.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.

Eleven domains suspended under .uk anti-rape rules

Nominet has suspended and permanently blocked 11 “rape” domain names in .uk since introducing a controversial policy earlier this year.
The company today disclosed that nine pre-existing domains were suspended immediately following the introduction of the rules in May. Another two have been blocked since then.
The policy calls for Nominet to ban any domain name that seems to “promote or incite serious sexual offences”.
Examples of such domains given by Lord MacDonald, who compiled the review that led to the policy, included rapeme.co.uk, rapemyteacher.co.uk and rapeporn.co.uk.
Nominet now automatically scans all new .uk registrations for keywords that may be a cause for concern. These are then manually reviewed to weed out the false positives, which could include for example domains that contain the word “grape” or “therapist”.
The false positive level is very high. According to a Nominet report (pdf) this week, 1,029 domains have been automatically flagged since May, only two of which were then suspended.
The policy was introduced following articles in some of the UK’s right-wing tabloids and pressure from government ministers.
Nominet also disclosed this week that 948 domains have been suspended for “criminal activity” in the last six months.
Under Nominet rules, such domains are suspended merely upon notification by the law enforcement agencies that the domain in question is suspected of harboring criminal activity. Unlike elsewhere in the world, no court order is required.
“Criminal activity” means intellectual property infringement in the vast majority of cases.
Of those 948 suspended names, 839 were suspended after complaints from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. Another 102 were yanked following notices from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. The remaining 7 complaints came from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

After lawsuit, YouPorn buys into .xxx portfolio

Porn site operator Manwin Licensing, known to the domain industry for its antitrust lawsuit against ICANN and ICM Registry that was settled last year, has taken over a portfolio of .xxx domains from a staunch .xxx supporter.
Now known as MindGeek, the YouPorn operator is to manage sites for Really Useful, one of the most enthusiastic buyers of premium .xxx domain names.
Really Useful was the first company to have a live .xxx web site — casting.xxx. It has also bought premiums such as orgasms.xxx, bdsm.xxx, mature.xxx, publicsex.xxx, czech.xxx, tubes.xxx, teen.xxx and mom.xxx directly from ICM.
Its spokesperson, “JT”, has expressed his support for .xxx in a few ICM press releases.
MindGeek is also taking over a selection of .com domains as part of the deal.
As Manwin, MindGeek sued ICANN and ICM in late 2011, alleging breaches of US antitrust law. It claimed the need for defensive registrations when .xxx launched amounted to “extortion”.
The suit was settled by ICM last year, but not before a California court ruled that ICANN is not immune to antitrust law.
Now, MindGeek seems to think .xxx domains are okay. Its director of global sales, “Nick P”, reportedly said: “JT’s content and brands are among the hottest on the Internet right now and the future sites planned are phenomenal.”
In unrelated news, MindGeek came under fire this week for producing a series of porn videos that allegedly depict the simulated rape of illegal immigrants by US border patrols.

Donuts wins five more new gTLD auctions

Donuts added five new gTLDs to its ever-growing portfolio this week, as the results of five private auctions were revealed.
The company won the following strings:
.news — went to Donuts after withdrawals from Merchant Law Group, Amazon, Radix, Uniregistry, Famous Four Media and Primer Nivel. As somebody with a vested interest in the news media, I’m glad this one went to a registry with an open registration policy.
.golf — Donuts beat Famous Four, Dot Golf and Fegistry.
.casino — Donuts won after withdrawals from Famous Four, Afilias and dotBeauty.
.school — Donuts beat Fegistry, Uniregistry and Minds + Machines.
.football — Donuts beat Famous Four.
The registry currently has 156 delegated TLDs, more than half of those it originally applied for. It has another 99 active applications in various stages of pre-delegation.

M+M raises $4.4m losing latest gTLD auctions

Minds + Machines made $4.4 million losing three recent new gTLD auctions, according to a company press release.
It’s withdrawn bids for .latino, .school and a third string it said it could not disclose due to the rules of the private auction.
M+M now says it has $45 million cash on hand.
So far, the company has withdrawn 31 new gTLD applications, almost half of its original 70. Not all of those were lost at auction.
It has 17 contested applications left and expects those contention sets to be resolved one way or the other by the end of June 2015.