gTLD auctions net ICANN another $13m

ICANN has raised another $12.9 million from new gTLD auctions.
A small batch of three contention sets — .realty, .salon and .spot — were resolved last Wednesday in the third so-called “last resort” auction.
.realty went to Fegistry for $5,588,888, .salon to Donuts for $5,100,575 and .spot to Amazon for $2.2 million.
ICANN now has accumulated new gTLD auction sales totaling $27.8 million.
It raised $14.3 million selling off .buy, .tech and .vip in September. The auction for .信息 fetched $600,000 in June.
ICANN’s share — after auctioneer Power Auctions is paid off — is being put into a special fund, rather that ICANN’s current account. The community will one day have to decide what to spend it on.

Afilias set for $100m London IPO

London’s Alternative Investment Market is fast becoming the stock market of choice for new gTLD registries, with .info mainstay Afilias today announcing an upcoming IPO.
The Ireland-based company hopes to raise $100 million by selling off about 30% of the company, giving it a growth war-chest and giving its investors a shot at getting some of their money back.
Afilias earmarked part of the expected windfall for new gTLD auctions, as well as acquisitions of new gTLD “assets” and operational registries and expansion of its registrar business.
Executive chairman Jonathan Robinson said in a statement:

The Placing will bring significant benefits – by providing further capital to fund our organic and acquisitive growth plans, and raising our corporate profile with existing and new customers.

In addition to .info, .mobi and .pro, Afilias is associated with 254 new gTLD applications either as applicant or back-end provider. As registry, it already has about a dozen 2012-round gTLDs in the root.
The company’s revenue for 2013 was $77.6 million, up from $74.5 million in 2012. Earnings before deductions were $38.6 million in 2013, up from $32.1 million in 2012.
Fellow gTLD registries CentralNic and Minds + Machines are also listed on AIM.

Two-letter domains to be released in new gTLDs

New gTLD registries will be able to release all two-character strings in their zones, following an ICANN decision last week.
The ICANN board of directors voted on Thursday to instruct ICANN’s executive to

develop and implement an efficient procedure for the release of two-character domains currently required to be reserved in the New gTLD Registry Agreement

The procedure will have to take into account the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee issued at the end of last week’s ICANN 51 meeting in Los Angeles.
But that advice merely asks that governments are informed when a registry requests the release of two-character names.
All two-character strings were initially reserved due to the potential for confusion with two-letter ccTLDs.
But the GAC decided in LA that it doesn’t really have a problem with such strings being released, with some governments noting that ccTLD second-levels such as us.com and uk.com haven’t caused a problem to date.
The board’s decision is particularly good news for dot-brand applicants that may want to run domains such as uk.google or de.bmw to service specific regions where they operate.
Registries representing over 200 new gTLDs have already filed Registry Service Evaluation Process requests for the release of some two-character strings (some including ccTLD matches, some not).
It’s not yet clear how ICANN will go about removing the two-character restriction.
It may be more efficient to offer all registries a blanket amendment to the RA rather than process each RSEP request individually as it is today.
However, because the GAC has asked for notification on a case-by-case basis, ICANN may be forced to stick to the something along the lines of the existing procedure.

Donuts sells millionth domain name

Donuts today sold its millionth domain name, according to a company press release.
The name, according to Donuts, was heavenly.coffee.
I’m not saying heavenly.coffee wasn’t the one millionth name, but I reckon that if the one millionth name had been get-free-viagra.guru, I’d still be looking at a press release talking about heavenly.coffee this afternoon.
Donuts is obviously the first company to hit this target. It owns the largest portfolio of new gTLDs by a considerable margin.
The company has 150 delegated gTLDs, 140 of which are in general availability.

Iceland yanks Islamic State domain

Iceland’s ccTLD operator has suspended one or more domain names affiliated with Islamic State, the terrorist group currently running riot in parts of Iraq and Syria.
ISNIC runs .is, which matches the IS acronym.
In a statement on its web site, the company said:

ISNIC has suspended domains that were used for the website of a known terrorist organisation. The majority of ISNIC’s board made this decision today, on the grounds of Article 9 of ISNIC’s Rules on Domain Registration, which states: “The registrant is responsible for ensuring that the use of the domain is within the limits of Icelandic law as current at any time.”
Never before has ISNIC suspended a domain on grounds of a website’s content.

The domain in question was reportedly khilafah.is, which had a web site titled “Khilafah #IS | Media Releases from Islamic State”. Khilafah is the Latin-script version of the Arabic word for Caliphate.
IS has previously been known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It’s current media practice here in the UK to call it “so-called Islamic State”.

Governments totally cool with two-letter domains

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee does not plan to advise against the release of two-character domain names in new gTLDs.
In fact, judging by a GAC discussion at ICANN 51 in Los Angeles yesterday, the governments of many major nations are totally cool with the idea.
Under the standard Registry Agreement for new gTLD registries, all two-character domains (any combination of letters, numbers) must not be sold or activated in the DNS.
The blanket ban was designed to avoid clashes with two-letter ccTLD codes, both existing and future.
ICANN left the door open for registries to request the release of such names, however, and many companies have formally applied to do so via the Registry Services Evaluation Process.
Some registries want all two-character domains released, others have only asked for permission to sell those strings that do not match allocated ccTLDs.
There seems to have been an underlying assumption that governments may want to protect their geographic turf. That assumption may turn out to be untrue.
Representatives from the United States, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Australia, Austria and Iran all said yesterday that the GAC should not issue formal advice against the the two-character proposals.
No governments opposed that apparent consensus view.
“The use of the ‘US’ two-letter country code at the second level has not presented any technical or policy issues for the United States,” US rep Suzanne Radell said.
“We, in fact, do not require any approval for the use of US two-character country codes at the second level in existing gTLDs, and do not propose to require anything for new gTLDs,” she said.
She even highlighted domains such as us.com and us.org — which are marketed by UK-based CentralNic as alternatives to the .us ccTLD — as being just fine and dandy with the US government.
It seems likely that the GAC will instead suggest to ICANN that it is the responsibility of individual governments to challenge the registries’ requests via the RSEP process.
“What we see at the moment is that ICANN is putting these RSEP requests out for public comment and it would be open to any government to use that public comment period if they did feel in some instances that there was a concern,” Australian GACer Peter Nettlefold said.
I’ve not been able to find any government comments to the relevant RSEP requests.
For example, Neustar’s .neustar, which proposes the release of all two-character strings including country codes, has yet to receive a comment from a government.
Many comments in other RSEP fora appear to be from fellow dot-brand registries that want to use two-letter codes to represent the countries where they operate.

Uniregistry wins .cars gTLD

Uniregistry has won the .cars new gTLD at auction.
Donuts withdrew its competing application for the string this week. Third candidate DERCars’ application is still showing as active on ICANN’s web site.
However, Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling confirmed to DI that his company has won the contention set.
The automobile-related gTLD space is quite congested and, one might argue, confusing.
Uniregistry’s .cars will compete with Google, which has an uncontested application for the singular .car, and DERCars which stood uncontested for the now-delegated .autos.
Uniregistry previously won the four-way fight for .auto at auction but has yet to contract with ICANN.

Gay community not gay enough to win new gTLD

An applicant for .gay has lost its chance to get exclusive rights to the new gTLD, partly because the self-defined gay community it wants to represent is not “gay” enough.
Dotgay LLC is one of four applicants, and the only “Community” applicant under ICANN rules, for .gay.
But the company yesterday failed in its attempt to pass a Community Priority Evaluation, scoring just 10 out of 16 available points and failing to reach the required 14-point passing threshold.
Most of its points were lost on the “Nexus between Proposed String and Community” criteria, where 4 points were available but Dotgay scored zilch.
The CPE panel concluded that the gay community described in the Dotgay application was too broad to be described by the string “gay”, because it includes lots of people who aren’t gay — such as transgender people or heterosexual campaigners for gay rights.
Under the CPE rules, applicants can score the maximum points if their chosen string “matches” the name of the community. Partial points can be won if it “identifies” the community.
The panel decided that it did neither:

Included in the application’s community definition are transgender and intersex individuals as well as “allies” (understood as heterosexual individuals supportive of the missions of the organizations that comprise the defined community). However, “gay” does not identify these individuals. Transgender people may identify as straight or gay, since gender identity and sexual orientation are not necessarily linked.8 Likewise, intersex individuals are defined by having been born with atypical sexual reproductive anatomy; such individuals are not necessarily “gay”. Finally, allies, given the assumption that they are heterosexual supporters of LGBTQIA issues, are not identified by “gay” at all. Such individuals may be an active part of the .GAY community, even if they are heterosexual, but “gay” nevertheless does not describe these individuals

Because “gay” was not found to identify the applicant-defined community, Dotgay lost 3 points. A knock-on effect was that it lost another 1 point for not “uniquely” identifying the community.
The applicant lost another two points on the “Community Endorsement” criteria — one point for not being backed by an organization recognized as representing all gays and another because the application had received informal objections from at least one significant community member.
The CPE decision means that rival applicants Top Level Design, Rightside and Minds + Machines are back in the game.
The .gay gTLD, assuming there are no successful appeals against the CPE, is now likely headed to auction.

Music industry gets its ass handed to it by gTLD panel

The music industry-backed application for the new gTLD .music today suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a Community Priority Evaluation panel.
The Far Further (.music LLC) application scored a pitiful 3 out of 16 possible points in the evaluation, missing the required 14-point passing threshold by a country and western mile.
CPE is a way for applicants representing genuine communities to avoid an auction. If one applicant in a contention set wins a CPE, all the others must withdraw their applications.
But in this case the CPE panel went so far as to accuse the applicant of attempting to get its hands on a nice generic string by creating a new community, rather than by representing an existing one:

The Panel determined that this application refers to a proposed community construed to obtain a sought-after generic word as a gTLD. Moreover the applicant appears to be attempting to use the gTLD to organize the various groups noted in the application documentation, as opposed to applying on behalf of an already organized and cohesive community.

The application was backed by dozens of music industry trade groups and (by inference) thousands of their member associations and millions of individual members, spread over 150 countries.
But that wasn’t enough to persuade the CPE panel that “music” is even a “community” within the meaning of the ICANN new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook:

While the Panel acknowledges that many of the members in the proposed community share an interest in music, the AGB specifies that a “commonality of interest” is not sufficient to demonstrate the requisite awareness and recognition of a community among its members.

The panel pointed to the existence of legions of amateur musicians — estimated at 200 million — that do not identify with the community as defined in Far Further’s new gTLD application, which is restricted to the four million or so members of the application’s backers.
The panel found therefore that “there is no entity mainly dedicated to the entire community as defined by the applicant, nor does the application include reference to such an organization”.
The very fact that the Far Further application included reference to 42 trade groups, covering different facets of the music industry, seems to have counted against it. One overarching body dedicated to “music” in its entirety may have been enough to win the applicant some points.
The fact that the panel decided the community did not exist had a knock-on effect in other parts of the evaluation.
Has the community been around for a long time? No, because the community doesn’t exist. Is it a big community? No again, because the community doesn’t exist. And so on.
The only places Far Further managed to pick up points were on its registration policies, where it had promised to restrict registration to certain community members, and on community endorsement.
There are eight applicants for .music in total. One other, regular DI commenter Constantine Roussos’ DotMusic Limited, is also a Community application that is eligible for CPE.
It’s always seemed highly improbable that any .music applicant could pass CPE, but it’s looking even less likely for DotMusic after today’s result for Far Further.
.music, it seems, is heading to auction, where it is likely to fetch big bucks.

.now and .realestate will be restricted, but Donuts keeps .tires open

It was a battle between open and restricted registration rules this week, as three more new gTLD contention sets were resolved between applicants with opposing policies.
Donuts won .tires (open), Amazon won .now (closed) and the National Association of Realtors won .realestate (restricted).
Donuts beat Goodyear and Bridgestone — two of the biggest tire companies in the world — to .tires. Both withdrew their respective applications over the last week.
If it was an auction it was not conducted via the usual new gTLD auction houses. It seems like Donuts settled the contention privately (or maybe just got lucky).
Both tire companies had proposed single-registrant closed generic spaces. Donuts, of course, has not.
Goodyear has active dot-brand applications for .goodyear and .dunlop remaining. Bridgestone has active applications for .bridgestone and .firestone, also dot-brands.
Amazon, meanwhile, won the .now contention set over five other applicants — Starbucks HK, XYZ.com, One.com, Global Top Level and Donuts, which have all withdrawn their bids.
Amazon’s application for .now envisages a closed registry in which all the second-level domains belong to the company’s intellectual property department.
Also this week, the NAR, which already has the dot-brand .realtor under its belt, beat Donuts, Minds + Machines and Uniregistry to the complementary generic .realestate.
Unfortunately for estate agents worldwide, the NAR plans a tightly restricted .realestate zone, in which only its own members will at first be able to register, according to its application.
The application does seem to envisage a time when others will be permitted to register, however.
The organization said in a press release this week that .realestate will be more open than .realtor, but that full policies will not be released until next year.