.web auction to go ahead after ICANN denies Donuts/Radix appeal

The new gTLD .web seems set to go to auction next week after ICANN rejected an 11th-hour delay attempt by two applicants.
ICANN’s Board Governance Committee said yesterday that there is no evidence that applicant Nu Dot Co has been taken over by a deep-pocketed third party.
The BGC therefore rejected Donuts’ and Radix’s joint attempt to have the July 27 “last resort” auction delayed.
Donuts and Radix had argued in a Request for Reconsideration earlier this week that Nu Dot Co has changed its board of directors since first applying for .web, which would oblige it to change the application.
Its failure to do so meant they auction should be delayed, they said.
They based their beliefs on an email from NDC director Jose Ignacio Rasco, in which he said one originally listed director was no longer involved with the application but that “several others” were.
There’s speculation in the contention set that a legacy gTLD operator such as Verisign or Neustar might now be in control of NDC.
But the BGC said ICANN had already “diligently” investigated these claims:

in response to the Requesters’ allegations, ICANN did diligently investigate the claims regarding potential changes to Nu Dot’s leadership and/or ownership. Indeed, on several occasions, ICANN staff communicated with the primary contact for Nu Dot both through emails and a phone conversation to determine whether there had been any changes to the Nu Dot organization that would require an application change request. On each occasion, Nu Dot confirmed that no such changes had occurred, and ICANN is entitled to rely upon those representations.

ICANN staff had asked Rasco via email and then telephone whether there had been any changes to NDC’s leadership or control, and he said there had not.
He is quoted by he BGC as saying:

[n]either the ownership nor the control of Nu Dotco, LLC has changed since we filed our application. The Managers designated pursuant to the company’s LLC operating agreement (the LLC equivalent of a corporate Board) have not changed. And there have been no changes to the membership of the LLC either.

The RfR has therefore been thrown out.
Unless further legal action is taken, the auction is still scheduled for July 27. The deadline for all eight applicants (seven for .web and one for .webs) to post deposits with ICANN passed on Wednesday.
As it’s a last resort auction, all funds raised will go into an ICANN pot, the purpose of which has yet to be determined. The winning bid will also be publicly disclosed.
Had the contention set been settled privately, all losing applicants would have made millions of dollars of profit from their applications and the price would have remained a secret.
NDC is the only applicant refusing to go to private auction.
The applicants for .web are NDC, Radix, Donuts, Schlund, Afilias, Google and Web.com. Vistaprint’s bid for .webs is also in the auction.
The RfR decision can he read here (pdf).

One and two-letter .at domains coming soon

Nic.at will next month start selling .at domains shorter than three character domains for the first time.
All one-character and two-character domains will be released, the ccTLD registry said, about 5,000 domains in total.
The released domains include those containing any of the 34 non-Latin letters Nic.at supports, it said.
Holders of trademarks valid in Austria before July 1 get the first crack at the names, during a August 29 to September 23 sunrise period.
During this phase, domains will cost €240 ($265) with a €120 ($132) application fee. Contested sunrise names will be auctioned in October.
Everything not grabbed by trademark interests will be put to a public auction from November 7, where the minimum bid will be €72 ($79).
If there’s anything left after that, it will be released into the general available pool for registration at standard .at prices.
Nic.at plans to dump all registered one and two-character domains into the .at zone file, so they can be used, at the same time on December 6.
Austria has no local presence requirements for ccTLD registration.
Given “at” has some semantic value in English, it could be a popular launch.

Donuts joins fight to delay .web gTLD auction with emergency appeal

Donuts and Radix have filed an “emergency” appeal with ICANN in an attempt to get the forthcoming auction for the .web gTLD delayed.
The companies, both of which have applied for .web, say they have evidence that one of their rival bidders recently changed ownership without telling ICANN, in breach of application rules.
They filed a Request for Reconsideration (pdf) with ICANN (pdf) on Sunday, demanding the delay and an investigation into whether Nu Dot Co LLC is under new control.
The move follows speculation, which we reported last week, that Nu Dot Co is now being controlled by a major legacy gTLD registry player such as Verisign.
The evidence for the the change of ownership comes to light for the first time in the RfR. It’s an email from Nu Dot Co director Jose Ignacio Rasco to Donuts dated June 7. It reads:

Nicolai is at NSR full time and no longer involved with our TLD applications. I’m still running our program and Juan sits on the board with me and several others.

“Nicolai” is Nicolai Bezsonoff, who is listed as an NDC director in its .web application. NSR is presumably Neustar, where Bezsonoff went to work when it acquired .CO Internet.
“Juan” is Juan Calle, the third NDC director, CEO, and former CEO of .CO Internet.
Donuts and Radix believe that Bezsonoff’s departure and the apparent appointment of the unnamed “several others” as NDC directors gave NDC the obligation, under Applicant Guidebook rules, to inform ICANN of the changes.
The Guidebook states:

If at any time during the evaluation process information previously submitted by an applicant becomes untrue or inaccurate, the applicant must promptly notify ICANN via submission of the appropriate forms. This includes applicant-specific information such as changes in financial position and changes in ownership or control of the applicant.

(With that in mind, one wonders whether the acquisition of .blog at auction was strictly legit).
Donuts and Radix now want ICANN to delay the “last resort” auction, which is currently slated for July 27, and “conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the apparent discrepancies and/or changes in NDC’s .WEB/.WEBS application”.
NDC is believed to be the only one of the eight .web/.webs applicants to be refusing to settle the contention set via a private auction, where the losers get an equal share of the winning bid.
If the set goes to ICANN’s last-resort auction, ICANN gets all the cash.
The final price of .web could easily be in the ball park of $50 million, so each applicant stands to lose several million dollars if the July 27 auction goes ahead as planned.
Radix and fellow .web applicant Schlund had previously written to ICANN to request the delay, but were rebuffed in a letter last week.
The decision outlined in that letter is what the new RfR challenges.
RfRs have a long track record of being dismissed by ICANN’s Board Governance Committee, very often because the requester has not supplied ICANN with any new information with which to change its mind.
That’s a risk here, too, given that ICANN seems to have been in possession of the Rasco email since June 22, before decision to go ahead with the auction was made.
However, that decision seems to have been made by ICANN staff. An RfR makes sure it gets the attention of the ICANN board of directors.

Is Verisign .web applicant’s secret sugar daddy?

The fiercely contested .web gTLD is being forced into a last-resort auction and some people seem to think a major registry player is behind it.
Two .web applicants — Radix (pdf) and Schlund (pdf) — this week wrote to ICANN to demand that the .web auction, currently planned for July 27, be postponed.
They said the sale should be delayed to give applicants time “to investigate whether there has been a change of leadership and/or control” at rival applicant Nu Dot Co LLC.
Nu Dot Co is a new gTLD investment vehicle headed up by Juan Diego Calle, who launched and ran .CO Internet until it was sold to Neustar a couple of years ago.
I gather that some applicants believe that Nu Dot Co’s .web application is now being bankrolled by a larger company with deeper pockets.
The two names I’ve heard bandied around, talking to industry sources this week, are Verisign and Neustar.
Nobody I’ve talked to has a shred of direct evidence either company is involved and Calle declined to comment.
So is this paranoia or not?
There are a few reasons these suspicions may have come about.
First, the recent revelation that successful .blog applicant Primer Nivel, a no-name Panama entity with a Colombian connection, was actually secretly being bankrolled by WordPress, has opened eyes to the possibility of proxy bidders.
It was only after the .blog contention set was irreversibly settled that the .blog contract changed hands and the truth become known.
Some applicants may have pushed the price up beyond the $19 million winning bid — making the rewards of losing the private auction that much higher — had they known they were bidding against a richer, more motivated opponent.
Second, sources say the .web contention set had been heading to a private auction — in which all losing applicants get a share of the winning bid — but Nu Dot Co decided to back out at the last minute.
Under ICANN rules, if competing applicants are not able to privately resolve their contention set, an ICANN last-resort auction must ensue.
Third, this effective vetoing of the private auction does not appear to fit in with Nu Dot Co’s strategy to date.
It applied for 13 gTLDs in total. Nine of those have already gone to auctions that Nu Dot Co ultimately lost (usually reaping the rewards of losing).
The other four are either still awaiting auction or, in the case of .corp, have been essentially rejected for technical reasons.
It usually only makes sense to go to an ICANN last-resort auction — where the proceeds all go to ICANN — if you plan on winning or if you want to make sure your competitors do not get a financial windfall from a private auction.
Nu Dot Co isn’t actually an operational registry, so it doesn’t strictly have competitors.
That suggests to some that its backer is an operational registry with a disdain for new gTLD rivals. Verisign, in other words.
Others think Neustar, given the fact that its non-domains business is on the verge of imploding and its previous acquisition of .CO Internet from Calle.
I have no evidence either company is involved. I’m just explaining the thought process here.
According to its application, two entities own more than 15% of Nu Dot Co. Both — Domain Marketing Holdings, LLC and NUCO LP, LLC — are Delaware shell corporations set up via an agent in March 2012, shortly before the new gTLD application filing deadline.
Many in the industry are expecting .web to go for more than the $41.5 million GMO paid for .shop. Others talk down the price, saying “web” lacks the cultural impact it once had.
But it seems we will all find out later this month.
Responding to the letters from Schlund and Radix, ICANN yesterday said that it had no plans to postpone the July 27 last-resort auction.
All seven applicants had to submit a postponement form by June 12 if they wanted a delay, ICANN informed them in a letter (pdf), and they missed that deadline.
They now have until July 20 to either resolve the contention privately or put down their deposits, ICANN said.
The applicants for .web, aside from Nu Dot Co, are Google, Donuts, Radix, Schlund, Web.com and Afilias.
Due to a string confusion ruling, .webs applicant Vistaprint will also be in the auction.

Donuts invests in Bitcoin startup

Donuts has made an investment in Netki, a company focused on digital wallets used in Bitcoin and other e-money systems.
Netki’s service is designed to make it easier to locate the wallets Bitcoin users use when they send and receive money, which are usually gibberish strings of around 34 characters.
The company service, when integrated into wallet providers’ offerings, converts these impossible-to-remember strings into easy-to-understand domain names.
An example given by Netki on its web site is the wallet name 1CpLXM15vjULK3ZPGUTDMUcGATGR9xGitv, which can instead be rendered as wallet.BruceWayne.rocks.
The company seems to make its money from end users by selling domain names with a higher mark-up than you’d usually expect. A .com via Netki is $20.99, for example.
It offers scores of TLDs, both generic legacy, new, and ccTLD, many of which are in the Donuts stable.
The size of the investment was not disclosed.
It’s the second investment to be announced from Donuts Labs. In May, it invested in “geofencing” startup GeoFrenzy.

After long battle, first Bulgarian IDN domain goes live

Bulgarians finally have the ability to register domain names in their native Cyrillic script, after years of fighting with ICANN.
The domain Имена.бг, which translates as “names.bg” went live on the internet this week, according to local reports.
Bulgaria was one of the first countries to ask for a internationalized domain name version of its ccTLD, almost seven years ago, but it was rejected by ICANN in 2010.
The requested .бг was found too similar to Brazil’s existing Latin-script ccTLD .br. Evaluators thought the risk of phishing and other types of attacks was too high.
The requested string didn’t change, but ICANN processes were adapted to allow appeals and a new method for establishing similarity was established.
On appeal, .бг was determined to be less prone to confusion with .br than existing pairs of Latin ccTLDs are with each other, ergo should be approved.
Имена.бг does not yet directly resolve (for me at least) from the Google Chrome address bar. It’s treated as a web search instead. But clicking on links to it does work.
The new ccTLD, which is .xn--90ae in the DNS, was delegated last week.
The registry is Imena.bg (which also means “names.bg”), based in Sofia and partially owned by Register.bg, the .bg registry.
Despite the long battle, the success of .бг is by no means assured. IDNs have a patchy record worldwide.
It’s true that Russians went nuts for their .рф (.rf for Russian Federation) ccTLD during its scandal-rocked launch in 2010, but Arabic IDNs have had hardly any interest and the current boom in China seems to be largely concentrated on Latin-script TLDs.
.бг is expected to open for general registration in the fourth quarter.
I guess we’ll have to wait until at least next year to discover whether the concerns about confusion with .br were well-founded.

Buy it or lose it? Governments could get first dibs on two-letter domains

Governments and ccTLD registries would get new rights to own two-letter domains in new gTLDs under a proposed ICANN policy.
These highly-prized domains, many of which are likely worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, would be subject to a mini sunrise period, under the proposal.
The so-called Exclusive Availability Pre-registration Period would be limited to those companies or government entities in charge of matching ccTLDs.
The measures are outlined in “Proposed Measures for Letter/Letter Two-Character ASCII Labels to Avoid Confusion with Corresponding Country Codes” (pdf), published by ICANN late last week.
The surprisingly succinct document outlines three things new gTLD registries must do if they want to start selling two-letter domains matching ccTLDs, which are currently restricted.
The key measure is:

Registry Operator must implement a 30-day period in which registration of letter/letter two-character ASCII labels that are country codes, as specified in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard, will be made exclusively available to the applicable country-code manager or government.

In other words, if you’re a government or company listed as the ccTLD manager here, you get 30 days of exclusive opportunity to buy the LL.example matching your ccTLD.
Until now, governments have been able to block the release of LL new gTLD domains matching their ccTLDs.
The new proposal, introduced in an attempt to settle a long-running debate about the most appropriate way to enable the release of two-character strings, appears to add a “buy it or lose it” component to existing policy.
Under the base New gTLD Registry Agreement, all two-character domains were initially reserved.
Then, in late 2014, ICANN said registries could release all letter-number, number-letter and number-number combinations.
Many registries have already released such names, some selling for thousands at auction. When Rightside released its LN/NL/NN names, some carried price tags as high as $50,000.
Letter-letter domains could also be released following a formal registry request to ICANN, but were subject to a 60-day period during which governments could object.
Almost 1,000 new gTLDs have submitted such requests, and almost all have been “partially approved”.
That means some governments objected to the release of ccTLD-matching domains. Over 16,000 unique domain names have been objected to and therefore blocked over the last year or so.
The new proposal would add an extra process under which these blocked domains could be released, with ccTLD concerns getting first rights.
Interestingly, it appears to bring ccTLD managers into the mix, rather than restricting the names simply to governments.
The Governmental Advisory Committee has been the main driving force behind demands for restrictions on LL domains, but the proposed policy appears to also extend rights to private entities.
Remember, many ccTLDs are operated independently by private companies, without local government oversight.
For example, .uk is managed by Nominet, a non-governmental entity. The UK government has blocked many uk.example domains from being registered. The new policy appears to allow either Nominet or the government to register these names.
The one-page proposal is light on some details. It does not say, for example, what happens when the government and the ccTLD manager both want the name.
In keeping with ICANN’s habit of staying out of pricing, it does not specify price caps either.
It does, however, oblige registries to ban registrants from pretending to be affiliated with the relevant government when they are not.
Governments also get to complain, and registries have to investigate, if the relevant domains are causing “confusion”, though registries do not appear to be under a strict obligation to delete or suspend domains.
The policy is open for public comment until August here.

Chinese gTLD cranks up renewal prices from $18 to $100

Chinese new gTLD registry Beijing RITT-Net has said it intends to more than quintuple its registration and renewal prices.
From January 1, 2017, prices for .手机 will go up from $18 a year to $100 a year, the company said in a notice to ICANN late last month.
.手机 (.xn--kput3i) is a Chinese internationalized domain name meaning “.cell” or “.cellphone”.
The registry told ICANN:

it is our sincere hope to adjust the initial registration and renewal fees from 18 dollars to 100 dollars with the aim to keep up with the status quo of China’s domain name market and to provide registrants with better services. We wish the new price will be effective from Jan 1st, 2017.

I believe this is the biggest renewal price hike for a new gTLD registry to date.
Around 25,000 existing registrations appear to be affected, but very few registrars will have to deal with the ramifications.
According to registry reports, over 99% of its registrations were made via Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology, which does business at dns.com.cn.

.blog launch date and pricing revealed

The new gTLD .blog will go to general availability in November with a wholesale price tag of $20, it was revealed today.
The registry, Knock Knock Whois There, told registrars that sunrise will kick off August 18 and run for 60 days with a $130 price tag. Disputed sunrise domains will go to auction.
Landrush will follow for a week from November 2 with a $130 application fee and auctions for contested domains a week later.
General availability is then due to begin November 21, with a registry fee of $20.
There will be tiered pricing on reserved “premium” names.
The registry does not seem to have ruled out an Early Access Period either.
This is all fairly consistent with KKWT’s previous statements that its pricing and launch structure will be in line with current industry norms.
The registry is owned by Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging software and service.
It emerged as the surprise secret backer of original applicant Primer Nivel earlier this year, following a $19 million auction win.

Most businesses don’t care about .uk domains

The majority of businesses in the UK don’t care about direct second-level .uk domains, even when the benefits are spelled out for them, according to Nominet research.
The new survey found that only 27% of businesses would “definitely” or “probably” exercise their new right to buy a .uk domain that matches their .co.uk or .org.uk name.
That number only went up to 40% after respondents had seen a brief Nominet marketing pitch, the survey found.
Another 16% said they had no plans to get their .uk, post-pitch, while 44% remained undecided.
This was the value proposition the respondents saw (click to enlarge):

Under the direct .uk policy, all registrants of third-level domains, such as example.co.uk, have the right of refusal over the matching example.uk.
If they don’t exercise that right by June 10, 2019, the matching SLDs will be unfrozen and released into the available pool.
The new Nominet research also found out that most registrants don’t even know they have this right.
Only 44% of respondents were aware of the right. That went up to 45% for businesses and down to 33% for respondents who only owned .uk domain names (as opposed to gTLD names).
A quarter of respondents, which all already own 3LD .uk domains, didn’t even know second-level regs were possible.
Of those who had already bought their .uk names, over two thirds were either parking or redirecting. Individuals were much more likely to actually use their names for emails or personal sites.
The numbers are not terribly encouraging for the direct .uk initiative as it enters into its third year.
They suggest that if something is not done to raise awareness in the next few years, a lot of .co.uk businesses could find their matching SLDs in the hands of cybersquatters or domainers.
Nominet members (registrars and domainers primarily) were quizzed about possible ways to increase adoption during a company webinar today.
Suggestions such as making the domains free (they currently cost £2.50 a year, the same as a 3LD) or bribing a big anchor tenant such as the BBC to switch were suggested.
There’s a lot of dissatisfaction among the membership about the fact that .uk SLDs were allowed in the first place.
The number of second-level .uk names has gone from 96,696 in June 2014 to to 350,088 last year to 593,309 last month, according to Nominet stats.
Over the same periods, third-level regs have been shrinking, from 10.43 million to 10.22 million to 10.08 million, .