.sucks “gag order” dropped, approved

Vox Populi, the .sucks registry, has had controversial changes to its registrar contract approved after it softened language some had compared to a “gag order”.
ICANN approved changes to the .suck Registry-Registrar Agreement last week, after receiving no further complaints from registrar stakeholders.
Registrars had been upset by a proposed change that they said would prevent brand-protection registrars from publicly criticizing .sucks:

The purpose of this Agreement is to permit and promote the registration of domain names in the Vox Populi TLDs and to allow Registrar to offer the registration of the Vox Populi TLDs in partnership with Vox Populi. Neither party shall take action to frustrate or impair the purpose of this Agreement.

But Vox has now “clarified” the language to remove the requirement that registrars “promote” .sucks names. The new RRA will say “offer” instead.
Registrars had also complained that the new RRA would have allowed Vox to unilaterally impose new contractual terms with only 15 days notice.
Vox has amended that proposal too, to clarify that changes would come into effect 15 days after ICANN has given its approval.
Vox CEO John Berard told ICANN in a March 18 letter:

VoxPop’s intent was never to alter any material aspect of the Registry Registrar Agreement. Our intent was to clarify legal obligations that already exist in the Agreement, and conform the timeframes for any future amendments with those specified in our ICANN registry contract.

Did the DotConnectAfrica judge make a big dumb mistake?

The court ruling that granted DotConnectAfrica a preliminary injunction preventing ICANN delegating .africa seems to be based to a large extent on a huge error by the judge.
In explaining why he was allowing DCA v ICANN to proceed, despite DCA’s signing away its right to sue when it filed its new gTLD application, California district judge Gary Klausner seems to have confused DCA with rival .africa applicant ZACR.
In his Tuesday ruling, Klausner said that evidence supports the claim that ICANN was determined to flunk DCA’s application no matter what.
The key evidence, according to the judge, is that the Initial Evaluation of DCA’s application found that it did have enough support from African governments to pass its Geographic Names Review, but that ICANN subsequently reversed that view in Extended Evaluation.
He wrote:

DCA claims that “the process ICANN put Plaintiff through was a sham with a predetermined ending – ICANN’s denial of Plaintiff’s application so that ICANN could steer the gTLD to ZACR.”
…
In support, DCA offers the following evidence. ICANN’s initial evaluation report in July 2013 stated that DCA’s endorsement letters “met all relevant criteria in Section 2.2.1.4.3 of the Applicant Guidebook.” (Bekele Decl. ¶ 40, Ex. 27, ECF No. 17.) After the IRP Decision, ICANN performed a second evaluation on the same information originally submitted by DCA. In the second evaluation, however, ICANN found that the endorsement letters did not meet the same criteria applied in the first evaluation

He later writes:

Despite ICANN’s contention, the evidence presents serious questions pointing in favor of DCA’s argument. First, a March 2013 email from ICC to ICANN stated that ICANN needs to clarify AUC’s endorsements since AUC properly endorsed both DCA and ZACR. (Bekele Decl. ¶ 30, Ex. 19, ECF No. 17.) Subsequently, ICANN’s July 2013 initial evaluation report found that the endorsement letters have “met all relevant criteria in Section 2.2.1.4.3 of the Applicant Guidebook.” (Bekele Decl. ¶ 40, Ex. 27, ECF No. 17.) Because ICANN found DCA’s application passed the geographic names evaluation in the July 2013 initial evaluation report, the Court finds serious questions in DCA’s favor as to whether DCA’s application should have proceeded to the delegation stage following the IRP Decision.

The document “Bekele Decl. ¶ 40, Ex. 27” referred to is exhibit 27 of DCA CEO Sophia Bekele’s March 1 declaration, filed in support of its preliminary injunction motion.
The problem is that that exhibit is not the Initial Evaluation report for DCA’s .africa bid, it’s the IE report for rival ZACR (aka UniForum).
Read it here (pdf).
DCA’s own application never received a scored IE report. At least, one was never published.
It only got this (pdf), which states simply “Overall Initial Evaluation Summary: Incomplete”. That document is dated July 3, 2013, almost two weeks before the ZACR report.
Bekele’s declaration even states that exhibit 27 is the IE report for the ZACR application.
It’s not clear to this non-lawyer how important this pretty basic error is to Klausner’s thinking, but as a layman it looks pretty crucial.
It certainly seems like something that needs to be addressed, given that the apparent misunderstanding plays into both the decision to allow the lawsuit to proceed and the decision that DCA’s complaint may have merit.
Several other exhibits cited in the ruling — including emails from the InterConnect Communications evaluators who carried out the Geographic Names Review — have been redacted by the court.
It’s possible there are smoking guns contained within these censored documents that were more influential on the ruling.
It’s also notable that ICANN is continuing to redact the court documents it publishes on its web site, beyond those filed under seal and censored by the court.

Afilias goes it alone with .green as DotGreen bows out

DotGreen Community has withdrawn from its partnership with Afilias, leaving the registry operating the .green gTLD solo.
The new management means that renewal prices for sunrise names will be slashed, and the size of the premium names list will be reduced.
DotGreen was originally a .green gTLD applicant, but it withdrew its application before the auction, which Afilias subsequently won.
It made a deal with Afilias to run sales and marketing for the domains, with Afilias handling all the technical stuff. The plan was to use profits to help environmental causes.
But Afilias told its registrars in an email this week:

Unfortunately, DotGreen Community has informed us that it is no longer able to discharge these responsibilities, and has turned the sales and marketing responsibilities back over to Afilias.

The gTLD has a new logo and a new website at get.green.
Afilias said it will no longer charge a extra $50 for renewals of sunrise period names.
It also plans to revise its premium names list by November, and will probably reduce the size of the list, releasing names at regular registry prices.
.green domains haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves with DotGreen running marketing.
It went into general availability in March last year but only has about 2,200 names in its zone file.

No, .kids isn’t a community either

DotKids Foundation has comprehensively lost is .kids Community Priority Evaluation.
The company’s CPE results came out at the weekend (pdf), showing a score of 6 out of the 16 available points, a long way short of the 14-point passing score.
Like other “community” new gTLD bids before it, .kids failed because the Economist Intelligence Unit panel decided that the application was an attempt to create a community rather than represent an existing one. It wrote:

The Panel determined that this application refers to a “community” construed to obtain a sought-after generic word as a gTLD string, and that the application is attempting to organize the various groups mentioned in the documentation through a gTLD.

The application scored a big fat 0/4 on the question of whether the community exists and, as a knock-on effect, another 0/4 on whether the .kids string represents the community.
It picked up 3/4 for its registration policies and 3/4 on community endorsement.
The CPE failure means DotKids will have to face rival Amazon at auction, where one imagines the not-for-profit foundation will have a hard time winning.
ICANN’s CPE pipeline currently only has one active application, where Merck KGaA is fighting to avoid an auction with rival Merck Registry Holdings, Inc.
The latter .merck, and Vistaprint’s .webs application, have both also been invited to CPE.

Rightside rejects Negari’s $5m new gTLD offer

Rightside has turned down Daniel Negari’s $5 million offer to acquire four of its new gTLDs, according to Negari.
The XYZ.com CEO told DI via email tonight:

I was looking forward to operating .Army, .Dance, .Dentist, and .Vet under the XYZ umbrella. I’m disappointed that Rightside didn’t entertain my offer, especially since I believe $5MM was more than fair. I believe these and other new TLDs are worth more to me than any other registry operator due to my growing enterprise. However, it’s understandable for Rightside to want to monetize on these assets.

Rightside has told him it had reviewed the offer and was not interested, he said.
The offer was made in a March 30 open letter to the company and Securities and Exchange Commission filing and expired last night, April 7.
There was some speculation about whether it was a genuine offer, just an attempt to boost Rightside’s share price, or both.
Negari and his COO, Mike Ambrose, own about 5% of Rightside between them, following an $8.5 million investment.
Rightside’s ability to grow revenue from its new gTLD portfolio has become the focus of attention due to the intervention of activist investor J Carlo Cannell of Cannell Capital, who reckons the company is paying too much attention to rubbish TLDs at the expense of its profitable registrar businesses.
Negari thinks he would be able to grow .army, .dance, .dentist, and .vet.
The largest of those gTLDs is .vet, with about 5,200 names in its zone file. It grew by 794 names in the last 90 days.
The other three are below 3,000 names, and are either shrinking or adding fewer than 10 names per day.
XYZ.com’s second-tier portfolio strings, such as .college, .rent and .theatre, are faring a little better, at least in terms of growth. But they are a little younger, and none are over 10,000 names.

Nominet has sights set on .org after M+M deal

Nominet chief Russell Haworth is hopeful that its new outsourcing deal with Minds + Machines will help it win a much more lucrative back-end contract — .org.
The company is among the 20-plus companies that have responded to Public Interest Registry’s request for proposals, as its back-end deal with Afilias comes to an end.
Nominet is one of a handful of companies — which would also include Verisign, Afilias, CNNIC and DENIC — that currently handles zones the size or larger than .org, which at over 10 million names is about the same size as .uk.
It, like PIR, is also a not-for-profit entity that donates excess funds to good causes, which could count in its favor.
But Haworth told DI today that showing the ability to handle a complex TLD migration may help its bid.
“I personally think that it would stand us in good stead, but we’ll have to see how the process plays out,” he told DI today. “With .org there’s 19-odd players pitching for that, so it’s a fairly competitive field.”
If the migration were to happen today, we’d be looking at around 300,000 domains changing hands. It’s likely to be a somewhat larger number by the time it actually happens.
Collectively, it will be one of the largest back-end transitions to date, though the largest individual affected gTLD, .work, currently has fewer than 100,000 names in its zone.
Haworth said that the plan is to migrate M+M’s portfolio over to Nominet’s systems one at a time.
He was hesitant to characterize the migration process as “easy”, but said Nominet already has such systems in place due to its role as one of ICANN’s Emergency Back-End Registry Operators.
Earlier this year, Nominet temporarily took over defunct dot-brand .doosan, in order to test the EBERO process.
A back-end migration primarily covers DNS resolution and EPP systems.
It sounds like the EPP portion may be the more complex. Some of M+M’s gTLDs have restrictions and tiered pricing that may require EPP extensions Nominet does not currently use in its TLDs.
But the DNS piece may hold the most risk — if something breaks, registrants names stop resolving and web sites go dark.
Haworth said Nominet is also talking to other new gTLD registries about taking over back-end operations. Registries signed three, five or seven-year contracts with their RSPs when the 2012 application round opened, and some are coming up for renewal soon, he said.
Nominet says it will become a top ten back-end after the M+M migration is done.

Minds + Machines dumps back-end and registrar in Nominet, Uniregistry deals

Minds + Machines is to get out of the registrar and back-end registry services markets in separate deals with Nominet and Uniregistry.
The cost-saving shake-up will lead to about 10 job losses, or about 25% to 30% of its current headcount, CEO Toby Hall told DI this morning.
Under the Nominet deal, M+M will outsource the back-end registry functions for 28 new gTLDs, currently managed in-house, to the .uk ccTLD manager.
The deal covers all the gTLDs for which M+M is the contracted party (such as .law, .cooking and .fashion), as well as the four it runs in partnership (eg .london) and the five where it currently acts as back-end for a third party registry (eg .broadway).
The company also plans to dump its “unprofitable” registrar entirely, migrating its existing customers to Uniregistry’s Uniregistrar business.
About 49,000 domains will be affected by this move, Hall said.
Uniregistry will pay M+M a commission over the lifetime of the accounts.
Focusing on the registry business was the plan from the moment Hall took over M+M, following a shareholder coup that kicked out founding CEO Antony Van Couvering in January.
Hall told DI:

It [previously] had a very ambitious plan. It wanted to be vertically integrated, but the considered view is there are people out there who are far better able to run parts of the exercise than ourselves, both on the RSP piece and likewise the registrar piece. The strategy from day one was to rapidly evolve into becoming a business-to-business marketing-led registry business and radically overhauling our cost structure at the same time.

The company is currently in a financial quiet period and will not yet disclose the amount of savings it expects to reap, Hall said. He added:

Reducing cost isn’t a strategy for growth, and as a business that will be where we will be judged. Growing our portfolio, growing our domains under management, growing our revenue within those domains. That’s what the business has to be focused on. We see within the industry that the highest value is in the [TLD] ownership part.

The job losses are expected to be largely on the technical side of the house.
The RSP outsourcing means that Nominet significantly boosts its stable of managed TLDs. While it’s in the top five back-ends in terms of DUM (due to the 11 million in .uk) its portfolio of clients there is relatively small, largely limited to a handful of dot-brands.
Nominet CEO Russell Haworth said in a statement:

This partnership takes us into the top tier of registry operators globally by volume of TLDs and compliments the brands we currently manage, such as .BBC, .Bentley and .Comcast. It also underlines our long-term strategy to provide a more diversified range of services to gTLDs and registrars.”

With the Uniregistry registrar deal, Hall said that competing with its own channel “was just not right for us”.
It might be worth noting that Uniregistry is actually a vertically integrated triple-play along the lines of M+M, also, managing its own back-end, registry and registrar businesses.
Hall said that the M+M registrar had sold mainly to domain investors with little interest in buying value-added services such as email and hosting, which is often where much of the profit lies.
Both deals are subject to ICANN approvals, and client approval in case of the back-end transition, will be phased in over many months, and are expected to be finalized by the end of the year.
UPDATE: M+M said later this morning that it is changing its official company domain to mmx.co from mindsandmachines.com.

Rightside offers $10 renewals on premium names

Rightside is to run a promotion that will discount renewals on premium names down to .com prices.
From May 16 to June 30, if you buy any of the domains that Rightside has marked as premium — except the super-premium “Platinum” names — the wholesale renewal fee will be just $10.
Registrars will mark this up according to their own pricing models.
Normally, the price you pay at the checkout is the price you pay every year after that.
The deal is overtly targeted at domainers.
Rightside said: “At these reduced prices, you’ll have more time to find the right buyer for any domains you register, and incur lower fees to transfer to them once you do. If you’re looking to add high-quality domains to your portfolio, this will be the time to do it.”
The reduced renewals only apply to names registered during the six-week window, but they do pass on to subsequent registrants if the domain is sold.
Rightside is calling it a “first-of-its-kind” promo, but in reality it’s just a temporary regression to the once-standard industry model.
Remember, prior to the 2012-round gTLDs, only exceptions like .tv charged premium rates for renewals.
Premium renewals are now very commonplace, but are by no means the rule, in the new gTLD industry.
For Rightside, the offer means the company may experience a brief cash windfall as domainers, who generally hate premium renewals, take a chance on the registry’s names.
There’s also a potential marketing benefit to be gained from having more domainers on board as unpaid salespeople.
But it does rather suggest the premiums are not flying off the shelves at the rate Rightside wants.
The company recently disclosed that in the first few months of the year it made revenue of $674,610 selling 1,820 premium names, leading to an average price of $372. Twelve five-figure names had been sold.
Over its portfolio of 39 gTLDs, Rightside has flagged over 964,000 as premium, or about 25,000 per TLD.

Over 20 companies fighting for .org contract

More than 20 companies want to take over the back-end registry for the .org gTLD, according to Public Interest Registry.
PIR put the contract, currently held by Afilias, up for bidding with a formal Request For Information in February.
It’s believed to be worth north of $33 million to Afilias per year.
PIR told DI today that it “received more than 20 responses to its RFI for back-end providers from organisations representing 15 countries.”
That represents a substantial chunk of the back-end market, but there are only a handful of registry service providers currently handling zones as big as .org.
.org has about 11 million names under management. Only .com, .net and a few ccTLDs (Germany, China and the UK spring to mind) have zones the same size or larger.
PIR said it would not be making any specific details about the bidders available.
The non-profit says it plans to award the contract by the end of the year.

auDA chief Disspain let go after 16 years

Australian ccTLD manager auDA had parted ways with its founding CEO, Chris Disspain.
Disspain had been with auDA since its formation in 2000, spearheading the liberalization of the .au market.
His contract was up for renewal later this year, auDA said, “but the Board agreed new leadership was required to take the organisation forward”.
No further explanation was given, but it seems he’s leaving immediately.
Chief operations and policy officer Jo Lim will be acting CEO while a permanent replacement is found, a process expected to take six months.
auDA’s brief statement can be found here.
Disspain is a long-time ICANN leader, chairing the ccNSO for many years and sitting on the board of directors in one of the two ccNSO seats since 2011.
A vocal and active participant in board interactions with the community, he’s often tipped as a natural successor to current chair Steve Crocker, whose term limit kicks in late 2017.
Losing his job at auDA may make that a little more complicated.