Straat-backed bidder beats Donuts and Afilias to .health

DotHealth has won the four-way contention set for the controversial new gTLD .health.
Afilias and Donuts both withdrew their competing applications this week. Famous Four withdrew its application over a month ago.
DotHealth is backed by Straat Investments, the investment vehicle chaired by .CO Internet’s Juan Calle.
The new gTLD will run on a Neustar (which now owns .CO) back-end.
.health is likely to be restricted, or at least policed, to ensure fake pharmacies are scrubbed from the zone.
DotHealth is supported by, among other health groups, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) which often targets registries and registrars in its campaigns against bogus online pharmacies in the US.
The company plans to use LegitScript to monitor its namespace.
.health will compete against the unrestricted .healthcare, which has been delegated to Donuts.
All four applicants for .health faced adverse Governmental Advisory Committee advice and unsuccessful public interest objections from the Independent Objector.

Biggest dot-brand? .realtor to give away half a million domains

Up to 500,000 card-carrying members of North American real estate associations will be given a free one-year .realtor domains, according to the registry.
The National Association of Realtors said its members and members of the Canadian Real Estate Association will be able to claim their names at claim.realtor.
The offer will become active October 23.
As “realtor” is a registered trademark belonging in the US to the NAR, there’s a pretty good chance .realtor could very soon become the largest dot-brand by volume.
The organization says it has a million members. The CREA, which owns the Canadian trademark on the term, has 100,000 members and will have 10,000 free registrations to hand out.

After slamming the ccNSO, India joins it

India has become the newest member of ICANN’s country-code Supporting Organization, the ccNSO, just one month after the local registry slammed the group for not representing its interests.
The National Internet Exchange (NIXI), which runs .in, became the 152nd ccNSO member yesterday, according to a note on its website.
I haven’t reported on the first 151 ccTLDs to join, but this one’s interesting because NIXI’s mononymed CEO, Dr Govind, led a charge of criticism against the ccNSO for excluding non-members from the IANA transition review.
In July, Govind complained that a “significant section of the ccTLD Registry operator community do not share the objectives of the ccNSO membership are now excluded from the process.”
By joining the ccNSO, registries agree to follow the policies it creates for ccTLDs (though I understand they may opt out), which has led 103 ccTLDs to stay out of it completely.
Some ccTLDs are primarily concerned that the ccNSO does nothing to dilute or overturn RFC 1591, the 20-year-old standards document that states ccTLDs can only be redelegated with the consent of the incumbent.

New gTLD registries increasingly attacking .com

Is .com “silly” and “meaningless”?
That’s what some new gTLD registries would have you believe.
In separate blog posts over the last week, Donuts and ARI Registry Services have gone on the offensive, dismissing .com as an irrelevant relic of a bygone age.
ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis branded .com as “meaningless and unintuitive” in a post slamming the Board of Racing Victoria, an Australian horse-racing organization, for the purchase of racing.com for (he claimed) $500,000.
New gTLDs with more semantic relevance to horse racing or geographic regions will make this purchase look “silly” in future, he said.

Take for instance .racing which is set to launch soon. It would offer a more creative and relevant domain name such as horses.racing, victorian.racing or vichorses.racing.

He also said that most Australians are conditioned to visit .com.au (for which ARI provides the registry back-end), which will lead to traffic leakage from racing.com to racing.com.au.

The problem is that racing.com does not have an intrinsic connection with Victorian horse racing that would lend itself to intuitive navigation and recall.

Donuts had a similar message in a blog post last week.
Donuts vice president Mason Cole said on that company’s blog that .com is “diluted and meaningless” when compared to more vertically oriented TLDs such as Donuts’ .photography and .bike.

It adds nothing to an identity. Except perhaps to say, “I’m on the Internet somewhere.” .COM is “1999” — not “today,” and definitely not the future. New .COM registrations are extraordinarily long and much less meaningful when compared to a new registration in a new gTLD. And with its recent price decreases on new registrations (which apparently is necessary to match their low quality), .COM now means “low quality and cheap.”

It will be interesting to see whether this kind of messaging will be carried over from lightly trafficked corporate blogs into more mainstream new gTLD marketing by registries.
What do you think? Do Donuts and ARI have a point? Is .com meaningless? Will it fall out of fashion? Is going negative on legacy gTLDs a wise strategy for new gTLD companies?

Reported mass exodus from .com explained

Did Verisign suffer from a massive 2,600% increase in the number of deleted .com domain names this April?
Not quite, although the bizarre spike in deletes may have highlighted an area where the company was previously out of compliance with its ICANN Registry Agreements.
April’s .com registry report, filed with ICANN and published last week, shows 2.4 million domains were deleted, compared to just 108,000 in March and 90,000 in April 2013.

The spike looks surprising, and you may be tempted to think it is in some way related to the arrival of new gTLDs.
But look again. Could .com, a registry with over 116 million domains under management, really only see roughly 100,000 deletes every month? Clearly that number is far too low.
So what’s going on? I asked Verisign.
The company said that it has implemented “voluntary” changes to its reporting of deleted domains, based on the standard new gTLD Registry Agreement, which specifies what must be reported by new gTLD registries.
It said:

Prior to the April 2014 monthly reports, and per the ICANN gTLD registry reporting guidelines, Verisign reported on only deleted domains outside of any grace period.

There are five “grace periods” permitted by ICANN contracts: the Add Grace Period, Renew/Extend Grace Period, Auto-Renew Grace Period, Transfer Grace Period, and Redemption Grace Period.
The familiar Add Grace Period allows registrars to cancel registrations within a week of registration if the registrant made a typo, for example, and asked for a refund.
The Redemption Grace Period covers domains that have expired and do not resolve, but can still be restored for 30 days at the request of the registrant.
According to Verisign, before April, domains that were deleted outside of any of the five grace periods were reported as “deleted-domains-nograce”.
From April, the company is reporting domains only as “deleted-domains-nograce” if they delete outside of the Add Grace Period.
According to my reading of the .com contract, that’s what Verisign should have been doing all along.
The contract, which Verisign and ICANN signed in late 2012, defines “deleted-domains-nograce” only as “domains deleted outside the add grace period”. There’s no mention of other grace periods.
The same definition can be found in the 2006 contract.
It appears to me that Verisign may have been under-reporting its deletes for quite some time.
Verisign said in response that it does not believe it has a compliance issue. A spokesperson said: “[We] voluntarily updated our reporting of deleting domain names so that our reporting is aligned with ICANN’s reporting clarifications for the new gTLDs.”

Infosys withdraws dot-brand bids

Indian consulting giant Infosys has dropped its bids for two dot-brand new gTLDs.
It withdrew its applications for .infosys and .infy this week, leaving it with no remaining applications.
Both bids were straightforward dot-brands applications with no objections or contention. Both had passed Initial Evaluation and were just awaiting contract signing.
Infosys, which provides business and IT consulting services and outsourcing, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and had revenue of $8.4 billion in its last reported year.

Donuts wins .ltd gTLD contest

Donuts has emerged the victor of the contention set for .ltd, beating six other applicants for the new gTLD.
Dot Registry, NU DOT CO, Afilias and myLTD all withdrew their applications this week, evidently after a private auction.
LTD Registry and C.V. TLDcare withdrew their applications in April and May respectively.
The string is of course an abbreviation for “limited” as in “limited liability company”, used by privately held companies in many companies including the UK.
While bids for comparable TLDs such as .inc, .corp and .gmbh have received criticism from company regulators in the US and Germany, .ltd hasn’t raised as much of a ruckus.
Like all Donuts gTLDs, it looks like .ltd is set to be unrestricted.
I’m not a fan of corporate identifier TLDs. They always strike me as more prone to defensive registrations than other, more descriptive strings.

Verisign: 41% of new gTLD sites are parked

As much as 41% of domains registered in new gTLDs are parked with pay-per-click advertising, according to research carried out by Verisign.
That works out to over 540,000 domains, judging by the 1.3 million total I have on record from June 29, the day Verisign carried out the survey.
Domains classified as carrying “business” web sites — defined as “a website that shows commercial activity” — accounted for just 3% of the total, according to Verisign.
There are some big caveats, of course, not least of which is .xyz, which tends to skew any surveys based on “registered” names appearing in the zone file. Verisign noted:

XYZ.COM LLC (.xyz) has a high concentration of PPC websites as a result of a campaign that reportedly automatically registered XYZ domains to domain registrants in other TLDs unless they opted out of receiving the free domain name. After registration, these free names forward to a PPC site unless reconfigured by the end user registrant.

On June 29, .xyz had 225,159 domains in its zone file. I estimate somewhat over 200,000 of those names were most likely freebies and most likely parked.
The practice of registry parking, carried out most aggressively by Uniregistry and its affiliate North Sound, also threw off Verisign’s numbers.
Whereas most new gTLD registries reserve their premium names without adding them to the zone files, Uniregistry registers them via North Sound to park and promote them.
Tens of thousands of names have been registered in this way.
Coupled with the .xyz effect, this leads me to conclude that the number of domains registered by real registrants and parked with PPC is probably close to half of Verisign’s number.
That’s still one out of every five domains in new gTLDs, however.
Judging by a chart on Verisign’s blog, .photography appears to have the highest percentage of “business” use among the top 10 new gTLDs so far.
Verisign also found that 10% of the names it scanned redirect to a different domain. It classified these as redirects, rather than according to the content of their final destination.

Demand Media spins off Rightside

Demand Media has completed the spin-off of its domain name business, Rightside.
Shares in the new company, which will be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, went to existing Demand Media shareholders.
Trading under the ticker symbol NAME, Rightside stock started off at $16.77 yesterday morning and is currently trading at around $15.07.
Rightside comprises number two registrar eNom, retail registrar Name.com, new gTLD portfolio registry United TLD (which is branded Rightside), and its share of auction house NameJet.
It is headed by CEO Taryn Naidu and chairman David Panos.
The company also today named its initial board of directors.

Google beats Microsoft to .docs

Google and Microsoft seem to have settled their contention set for the .docs new gTLD, with Google emerging the victor.
Microsoft withdrew its application for .docs this week.
It’s not clear how the deal was made, but Google is known to have participated in private auctions for other strings.
Google Docs is of course Google’s office document service.
Microsoft also has a Docs service, a collaboration with Facebook at Docs.com, but it seems to have been in beta since April 2010 and, by the looks of the site, isn’t what you’d call a success.