.london predicts 50,000 landrush names

Two months into its combined sunrise/landrush period Dot London Domains estimates it will end July with 50,000 applied-for names.
A “projection based on current applications”, the number doesn’t say a heck of a lot about how many names have actually been applied for since the TLD opened for applications on April 29.
It could mean that 33,000 names, given that we’re two-thirds of the way through the launch phase. Alternatively, the registry could be predicting the kind of last-minute rush common to sunrise periods before 2014.
The number doesn’t say much about .london’s eventual number of names under management, given that there’s likely to be multiple applications for the same names.
If it were to sell 50,000 names, that would make it the fifth-largest new gTLD, based on today’s numbers.
The three-month launch phase combines the sunrise and landrush, with trademark owners listed in the Trademark Clearinghouse getting first priority.
Registrants based in London applying for a non-TMCH business name get second dibs, followed by Londoners generally and then anyone anywhere in the world.
Clashing applications will see the names going to auction. Sunrise applicants will not have to compete at auction with non-sunrise applicants, of course.
Back-end registry provider Minds + Machines is being promoted heavily as the primary registrar. It’s selling the names for £30 ($51) per year and pushing sunrise applicants to Com Laude.
1&1, 123-reg, GoDaddy, Fasthosts and CentralNic, which all have dedicated .london pages or sites, are also being promoted by M+M as partner registrars.
The cheapest deal of those registrars appears to be at FastHosts, which is selling at £24.99 ($42.85).

The price of .bar was $100,000 to a school

Wondering how the new gTLD registry Punto 2012 managed to get government approval for .bar, even though it’s a protected geographic term in Montenegro under ICANN rules?
At least part of the deal seems to involve a 10-year, $100,000 commitment to fund a school in the tiny Montenegrin city of Bar, judging by a press release today.
The registry will pay $10,000 a year to the school for the duration of its 10-year registry agreement.
It’s a stroke of good fortune for the city. Whilst not a capital city, it’s also a ISO-designated administrative region of the country and therefore protected by the ICANN Applicant Guidebook.
Punto 2012 intends to reserve a few names for the city, and said it hopes residents will use .bar — intended to represent drinking establishments — as a city TLD also.
With a little over 17,000 inhabitants, Bar is likely going to be have one of the smaller city TLDs, and I expect most registrations will in fact come from bars elsewhere in the world.
In related news, as of last Friday there’s only one new gTLD application of the original 1,930 still under ICANN evaluation and it’s .tata, the dot-brand for a massive Indian conglomerate that is also the name of a province in Morocco. Coincidence? Probably not.

Bieber plug has no impact on .tattoo sales

Justin Bieber used his extensive social media channels to plug a .tattoo domain name to his bazillions of “beliebers” last week, but so far the plug has had no impact on sales of the gTLD.
The pop singer, beloved of 11-year-old girls worldwide, tweeted and Facebooked about the domain joker.tattoo, which leads visitors to his Tumblr blog.
A Facebook update reading simply “My Tumblr is http://joker.tattoo” has been “liked” over 230,000 times and shared almost 2,500 times by the over 70 million people following him on the platform.

On Twitter, where Bieber has 52.6 million followers, his identical tweet was retweeted over 50,000 times and favorited close to 60,000 times.

My Tumblr is http://t.co/PBP0ceJXeF ♛

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) June 27, 2014

The “news” was even picked up by MTV, which gently ribbed the musician for apparently (don’t ask me, I’m 37) not understanding that Tumblr isn’t just for “selfies”.
But the widespread publicity for a .tattoo name had no impact whatsoever on .tattoo sales, judging by zone files.
The Uniregistry TLD hasn’t grown by more than one name per day since Bieber’s tweet.
One June 27 the .tattoo zone file had 6,312 names in it, today it has 6,316.
The joker.tattoo domain — apparently chosen because Bieber has a tattoo of a joker — is registered to one of the founders of RockLive, a San Francisco selfie-oriented app start-up funded in part by Bieber.
The domain redirects to a Tumblr third-level subdomain, so there’s no visibility for the new gTLD in browser address bars.
There’s also the issue that most of Bieber’s fans are probably too young to own a credit card, which is a prerequisite for buying a domain name.

No mention of .london at ICANN London

The forthcoming .london gTLD didn’t get a look in during the opening ceremony of ICANN 50, held this morning in London.
The host city gTLD’s complete absence from the two-hour event — it wasn’t mentioned once — would have escaped notice had it not been for the abundance of plugs for .wales and .cymru attendees received instead.
.cymru is the Welsh name for Wales. The gTLDs are to be launched simultaneously.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones was given stage time to announce, in between anti-English quips, that the Welsh government is to dump .gov.uk in favor of the two new Welsh gTLDs.
Later, a Welsh male voice choir (presumably a famous one) took to the stage to sing a couple of songs and announce that they too are planning to use .wales and .cymru for their web sites.
Nominet chair Rennie Fritchie also plugged the upcoming launches during her five-minute slot.
You’d have been forgiven for wondering if you’d accidentally got off the plane in Cardiff.
Where was .london?
Did Dot London Domains seriously drop the ball here?
Or did .london’s absence have something to do with the fact that the host ccTLD and meeting sponsor, Nominet, is the registry for .wales and .cymru but was beaten to the .london back-end contract by Minds + Machines?

New gTLDs now outnumber the old TLDs

There are now more 2012-round new gTLDs alive on the internet than there are legacy TLDs.
With today’s addition of five new strings, including .brussels and .surf, there are now 312 delegated new gTLDs and 308 others in the DNS root zone file.
The legacy TLD count includes the original eight gTLDs such as .com and .gov, 285 ccTLDs (including 36 IDN ccTLDs), and 15 gTLDs added by ICANN in the 2000 and 2003 rounds.
With just shy of 1.2 million domains under management (including all the registry-reserved and freebies) the new gTLD program currently accounts for about 0.4% of all registered names.
About 140 new gTLDs are in general availability. The rest have been delegated but are either in sunrise periods or pre-sunrise periods.

ICANN smacks new gTLDs for pre-sunrise auctions

Running a premium domain name auction before you’ve finished your new gTLD sunrise period is Officially Not Cool, according to ICANN’s compliance department.
People who won premium new gTLD domains in auctions that took place before sunrise periods now face the possibility of losing their names to trademark owners.
.CLUB Domains, and probably XYZ.com, operators of .club and .xyz, two of the highest-volume new gTLDs to launch so far, appear to be affected by the ICANN decision.
ICANN told .CLUB that its “winter auction“, which took place in late February, may have violated the rules about allocating or “earmarking” domains to registrants before sunrise takes place.
Meanwhile, NameJet has cancelled the auction for deals.xyz, which “sold” for $8,100 late last year, suggesting that .xyz’s pre-sunrise auction is also considered ultra vires.
ICANN told .CLUB that its auction sales “constitute earmarking” in violation of the rule stating that registries “must not allow a domain name to be allocated or registered prior to the Sunrise period”.
.CLUB had told its auction winners that a sunrise period registration would prevent them from getting the domain they wanted and that they would be refunded if a sunrise registrant emerged.
But ICANN evidently told the registry:

Irrespective of whether “[a]llocation was expressly conditioned upon any Sunrise claim,” or whether any Sunrise claim was made, the pre-selection, pre-registration or pre-designation to third parties, in this case via .Club Domains’ “winter auction,” constitutes improper allocation.

I kinda thought this would happen.
Back in November, when XYZ.com ran its first .xyz auction — about six months before its sunrise even started — CEO Daniel Negari told us he believed it was “comfortably within the rules“.
We said the auction “seems to be operating at the edge of what is permissible under the new gTLD program’s rights protection mechanisms, which state that no domains may be allocated prior to Sunrise.”
I’ve not yet been able to definitively confirm that .xyz is affected by this ICANN decision, but .club definitely is.
.CLUB Domains told its auction winners today that the names they won are now subject to a 60-day period during which they could be obtained by trademark owners.
If no trademark owner claims the name, .CLUB said it will give the auction winner a 10% rebate on their purchase price.
The email states:

We are placing the domain on hold for 60 days, during which time a Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) holder will have the opportunity to purchase the domain at Sunrise rates. Although, the domain is not currently in the TMCH, if a trademark holder should file in the TMCH over the next 60 days, the domain will be offered to that registrant. However, if the name is not claimed by filing in the TMCH over the next 60 days, your transaction will move forward as planned.
Although we disagree with ICANN compliance’s position on this matter, the actions we are taking are necessary to ensure that we are not offside with ICANN compliance in any way. We understand that you have been caught in the middle of this issue due to no fault of your own. Given these circumstances, we are offering you two options:
1) Should you decide to complete this transaction, we will issue you a payment of 10% of the purchase price after the transaction closes in 60 days, assuming the name is not registered by a TMCH mark holder because of the delay.
2) At any time during the 60 day period you have the option to rescind the auction bid and not purchasing the domain.

dotBERLIN pulls plug on free domain giveaway

The .berlin registry has apparently halted the promotion that has given away tens of thousands of free domain names, citing unexpectedly high demand.
According to 101domain, a registrar that started giving away .berlin domains for free yesterday:

As of 1pm PST today, June 18th, the free .BERLIN promotion will unfortunately come to an end.
According to the dotBERLIN registry, demand was exceedingly above their anticipated volumes, so they have decided to pull the plug early.

The promotion, which led to domainers registered tens of thousands of names, was due to end on Friday.
Why has dotBERLIN pulled the plug? I have to wonder whether it is related to the company’s own registration policies, which are not particularly domainer-friendly.
The .berlin TLD started today at 121,193 names, according to its zone file, up 5,227 on the day.
Over 70,000 of those names were registered in the last two days, and most of those are believed to be freebies handed out by InternetX and, as of yesterday, 101domain.
As we reported yesterday, one domainer, DomainProfi, is responsible for over 23,000 of these registrations.
Another massive registrant, as DNW reported today, is Sedo-affiliated DomCollect, part of the same group (United Internet) as InternetX. It has over 30,000 .berlin names.
It’s difficult to see any of these names being developed or used in any meaningful way — they seem to be currently parked — yet the dotBERLIN registration policy may require it.
The English translation of the policy (pdf) states:

5.2. Conditions for the content and use of domain names
As the gTLD .BERLIN is a so-called “community based” gTLD, where the registration of domain names is subject to restrictions, a domain name must be put into use within 12 months of registration.
If the registrant sets up a web site which can be reached via the registered domain name, the content of this site must have be directly related to the authorisation to register

The first part of that seems simple: you have to “use” the domain within a year or risk losing it.
The “authorisation to register” appears to be the registrant’s self-declared “economic, cultural, historical, social or other connection to the German capital, Berlin”.
I interpret the two paragraphs together to read: “You must use the name in a manner that reflects your connection to Berlin”.
Does this mean parking is prohibited? There’s nothing explicit banning it, but I’d say it’s definitely a grey area. It seems to be down to the decision of the registry.
I asked dotBERLIN for clarification this morning but have not yet received one.
For the registrants, there seems to be little risk, however. They haven’t paid for their names and probably don’t intend to renew any that they can’t sell before renewal time.

Are you ready to sell your new gTLD yet?

Applicant Auction wants to know.
The company, which was set up to help resolve new gTLD contention sets, has started pitching its services to the owners of gTLDs that are already delegated.
An email sent out to applicants this week says:

Many people approach us with interest in purchasing strings, so we are offering a new auction where gTLD owners can sell their string in a open auction.

I gather that the company is targeting both live registries and applicants for uncontested strings.
It’s sad to say, but I think there might even be a market for it.
The laid-back “if we build it, they will come” mentality among applicants seems to have been a lot more prevalent than I had anticipated, which has resulted in depressing sales for some new gTLDs.
Will any of them decide to cash out early rather than putting in the time and money to make their businesses work over the long haul? It remains to be seen.

CentralNic pays up to $7.5m for Internet.bs

CentralNic has acquired the unfortunately named Bahamas-based registrar Internet.bs for up to $7.5 million, in an effort to bolster its registrar business.
The deal is for a mixture of cash ($2.7 million), newly issued shares ($2.5 million) and a delayed performance-related payout of up to $2.3 million.
CentralNic is best known as a registry and back-end provider, but it also has a registrar, TLD Registrar Solutions, which is aimed primarily at registries that want to vertically integrate.
The acquisition means the company now has a medium sized ICANN-accredited retail registrar arm too.
Internet.bs has well over half a million gTLD names under management, according to registry reports. According to CentralNic, it has 28,000 customers in 199 countries.
The company made a profit of $730,000 last year, CentralNic said.

.berlin rockets to 116k on free domain offer

A promotion from dotBERLIN saw .berlin more than double its registration count yesterday, as speculators (apparently) swooped to claim over 61,000 free domain names.
The new gTLD ended the day with 115,966 domains in its zone, up 67,347 or 138% on the day.
That makes it the number two new gTLD again, snipping at the heels of .xyz, which has 144,474 names.
But, like .xyz, the numbers are not an accurate reflection of demand.
Giving away free domains seems to be the way to go if you want to quickly rack up your registration count with scant regard for actual end user purchases or renewal rates.
dotBERLIN said yesterday that it was celebrating 50,000 registrations with a five-day offer seeing registrars sell the names for no more than €5.55 ($7.53).
But some registrars are actually offering them for free.
InternetX is one such registrar, and it appears to have taken the vast, vast majority of all the new .berlin registrations yesterday.
Digging into name server records, it appears that at least 61,000 names were registered via InternetX-owned registrars. Of those, over 23,000 appear to have been registered to a single domainer.
InternetX, to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t forcing the domains on its customers, which is what Network Solutions did with .xyz.
According to its web site, the offer was limited to 50 domains per customer, though there appears to be an option to purchase obtain more.
The domainer with the cache of 23,000 names appears to be an InternetX reseller.
The numbers are big, and they may well convert into revenue-generating renewals for dotBERLIN, but right now I don’t think they’re especially reflective of demand among end user registrants.