Donuts wins .immo gTLD

Donuts has acquired the .immo new gTLD after its three rival bidders withdrew their applications.
Minds + Machines, dotimmobilie and Starting Dot have all withdrawn from the contest in the last few days, presumably due to an auction.
Starting Dot had applied for a Community Priority Evaluation, which would have allowed it to avoid an auction altogether, but it failed to score enough points to pass.
“Immo” is short for “immobilien”, which means “real estate” in German. The contraction is also widely used in other European countries, potentially making it more attractive a string.
The gTLD will compete with .immobilien, which is delegated to RightSide. That TLD has been in general availability since May 28 and has 5,136 domains under management as of today.
It would be fascinating to know whether .immobilien’s performance to date had any bearing on how much the applicants were prepared to bid at auction. But, as usual, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

Donuts spends $50 million on new gTLD auctions

Donuts has revealed that its bill for new gTLD auctions has so far come to $50 million.
That, coupled with some other data released in a blog post last week, suggests that it’s spent over $2 million, on average, per gTLD.
CEO Paul Stahura wrote that the company has participated in “roughly” 50 auctions and that it’s won more than 50% of those it’s participated in.
“We’ve spent $50M to win those auctions to secure the resulting TLDs,” Stahura wrote.
According to my numbers, Donuts has been in 45 auctions and won 23. I may be missing a couple, but the numbers fit with Stahura’s. That would make an average spend of $2.17 million per gTLD.
That doesn’t mean the company has burnt through $50 million of its funding, of course.
In private gTLD auctions, the winner pays the losers. By losing at least 22 auctions, Donuts could just as easily be breaking even.
Not all of Donuts’ auctions have been organized by Applicant Auction. A few were settled via other means. Applicant Auction takes a 4% cut, which means its take so far is approaching $2 million.

Amazon snubs ICANN auction to win .coupon privately

Amazon has won the new gTLD .coupon, after Minds + Machines withdrew its application this week.
I understand that the two-way contention set was settled privately via a third party intermediary, possibly via some kind of auction, with M+M ultimately being paid off to withdraw its bid.
.coupon was the only ICANN-managed “auction of last resort” scheduled for July, following the $600,000 sale of .信息 last week.
The next batch of ICANN auctions is now not due to happen until August, unless of course ICANN rejigs its schedule in light of the .coupon settlement.
It’s not clear why Amazon has suddenly decided it prefers the idea of a private commercial settlement after all, but it appears to be good news for M+M, which will see the majority of the cash.
However, it could be related to the fact that .coupon, and dozens of other Amazon new gTLD applications, recently made the switch from being “closed generics” to more inclusive proposals.
Amazon had originally intended that itself and its subsidiaries would be the “only eligible registrants” for .coupon, but in March it changed the application, among many others.
Now, Amazon talks in vague terms about .coupon names being available to “eligible trusted third parties”, a term that doesn’t seem ready to define before the TLDs are actually delegated.
It seems to me, from Amazon’s revised applications, that .coupon and its other gTLDs will be locked down tight enough that they could wind up being effectively closed generics after all.
When Amazon publishes its first eligibility requirements document with ICANN, I expect members of the Governmental Advisory Committee will be watching closely.

.hotel avoids auction with CPE win

A new gTLD applicant backed by the hotel industry has won a Community Priority Evaluation, meaning it gets to automatically win the .hotel contention set without going to auction.
If the decision stands, no fewer than six rival applicants for the string — including the likes of Donuts, Radix, Famous Four and Minds + Machines — are going to have to withdraw their applications.
It’s a bit of a shocker.
The CPE winner is HOTEL Top-Level-Domain, which scored 15 out of 16 available points in the CPE. The minimum required to vanquish all foes is 14 points.
The company will have spent a fair bit of cash fighting the CPE, but nothing compared to the millions of dollars an auction for .hotel would be likely to fetch.
Crucially, where HOTEL prevailed was on the “Nexus” criterion — demonstrating a link between the string and the community supporting the application — where four points are available.
In the first four CPE results to come through, back in March, each applicant scored a 0 on Nexus and none scored more than 11 points overall.
Dot Registry, which failed four CPEs (.inc, .llc, .corp and .llp) this week, also repeatedly flunked on this count.
HOTEL, however, scored a 3.
Rival applicants such as Donuts and M+M had argued that HOTEL’s stated community failed to take into account smaller hoteliers, such as bed and breakfast owners.
But the CPE panelist decided that the application did not “substantially overreach”:

The string nexus closely describes the community, without overreaching substantially beyond the community. The string identifies the name of the core community members (i.e. hotels and associations representing hotels). However, the community also includes some entities that are related to hotels, such as hotel marketing associations that represent hotels and hotel chains and which may not be automatically associated with the gTLD. However, these entities are considered to comprise only a small part of the community. Therefore, the string identifies the community, but does not over-reach substantially beyond the community, as the general public will generally associate the string with the community as defined by the applicant.

There’s no formal appeals mechanism for CPE, but rival applicants could try their luck with more general ICANN procedures such as Requests for Reconsideration.
HOTEL Top-Level-Domain is a Luxembourg-based entity, founded in 2008 to apply for the gTLD, backed by about a dozen international hotelier associations, including the International Hotel and Restaurant Association.
The IHRA counts 50 major hotel chain brands among its members and claims to be officially recognized by the UN for its lobbying work on behalf of the hospitality industry.
HOTEL intends to keep the .hotel gTLD restricted “initially” to only hotels as defined in the international standard ISO 18513.
Registrants will be verified against hotel industry databases. This will happen post-registration, but before the domain name can be activated in the DNS.
In other words, unless you’re a member of the hotel industry, you won’t be getting to use a .hotel domain name. Domainers are apparently not wanted.
All .hotel names will also be checked a year from registration to ensure that they have a web site displaying relevant content. Redirection to other TLDs may be allowed.
I was so convinced that the CPE was designed in such a way that it would be failed by all the applicants which had applied for it, I bet $50 (to go to an applicant-nominated charity) that none would.
If HOTEL wants to let me know which charity they want the $50 to go to, I’ll get it donated forthwith. I’m just glad I didn’t offer to eat my underwear.

Uniform Rapid Suspension comes to .us

Neustar is to impose the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy on the .us ccTLD.
This means trademark owners are going to get a faster, cheaper way to get infringing .us domains taken down.
From July 1, all existing and new .us names will be subject to the policy.
Neustar’s calling it the usRS or .us Rapid Suspension service, but a blog post from the company confirms that it’s basically URS with a different name.
It will be administered by the National Arbitration Forum and cost mark owners from $375 per complaint, just like URS.
Neustar becomes the second ccTLD operator to support URS after PW Registry’s .pw, which implemented it from launch.
URS and usRS only permit domains to be suspended, not transferred to the mark owner, so there’s less chance of it being abused to reverse-hijack domains.
The burden of proof is also higher than UDRP — “clear and convincing evidence”.

Three more dot-brands dumped

Two companies have yanked three bids for dot-brand new gTLDs this week.
The German financial advisor Allfinanz Deutsche Vermögensberatung withdrew its applications for .allfinanzberatung and .allfinanzberater, which mean Allfinanz “advice” and “advisers”.
As well as being a bit of a mouthful, they both appear to be unnecessary given that the company also applied for .allfinanz by itself. That application has passed evaluation and is still active.
Meanwhile, in Finland, one of the world’s biggest elevator/escalator manufacturers, KONE, has withdrawn its equally unfathomable application for .kone.
Roughly 55 dot-brand applications have been withdrawn to date. Hundreds remain.

M+M profits by losing new gTLD auctions

Minds + Machines managed to make a profit in 2013, after years of losses, due to its participation in private new gTLD auctions, some of which it “lost”.
The company today reported operating profit of £776,000 for the year to December 31, compared to a £3.07 million loss in 2012, on revenue of £4.12 million. Profit after tax was £729,000.
“Profit was primarily a result from participating three private auctions,” CEO Antony Van Couvering said in a statement.
Chairman Fred Krueger added:

As we expected, private auctions have become the key method of settling contention between applications and we have benefited from this development, as it has enabled our cash to work on a leveraged basis: the domains we have lost in private auction (for example .property and .website) have helped finance new TLDs we have acquired such as .wedding and .garden.

Minds + Machines (then Top Level Domain Holdings) said last October that it had raised £2.97 million by losing the auctions for .lawyer and .website.
Excluding the auctions, it looks like the company made just £36,000 in revenue, all of which came from its registry back-end business.

Donuts wins .gifts, .sarl and .restaurant

Donuts has won the contention sets for three new gTLDs, at least two of which seem to have come as the result of an Applicant Auction auction.
It beat mySARL to .sarl, Lucy Ventures to .gifts and Uniregistry, Minds + Machines and Famous Four to .restaurant. All of these rival bidders have withdrawn their applications now.
.sarl is a company designator in some French-speaking countries, including France.
.restaurant is interesting because it will be competing against .rest. While I prefer .restaurant, .rest’s backers believe it has broader appeal in non-English-speaking nations.
.gifts will be competing against Uniregistry’s .gift, which currently has 5,781 registrations.
Since I was told that Applicant Auction had settled 10 contested gTLDs almost two weeks ago, 11 contention sets have been resolved by withdrawals.
I’m guessing one of these fights was settled by other means. Donuts has been known to make private deals on occasion.

.uk launches with Stephen Fry as anchor tenant

Nominet has launched its controversial .uk service, enabling Brits and others to register directly at the second level for the first time.
It did so with an endorsement from quintessential uber-Brit, gadget nut, Apple slave and national treasure Stephen Fry and a marketing splash including a .uk domain apparently visible from 35,000 feet up.
This sign has been placed in one of the main flight paths into Heathrow. Readers flying in to London for ICANN 50 later this month might want to ask for a window seat.

Actor/author/comedian Fry was the first to be given a .uk today. He’s switched from stephenfry.com to stephenfry.uk as a result — the .com is already redirecting to the .uk.
He said in a blog post:

It’s only three harmless key-presses, you may think. A year or so back I wrote that it seemed to me annoying and lax of the British internet authority (if such a body ever existed, which it didn’t and doesn’t) when domain names were being handed that they were so inattentive and their eyes so off the ball. How come Germany could have .de, France .fr, South Africa .za, Italy .it etc etc etc? And we poor British had to have the extra exhaustion of typing .co.uk. Three whole keystrokes. It doesn’t stack up to much when compared to other howling injustices in the world. The length of time poor students and tourists have to queue to get an Abercrombie and Fitch polo shirt for example, but nonetheless it has been a nuisance these twenty years or so.

His involvement has helped the news hit many of the major daily newspapers in the UK today.
This is how to launch a TLD.
Fry’s friend Prince Charles was given princeofwales.uk last December, among 69 domains previously under .gov.uk that the government requested receive special treatment.
While new .uk addresses are available to register now, you won’t be able to immediately register one that matches a .co.uk unless you’re the owner of that .co.uk.
All .co.uk registrants have been given five years to decide whether they want the .uk equivalent, which carries a £2.50-a-year fee ($4.20), assuming a multi-year registration.
That’s the same as a .co.uk. Assuming .uk gets good uptake and that most registrants will keep their .co.uk names for the foreseeable future, Nominet’s accounts could be in for a significant boost.
Owners of .org.uk or .me.uk names only get the free reservation if the matching .co.uk is not already registered. Otherwise, they have to wait five years like everyone else.

.xyz is now the biggest new gTLD (kinda)

The controversial new gTLD .xyz is now officially the biggest, with 67,504 domains under management.
That’s according to today’s zone files, which see former number ones .club at 65,630 and .guru at 60,480.
Due to what appears to be an ICANN screw-up, there were no zone files available for any new gTLDs via the Centralized Zone Data Service yesterday, so I can’t tell you what the daily growth numbers are.
But .xyz had 36,335 names in its zone on Wednesday. It’s grown by 85% in two days.
That’s a shocking, unprecedented growth spurt.
The question is, of course, how many of these registrations are legit?
.xyz has come under a great deal of fire from domainers the last few days, after it emerged that the majority of its growth in the first days of general availability was questionable.
Network Solutions, it transpired, had seriously inflated .xyz’s numbers by registering .xyz names matching existing .coms on behalf of its customers without their permission and for no charge.
NetSol seems to have paid .xyz a few hundred thousand dollars for domain names its customers have not requested.
Data from today’s .xyz zone file is likely to reinforce the perception that most of .xyz’s apparent popularity is bogus.
I see that 56,019 domain names in .xyz today — 82% of the gTLD’s total — are using register.com name servers.
Those name servers belong to Web.com, NetSol’s parent company.
There were 27,000 such names on Wednesday. While .xyz as a whole has grown by about 31,000 names in two days, NetSol’s .xyz share has grown by about 29,000 names.
Nobody believes that NetSol, with its $40 retail price for .xyz (with a wholesale price I peg at around $6 to $7), could have obtained this market share with actual, paid-for sales.
I believe that the large majority of NetSol’s roughly 56,000 .xyz names are freebies, not reflective of buyer demand.
Many domainers are incandescent about this.
They look to registration numbers as a measurement of demand, which could be a predictor of the resale market for a TLD, so they’re upset at anything that looks like a manipulation of that number.
Daniel Negari, the charismatic CEO of .xyz, has borne the brunt of this criticism, despite the fact that there’s no evidence out there yet that .xyz supported or had prior knowledge NetSol’s mass giveaway.
Negari has so far refused to comment on the situation (he hasn’t responded to several inquiries from yours truly), which has only served to reinforce the suspicion that the registry was somehow complicit in NetSol’s promotion and used the registrar to artificially inflate its numbers.
I have no evidence one way or the other.
NetSol refused to even confirm the existence of the promotion when DI inquired earlier this week.