Famous Four following .sucks playbook with premium pricing for brands?

New gTLD registry Famous Four Media has slapped general availability prices of $500 and up on domain names matching famous brands.
The company plans to shortly introduce eight “premium” pricing tiers, ranging from $200 a year to $10,000 a year.
The first to launch, on July 8, will be its “brand protection tier”, which will carry a $498 registry fee.
Famous Four told its registrars that the tier “will provide an additional deterrent to cyber-squatters for well-known brands ensuring that domain names in this tier will not be eligible for price promotions”.
The gTLDs .date, .faith and .review will be first to use the tiered pricing structure.
It’s not entirely clear what brands will be a part of the $498 tier, or how the registry has compiled its list, but registrars have been given the ability to ask for their clients’ trademarks to be included.
I asked Famous Four for clarification a few days ago but have not yet had a response.
While other registries, such as Donuts, used tiered pricing for GA domains, I’m only aware of one other that puts premium prices on brands: .sucks.
Vox Populi has a trademark-heavy list of .sucks domains it calls Market Premium — formerly Sunrise Premium — that carry a $1,999-a-year registry fee.
Unlike Vox Pop, Famous Four does not appear to be planning a subsidy that would make brand-match domains available at much cheaper prices to third parties.
Famous Four’s gTLDs have seen huge growth in the last month or two, largely because it’s been selling domains at a loss.
.science, for example, has over 300,000 registrations — making it the third-largest new gTLD — because Famous Four’s registry fee has been discounted to just $0.25 from May to July.
The same discount applies to .party (over 195,000 names in its zone) and .webcam (over 60,000).
Those three gTLDs account for exactly half of the over 22,000 spam attacks that used new gTLD domains in March and April, according to Architelos’ latest abuse report.
With names available at such cheap prices, it would not be surprising if cybersquatters are abusing these gTLDs as much as the spammers.
Will intellectual property owners believe a $498+ reg fee is a useful deterrent to cybersquatting?
Or will they look upon this move as “predatory”, as they did with .sucks?

Canada shrugs over .sucks

The Canadian trade regulator has sent ICANN a big old “Whatever” in response to queries about the legalities of .sucks.
The response, sent by Industry Canada’s deputy minister John Knubley yesterday, basically says if the intellectual property lobby doesn’t like .sucks it can always take its complaints to the courts.
Other than opening and closing paragraphs of pleasantries, this is all Knubley’s letter (pdf) says:

Canada’s laws provide comprehensive protections for all Canadians. Canada has intellectual property, competition, criminal law and other relevant legal frameworks in place to protect trademark owners, competitors, consumers and individuals. These frameworks are equally applicable to online activities and can provide recourse, for example, to trademark owners concerned about the use of the dotSucks domains, provided that trademark owners can demonstrate that the use of dotSucks domains infringes on a trademark. Intellectual property rights are privately held and are settled privately by the courts.

There’s not much to go on in there; it could quite easily be a template letter.
But it seems that Vox Populi Registry has been cleared to go ahead with the launch of .sucks, despite IP owner complaints, at least as far as the US and Canadian regulators are concerned.
The Federal Trade Commission was equally noncommittal in its response to ICANN two weeks ago.
Vox Populi is based in Canada. It’s still not entirely clear why the FTC was asked its opinion.
ICANN had asked both agencies for comment on .sucks’ legality after its Intellectual Property Constituency raised concerns about Vox Pop’s “predatory” pricing.
Pricing for .sucks names in sunrise starts at around $2,000.
ICANN told DI in April that it was in “fact finding” mode, trying to see if Vox Pop was in breach of any laws or its Registry Agreement.
The .sucks domain is due to hit general availability one week from now, June 19, with a suggested retail price of $250 a year.
If anything, the $250 says much more about Vox Pop’s business model than the sunrise fees, in my opinion.

.bank doing surprisingly well in sunrise

The forthcoming .bank gTLD has received over 500 applications for domains during its sunrise period, according to the registry.
fTLD Registry Services tweeted the stat earlier this week.

.BANK surpasses 500 Sunrise applications and this period ends on June 17 (see http://t.co/qkb8lwNInB), #.BANK

— fTLD Registry (@fTLD_Registry) June 9, 2015

Its sunrise period doesn’t even end until June 17. Sunrise periods tend to be back-weighted, so the number could get a lot higher.
Five hundred may not sound like a lot — and applications do not always convert to registrations — but in the context of new gTLDs it’s very high.
Discounting .porn and .adult, both of which racked up thousands of names across their various sunrise phases, the previous high for a sunrise was .london, with just over 800 names registered.
It’s not unusual for a sunrise to get under 100 names. A year ago, I calculated that the average was 144.
The 500+ .bank number is especially surprising as it’s going to be a very tightly controlled gTLD where the chance of cybersquatting is going to be virtually nil.
All .bank registrants will be manually vetted to ensure they really are banks, substantially mitigating the need for defensive registrations.
Could this be an indication that .bank will actually get used?

ICM beats own annual projections with .porn on day one

ICM Registry says it managed to comfortably beat its own expectations for annual sales within the first eight hours of .porn and .adult going into general availability yesterday.
CEO Stuart Lawley said that there were 10,038 .porn domains and 8,277 .adult domains in its registry at the end of yesterday.
The company’s new gTLD applications with ICANN had predicted 10,000 .porn domains and 3,000 .adult domains at the end of the first year of availability, he said.
“We are therefore delighted to have exceeded those numbers on day one of GA,” he said. “We are particularly pleased with the high numbers from .adult.”
The majority of the names were registered either during the sunrise periods (ICM had two per TLD) or the recently ended “domain matching” program, which gave .xxx owners first dibs on matching .porn and .adult names.
A month ago, the company said .porn received 3,995 registrations while .adult had 3,902 at the end of the sunrises.
Earlier this week, after domain matching ended, Lawley said that .porn had almost 7,500 names while .adult had almost 7,000.
ICM will launch .sex in September.

Are new gTLD registries ripping off brands with unfair sunrise fees?

Forget .sucks — several less controversial new gTLD registries have come under fire from the likes of Google, Facebook and Adobe for charging sunrise fees as high as $17,000 for domains matching famous trademarks.
According to figures supplied to DI by ICANN’s Business Constituency, the domain instagram.love carries a $17,610 “Premium Name Fee” during the current sunrise period.
Instagram is of course the photo sharing service belonging to Facebook, and to the best of my knowledge not a dictionary word.
The domain facebook.love has a $8,930 fee, these figures show, while google.love costs $6,610, both in addition to sunrise fees of $350 and annual fees of $60.
The regular sunrise fee for .love comes in at $265 at some registrars.
The new gTLDs .design, .video, .wang, .wein, .rich and .top also seem to carry very high fees for brands such as Facebook, according to the BC’s numbers.
Google recently filed a public comment with ICANN which warned:

some registry operators are taking advantage of rights owners during Sunrise by charging exorbitant and extortionate Sunrise registration fees. Although such pricing policies are not strictly within the ICANN compliance mandate, they contravene the spirit of the RPMs [rights protection mechanisms], damage ICANN’s reputation, harm consumers in contravention of ICANN’s mandate to promote the public interest, and create disincentives for rights owners to take advantage of the Sunrise period

Similar comments were sent by the Intellectual Property Constituency, BC, and others.
The issue of registries charging super-high “premium” fees for trademarked names has been on the radar of the BC and the IPC since at least 2013.
It seems that in at least some cases, trademark owners are being hit with the higher fees because their marks are dictionary words that the registry has identified as premium due to their regular meaning.
For example, adobe.design is on the list of names provided by the BC, carrying a $1,175 registration fee.
But Andrew Merriam, director of business development at .design registry Top Level Design, denied that the software company is being targeted. Instead, he said “adobe” refers to the material used in architecture — its dictionary meaning.
He said: “Stucco.design, concrete.design, wood.design, granite.design (and many other materials and building styles) are all on the premium list, at varying prices. In fact, adobe.design is priced on the lower end of all these materials.”
Merriam said the registry’s premium fee for adobe.design is actually $250 and speculated that $1,175 could be the price quoted by Adobe’s brand protection registrar post-markup. It was $349 at Go Daddy, he said.
In other cases, trademarks may have found their way on to premium lists due to a lack of manual vetting by the registry, rather than nefarious targeting.
In the case of instagram.love, Evatt Merchant of .love registry Merchant Law Group told DI that Facebook can buy the name for the normal sunrise fee if it wants.
He told DI that trademark owners should contact the registry if they believe their marks have been wrongly given premium prices. He said:

While it is possible that some brand terms that are frequently googled have ended up on the premium list, valued based on their Google search frequency, there is a simple solution. During the sunrise period, brands seeking non-dictionary trademarked domain names can contact the registry so that a review of individual sunrise pricing can occur. As has already occurred, such requests will often result in the .LOVE TLD voluntarily offering to reduce their sunrise application cost to the base sunrise price and that would certainly be the case for Instagram.

ICANN’s does not regulate pricing in new gTLDs, but nevertheless the IPC and BC and their members have asked ICANN to include premium pricing of trademarked names in its upcoming review of rights protection mechanisms.

.sucks extends controversial sunrise, delays GA

Vox Populi has extended the pricey .sucks sunrise period for three weeks, saying trademark owners need more time to participate.
Sunrise was due to end this week, with general availability kicking off today.
But Vox Pop has extended the period to June 19, with GA starting two days later.
In an email blast to fellow attendees of the INTA 2015 intellectual property conference, the registry said it has “discovered that far too many intellectual property lawyers and company executives were unaware of the registry or the availability of its names.”
Other brands were unaware of the Trademark Clearinghouse, the email said.
“Additionally, we have seen an influx of applications in the final days and hours of our TMCH Sunrise Period,” Vox Pop said.
“We are concerned about the extent of awareness and rush, and so have decided that the responsible move is to add a bit more time to the equation by extending the TMCH Sunrise period,” it said.
The change in timings have been announced on the registry’s web site.
While it’s possible to read the move cynically — a way for Vox Pop to claw more cash from rights holders — it’s not particularly unusual.
It is not unheard of for launching TLDs to extend their sunrise periods in order to deal with late demand.
Anecdotally, trademark owners tend to delay sunrise purchasing decisions until towards the end of sunrise windows, creating the impression of growing demand and adding pressure to processing cycles.
The .sucks sunrise has come under fire for its pricing — a $1,999 registry fee that is being marked up by registrars by everything from $20 to many hundreds of dollars.

Obama, Apple, cancer and Taylor Swift’s cat top lists of most searched-for .sucks domains

You’ve got to hand it to .sucks registry Vox Populi.
The pricing may be “exploitative” and “predatory”, as the intellectual property community believes, but damn if the the company doesn’t know how to generate headlines.
Vox Pop has just added a new ticker stream to its web site, fingering the 50 most sucky celebrities, politicians, companies, social ills and abstract concepts.
The lists have been compiled from “more than a million” searches for .sucks domains that Vox Pop has seen pass through its system, according to CEO and veteran PR man John Berard.
For some reason, TayloySwiftsCat.sucks is the most searched-for in the “Personalities” category.
I’m guessing this relates to a meme that has yet to reach my isolated, middle-aged, non-country-music-loving corner of the world.
Whatever the cat did to earn this ire, it’s presumably equivalent to what Barack Obama, Apple, cancer and just life generally has done to searchers on the .sucks web site.
Here are the lists of most-searched-for terms, as it stands on the .sucks web site right now.
Top Personalities:

• 1. TaylorSwiftsCat
• 2. JustinBeiber
• 3. KevinSpacey
• 4. Oprah
• 5. KimKardashian
• 6. KayneWest
• 7. GuyFieri
• 8. TomBrady
• 9. DonaldTrump
• 10. OneDirection

Catch Phrases:

• 1. Life
• 2. YourMomma
• 3. This
• 4. Everyone
• 5. MyJob
• 6. MyLife
• 7. Reality
• 8. YouKnowWhat
• 9. Who
• 10. College

Causes:

• 1. Cancer
• 2. Technology
• 3. Obesity
• 4. Racism
• 5. Depression
• 6. Meat
• 7. AIDS
• 8. Hate
• 9. Poverty
• 10. Government

Companies:

• 1. Apple
• 2. Google
• 3. Microsoft
• 4. Facebook
• 5. Comcast
• 6. Walmart
• 7. CocaCola
• 8. McDonalds
• 9. Sony
• 10. Amazon

Politicians:

• 1. Obama
• 2. Hillary
• 3. TedCruz
• 4. RandPaul
• 5. StephenHarper
• 6. Putin
• 7. JebBush
• 8. TonyAbbott
• 9. DavidCameron
• 10. Democrats

Make no mistake, this is a headline-generating exercise by Vox Pop.
It comes as .sucks hits 10 days left on the clock for its $1,999+-a-pop sunrise period.
The company got a shed-load of mainstream media publicity when celebrities, starting with Kevin Spacey, started registering their names in .sucks several weeks ago.
It’s looking to get more headlines now, from lazy journalists and bloggers.
This is one of the first, for which I can only apologize.

.sucks explains Sunrise Premium name change

Vox Populi Registry abandonment of the .sucks “Sunrise Premium” brand in favor of a new “Market Premium” service is just a renaming, designed to reduce confusion among trademark owners, according to the company.
As we reported Sunday, all mentions of Sunrise Premium — a list of .sucks domains that will always carry a recommended $2,499 a year fee — have been expunged from the Vox Pop web site.
They were replaced with references to Market Premium, which appeared to carry all the characteristics of Sunrise Premium albeit under a new name.
Now, CEO John Berard has confirmed to DI that the program has not changed.
Rather, the new name is an effort to distance it from the regular sunrise period, which is linked to the Trademark Clearinghouse.
The decision was made following last week’s International Trademark Association conference, Berard said:

It was an insight gained from talking to people at INTA15. The intellectual property people there asked us so many times about the sunrise premium list of names that we realized we had allowed a mis-perception to take hold. This is no and never has been a relationship between that list and the TradeMark ClearingHouse. It was surprising how many people thought we had access to the TMCH (we don’t) and merely cut-and-pasted its names.
That is why we renamed it. Now called Market Premium and more clearly presented as a set of names that over time have been viewed as valuable (because they have been registered before). Names on this list will carry a suggested price of $2,499 (yes, the same as was suggested in Sunrise). Given the list is of names that the market has decided has value, it is likely it will contain trademarks.

The change may also be an attempt to head off a contractual squabble with ICANN.
Last Friday, the ICANN Business Constituency told ICANN management that if the Sunrise Premium list had been populated by names drawn from the TMCH, that would have been a breach of the .sucks Registry Agreement.

.sucks threatens ICANN with defamation claim after “extortion” letters

Vox Populi Registry has threatened to sue ICANN for defamation and other alleged breaches of US law, over allegations of “extortion” made by two of its constituencies.
The registry’s outside law firm wrote to ICANN yesterday, saying that it has “has no interest in pursuing claims at this time” but adding:

if ICANN or any of its constituent bodies (or any directly responsible member thereof) engages in any further wrongful activity that prevents the company from fulfilling its contractual obligations and operating the .SUCKS registry as both ICANN and Vox Populi envisioned, the company will have no choice but to pursue any and all remedies available to it.

The letter follows claims by the Intellectual Property Constituency that .sucks and its $1,999 annual sunrise fees constitute a “predatory” “shakedown”, claims which ICANN has forwarded to US and Canadian trade regulators for their legal opinions.
The IPC letter was followed up by similar claims by the Business Constituency on Friday.
Vox Pop now wants these constituencies, and ICANN itself, to shut up.
“Rather than assuming cooler heads will prevail, it is time to tell ICANN to stop interfering in our ability to operate the registry,” CEO John Berard said in an email to reporters. “We are not taking legal action at this point but making it clear that we reserve the right if ICANN continues in its wrong-headed approach.”
The company denies that .sucks will encourage cybersquatting, noting that like all other gTLDs it is subject to the anti-cybersquatting UDRP and URS remedies.

it would seem that ICANN is not actually concerned about cybersquatting or any other illegal activity. Rather, ICANN appears concerned that registrations on the .SUCKS registry will be used to aggregate uncomplimentary commentary about companies and products — the very purpose for the registry that Vox Populi identified in the application it submitted to ICANN, and that ICANN approved
ICANN has disseminated defamatory statements about Vox Populi and its business practices aimed at depriving Vox Populi of the benefits of its contract with ICANN. These actions further violate the duty of good faith and fair dealing that is implied in every contract… in suggesting illegality without any basis whatsoever, your actions (and those of the ICANN IPC and ICANN BC) have given rise to defamation claims against ICANN. Vox Populi hereby demands that ICANN, including any and all of its subdivisions, cease any and all such activity immediately.

There’s bucketloads of irony here, of course.
The company says it is standing up for its future registrants’ rights to free speech, but wants its own critics gagged today.
Read the letter as a PDF here.

Businesses call on regulators to stop .sucks “extortion”

ICANN’s Business Constituency wants US and Canadian regulators to intervene to prevent Vox Populi Registry, which runs .sucks, “extorting” businesses with its high sunrise fees.
The BC wrote to ICANN, the US Federal Trade Commission and the Canadian Office for Consumer Affairs on Friday, saying .sucks has employed “exploitive [sic] pricing and unfair marketing practices”.
The constituency adds its voice to Intellectual Property Constituency, which complained last month, causing ICANN to refer the matter to US and Canadian regulators.
Now, the BC has told the OCA and FTC:

We do not believe that exploitative and unfair business practices are conducive either to promoting end-user confidence in the Internet or to fair competition in the domain name space. On the contrary, the pricing structure adopted by Vox Populi for .sucks domain names is predicated purely on expecting the businesses and brands that drive global growth to pay extortionate fees for no consumer or market benefit.
…
Vox Populi’s tactics exploit businesses that neither want nor need these domain name registrations but feel unfairly pressured to register purely for defensive purposes.

The BC’s letter chooses to focus on saying sunrise names cost “$2,499 and up” (original emphasis). That’s based on the MSRP Vox Pop publishes on its web site.
In reality, Vox Pop is charging a registry fee of $1,999 per year for .sucks sunrise registrations.
Retail registrars can add hundreds of dollars in mark-up fees, but the leading corporate registrars that are selling the most .sucks sunrise names — MarkMonitor, CSC and Com Laude among them — have said that as a matter of principle they are only charging a nominal $20 to $25 processing fee.
It’s not the highest sunrise fee I’ve come across. The Chinese registry behind .top asked for $3,500 during its sunrise.
But the semantics of the .sucks TLD makes brand owners nervous and makes many of them feel that a defensive registration is a must-have.
The BC now write to regulators to “urge the FTC and OCA to expeditiously determine whether these practices constitute unfair trade practices”.
The letter points to US and Canadian regulations covering consumer protection for examples of where Vox Pop’s practices may fall short of the law.
The free speech opportunities afforded by .sucks do not outweigh the harms, the BC says.
It’s also interesting to note that while the BC appears to be running to regulators for assistance, it notes that it still fully supports the ICANN model.
There may be a degree of cognitive dissonance within the BC.
In a separate letter to ICANN, also signed by BC chair Elisa Cooper and sent yesterday, the BC seems to take issue with the fact that ICANN felt the need to report .sucks to regulators in the first place, writing:

We would like to understand the rationale for doing so. ICANN has ample authority, a clear obligation and the resources available to stop rogue practices through its contractual agreements with registries, its Compliance Department, and its broad duty to protect the public interest and the security and stability of the Internet, particularly for issues with global reach. Like all other gTLDs launched under ICANN’s program, .sucks has a global reach. It is not clear why ICANN feels it should seek clarification from these two North American agencies.

It’s worth noting that Vox Pop CEO Berard is a member of the BC via his PR agency, Credible Context. He was Cooper’s immediate predecessor as BC chair, leaving the post last year.
Correction: Thanks to the many readers who pointed out that Berard was actually the BC’s representative to the GNSO, not its chair. Apologies for the error.
The letter tells Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah that “viewed in its entirety, Vox Populi’s pricing scheme is a violation of the Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs)” developed for the new gTLD program, alleging it discourages use of the RPMs and encourages cybersquatting.
It claims that if Vox Pop populated its Sunrise Premium list (now known as Market Premium, it seems) with data from the Trademark Clearinghouse it could be in violation of its Registry Agreement with ICANN.
My sense has been that the names on that list were actually culled from zone files. Vox Pop has said it was compiled from lists of names that have previously been defensively registered. Most of the names in the TMCH have not been defensively registered.
The BC asks for ICANN “to take strong action”, but does not specify what, exactly, it wants.
The letter to the OCA and FTC can be read here. The letter to ICANN is here. Both are PDF files.