Anger as governments delay two-letter domains

ICANN has heard an angry response from gTLD registries after delaying the release of two-character domains in new gTLDs, apparently at the whim of a small number of governments.
ICANN has yet to approve any of the over 350 requests for the release of two-letter domains filed by registries under a process approved by its board last October and launched in December.
The reason, according to registries, is that members of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee — probably a minority — have objected and ICANN staff has “unilaterally” put a halt to the process.
Some governments — Spain, Italy and Cote d’Ivoire among them — are concerned that two-letter domains, such as es.example or it.example, may cause confusion with existing ccTLDs.
But the GAC itself was unable to find a consensus against the release of two-letter domains when it discussed the issue back in October. It merely asked for comment periods to allow individual governments to object to specific domains.
So ICANN’s board asked staff to create an “efficient procedure” to have requests swiftly approved, taking some of the stress off of the regular Registry Services Evaluation Process.
Two-letter domains have a premium dollar value for open registries, while multinational dot-brands expect to find them useful to market to the territories in which they operate.
Under the streamlined approval process, each request is subject to a 30-day comment period, and would be approved or not within seven to 10 days.
Right now, the oldest requests, which were filed in early December, are almost a month overdue for a response. The Registries Stakeholder Group told ICANN, in a letter (pdf):

We write to raise serious concern about what appears to be a recent closed-door, unilateral decision by ICANN staff, which took place over a period of weeks, to defer action on pending requests for two-character labels. This action was apparently initiated as a result of recent correspondence you received from the Chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee — but which critically does not represent formal consensus advice or even purport to represent the opinion of the GAC as a whole

It’s a case of governments strong-arming ICANN staff into changing policy, the registries claim.
GAC chair Thomas Schneider’s letter (pdf) says that an unspecified number of governments have “concerns” that the approval process was launched quite quickly and without any formal consultation with the GAC.
He goes on to make a laundry list of recommendations for making the process more amenable to governments, before requesting a “stay” on approvals until the GAC has further discussed the issue.
To date, registries representing a little over 300 strings have completed their 30-day comment periods, yet there have been only four comments from governments.
Italy and Cote d’Ivoire want ICANN to deny all requests for it.example and ci.example, because they may be confused with ccTLDs.
Spain, meanwhile, filed specific objections against the release of es.bingo, es.casino and es.abogado (lawyer), saying that these are regulated industries in Spain and should only be given to registrants who “have the required credentials”.
The RySG wants ICANN staff to immediately start approving requests that have passed through the comment process. The GAC says it will discuss the matter further at the ICANN 52 meeting currently going on in Singapore.
When RySG members raised the topic at a meeting the with ICANN board yesterday, directors avoided directly addressing the specific concerns.

In a first for new gTLDs, Aquitaine dumps geo bid

The authority for the French region of Aquitaine has become the first applicant for a geographic new gTLD to pull its application apparently of its own accord.
Région d’Aquitaine’s bid for .aquitaine was withdrawn today, despite the fact that the applicant was already in the contracting stage with ICANN.
A handful of other geographic gTLD applications have been withdrawn previously, but only due to disputes between the applicant and the governments of the regions they wanted to represent.
.aquitaine is the first would-be geographic gTLD to be pulled after passing through the evaluation stage of the program.
Aquitaine is one of France’s 27 formal regions, with a population of over three million.

With Cayman deal, Uniregistry now runs ccTLDs too

Uniregistry has got into the ccTLD business, taking over management of the Cayman Islands’ .ky domain this week and planning a relaunch for later this month.
Uniregistry, which is based in Cayman, has replaced a US company called SilverSky, now part of BAE Systems, as the official registry for .ky.
CEO Frank Schilling told DI that the previous custodian was running a manual registration process but that the ccTLD will now run on the same platform Uniregistry uses for its new gTLDs.
The company will act as both registry and registrar for the names, though the space will be opened up to third-party registrars.
The wholesale fee will be $29, with Uniregistry’s registrar business retailing names for $39 a year, Schilling said.
The ccTLD will be relaunched later this month with a six-month period where only people with a self-professed (check-box) “nexus” to the Cayman Islands will be able to register names, Schilling said.
There won’t be a sunrise period in the classical sense, but UDRP will apply, he said.
An official announcement about dates and eligibility rules is due some time this month, about a week before the relaunch.
Currently, .ky has about 11,000 registrations, Schilling said. That may be considered surprisingly high, given Cayman’s small population (under 60,000) and the apparent lack of automation in place previously.
But Cayman is a tax haven, and overseas companies often choose to register .ky names to help convince the tax man where they really are based that they have a true connection to the territory.
Schilling said that the Cayman government’s registrar of companies will promote .ky domains to businesses that set up a presence there.
He added that its shipping register will plug the names to those who moor their “super yachts” in Cayman.
The deal with the Cayman government, which remains the “owner” of .ky as far as IANA is concerned, is the first of what Schilling said he hopes will be many ccTLD relationships.
Uniregistry has also bid to run Bermuda’s .bm, which is currently managed in-house by the country’s government, and is talking to other ccTLDs as well, Schilling said.

500 new gTLDs now live, a new one added every day

ICANN delegated its 500th new gTLD from the 2012 application round this week.
The honor of the landmark delegation went to .ntt, the dot-brand applied for by Japanese telco NTT, which hit the root two days ago.
Since then, a further six new gTLDs — including .canon, the first announced dot-brand — have been delegated under the program.
In the past 12 months, 374 new gTLDs have been added to the DNS root. That’s obviously more than one a day on average.
Yet ICANN is probably still not even half-way through the program — the maximum number of delegated strings that could be produced is still a little over 1,300.
A large majority of the remaining undelegated strings are dot-brands or otherwise single-registrant spaces. Currently, just 18 brands (under a strict Spec 13 definition) have gone live.

Back in evaluation! Tata dot-brand bid falls foul of Morocco

Tata Group, the Indian conglomerate, is to see its application for .tata head back into evaluation, after the Moroccan government denied it had given its approval for the bid.
ICANN told the company this week that .tata will have to be reviewed by the Geographic Names Panel for a third time.
Tata, as well as the name of the 150-year-old, $100 billion-a-year company, is also the name of a tiny Moroccan province (pop. 121,618) that is a protected geographic term under the new gTLD program’s rules.
Tata needed to get a letter of endorsement or non-objection from the relevant Moroccan authorities in order to pass the Geographic Names Panel review.
The company apparently had secured such a letter, when last July .tata became the final new gTLD application to pass through evaluation.
However, senior officials at Morocco’s industry of trade started kicking up a fuss last September, denying any such non-objection had been given.
In exchanges of letters with ICANN over the last few weeks, Morocco has elaborated. It now claims the letter provided by Tata to the panel referred to trademark protection of the Tata brand under Moroccan law and did not specifically not object to .tata.
The original letter (pdf) was sent by the Moroccan Office for Industry and Intellectual Property (OMPIC). It’s in French, so it’s hard for me to comment with much confidence either way even with a translation, but it seems to say that no Moroccan law would forbid the .tata application.
Now, OMPIC director Adil El Maliki has told ICANN (pdf) that there was no intention to confer non-objection. Another letter from the ministry of trade says the same.
ICANN has accepted the government’s explanation and has thrown .tata back at the evaluation process, where it is basically now at the mercy of the Moroccan government.
It’s not the first time there’s been some (charitably) confusion in government agencies about endorsements for new gTLD applications. DotConnectAfrica’s bid for .africa had backing from an African Union representative at first, which was subsequently withdrawn.
Other “geographic” gTLDs have found it’s easiest to throw money at the problem. Tata Group’s best hope for .tata now might be to build Tata province a new school.

.cancerresearch — a role model for dot-brands?

.cancerresearch went live today with an interesting, and possibly unique to date, take on the new gTLD concept.
It’s technically not a dot-brand under ICANN rules, but there are no firm plans to start selling registrations to third parties yet and the people running it are pointing to it as a possible model from which dot-brands could draw inspiration.
The registry, the charitable Australian Cancer Research Foundation, is working heavily with back-end provider ARI Registry Services and has recruited the ad agency M&C Saatchi for the promotion.
It’s reserved about 80 .cancerresearch domain names for its own “promotional purposes” — permissible under ICANN rules — and gone live today with a handful of web sites designed to raise awareness about and funds for cancer research.
I say it looks possibly unique because, despite the multiple domains in play, it basically looks and feels like one web site.
Start at home.cancerresearch, click a link entitled “Donate” and you’ll be taken to donate.cancerrresearch. Click a link about lung cancer, you’ll go to lung.cancerresearch. There’s another link to theone.cancerresearch, soliciting donations.
Unless you’re looking at the address bar in your browser, you’d be forgiven for assuming you’re on the same web site. The sites on the different domains are using the same style, same imagery, and are obviously part of the same campaign.
That’s not particularly innovative, of course. Redirecting users to other domains within the same web site experience happens all the time. But I don’t think I’ve seen it done before with a new gTLD. Navigation-wise, it seems to have a degree of novelty.
Tony Kirsch, head of global consulting at ARI, said that what the ACRF is doing could “help give dot-brand holders struggling with a wait-and-see approach a real example of what can be done”.
.cancerresearch isn’t a dot-brand under ICANN’s strict Specification 13 rules, however. It’s more like an unofficial ‘closed generic’ at this point.
The gTLD is launching today — with mainstream media coverage — without a confirmed Sunrise date. Right now, nobody apart from the registry can own a domain there.
And while Kirsch told DI that .cancerresearch will be available to third parties, he also said that there will be strict eligibility requirements. Those requirements are still “TBD”, however.
There are also no accredited registrars for the gTLD at this point, he confirmed.

Toilet Paper Test not to blame as .tp faces deletion

The DNS root zone file is set to shrink, albeit only temporarily, with ICANN planning to delete the redundant ccTLD .tp in the coming weeks.
ICANN’s board of directors plans to vote on “Removal of the .TP top-level domain representing Portuguese Timor” on February 12. It’s on the consensus agenda, meaning there won’t be any detailed discussion of the motion.
The ccTLD has an interesting history.
When Jon Postel and the original DNS pioneers decided to use the UN’s ISO 3166 list as the official reference point for ccTLD codes, the country known as East Timor, at the time under Indonesian occupation, was officially only recognized as Portuguese Timor, its old colonial name.
Thus, in 1997, .tp was delegated to represent East Timor.
After an independent East Timor was formally recognized as a sovereign state by Indonesia and the international community, it was assigned the TL code by ISO 3166 in 2002.
IANA/ICANN delegated .tl to the East Timor government in 2005, and shortly thereafter the .tp registry stopped accepting new registrations, migrating existing .tp domains to the new ccTLD.
Now, it seems .tp is finally set to be removed from the root entirely.
While .tp was managed by an Irish company, the administrative contact was originally listed as Xanana Gusmao — at the time a senior resistance fighter serving a life sentence in an Indonesian jail.
Gusmao, who is still listed as .tp’s admin contact, went on to be East Timor’s first president from 2002 to 2007. Since 2007, he’s been the country’s prime minister.

.net zone back above 15 million names

Is .net bouncing back after a year of declines?
The Verisign legacy gTLD has topped 15 million names again, a bit over a month after it dipped below the notable but ultimately irrelevant threshold. Today, the .net zone has 15,000,038 names in its zone file.
It had gone below 15 million on January 1, and hit a trough of 14,980,773 on January 19, but has been gaining ground — in a wobbly fashion — ever since.
Verisign executives have previously blamed “confusion” from the sudden influx of new gTLDs into the market for .net’s 2014 decline, which saw it lose a couple hundred thousand zone file domains.
On January 22 and 26, the company’s stock outlook was downgraded by financial analysts, based on the view that new gTLDs were hurting its business.
But the company has been quite aggressively marketing .net alongside big brother .com for several months. Are those efforts paying dividends?

Amazon staffing up for new gTLD launches

Amazon is one of the biggest portfolio applicants for new gTLDs, but to date we haven’t heard much from the e-commerce giant about how it intends to use its new assets.
That could change soon, however. The company is currently looking to bulk up its registry services staff, according to two job ads posted to DI Jobs today.
Amazon is looking for a Project Manager, Registry Services and a Sr. Software Development Manager, Registry Services to “help develop and launch innovative business models across Amazon’s new domain program.”.
Applicants will need to “see beyond DNS in its traditional function”, one of the ads intriguingly notes.
The project manager role is described as “a start-up opportunity with the backing of a larger organization”.
Amazon currently has 63 live new gTLD applications, of its original 76, 21 of which are currently in the final testing phase before delegation. Those include strings such as .buy, .read, .author and .like. Another 29 are in contracting with ICANN right now.

.CLUB sells $200,000 domain for $10.99

.CLUB Domains has honored the $10.99 registration of credit.club, a premium domain it had hoped to sell for a record-busting $200,000.
The registry this week said it would allow registrant Bruce Marler to keep hold of the domain he bought at the base registration fee, even though it was due to be sold as a premium with an asking price above the previously record price for a .club name.
Marler acquired the name January 14, the day wine.club sold for $140,000 at NamesCon, for a reported $10.99 via Name.com. He’s since launched a basic web site there, though he made his intention to sell the domain clear in an email exchange with DomainGang.
.CLUB CEO Colin Campbell told DI: “It was listed for 200,000 on StartUp.club.”
StartUp.club is the company’s recently launched site for selling premium .club domains, many for six-figure sums.
A registry screw-up seems to be to blame for the sale.
Judging by a a post on NamePros by Campbell, the company was in the process of transferring 130 premium .club names from a registry-reserved status to its own ownership.
During the 26-hour period the domain was unreserved and available, Marler grabbed it.
Campbell said that the contracts between Name.com, itself, and the registrant would allow it to reclaim the domain, but said:

The registry does not believe it is in our best interest nor the best interest of the registrant to pull the name back given the substantial investment in time and money he has invested to launch credit.club. I informed the registrant of such matters and wish him a continued success.

While domainers are obviously lauding the decision as an example of registries owning — and paying for — their technological mistakes, I can’t help but wonder whether this was an economically sound decision.
The registry has certainly won brownie points in the investor community, it’s also lost a potential $200,000 sale.
Marler, by his own admission, intends to sell on the domain. While the domain hosts content today, it may not wind up being the kind of flagship, big-ticket anchor tenant that new gTLD registries need.
UPDATE: Marler, in the comments below, says he feels morally obliged to develop the site.