs with any registrations at all is .moi, which has just a couple hundred domains in its zone.
The other affected TLDs, none of which have launched, are: .moi, .yamaxun, .author, .book, .buy, .call, .circle, .fast, .got, .jot, .joy, .like, .pin, .read, .room, .safe, .smile, .tushu, .wanggou, .spot, .tunes, .you, .talk, .audible, .deal, .fire, .now, .kindle, .silk, .save, .hot, .pay, .secure, .wow and .free.
The TLDs remaining with Neustar are: .bot, .zero, .ポイント, .書籍, .クラウド, .ストア, .セール, .coupon, .zappos, .ファッション, .食品, .song, .家電, .aws, .imdb, .prime, and .通販.
Six of the TLDs staying with Neustar have launched, but only one, .bot, has more than 100 registrations.
.bot is a tightly restricted, experimental space currently in a long-term “limited registration period” which is not due to end until next January. It has around 1,500 names in its zone file.
Four of Amazon’s dot-brands are staying with Neustar, which is probably the most enthusiastic cheerleader for dot-brands out there, and four are going to Nominet.
Neustar appears to be keeping all of Amazon’s internationalized domain names. Nominet currently manages no IDNs.
How important the adjustment is from a dollar perspective would rather depend on what the per-domain component of the deals were, and whether Amazon ever plans to actually make its gTLDs commercially available.
In recent weeks, XYZ.com also moved its recently acquired .baby gTLD from Neustar, where it had been an unused dot-brand, to preferred provider CentralNic, while .kred and .ceo, both under the same ownership, also switched to CentralNic.

ICANN takes the reins again as .amazon talks fail

ICANN has re-involved itself in the fight over the .amazon gTLD, after Amazon and eight South American governments failed to reach agreement over the name.
ICANN chair Cherine Chalaby wrote this week to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization to inform the group that it is now ICANN that will decide whether the proposed dot-brand domain is approved or not.
ICANN’s board had given Amazon and ACTO until April 7 to come to a mutual agreement that addressed ACTO’s sovereignty concerns, but they missed that deadline.
According to the BBC World Service, citing unnamed diplomats, ACTO wanted Amazon to create a kind of policy committee, with seats at the table for governments to veto second-level domains Amazon decides it wants to register in .amazon in future.
Amazon declined this demand, instead offering each of the eight ACTO countries its two-letter country-code under .amazon — br.amazon for Brazil, for example — the Beeb reported at the weekend.
Now that ICANN’s deadline has passed, ACTO appears to have lost its chance to negotiate with Amazon.
ICANN has now asked the company to submit a plan to address ACTO’s concerns directly to ICANN by April 21.
From that point, it could go either way. ICANN might approve the .amazon application, reject it, or push it back to Amazon for further work.
But .amazon may not necessarily be on the home straight yet. A straightforward approval or rejection will very likely provoke howls of anguish, and further appeals action, from the losing side.