Krueger’s suit against M+M dropped, for now

Former Minds + Machines chair Fred Krueger has dropped his lawsuit against the company, which concerned “missing” shares.
M+M announced today that the two parties have signed a “tolling agreement”, which apparently leave the door open for Krueger to re-file the suit at a later date.
If he does re-file, the company has agreed to the date of the original suit being filed if it deploys any statute of limitations defenses.
The company said in a statement to investors:

The Tolling Agreement provides that if the plaintiffs refile their suit, that any statute of limitation defenses of the defendants will be based on the date of the filing of the dismissed suit, 23 February 2016, but will not be deemed to revive any of the plaintiffs’ causes of action, claims, rights, legal positions, or defenses, at law or in equity, that were time-barred prior to 23 February 2016.

Krueger sued claiming M+M or its accountants had misplaced five million shares he was due.
He was looking for $1.5 million in damages.

New .sucks logo actually kinda sucks

Vox Populi has revealed a new logo for its .sucks gTLD.
Here it is. What do you think?

In going for a retro, 8-bit vibe, has Vox deliberately gone for a look that actually kinda sucks? Is that the joke? Or do you like it?
The company said on its blog:

The program is designed to portray the tight link between the ubiquity of digital technology and the individual’s long-standing right of free expression. Moving from a softer blue image to a sharper black-and-white logo that evokes a computer’s font better honors the role the internet plays as a modern day soapbox

Previously, the .sucks logo was the brand inside a speech bubble.
The logo comes with a relaunched web site at get.sucks and a billboard advertising campaign that has included a stint in New York’s Times Square, as seen in this registry-supplied photo.

The gTLD has been in general availability since June 2015 and has about 7,500 names in its zone file today, growing at roughly three to four domains per day over the last few months.

XYZ settles Verisign’s back-end switcheroo lawsuit

XYZ.com has settled a lawsuit filed against it against Verisign stemming from XYZ’s acquisition of .theatre, .security and .protection.
Verisign sued the new gTLD registry operator for “interfering” with its back-end contracts with the previous owners last August, as part of its campaign to compete against new gTLDs in the courtroom.
XYZ had acquired the .security and .protection ICANN contracts from security Symantec, and .theatre from a company called KBE Holdings.
As part of the transitions, all three applications were modified with ICANN to name CentralNic as the back-end registry services provider, replacing Verisign.
Verisign sued on the basis of tortious interference and business conspiracy. It was thrown out of court in November then amended and re-filed.
But the case appears to have now been settled.
Negari issued a grovelling not-quite-apology statement on his blog:

I am pleased to report that the recent case filed by Verisign against CentralNic, Ltd., XYZ and myself has been settled. After looking at the claims in dispute, we regret that as a result of our acquisition of the .theatre, .security and .protection extensions and our arrangement for CentralNic to serve as the backend service provider for these extensions, that Verisign was prevented from the opportunity to pursue monetization of those relationships. As ICANN’s new gTLD program continues to evolve, we would caution others who find themselves in similar situations to be mindful of the existing contracts extension owners may have with third parties.

Registries changing their minds about their back-end provider is not unheard of.
In this case, large portions of Verisign’s final amended complaint were redacted, suggesting some peculiarities to this particular switch.
If there was a monetary component to the settlement, it was not disclosed. The original Verisign complaint had demanded damages of over $2 million.

Donuts quietly buys .shopping from Uniregistry (and .jetzt)

Just a few months after Uniregistry bought out Donuts to win .shopping, Donuts has bought the pre-launch gTLD back.
Donuts has also bought live gTLD .jetzt from a Swedish company.
The .shopping deal is a weird one.
Uniregistry and Donuts were the only two applicants for .shopping, until Uniregistry paid Donuts to withdraw its application back in January.
Uniregistry went on to sign its ICANN Registry Agreement in March, but less than a month later, April 27, transferred the contract to Donuts.
.shopping had been entangled in the .shop contention set, which was eventually resolved when GMO Registry paid $41.5 million at ICANN auction.
Despite the unusual circumstances, Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling said today it was just the simple sale of a string. Donuts declined to comment. Neither revealed a price.
The second Donuts acquisition, closed April 26, was of .jetzt, which was applied for, delegated to and managed by New TLD Company AB of Sweden.
That gTLD, which is German for “.now”, has been in general availability for almost two years but has only 5,600 names in its zone file.
Donuts declined to comment, but it seems to me we’re looking at a failing gTLD looking for a white knight in this instance.

Radix joins the Hollywood content police

Radix has become the second major gTLD registry to announce a content policing deal with the movie industry.
It today said it has signed an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America similar to the one Donuts announced in February.
Like Donuts, Radix will treat the MPAA as a “trusted notifier” for the purposes of taking down “large-scale pirate websites”.
Radix said the deal “imposes strict standards for such referrals, including that they be accompanied by evidence of clear and pervasive copyright infringement, and a representation that the MPAA has first attempted to contact the registrar and hosting provider for resolution.”
Donuts described its notifier program in this document (pdf). Radix said its arrangement is “similar”.
The Donuts-MPAA deal proved somewhat controversial.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation invoked the slippery slope argument, saying of it:

The danger in agreements like this is that they could become a blanket policy that Internet users cannot avoid. If what’s past is prologue, expect to see MPAA and other groups of powerful media companies touting the Donuts agreement as a new norm, and using it to push ICANN and governments towards making all domain name registries disable access to an entire website on a mere accusation of infringement.

The EFF said these kinds of deals could ultimately lead to legal freedom of speech being curtailed online.
We’re not quite there yet — right now we have two gTLD registries (albeit covering over 200 gTLDs) and one trusted notifier — but I expect more similar deals in future, branching out into different industries such as music and pharamaceuticals.
The deals stem in part from the Domain Name Association’s Healthy Domains Initiative, which aims to avoid ICANN/government regulation by creating voluntary best practices for the industry.
The advantage of a voluntary arrangement is that there’s no risk of a terminal sanction — such as losing your registry contract — if you fail to live up to its terms.
Radix’s portfolio includes .website, .space, .online and .tech. It’s also a .music and .web applicant.

WordPress reveals IT bought .blog for $19 million

WordPress.com owner Automattic has outed itself as the bankroll behind the winner of the .blog auction and the new owner of the forthcoming new gTLD.
Founder Matt Mullenweg also revealed that the company paid around $19 million for the domain at private auction in February 2015, about $1 million more than the amount DI estimated at the time.
Until now, the winning .blog applicant, which fought off competition from eight competitors including Google, M+M, Radix and Donuts, was only known as Primer Nivel.
Primer Nivel is a Panamanian company previously described to DI as an investment vehicle with links to Colombian registrar My.co.
To the best of my knowledge, Automattic’s involvement with the bid has never even been hinted at, but Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg said in a blog post last night that it has been involved since well before the auction took place.

It’s now public that Automattic is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and afterward in order not to draw too much attention, but nonetheless the cost of the .blog auction got up there (people are estimating around $20M).

An earlier version of the blog post put the price at “about $19m”, as captured by Google.

ICANN approved the reassignment of the .blog contract from Primer Nivel to Knock Knock WHOIS There on April 29.
In the original Primer Nivel application, only My.co CEO Gerardo Aristizabal and VP of business development Carlos Neira were listed as shareholders of 15% or more of the company in its answer to question 11 of the application form.
ICANN processed a change request to the question 11 answer in March 2014, but did not publish the result of the change. It may merely have been a change of personal contact information.
One has to wonder whether, had WordPress’ involvement in Primer Nivel been public, the .blog auction could have fetched even more.
One might imagine that Google, which competes with WordPress with its Blogger service, would have viewed .blog as more threatening in a rival’s hands.
But Primer Nivel and now Automattic/KKWT appear to have no intention to make .blog a WordPress-exclusive gTLD. The original application stated that it would be open to all, and ICANN has since banned so-called “closed generics”.
The registry has already opened a web site at kkwt.domains, which is currently pitching the product to accredited registrars.
It says it plans to go to general availability and “activate” 250,000 .blog domains before the end of the year.
Automattic obtained an ICANN registrar accreditation back in October 2010 but to date has not sold a single domain via that accreditation.
It offers WordPress.com hosting customers domain registrations, but I believe it does so as a GoDaddy reseller.
.blog is currently in “transition to delegation” and it’s probably only a matter of days before it is delegated to the internet.
Mullenweg blogged that the sunrise period is expected to start in August, with and October landrush.
Pricing is expected to be in line with current industry standards, including premium tiers.
The gTLD has always been one of my favorites, and having WordPress backing it will almost certainly make it more successful than if the registry were an independent third party, possibly raising the profile of new gTLDs as a whole.

World’s first vanity gTLD goes live

Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li has become the first person to own a top-level domain matching his name.
The new gTLD .richardli went live on the internet today.
The registry is Pacific Century Asset Management (HK) Limited, a subsidiary of PCCW, the Hong Kong telecomms and internet giant of which Li is chair.
Forbes estimated Li’s personal wealth in 2015 at $4.7 billion, making him the 360th richest guy in the world.
The gTLD is a pure brand-protection play, according to the 2012 application, which states:

An important goal of the TLD is the safeguard of the intellectual property right of our Chairman’s name Richard Li.
…
The establishment of the .richardli TLD on the Internet safeguards our brand’s intellectual property right (in this case, our Chairman’s name Richard Li). PCCW has invested substantially in the online areas and will continue to do so.

There are no domains currently resolving in .richardli, though we should expect nic.richardli to start resolving in the coming days.
I believe .richardli was the only applied-for new gTLD that exactly matches a specific individual’s personal name.
A handful of gTLDs representing PCCW’s brands in Latin and Chinese scripts also went live today.

Afilias takes over .hotel, sidelines Krischenowski over hacking claims

Afilias has sought to distance itself from DotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski, due to ongoing claims that he improperly accessed secret data on rival .hotel applicants.
The company revealed in a recent letter to ICANN that it has bought out Krischenowski’s 48.8% stake in successful .hotel applicant Hotel Top Level Domain Sarl and that Afilias will become the sole shareholder of HTLD.
The move is linked to claims that Krischenowski exploited a glitch in ICANN’s new gTLD applicants’ portal to access confidential financial and technical information belonging to rival .hotel applicants.
These competing applicants have ganged up to demand that HTLD should lose its rights to .hotel, which it obtained by winning a controversial Community Priority Evaluation.
Afilias chairman Philipp Grabensee, now “sole managing director” of HTLD, wrote ICANN last month (pdf) to explain the nature of the HTLD’s relationship with Krischenowski and deny that HTLD had benefited from the alleged data compromise.
He said that, at the time of the incidents, Krischenowski was the 50% owner and managing director of a German company that in turn was a 48.8% owner of HTLD. He was also an HTLD consultant, though Grabensee played down that role.
He was responding to a March ICANN letter (pdf) which claimed that Krischenowski’s portal credentials were used at least eight times to access confidential data on .hotel bids. It said:

It appears that Mr Krischenowski accessed and downloaded, at minimum, the financial projections for Despegar’s applications for .HOTEL, .HOTEIS and .HOTELES, and the technical overview for Despegar’s applications for .HOTEIS and .HOTEL. Mr Krischenowski appears to have specifically searched for terms and question types related to financial or technical portions of the application.

Krischenowski has denied any wrongdoing and told DI last month that he simply used the portal assuming it was functioning as intended.
Grabensee said in his letter that any data Krischenowski may have obtained was not given to HTLD, and that his alleged actions were not done with HTLD’s knowledge or consent.
He added that obtaining the data would not have helped HTLD’s application anyway, given that the incident took place after HTLD had already submitted its application. HTLD did not substantially alter its application after the incident, he said.
HTLD’s rival .hotel applicants do not seem to have alleged that HTLD won the contention set due to the confidential data.
Rather, they’ve said via their lawyer that HTLD should be disqualified on the grounds that new gTLD program rules disqualify people who have been convicted of computer crime.
Even that’s a bit tenuous, however, given that Krischenowski has not been convicted of, or even charged with, a computer crime.
The other .hotel applicants are Travel Reservations, Famous Four Media, Radix, Minds + Machines, Donuts and Fegistry.
ICANN is now pressing HTLD for more specific information about Krischenowski’s relationship with HTLD at specific times over the last few years, in a letter (pdf) published last night, so it appears that its overdue investigation is not yet complete.

Rightside to modernize eNom, predicts $75m new gTLD revs

Rightside used its first quarter earnings call yesterday to address, albeit indirectly, some of the criticisms recently leveled at it by activist investors and competitors.
CEO Taryn Naidu revealed for the first time how the company sees the new gTLD market playing out in the longer term.
He said than in three to five years, Rightside expects annual revenue from its registry business to come it at $50 million to $75 million.
That’s a hell of a lot more than it makes today.
In the first quarter, registry revenue was $2.6 million, compared to $1.6 million a year ago. Annualized, that’s a shade over $10 million.
On the back of an envelope, Rightside seems to need roughly 50% growth per year over five years to hit the low end of its target.
Naidu told analysts that one factor built into this projection is that third-party registrars will start to sell just as many new gTLD domains as Rightside’s registrars do.
Currently, Rightside sees 15% to 20% new gTLD, but with others it’s 3% to 5%, he said.
Naidu said he expects margins to be 20% at the EBITDA level.
The revelation of these targets may go some way to address investor concerns that Rightside is putting too much effort into its new gTLD business at the expense of its cash-generating registrars.
J Carlo Cannell of Cannell Capital expressed these views and others in March, and was supported by fellow investor Frank Schilling, CEO of Uniregistry.
Naidu last night also addressed concerns about eNom, which Cannell had called a “time capsule” due to its aging user experience.
He admitted that eNom is “encumbered by some older technology” but said it was being fixed.
“Later this quarter we will be rolling out the first phase of our development efforts, which include a dramatically revamped user interface, a new suite of software development tools and a new developer hub to help our partners learn, develop and test faster,” he said.
The registrar business brought in $44 million in the quarter, up from $41.9 million. Aftermarket revenue was $9.3 million compared to $7.3 million.
Overall, revenue was up 9% at $55.1 million, with a net loss of $5.1 million. That compared to income of $1.9 million a year ago.
Naidu also seemed to obliquely address the criticism that a lot of Rightside’s new gTLDs are shit — .democrat, .dance, .army, .navy, and .airforce have been singled out by Cannell and others — by talking about how the company doesn’t necessarily put the same amount of effort into marketing its whole stable.
Some gTLDs will be marketed more heavily later, he said, comparing it to a real estate owner holding on to parcels of land for later development.
Naidu also talked up Rightside’s prospects in China, where apparently .pub is doing quite well because registrants think it means “public” rather than “drinking establishment”.

.flir becomes the 1,300th TLD

There are now 1,300 top-level domains live on the internet.
The milestone was hit today when the dot-brand .flir was delegated to FLIR Systems, a $1.5 billion-a-year thermal imaging systems manufacturer.
Its nic.flir domain is now live and currently redirects to existing sites in other TLDs.
According to the DI database, there are 292 ccTLDs, of which 45 are internationalized domain names.
There are 1,008 gTLDs of which 84 are IDNs; 985 were applied for in the 2012 new gTLD application round.
Of the gTLDs, 347 are dot-brands (defined as where the registry has signed Spec 9 and/or Spec 13 of the new gTLD Registry Agreement).