Could Verisign lose $3.3m .gov deal?

The US government has put its feelers out for information about a possible successor to Verisign as manager of the .gov TLD.
A formal Request For Information — potentially a precursor to a Request For Proposals — was was issued by the General Services Administration on March 9.
The GSA, which is the sponsor of the .gov gTLD, seems to be looking for information about all aspects of running a registry back-end and the secure dotgov.gov registrar front-end.
Those functions have been carried out by Verisign since it took them over from the GSA itself in December 2010.
Its five-year contract expires in September this year.
Because it’s restricted to US government entities, .gov is not a large gTLD — the RFI says it has about 5,000 domains and grows at about 5% a year — but it does carry a certain prestige.
It also carries a not inconsiderable fee. According to the September 2010 award page, the deal is worth $3,325,000 to Verisign.
It’s quite possible that the RFI is just a case of the US government going through the necessary motions prescribed by its procurement policies; Verisign may well be a shoo-in.
But the company’s record with .gov isn’t as great as its record with .com and .net.
In August 2013, Verisign screwed up a DNSSEC key rollover in the .gov zone, causing resolution failures on the small number of networks that rigorously enforce DNSSEC.
The deadline for RFI responses is March 23.

Start-ups protest “the dark side of .io”

Two technology start-up companies that use .io domain name are to campaign on behalf of the exiled natives of the islands represented by the ccTLD.
As you’re no doubt aware, in recent years .io became a popular TLD among young tech firms squeezed out of .com by the lack of decent available names.
It could be understood to mean “input/output”, but the ccTLD actually represents the British Indian Ocean Territory, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean with a storied past.
It’s managed by UK-based Internet Computer Bureau, which runs several obscure overseas ccTLDs.
Over the last year or so, there’s been increasing awareness among .io registrants of BIOT’s recent history, which isn’t great.
The biggest island in the territory is Diego Garcia. In the 1960s, about 1,800 people — known as Chagossians — lived there.
But they were all forced to leave by the UK government in the early 1970s as part of a move to lease essentially the entire island to the US military.
This was at the height of the Cold War, when the US believed the islands were strategically important.
According to the UK Chagos Support Association, the exile was carried out covertly and many of those kicked off the islands were forced to live in “utmost poverty” in nearby Mauritius.
Now, Diego Garcia is populated by about 3,000 military personnel, mostly Americans, who staff the air and naval bases that were established following the Chagossians’ exile.
But the US lease is due to expire next year, so those backing the Chagossian cause reckon they’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to get the UK government to let them return.
You can read about the campaign here.
How does this all relate to domain names?
Two .io-using start-ups — Seats.io and BigBoards.io — said late last week that they have pledged their support to the cause.
In a press release, Seats.io’s “Chief Everything Officer” Ben Verbeken said the company will soon launch a web site at thedarksideof.io, “where companies can pledge to match the cost of registering their .io domain name with a donation to a Chagossian group or charity.”
.io names currently cost about $100 for the first year and about $50 a year thereafter.
Verbeken said: “When we learned about the Chagossian people’s story, we had two choices. We could give up our domain name and change the name of our business. But we would just be running away from the problem. So we decided to accept our social responsibility and actually help the Chagossian people a bit.”
The domain thedarksideof.io currently leads to a placeholder.
You can read more of the political back-story at The Guardian

Donuts launches first “not com” ad campaign

Donuts has launched its first ad campaign, part of its plan to raise awareness about new gTLDs as a category.
It’s a digital-only video campaign, expected to run on sites including YouTube, the New York Times, Forbes, Mashable and Fast Company.

The theme is “freedom of choice”, using the slogan “Welcome to the not com revolution”.
“It’s going to be a lot of digital, a lot of online marketing, and it’s going to be about choice and the fact that this new product category represents an opportunity to grab an identity on the internet, that really reflects what it is you are and what you do,” COO Richard Tindal told DI in a recent interview.
The ad campaign going to be US-only, which chimes with what Tindal said as he laid out some of Donuts’ vision and marketing plans for 2015.
“I think that level of awareness is very low at sort of five to ten percent,” he said in the January interview. “It varies from country to country. Probably in the US it is even a little lower than other places.”
Tindal told us that Donuts is primarily concerned with marketing the “category” of new gTLDs, rather than any specific TLD.
“Our mission in 2015 is to have those people be aware of the category before they turn up at the registrar,” he said. “They are still going to get the story from the registrar, but we want them to know all about this new thing before they turn up.”
Donuts says that the new ad campaign will drive traffic to Your.domains.
That domain actually redirects to Domainr — a sparse, but quite smart, name-spinner app developed by the little-known nb.io.

That site, which appears to be monetized with affiliate links, quickly presents relevant domains based on user keywords and sends leads to a selection of registrars.
Such “smart search” is an important part of Donuts’ strategy, but one where the new gTLD industry as a whole is failing to make much of an impact at the moment.
Here in the UK, it’s pretty obvious from Go Daddy’s advertising that the market-leading registrar would sooner take the Verisign shilling and plug .com rather than risk promoting the largest expansion of inventory in its history.
Tindal said in our interview that Donuts’ aim in 2015 is to promote smart search over paid placement.
Asked whether registrars’ economic interests are aligned with new gTLD registries’, he said he’s convinced that for all the domains sold in 2014, new gTLDs have better metrics for registrars than .com. The only problem is volume.

If you look at the metrics of those .com names, under every criteria the registrar is better off selling one of ours.
The customer finds a name more quickly. It’s got more margin for the registrar, because they’re better quality names. They’re going to buy more. The problem, as you’ve just noted is of course just the volume. At the moment, there’s so much volume for them in .com that they tend to stick to that, and so we’re seeing the sort of behaviors, if you like, that are sort of clouding what we would like to see.

Awareness-raising is important, therefore, to get customers actively looking for more relevant domains, rather than being served up .com by default at registrars unwilling to take a risk on new TLDs.
Donuts’ announcement can be found here.
The full interview with Tindal, which also covers topics such as SEO and dot-brands, can be read by DI PRO subscribers here.

CentralNic signs first legacy gTLD

CentralNic has become the new back-end registry provider for .coop, a gTLD that was approved by ICANN almost 15 years ago.
The decision by DotCooperation comes after original back-end Midcounties Co-operative Domains decided to get out of the business, according to the registry.
In a statement, DotCooperation said:

We would like to advise our registrars that we have started the preparations for migrating .coop to the new registry operator system and we aim to be fully transitioned by early April in order to make sure that Registrars have 30 days notice in respect of these changes

The transition won’t affect many registrars — only about a dozen currently have .coop domains under management.
The registry said most of them already have relationships with CentralNic.
It’s CentralNic’s first back-end deal for a legacy, pre-2012 gTLD.
The company is also taking over DNS for the TLD, replacing Dyn.
The .coop space, which is restricted to co-operatives, only has about 8,000 domains. If it were a new gTLD, it would rank around 100 by volume.

Watch this jaw-dropping .sucks promo vid

Is .sucks just a domain name registry? A way to extort money from trademark owners?
No, it’s the about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, the kind of thing civil rights movement leaders including Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson could get behind.
At least, that’s the message in the jaw-dropping debut promo video for the new gTLD .sucks, which hits sunrise at the end of the month.
You may not instinctively associate registering a domain name with, say, Rosa Parks refusing to comply with Alabama’s racist segregation laws in the 1950s, but that’s what Vox Populi Registry is inviting you to do.

The video opens with stock news footage of MLK and various civil rights marches, accompanied by what seems to be audio from one of King’s speeches.
The video goes on to intermingle archive footage with nauseating B-roll padding, until we discover that none other than former US presidential candidate Ralph Nader loves .sucks.
He’s provided what seems to be an official endorsement, saying in part:

Most of the great changes in our planet’s history come from less than 1% of the people. For many changes in our country and the world, it’s a lot easier than we think. The word “sucks” is now a protest word, and it’s up to people to give it more meaning.

Nader is not as random a celebrity endorser as you might imagine. Fifteen years ago he wrote to ICANN to specifically endorse the creation of .sucks.
What do you think of the video? Clever? Inspiring? Funny? Tasteless? Offensive? Or just baffling?

Here’s why trademark owners will think .sucks sucks

Vox Populi Registry is to launch its .sucks gTLD at the end of the month, and its plans are likely to piss off trademark owners no end.
As previously reported, the company has backpedaled on its idea of pricing its sunrise period names at $25,000 per name per year, but it’s introducing some new concepts that seem almost designed to get hackles up in the IP community.
From March 30 to May 29, any company with a trademark registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse will be able to buy their matching .sucks domains at sunrise for $2,499. That’s also the annual renewal fee.
It’s a tenth of the price previously touted, but still pretty steep even by sunrise standards.
Vox Pop isn’t doing anything particularly unusual with its sunrise, which is governed by policies closely regulated by ICANN.
But its big new idea is its “Sunrise Premium” list, a list of strings dominated by famous trademarks.
Vox Pop CEO John Berard told DI yesterday that the Sunrise Premium list has been compiled from strings registered or blocked in other TLDs’ sunrise periods.
While he declined to characterize it as a list of trademarks, he acknowledged that it will be trademark-heavy.
If your mark is on this list, you will never be able to get a .sucks domain at the regular general availability retail price of $249 a year. It will always be $2,499 a year.
Despite the name, Sunrise Premium names are only available during general availability, which begins June 1.
On the one hand, this mandatory premium pricing for the world’s most well-defended marks appears to have benefits for some trademark owners.
While Sunrise Premium names are not restricted to owners of matching marks, the $2,499 fee applies whether you’re the mark owner, a legitimate third-party registrant, or a cybersquatter.
So the high price looks like a deterrent to cybersquatting, suggesting that Vox Pop is fighting from the IP corner.
But then we discover that Sunrise Premium names will never be eligible for the .sucks “Block” service — similar to .xxx’s Sunrise B, a Block is a non-resolving registry reservation — which is expected to retail at a discounted $199 per year.
Berard said that the registry wants to encourage use.
“If you are on the Sunrise Premium list or want a premium name, those can’t be blocked,” Berard said. “It’s all part and parcel of us trying to put more power in the hands of individuals and to cultivate a commitment on behalf of the commercial world to participate in the dialogue.”
But the fact remains: if you have a track record of defensively registering your trademark, Vox Pop is essentially penalizing you with higher fees.
Feel those hackles rising yet?
Vox Pop’s stated goals are to give companies a way to manage customer feedback and individuals a way to exercise their rights to criticize.
“A company would be smart to register its name because of the value that consumer criticism has in improving customer loyalty, delivering good customer service, understanding new product and service possibilities,” Berard said.
“They’re spending a lot more on marketing and customer service and research. This domain can another plank in that platform,” he said. “On the other hand, we also want to make sure that these names are also accessible to individuals who have something to say.”
Companies on the Sunrise Premium list have an additional thing to worry about: the .sucks Consumer Advocate Subsidy, which will bring the price of a .sucks domain down to $9.95 per year.
The subsidy will only be available to registrants unaffiliated with the trademark-owning company, and they’ll have to direct their domains to a discussion forum platform called Everything.sucks.
Berard said Everything.sucks will be operated by a third party, but could not yet disclose the details.
The subsidy program will be available on regular and Sunrise Premium names, but not Sunrise names. It is not expected to launch until September.
It’s not yet clear how flexible and configurable the service will be.
It seems likely that if somebody wants to write a blog, say, criticizing a certain company, product, service or public figure, they will incur the usual $249 annual reg fee.
It’s not exactly “free” speech.
On the whole, the finalized policies and fees may look like they’re specifically designed to irk the IP lobby, but they do seem to be aligned with Vox Pop’s mission statement.
If you’re of the view that trademark owners should have the sole right to use the string matching their mark as a domain name, you’re likely to be unhappy with what Vox Pop is doing.
If, on the other hand, you’re an advocate of the right of every free person to stick it to The Man, you may view the policies more favorably.
Either way, it could be a money-spinner for Vox Pop.
I’m expecting .sucks to be only the third new gTLD to top 1,000 sunrise registrations (assuming .porn and .adult will be the first).
Assuming the registry’s slice of the $2,499 fee is over $2,000, the company is looking to clear in excess of $2 million in annually recurring sunrise revenue alone.

Nominet to give nod to .uk privacy services

Nominet plans to start accrediting proxy/privacy services in .uk domain names, and to make it easier to opt-out of having your full contact details published in Whois.
The proposed policy changes are outlined in a consultation opened this morning.
“We’ve never recognized privacy services,” director of policy Eleanor Bradley told DI. “If you’ve registered a .uk with a privacy service, we consider the privacy service to be the registrant of that domain name.”
“We’ve been pretending almost that they didn’t exist,” she said.
Under the proposed new regime, registrars would submit a customer’s full contact details to Nominet, but Nominet would publish the privacy service’s information in the domain’s Whois output.
Nominet, getting its hands on the customer data for the first time, would therefore start treating the end customer as the true registrant of the domain.
The company says that introducing the service would require minimal work and that it does not intend to charge registrars an additional fee.
Currently, use of privacy services in .uk is pretty low — just 0.7% of its domains, up from 0.09% a year ago.
Bradley said such services are becoming increasingly popular due to some large UK registrars beginning to offer them.
One of the reasons for low penetration is that quite a lot of privacy is already baked in to the .uk Whois database.
If you’re an individual, as opposed to a “trading” business, you’re allowed to opt-out of having any personal details other than your name published in Whois.
A second proposed reform would make that opt-out available to a broader spectrum of registrants, Nominet says.
“We’ve found over the last few years that it’s quite a hard distinction to draw,” Bradley said. “We’ve had some criticisms for our overly strict application of that.”
In future, the opt-out would be available according to these criteria:

i. The registrant must be an individual; and,
ii. The domain name must not be used:
a) to transact with customers (merchant websites);
b) to collect personal data from subjects (ie data controllers as defined in the Data Protection Act);
c) to primarily advertise or promote goods, services, or facilities.

The changes would allow an individual blogger to monetize her site with advertising without being considered a “trading” entity, according to Nominet.
But a line would be drawn where an individual collected personal data on users, such as email addresses for a mailing list, Bradley said.
Nominet says in its consultation documents:

Our continued commitment to Nominet’s role as the central register of data will enable us to properly protect registrants’ rights, release contact data where necessary under the existing exemptions, and maintain public confidence in the register. It acknowledges that some registrants may desire privacy, whilst prioritising the core function of the registry in holding accurate records.

The proposals are open for comments until June 3, which means they could potentially become policy later this year.

Rightside to release 20,000 two-character domains

A week from now, new gTLD registry Rightside is to release over 20,000 two-character domain names.
The releases will come across all of its delegated gTLDs, but exclude letter-letter combinations.
Only letter-number, number-letter and number-number combinations will be available, following ICANN’s partial lifting of the ban on two-character domains back in December.
Strings such as “a1”, “2b” and “69” will presumably become available.
Rightside said the domains will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis, with prices ranging from $200 to $50,000.
The registry has almost 30 delegated new gTLDs, including .auction, .software, .lawyer, .sale and .video.
If you’re interested, set your alarms for 1700 UTC on March 18. That’s when all 20,000 drop.
Two-letter domains are still reserved, pending the outcome of ICANN’s government-delayed release process.

Adware dominating popular new gTLD ranks

Afilias’ .kim has become the latest victim (beneficiary?) of adware, as robo-registrations boost the gTLD’s zone file and apparent popularity.
It’s the latest new gTLD, after .xyz and .country, to see its rankings soar after hundreds of gibberish, bulk-registered domains started being used to serve ads by potentially unwanted software.
.kim is today the 4th most-popular new gTLD, with 85 domains in the top 100,000 on the internet and 264 in the top one million.
A month ago, it had a rank of 223, with just 16 domains in the top one million.
The domain names involved — gems such as oatmealsmoke.kim, vegetableladybug.kim and tubhaircut.kim — have seen a boat-load of traffic and rocketing Alexa rank.
The reason for the boost seems to be a one-off bulk registration of about 1,000 meaningless .kim domain names in early February, which now appear to be being used to serve ads via adware.
In this chart (click to enlarge), we see .kim’s zone file growth since the start of 2015.

The spike on February 5, which represents over 1,000 names, is the date almost all of the .kim names with Alexa rank were first registered.
They all appear to be using Uniregistry as the registrar and its free privacy service to mask their Whois details.
These domains often do not resolve if you type them into your browser. They’re also using robots.txt to hide themselves from search engines.
But they’ve been leaving traces of their activity elsewhere on the web, strongly suggesting their involvement in adware campaigns.
It seems that the current (ab?)use of .kim domains is merely the latest in a series of possibly linked campaigns.
I noted in January that gibberish .country domains — at the time priced at just $1 at Uniregistry — were suddenly taking over from .xyz in the popularity charts.
The following three charts, captured from DI PRO’s TLD Health Check, show how the three TLDs’ Alexa popularity rose and fell during what I suspect were related adware campaigns..
First, .xyz, which was the first new gTLD to show evidence of having robo-registrations used in adware campaigns, saw its popularity spike at the end of 2014 and start of 2015:

Next, Minds + Machines’ .country, which saw its zone file spike by 1,500 names around January 6, starts to see its Alexa-ranked total rocket almost immediately.
.country peaks around February 9, just a few days after the .kim robo-registrations were made.

Finally, as .country’s use declines, .kim takes over. Its popularity has been growing day by day since around February 13.

I think what we’re looking at here is one shadowy outfit cycling through bulk-registered, throwaway domain names to serve ads via unwanted adware programs.
It seems possible that domains are retired when they become sufficiently blocked by security countermeasures, and other domains in other TLDs are then brought online to take over.
None of this necessarily reflects badly on any of the new gTLDs in question, or even new gTLDs as a whole, of course.
For starters, I’ve reason to believe that TLDs such as .eu and .biz have previously been targeted by the same people.
The “attacks”, for want of a better word, are only really noticeable because the new gTLDs being targeted are young and still quite small.
It takes much longer to build up genuine popularity for a newly launched web site than it does to merely redirect exist captive traffic to a newly registered domain.
What it may mean, however, is that .kim and .country are going to be in for statistically significant junk drops about a year from now, when the first-year registrations expire.
For .kim, 1,000 names is about 14% of its current zone file. For .country, it’s more like a quarter.
The daily-updated list of new gTLD domains with Alexa rank can be explored by DI PRO subscribers here. The charts in this post were all captured from the respective TLD’s page on TLD Health Check.

.porn now the biggest new gTLD sunrise

.porn and .adult have taken the crown of the most-subscribed new gTLD sunrise periods to date.
The two ICM Registry spaces opened up for registrations from users of the Trademark Clearinghouse on March 2.
A little over a week later, the company tells DI that both gTLDs have individually exceeded the previous sunrise record holder.
My understanding is that .london was the new gTLD with the most sunrise registrations, selling just over 800 names to TMCH customers during its combined sunrise/landrush, which ended last July.
ICM revealed in a webinar last week that it expected its new gTLDs to have to biggest sunrise numbers to date.
“Both .porn and .adult will have exceeded that [.london] number comfortably,” ICM president Stuart Lawley confirmed to DI today.
.adult is “almost neck and neck” with .porn, Lawley said.
The numbers are still pretty small compared to ICM’s 2003-round gTLD, .xxx, which had over 80,000 sunrise applications in October 2011.
They’re also pretty small compared to the TMCH’s overall number of registrations, which at the last public disclosure was a little under 35,000.
But ICM has another couple opportunities for trademark owners to defensively register that may work out cheaper.
First, from April 6 to April 30 companies that bought non-resolving “blocked” names in the .xxx Sunrise B will be able to block the same strings in .porn and .adult.
ICM says registrars are offering discounts for five-year blocks.
Then, from May 6 to May 31 the Domain Matching program starts. That’s open to any .xxx registrant, defensive or otherwise, but not to those with .xxx Sunrise B blocks.