Hotly contested gTLDs up for auction tomorrow

ICANN’s fifth set of last-resort new gTLD auctions is set for tomorrow and it’s another small batch.
Just two contention sets — .baby and .mls — are set to be resolved, with ICANN stashing the winning bids into its special fund.
.baby is hotly contested with no fewer than six applicants — five portfolio applicants and one big brand.
Will Johnson & Johnson get what was once a single-registrant “closed generic”, or will Donuts, Google, Radix, Famous Four or Minds & Machines prevail?
Meanwhile, .mls (for “multiple listing service”, a type of real estate listings aggregation service popular in North America) is a two-horse race between Afilias and the Canadian Real Estate Association.
I’m tempted to call this one for CREA. The organization is so desperate for the .mls gTLD that it filed two applications, one “community” and one vanilla.
The community application was withdrawn earlier this year when CREA scored 11 out of 16 points on its Community Priority Evaluation, failing to pass the 14-point threshold.
The organization even filed a Legal Rights Objection against Afilias in attempt to kill off the competition, which also failed.
Having fought off these challenges, Afilias is either going to get the gTLD or walk away empty-handed. The last resort auction does not compensate unsuccessful bidders for their investments.

As .trust opens for sunrise, Artemis dumps .secure bid

Amazon is now the proud owner of the .secure new gTLD, after much smaller competing applicant Artemis Internet withdrew its bid.
Coincidentally, the settlement of the contention set came just yesterday, the day before Artemis took its .trust — which I’ve described as a “backup plan” — to sunrise.
I assume .secure was settled with a private deal. I’ve long suspected Artemis — affiliated with data escrow provider NCC Group — had its work cut out to win an auction against Amazon.
It’s a shame, in a way. Artemis was one of the few new gTLD applicants that had actually sketched out plans for something quite technologically innovative.
Artemis’ .secure was to be a “trust mark” for a high-priced managed security service. It wasn’t really about selling domain names in volume at all.
The company had done a fair bit of outreach work, too. As long ago as July 2013, around 30 companies had expressed their interest in signing up as anchor tenants.
But, after ICANN gave Amazon a get-out-of-jail-free card by allowing it to amend its “closed generic” gTLD applications, it looked increasingly unlikely Artemis would wind up owning the gTLD it was essentially already pre-selling.
In February this year, it emerged that it had acquired the rights to .trust from Deutsche Post, which had applied for the gTLD unopposed.
This Plan B was realized today when .trust began its contractually mandated sunrise period.
Don’t expect many brands to apply for their names during sunrise, however — .trust’s standard registration policies are going to make cybersquatting non-existent.
Not only will .trust registrants have their identities manually vetted, but there’s also a hefty set of security standards — 123 pages (pdf) of them at the current count — that registrants will have to abide by on an ongoing basis in order to keep their names.
As for Amazon, its .secure application, as amended, is just as vague as all of its other former bids for closed, single-registrant generic strings (to the point where I often wonder if they’re basically still just closed generics).
It’s planning to deploy a small number of names to start with, managed by its own intellectually property department. After that, its application all gets a bit hand-wavey.

Last resort gTLD auction loser wants share of $5m winning bid

An unsuccessful new gTLD applicant wants ICANN to share the proceeds of its “last resort” auction with itself and the other losing applicants.
Aesthetics Practitioners Advisory Network had applied for .salon, but found itself in a contention set with three other applicants and was ultimately beaten at auction by a winning bid of over $5 million from Donuts.
Now, the company has written to ICANN to ask for the money from the ICANN-run auction to be shared out among the losing bidders in much the same way as it is when a contention set goes to private auction.
APAN CEO Tina Viney wrote (pdf):

On the basis that ICANN received such a large amount ($5.175million) for the bidding of this auction it would be fair and equitable for the losing parties to be considered in the distribution of the winning financial bid. We believe that ICANN should review this consideration for losing parties who have had to incur numerous costs, not just the application fee, but also toward the preparation of documents so that we could meet with ICANN’s requirements. These include, but are not limited to registry fees, solicitor’s fees, financial services, not to mention the enormous amount of time that is required of an applicant in preparing for their application.
As a result, we respectfully request ICANN as part of their funds distribution policy to consider the applicants who did not win at the auction, BUT WERE SUCCESSFUL IN PASSING THE EVALUATION PROCESS.

She said that private auctions, which allow losing applicants to recoup some or all of their costs, should be mandatory when a majority of the applicants in a contention set want one.
In .salon’s case, one of the four applicants didn’t agree to a private auction, according to Viney. As Donuts is the enthusiastic pioneer of the private auction concept, that means the holdout was either DaySmart Software or L’Oreal.

First live dot-brand switches back to .com

CITIC Group, which became the first company to dump .com for its new dot-brand gTLD, has switched back to .com.
CITIC, a massive Chinese conglomerate, switched from citic.com to limited.citic in September, but a DI commenter noticed that it’s now back to using citic.com.
Google searches for “citic” were returning the new gTLD as the top hit for the Citic Limited, now it’s back to citic.com.
The domain limited.citic is not currently resolving to a web site for me.
Other brands are still actively using their dot-brand gTLDs, but Citic was the only one I’m aware of that decided to replace its .com.

.ceo smartens up in new promo video

Struggling to find its tone?
PeopleBrowsr has done a full 180 in its attempts to market .ceo through online commercials.
In its latest video, the company has gone for a straightforward grey-hair-in-a-suit-addresses-camera concept.

It’s a far cry from its first attempt, published a year ago but now flagged as “private” on YouTube, which comprised PeopleBrowsr staffers dicking around the office in Donald Trump masks.
It also represents an evolution from the cartoony, but much more respectable, effort from February.
“The video was produced over many months – with feedback and collaboration from over 100 of our early adopter CEOs,” the company said.
Now, .ceo is being positioned as a “business card” for CEOs that enables social networking opportunities.
The gTLD, which went to general availability in March, currently has fewer than 1,800 domains in its zone file, though PeopleBrowsr pegs its number of registrations at “almost 2,000”.

New .jobs contract based on new gTLD agreement

ICANN and Employ Media are set to sign a new contract for operation of the .jobs registry which is based heavily on the Registry Agreement signed by all new gTLD registries.
.jobs was delegated in 2005 and its first 10-year RA is due for renewal in May 2015.
Because Employ Media, like all gTLD registries, has a presumption of renewal clause in its contract, ICANN has published the proposed new version of its RA for public comment.
It’s basically the new gTLD RA, albeit substantially modified to reflect the fact that .jobs is a “Sponsored TLD” — slightly different to a “Community” TLD under the current rules — and because .jobs has been around for nine years already.
That means it won’t have to sign a contract forcing it to run Sunrise or Trademark Claims periods, for example. It won’t have to come up with a Continued Operations Instrument — a financial arrangement to cover operating costs should the company go under — either.
Its commitments to its sponsor community remain, however.
ICANN said it conducted a compliance audit on Employ Media before agreeing to the renewal.
Employ Media remains the only gTLD registry to have been hit by a formal breach notice by ICANN Compliance. In 2011, it threatened to terminate its contract over a controversial proposal to all job aggregation sites to run on .jobs domains.
The registry filed an Independent Review Process complaint to challenge the ruling and ICANN eventually backed down in 2012.
The fight came about as a result of complaints from the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, a group of jobs sites including Monster.com.

.love won by class action lawyers

It appears that the contested new gTLD .love has been won by the law firm Merchant Law Group, after an auction.
Minds + Machines, Richemont, Google and Donuts have all officially withdrawn their competing applications. I gather that withdrawals from Uniregistry and Famous Four Media are on their way.
.love would be MLG’s first successful new gTLD application.
The would-be portfolio applicant applied for eight strings, all of which were contested by others. It has withdrawn bids for .news, .club and .law after auctions.
MLG is odd as new gTLD applicants go. It’s a Canadian law firm that offers services across many areas of law but seems to specialize in class action lawsuits.
According to its application, .love will be positioned in the same space as .wed and .wedding:

.LOVE’s target markets are broad enough to maintain a financially viable TLD and distinct enough that the .LOVE TLD will not become ‘just another .info’. A .LOVE TLD will provide a unique space on the Internet for information and services related to the idea of love, engagements, marriage, and family. It will allow anyone to register a domain name and post information about products and services related to the idea of love, an engagement, a marriage, or family.

It is anticipated to be an open, unrestricted gTLD running on a CentralNic back-end.

Private auction settles controversial plural gTLD fight

A private auction has been used to settle a new gTLD contention set containing two different strings for the first time.
Afilias has won the right to run .pet after Google withdrew its application for .pet and Donuts withdrew its bid for .pets.
The two strings, one the plural of the other, had been placed into indirect contention by ICANN after a String Confusion Objection panel controversially ruled in August 2013 that .pet and .pets were too confusingly similar to be allowed to coexist.
This means that Donuts has been forced to withdraw an uncontested application.
Notably, it was Google that filed, fought and won the SCO complaint, and it didn’t even wind up with the TLD it wanted.
The final settlement of the contention set reflects ICANN’s inconsistent policy on plurals. Several plural/singular combinations — such as .career(s) and .photo(s) — already coexist in the DNS.

CentralNic unloads $2.5m worth of premium domains

CentralNic today announced it has made $2.5 million by selling off some of its stash of premium domain names.
The sales appear to be of “non-core” names unrelated to its registry business that the company has been sitting on for a while, rather than names that it has reserved in its own subdomains and new gTLDs for which it acts as back-end.
The company did not disclose how many or which names it has sold, but the sales all seem to have happened in the last few months, since it first announced its intention to liquidate some of its premiums.
CentralNic said its portfolio comprises some 20,000 names.
The company also confirmed today that its financial results for the second half of the year will be in line with expectations.

Donuts blames “license” problems for Chinese gTLD delays

Donuts says that problems obtaining “licenses” from the Chinese government are to blame for the fact that it is yet to launch any of its Chinese-script new gTLDs.
Currently, four of the company’s portfolio of 156 gTLDs are in Chinese. Three have been delegated to the DNS root but none of them have been launched.
The first, .游戏 (for “games”) has been in the root since October 2013, but does not yet have a firm date for Sunrise. Another, .商店 (“shop”), was delegated just last week, almost a year after Donuts signed its Registry Agreement with ICANN.
Donuts explained the .游戏 delay with the following statement:

The Chinese government division which handles this area is MIIT [Ministry of Industry and Information Technology] and in conjunction with [.cn registry] CNNIC they are still to advise of the licensing application process. We hope to make these TLDs available during the first half of 2015.

No additional details were available and it’s not clear what licenses Donuts — which is based in the United States — thinks it needs to obtain before launching.
I’ve heard rumors that China may introduce a licensing system in future, but other new gTLD registries with Chinese-script strings in their stable have managed to launch their gTLDs just fine without a Chinese government license.
TLD Registry — legally based in Dublin, Ireland, founded by Finns — launched .中文网 and .在线 earlier this year and has tens of thousands of names under management.
Thousands of those domains, which match Chinese geographic names, were allocated to Chinese government, however.
“No licenses are currently possible, because the new law is MIA,” TLD Registry chief marketing officer Simon Cousins told us.