Recent Posts
- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
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- ICANN content policing power grab may be dead
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- Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment
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- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
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- Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD
- Up to 70 jobs on the line at Nominet as .uk regs dwindle
- Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay
- Private auctions could be banned in new gTLD next round
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- D3 announces fourth crypto new gTLD client
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- No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse
- ICANN insists it is working on linkification
- Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps
- GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
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- Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime
- Team Internet says revenue beat estimates
- Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction
- .ai helps UDRP cases rise in 2023, WIPO says
- Freenom’s domains land at Gandi after termination
- .ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite
- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
- Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
- ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable
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- After 14 years, ICANN practices what it preaches on IDNs
- Weak demand for private Whois data, ICANN data shows
- .ing doing way better than .meme
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- Anguilla fears the .ai junk drop
- Five more gTLDs get launch dates
- $10 million of ICANN cash up for grabs
- Almost 50,000 .ai domains sold in a quarter
- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
- Life insurance company kills dot-brand
- ICANN finds new home for Lebanon’s TLD after founder’s death
- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
- Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant
- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
- Amazon planning new push into registrar market?
- Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules
- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
- Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars
- GoDaddy service to let you block domains in over 650 TLDs
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- ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman
- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
- Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system
- Nominet to take over .gov.uk
- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
- ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live
- .au regs slide on 2LD anniversary
- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
- Two more dot-brands bite the dust
- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
- Did somebody spend a million bucks on a Google domain hack?
Fly9 offers services to simplify new gTLD sales
Portland-based developer Fly9 launched last week, offering new gTLD registries a broad range of software designed to make it easier to sell domain names.
The company, founded by SnapNames and Afilias alum Ravi Surya, hopes its platform will help new gTLD operators tap into registrars’ customer bases in a soon-to-be-flooded market.
“The problem with new TLDs is they’ll all depend on registrars, but the registrars are all busy selling other things, like hosting, they’re not interested in selling your TLD,” Surya said.
For a start-up, only just coming out of stealth mode, three-year-old Fly9 seems to have an awful lot of products with an awful lot of features, judging by a quick demo we saw last week.
Perhaps most interesting is the core TLD Distribution Platform. It’s a software service designed to plug the gap between the registry back-end and the registrar/reseller and simplify channel management.
The idea is to make it easier for newbie registry operators to leverage registrars’ marketing clout, but without asking the registrar to do a lot of technical integration work.
Say you’ve been awarded .pumpkins by ICANN. It’s a niche TLD and registrars — spoiled for choice in a world of 500 new gTLDs — aren’t exactly clamoring to sign up to offer it.
Fly9’s service would enable you to give these registrars a way to very quickly start selling .pumpkin domains, using their own registrar accreditation and payment systems but using Fly9’s hosted, white-label microsite.
According to Surya, registry managers can use the service to sign up registrars as little as five minutes. Adding branding and customizing the site for the registrar would obviously take longer.
Registries can also elect to use Fly9’s partner registrar, NameSystem, and create a channel of resellers instead.
The Fly9 suite also includes services for handling pre-registrations, sunrise periods, and premium domain auctions and Surya said the service can also handle EPP extensions for restricted gTLDs.
Pricing is based on transaction volume, but the software has already been licensed to two major back-end registry technical providers, which Surya said he could not yet name.
LogicBoxes and Architelos are among those offering software services for new gTLD management, but I’d be hard pressed to think of another company doing precisely what Fly9 is right now.
Tucows, Hexonet and TLD Registrar Solutions goes pretty much in the same direction as well.
To my knowledge, Fly9 is the only provider that enables multiple registrars, resellers and affiliates for a given TLD on the same platform. Our platform also has an integrated secondary marketplace (auctions); pre-order and sunrise order capability; and is customizable for TLD owners.
We’d be happy to offer a customizable demo that would help illustrate the distinctions of the Fly9 platform.
“Multiple registrars, resellers and affiliates” => check on both Tucows and Logic Boxes. I’ll ask Fly9 for a services description + quote and will happily consider them as well, but this uniqueness argument is a bit over.