MMX: three gTLDs approved for sale in Beijing

Three foreign new gTLDs have been approved for sale and resolution in Chinese capital Beijing, according to MMX.
The portfolio registry said today that its .vip is among the first to receive approval from the Beijing Communications Administration, one of China’s many regional authorities.
According to MMX, while many gTLDs have managed to pass through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s stringent vetting process, the Beijing local authority has so far been slow to follow the national regulator’s lead.
But BCA approved .vip, along with GMO’s .shop and Donuts’ .ltd on August 16, the registry said in a market update.
This gives .vip national coverage in China, adding Beijing’s 22 million inhabitants.
MMX added that 188,764 different .vip sites, of the over 600,000 in its zone file, are currently indexed by Chinese search engine Baidu.
It also said that it plans to start selling Chinese-script internationalized domain names in .vip (in IDN.ascii format) in November.

GMO and Radix secure Chinese gTLD approval

GMO Registry and Radix have won Chinese government approval for their respective new gTLDs .shop and .site.
It’s the second batch of foreign new gTLDs to get the nod from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, following .vip, .club and .xyz in early December.
They’re also the first two Asian registries from outside China to get the right to flog their domains in China — GMO is Japanese and Radix is UAE-based with Indian roots.
Their new Chinese government licenses mean Chinese registrars will now be able to allow their customers to actually use .shop and .site domains to host web sites.
The registries in turn have had to agree to enforce China’s rather arbitrary and Draconian censorship policies on their Chinese customers.
The approvals were announced by MIIT December 29.
.site currently has about 570,000 domains in its zone file, making it a top-10 new gTLD by volume, while .shop, which launched much more recently, has over 100,000.
The ability for Chinese customers to develop their domains is no doubt good for the long-term health of TLDs, but it’s not necessarily a harbinger of shorter-term growth in a market where domains are often treated little more than meaningless baseball cards to be traded rather than commodities with intrinsic value.

Free .shop domains until Christmas

The new .shop gTLD is likely to see growth over the coming week or so, as registrars begin to offer them for free.
Two retail registrars in the Key-Systems stable — Moniker and domaindiscount24 — said today they will offer a free .shop to each of their customers until December 23.
The offer is limited to one domain per account, so we’re unlikely to see the same level of growth, speculation and abuse we’ve seen in other TLDs that have offered free registrations.
Other popular registrars are currently selling first-year .shop names for $8 to $10, a discount on the usual retail price of between $25 and $30.
Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, Key-Systems’ native Germany already has the most .shop registrations to date, with over a quarter of the 100,000 or so names registered so far to registrants in that country.
You have to go to number four in its geographic breakdown league to even get to the first Anglophone nation (the US).

GMO offers free SSL with .shop domains

GMO Registry is to offer .shop domain registrants a free one-year SSL certificate with every purchase.
The company said yesterday that the deal, made via sister certificate company GMO GlobalSign, should be in place by the end of the month.
The certs on offer appear to be the of low-end “Domain Validation” variety.
Nevertheless, GlobalSign usually sells them for over $150 per year, many times more expensive than .shop domains themselves.
Popular registrars are currently selling .shop names from $10 to $25.
There are about 90,000 domains in .shop’s zone file today.
That’s a goodish volume by new gTLD standards, but probably not good enough to help GMO recoup the $41.5 million it paid for .shop at auction any time soon.
Upsell opportunities such as the SSL offer, assuming they get any uptake, may help accelerate its path to breakeven.

Over 50,000 names sold as .shop has successful launch day

GMO Registry has recorded one of the most successful new gTLD launch days to date, selling over 45,000 .shop domain names in the first hours.
The company said it sold 45,427 .shop names in the first two hours after general availability started yesterday afternoon at about 1600 UTC.
The total at that point was 51,755, including about 5,000 that were registered during the Early Access Period, during which names carried higher prices.
The latest .shop zone file contains 46,419 domains.
The registry had sold 616 premium-priced names already, GMO said.
The volume is quite impressive given the retail price tags — .shop is not priced for budget Chinese domainers, it’s selling for $20 to $30 at the major Western registrars.
That’s double, triple or even 10 times as much as Minds + Machines’ self-consciously ‘non-freenium’ .vip domains were selling for when it racked up a six-figure volume during its first day of GA earlier this year.
West.cn, the leading Chinese new gTLD registrar, priced .vip at $3 but is selling .shop at $25.
GMO paid a then record-setting $41.5 million for the rights to .shop at an ICANN auction back in January.

.shop pricing sunrise renewals at $1,000

If you’ve spent over $40 million on a gTLD, you need to make your money back somehow, right?
It’s emerged that GMO Registry, which paid ICANN a record $41.5 million for .shop back in January, plans to charge $1,000 renewal fees, wholesale, on domains registered during its upcoming sunrise period.
Trademark owners will seemingly have to pay over the odds for domains matching their trademarks, while regular registrants will have a much more manageable annual fee of $24.
The prices were disclosed in a blog post from the registrar OpenProvider last week, in which the company urged GMO to lower its prices.
Sunrise is due to start June 30, running for 60 days, so there’s still a chance prices could change before then.
It’s not the first registry to charge more for sunrise renewals than regular renewals.
Any company that bought a .sucks domain during sunrise was lumbered with a recurring $2,499 registry fee.
.green also had a $50 annual sunrise renewal premium before Afilias took over the gTLD in April.
Others have charged higher non-recurring sunrise fees. With .cars, the sunrise fee was $3,000, which was $1,000 more than the regular GA price.

.shop lawsuit falling to pieces

Commercial Connect’s lawsuit against ICANN appears to be on its way out, as ICANN claims the .shop applicant has “abandoned” the case.
The company sued ICANN in January in an attempt to prevent .shop gTLD being sold off via an ICANN last-resort auction.
It failed, and the auction raised a $41 million winning bid from GMO Registry.
It transpired that the company didn’t bother telling its lawyer that it had signed an agreement not to sue when it applied for .shop, and the lawyer jumped ship less than two weeks after the complaint was filed.
The lawyer told the court the waiver had been “buried among thousands and thousands of documents on a USB drive” and that he hadn’t noticed it before filing the suit.
In a court filing (pdf) yesterday, ICANN said that Commercial Connect had failed to secure a new lawyer, had failed to formally serve ICANN with the complaint, and had missed its April 25 deadline to argue against ICANN’s motion to dismiss the case.
For these reasons, it said, the case should be chucked.
Commercial Connect applied for .shop in 2000 and again in 2012 and has used every appeals mechanism and legal tool at its disposal in order to disrupt competing bids.
GMO’s .shop is currently in pre-delegation testing.

$41m auction loser tries to slam brakes on .shop

Lawyer-happy gTLD applicant Commercial Connect has put GMO Registry’s $41 million purchase of the new gTLD .shop in jeopardy by filing an appeal with ICANN.
On January 26 — the day before the .shop auction — the Connecticut-based company filed an Independent Review Process complaint with ICANN, asking a panel of judges to enjoin ICANN from delegating .shop or even signing a registry contract with GMO.
It’s applied for “emergency” relief. Its full IRP complaint has yet to be filed.
GMO won a seven-way ICANN auction for .shop last week, agreeing to pay $41.5 million into ICANN coffers.
The IRP news will not be particularly surprising for anyone who has followed the .shop contention set closely.
Commercial Connect has deployed pretty much every legal avenue available to it in order to win .shop, which had eight competing applications.
It applied as a “community” applicant, but unsurprisingly failed to meet the stringent criteria that a Community Priority Evaluation requires.
It scored a measly 5 out of the 16 available CPE points, missing the 14-point target.
The company also spunked goodness knows how much cash filing 21 formal objections against other gTLD applicants — ridiculous complaints that “.supply” or “.セール” or “.services” were “confusingly similar” to .shop.
It actually managed to win two of its string similarity challenges, when panelists apparently decided to write their judgments before their morning coffee had kicked in.
It was probable that .shopping and .通販 would be confused with .shop in the mind of the average internet user, these panelists decided.
The .通販 decision was thrown out when sanity prevailed, but the .shopping decision stood. Only a recent back-room deal between Uniregistry and Donuts prevented the .shop auction being a head-explodingly confusing mess.
Now, with its IRP, Commercial Connect is claiming that the whole CPE system goes against ICANN rules.
According to its initial complaint, the fact that the CPE adjudicator, the Economist Intelligence Unit, came up with its own supplemental “CPE Guidelines” means that the the CPE system is not “ICANN policy” and should therefore be disregarded.
At first glance, it seems weak. But I said the same about the DotConnectAfrica IRP case, which DCA won.
IRP panels have been known to be somewhat “activist” (not necessarily a bad thing) recently, so it’s hard to call which way they will swing in any specific case.
But it does seem quite possible that the emergency relief that Commercial Connect requests — that is, no .shop contract until the IRP is over — will be granted.
For GMO, that means it’s just spent $41.5 million on a gTLD it probably won’t be able to launch for well over a year.
It’s perhaps interesting that Commercial Connect doesn’t seem to make any reference in its IRP to its original 2000-round application for .shop.
If that comes up in future filings, it could open up an entirely new can of worms.

.shop gTLD sells for record $41.5 million

The nine-way fight for the .shop gTLD has raised $41.5 million at auction.
It’s the most-expensive reported new gTLD sale to date.
The victor was GMO Registry of Japan, which runs a few Asian geographic gTLDs and acts as service provider for over a dozen dot-brands.
GMO wanted .shop so badly it actually applied twice for the gTLD in the 2012 application round.
Only two bidders, GMO and an unidentified rival, were prepared to pay over $15 million, according to ICANN.
The previous record-holder for an ICANN gTLD auction was .app, which Google bought for a smidgen over $25 million last February.
Dozens of contention sets have “self resolved” via private auction, but the winning bids of those are typically not disclosed.
According to GMO’s .shop application, .shop will be an open, unrestricted namespace. The company seems to be planning to sell value-added e-commerce services in addition to domain names.
But domainers will not be welcome in the gTLD. GMO’s application reads:

Registration of a .SHOP domain name solely for the purpose of selling, exchanging, trading, leasing the domain name shall be deemed as inappropriate use or intent.

The company plans to do random spot checks to make sure no registrants are breaking this rule.
GMO is using CentralNic as its back-end registry services software provider, following a 2013 deal.
Radix, Famous Four, Donuts, Google, Amazon, 2000-round applicant Commercial Connect and a company called Beijing Jingdong 360 had all applied for .shop.
But according to ICANN only seven of the original applicants qualified for the auction.
One of the drop-outs was GMO itself. The company has actually applied for .shop twice — once as a regular applicant and once as a “community”.
The non-community application was the one that participated in the auction.
Unsuccessful community applicant Commercial Connect, which has been fighting for .shop since first applying for it in 2000, also did not participate.
On Tuesday, it filed a futile Request for Reconsideration (pdf) with ICANN, complaining about the fact that it lost its Community Priority Evaluation.
.shop was originally linked to .shopping, due to a badly decided String Similarity Objection, but that contention set was resolved separately by Donuts and Uniregistry last week.

Uniregistry beats Donuts to .shopping, but .shop still in play

Uniregistry has emerged as the successful registry-to-be of .shopping from the convoluted .shop/.shopping new gTLD contention set.
Donuts, the only competing applicant for the string, withdrew its application late last week.
As we previously reported, the .shop/.shopping contention sets were joined at the hip due to a bizarre string similarity challenge, making the scheduled auction very complex.
But Donuts and Uniregistry seem to have come to a private arrangement about .shopping, outside of the ICANN auction process, making .shop a straightforward nine-way fight.
Donuts tells me the auction, in which it is participating, is still scheduled for January 27.