Vienna is the first city with its own TLD

The world’s first city gTLD, .wien, went live on the internet this morning.
It’s the TLD for what the English-speaking world calls Vienna, the Austrian capital.
While its nic.wien starter page doesn’t seem to be resolving yet, .wien itself is in the DNS root zone file.
punkt.wien, the new registry, said in its application that .wien names will be restricted to anyone who “can demonstrate that they have an economic, cultural, historical, social or any other connection” to Vienna.
The same test will apply to the use of .wien names — the registry plans to review the content of sites under the gTLD from time to time to ensure compliance.
The policy appears to be modeled somewhat on the .cat geo-gTLD.
According to the .wien application, about a quarter of the Austrian population lives in its environs, giving the gTLD a market of about 1.7 million people.
The registry is planning to launch properly in March, according to its web site.
While it’s the first city gTLD to go live, it isn’t the first geo to hit the root in this round — that honor belongs to .ruhr, which represents a German state.
(Note: Laos’ ccTLD, .la, is often marketed as a city TLD for Los Angeles, but it’s not quite the same thing.)

.email and two other new gTLDs go live

Three more new gTLDs were delegated this afternoon, including the potentially interesting .email.
The other two were TLD Registry’s .在线 (Chinese for ‘.online’) and United TLD/Rightside’s .immobilien (German for ‘.realestate’).
The reason I think .email could be interesting is that it’s very close to “.mail”, which has been highlighted in several analyses as a potentially dangerous due to the risk of name collisions.
It’s also, I think, one of the highlights of Donuts’ portfolio, despite the fact that the company was the only applicant.
.immobilien is the third delegated gTLD for United TLD. It’s going to be competing against the arguably more attractive .immo — a well-known abbreviation — which is currently contested by four applicants.
For TLD Registry, .在线 is the first delegation. It’s planning to take both .在线 and its companion .中文网 (“Chinese website”) to Sunrise on January 17, so we might expect another delegation soon.

These are the first four new gTLD domain names

Two luxury goods companies have the honor of being the first to register domain names in a new gTLD.
Today, the first four domain names registered to actual registrants popped up in the zone file for dotShabaka Registry’s Arabic “.web” — شبكة.
شبكة. exited its mandatory Sunrise period on Sunday; the four new names appear to be the first ones to get name servers after their Sunrise applications were approved.
The two registrants, according to Whois records, are Richemont International and Rolex.
Richemont is itself a new gTLD applicant. The company has taken a strong interest in the program, with head of digital IP Richard Graham even moderating a new gTLDs conference in March.
The four names (with my best guesses at a translation) are:

• لانسيل.شبكة — seems to mean “Lancel”, Richemont’s brand of expensive leather bags.
• مونتبلان.شبكة — “Montblanc”, Richemont’s brand for selling watches, pens, cufflinks and such.
• بياجيه.شبكة — “Piaget”, another Richemont brand of watches and jewelry.
• رولكس.شبكة — seems to be the translation or transliteration of “Rolex”.

None appear to be resolving on the web yet, not even to placeholder pages, at least from where I’m sitting.
Because they’re Sunrise names, it’s possible that all four are defensive registrations that may never lead anywhere meaningful.
Richemont used Com Laude as its registrar while Rolex used Key-Systems.
The Sunrise was limited to Arabic-script trademarks.
dotShabaka said yesterday that it had “very few” Sunrise applications. Now we know that number was at least four.

First new gTLD Sunrise ends with “very few” registrations

The first new gTLD Sunrise period was not a success, according to dotShabaka Registry.
The 60-day Sunrise for شبكة. (.web in Arabic) ended yesterday with “very few” registrations, the company told us today, due largely to poor promotion of the Trademark Clearinhouse in Arabic-speaking regions.
The gTLD is restricted to Arabic strings, and therefore Sunrise was restricted to Arabic trademarks.
dotShabaka said in a statement:

We always knew – with the convoluted process for registration and lack of information out to the MENA [Middle-East/ North Africa] region on the Trademark Clearinghouse – that this was going to be a quiet time for us. We have seen very few applications through the Sunrise period.
We know that the managers of the TMCH and ICANN are working hard to promote the TMCH. However, as a pioneer we have unfortunately not enjoyed the fruits of this labour. At the same time it should be noted that we have been buoyed by the level of interest from trademark holders and businesses in the region and expect this interest to translate into registrations once we move into Landrush and are free of the TMCH sunrise eligibility requirements.

The company did not provide exact numbers, but my guess is that we might be looking at single figures here.
According to today’s شبكة. zone file, there are no active third-party domains in the شبكة. namespace. Zero. None. The only live sites are “nic.” and its Arabic equivalent, which both belong to the registry.
That may quickly change, of course, as registrations don’t always immediately translate into zone file entries.

.ninja springs to life as a squirrel as 19 new gTLDs get delegated

ICANN may be taking Christmas week off, but Verisign apparently isn’t — another 19 new gTLDs were delegated to the DNS root system last night.
Most belong to Donuts: .training, .builders, .coffee, .codes, .education, .florist, .farm, .glass, .house, .holiday, .international, .institute, .solar, .repair and .solutions.
United TLD, the Demand Media/Rightside business that is also providing Donuts’ back-end, had .ninja and .kaufen (German for “buy”) delegated.
PeopleBrowsr’s .ceo also went live, as did I-REGISTRY’s .onl (for “online”).
Donuts is already redirecting its latest batch of nic.[tld] domains to donuts.co.
The web site at nic.ninja currently shows this image as part of a placeholder page:

UPDATE: It occurs to me that this might actually be a prairie dog or something, rather than a squirrel.

Uniregistry plans “dot-spanning” Sunrise periods and anti-gaming protection

Uniregistry is to offer a second Sunrise period in its new gTLDs, going over and above what is required by ICANN, aimed at companies with trademarks that “span the dot”.
Say you run a tattoo parlor and have a trademark on “Joe’s Tattoo”. The ICANN-mandated Sunrise would only allow you to register joestattoo.tattoo, but Uniregistry will allow you to buy joes.tattoo as well.
It would also allow “plurals and conjugations”, so a company with a trademark on “Joe’s Tattoos” would presumably also be eligible for joes.tattoo, even though they’re not an exact match.
This Sunrise B plan appears to apply to all of Uniregistry’s forthcoming gTLDs and was approved by ICANN recently (pdf).
The additional service would be invitation-only, restricted to companies that have participated in the regular Sunrise period, which Uniregistry is calling Sunrise A.
For Sunrise A, Uniregistry plans to allow mark owners to register regular resolving domain names or purchase “blocking” registrations, where the domain resolves to a non-monetized Uniregistry placeholder.
Sunrise B participants would not be able to purchase blocking registrations; for “dot-spanning” trademarks the name must resolve.
Uniregistry also plans to implement an “anti-hijack” measure to help prevent — or at least add friction to — .eu-style gaming by domain speculators during its launch periods.
If you participate in either Sunrise period, you won’t be able to later transfer your name to a third party without providing the registry with proof that you’ve also transferred the corresponding trademark registration.

Extortion.sucks — Vox Pop CEO defends “under-priced” $25,000 sunrise fee

Vox Populi Registry, the .sucks new gTLD applicant backed by Momentous Corp, is to charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in its Sunrise period, should it win the TLD.
Not only that, but it’s become the first new gTLD applicant that I’m aware of to start taking pre-registration fees from trademark owners while it’s still in a contention set with other applicants.
At first glance, it looks like plain old trademark-owner extortion, taken to an extreme we’ve never seen before.
But after 45 minutes talking to Vox Pop CEO John Berard this evening, I’m convinced that it’s worse than that.
The company is setting itself up as the IP lobby’s poster child for everything that is wrong with the new gTLD program.
If Vox Pop wins the .sucks contention set — it’s competing against Donuts and Top Level Spectrum — it plans to charge trademark owners $25,000 to participate in Sunrise and $25,000 a year thereafter.
Registrations during general availability, whether they match a trademark or not, will cost $300 a year.
During the pre-registration period, the Sunrise fee is $2,500 and the “Priority Reservation” fee is $250.
The Sunrise fee is, I believe, higher than any sunrise fee in any TLD ever to launch.
But Berard said that he believes Vox Pop’s .sucks proposition is, if anything, “under-priced”.
“Most companies spend far more than $25,000 a month on a public relations agency, most companies spend more than $25,000 a month on a Google ad campaign,” he said.
“Companies spend millions of dollars a year on customer service. We view .sucks as an element of customer service on the part of companies,” he said.
Berard, a 40-year veteran of the public relations business, said that he believes .sucks represents an opportunity for brands to engage with their customers, gaining valuable insight that could help them improve product development or customer service.
“The last thing I view .sucks as is a domain name. That’s the last value proposition for .sucks,” he said. “The primary value proposition is as a key and innovative part of customer service, retention and loyalty.”
It’s about giving companies “the ability to bring internet criticism and commentary out of the shadows and into the light” and “an opportunity to actually have a legitimate ability to correct misconceptions and engage, in much the way they’re doing now with Facebook”, he said.
It’s all about helping companies create a dialogue, in other words.
But Berard said that Vox Pop does not intend to launch any value-added services on .sucks domains.
While a domain name may be the “last value proposition” of .sucks, it is also the only thing that Vox Pop is actually planning to sell.
Asked to justify the $25,000 Sunrise fee, at first Berard pointed to policies that he said will ensure a transparent space for conversation.
“A company might not have to register its brand in .sucks, because if someone else does the policies and practices that we hope to deploy give that company a transparent opportunity to participate,” Berard said. “There’s no chasing unknown people down dark alleys for unfounded criticism. It will all be done in the light of day.”
“We have built-in policies that prevent sites from being parked pages,” he said. “The site must be put to that use — of customer service — whether you are the company that owns [the brand] or a customer that wants to complain about it.”
There was some confusion during our conversation about what the policies are going to be.
At first it sounded like companies would be obliged to run criticism/conversation sites targeting their own brands or risk losing their domains, but Berard later called to clarify that while pages cannot be parked under the policy, they can be left inactive.
It will be possible, in other words, for a company to register its brand.sucks and leave the associated site dark.
The registry would also have an “authenticated Whois database”, he said, though it would allow registrants to use privacy services.
There would also be prohibitions on cyber-bullying and porn in .sucks, if Vox Pop wins it. It has committed to these policies in its Public Interest Commitments (pdf)
But the company does not appear to be doing anything that ICM Registry did not already do when it launched .xxx a couple of years ago, when it comes to making brand owners’ lives easier.
In fact, it’s planning to do a lot less, while being literally a hundred times more expensive.
By contrast, if Donuts wins .sucks, brand owners will be able to defensively block their marks using the Domain Protected Marks List for $3,000 over five years, which would cover all of Donuts 200-300 new gTLDs.
There doesn’t appear to be any good reason Vox Pop is charging prices well above the market rate, in my view, other than the fact that the company reckons it can get away with it.
In what may well be a deliberate move to put pressure on trademark owners, Vox Pop is also the first registry I’ve encountered to say it will do a 30-day, as opposed to a 60-day, Sunrise period.
Under ICANN rules, registries have to give at least 30 days warning before a 30-day Sunrise starts, but once it’s underway they are allowed to allocate domains on a first-come-first-served basis.
All of the 30-odd registries currently in Sunrise have opted for the traditional 60-day option instead, where no domains are allocated until the end of the period.
There’s also the question of accepting Sunrise pre-registrations before Vox Pop even knows whether it will get to run .sucks.
There are two other applicants and Berard said that he reckons the contention set is likely to go to an ICANN last-resort auction.
Judging by ICANN’s preliminary timetable, the .sucks auction wouldn’t happen until roughly September next year, by my reckoning.
Anyone who pre-registers today will have to wait a year before they can use (or not) their domain, if they even get to register it at all.
Any money that is taken during the pre-reg period will be refunded if Vox Pop fails to launch.
In the meantime, it will be sitting in Momentous’ bank account where the company, presumably, will be able to use it to try to win the .sucks auction.
Trademark owners, in my view, should vote with their wallets and stay the hell away from Vox Pop’s pre-registration service.
I’m not usually in the business of endorsing one new gTLD applicant over another, but I think Vox Pop’s Sunrise pricing is going to make the whole new gTLD program — and probably also ICANN and the domain name industry itself — look bad.
It’s a horrible reminder of a time when domain name companies were often little better than spammers, operating at the margins and beyond of acceptable conduct, and it makes me sad.
The new gTLD program is about increasing choice and competition in the TLD space, it’s not supposed to be about applicants bilking trademark owners for whatever they think they can get away with.

Donuts officially richer than God after winning three new gTLD auctions

Donuts has a clear path to being awarded the .church, .life and .loans new gTLDs, following a private auction managed by Innovative Auctions this week.
Life Covenant Church and CompassRose.life have already withdrawn their applications for .church and .life respectively, and others are expected to follow soon.
Life Covenant Church, which does business at LifeChurch.tv, was described as the largest multi-site church in the US last year, with 46,000 regular attendees across 15 locations.
A lucrative business, no doubt. But apparently not lucrative enough to beat Donuts.
In the three-way contention set for .life, Donuts beat CompassRose.life, which seems to be affiliated with a Canadian housing developer and Xiamen 35.com Technology.
In .loans, which still faces Governmental Advisory Committee advice, Donuts beat fellow portfolio applicant Radix.
The losing applicants will all receive pay-offs from Donuts as a result of losing the auctions.
Innovative has now helped resolve 21 contention sets.

.buzz and .support go live

DotStrategy has become the newest registry with a gTLD live in the DNS root.
Its .buzz, which is aimed at “groups related to blogging, communications, journalism, advertising, and marketing and development” was delegated last night.
The first second-level name, nic.buzz, is currently resolving to a parking page — seemingly managed by one of the usual parking companies — which, let’s face it, looks a bit crap even as a temporary measure.
That said, I really like .buzz as a concept, if for no other reason than it’s a rare example of a gTLD string that seems to have been selected by a human rather than an algorithm.
Speaking of which, Donuts also had its 42nd gTLD, .support, delegated last night.
There are now 54 new gTLDs live in the DNS root.

Seven registrars sign up to M+M pre-reg platform

Top Level Domain Holdings has signed up 12 registrars to sell its forthcoming gTLDs, seven of which are to also use its recently announced OPEN pre-registration platform.
While TLDH is operating vertically integrated registrar/registrar business, Minds + Machines it’s also built a pre-registration service that it wants other, higher-profile registrars to access.
OPEN, for Online Priority Enhanced Names, allows pre-registrations to be purchased on a more-or-less buy-it-now basis. Names blocked or claimed in Sunrise will be refunded.
The company also said in a market update today that 12 registrars have signed Registry-Registrar Agreements, and that it expects it first new gTLDs to launch in the first quarter 2014.