Three new gTLDs pass Extended Evaluation

ICANN still hasn’t polished off its backlog of new gTLD applications in Initial Evaluation, but three more passed Extended Evaluation this week.
Guangzhou YU Wei Information Technology passed EE on .佛山 (for Foshan, a Chinese city), Taipei City Government passed on its application for .taipei and MIH PayU passed for .payu.
The two Chinese-related applications had been held up by governmental approval. The application for .payu had failed IE due to its lack of financial statements.
Two applications remain in Initial Evaluation, 24 are in Extended Evaluation.

TLDH and others sign first gTLD registry contracts

Top Level Domain Holdings and a few other new gTLD registries signed their first Registry Agreements with ICANN this week.
Its six new RAs were among 15 registry contracts ICANN signed this week. TLDH and its subsidiaries signed for: .horse, .cooking, .nrw (as Minds + Machine GmbH), .casa, .fishing and .budapest.
I’d heard some concerns at ICANN 48 this week about TLDH’s lack of signed contracts to date, but the concerns seem to have been misplaced.
Monolith Registry, partly owned by Afilias, has also signed RAs for .voto and .vote, the latter of which was won at auction.
Small Chinese portfolio applicant Zodiac Holdings got its second and third gTLD contracts: .商城 (“.mall”) and .八卦 (“.gossip”).
German registry I-Registry got .rich and Russian registry The Foundation for Network Initiatives got .дети (“.kids/children”).
Previously contracted parties Donuts and Uniregistry added .tools and .expert (Donuts) and .christmas (Uniregistry) to their portfolios on Friday.
The total number of new gTLDs with RAs is now about 130.

Nominet approves direct second-level .uk domains

Get ready for a backlash — Nominet has committed to start offering second-level domain names under .uk for the first time.
Starting next year, you’ll be able to register example.uk, rather than only third-level names such as example.co.uk and example.org.uk.
The announcement today comes after at least two consultation periods over the last year or so, which provoked a strong negative reaction from many in the .uk domain investor community.
Concerns were raised that allowing .uk would allow names to fall into the hands of the wrong people, and that the cost to UK business would be prohibitively high.
“We all want shorter, snappier names,” CEO Lesley Cowley said. “But we appreciate that not everyone shares that view so as a board we had to very carefully consider what’s in the best interest of the public.”
Nominet has introduced a few new ideas that seem to be designed to address these criticisms.
First, every owner of a .co.uk domain name will be given a free five-year reservation on the matching .uk SLD. If you own example.co.uk, you’ll have five years to decide whether to pay for the .uk version.
Cowley told DI that Nominet’s market research suggested that UK businesses repaint their trucks and get new stationery every five years anyway, so the pressure to rebrand around a new domain would be alleviated.
“There was some concern that businesses would feel forced to register a .uk,” she said. “We would not want that to be the case. We want people to consider in their own time whether they want to move.”
In cases where matching .co.uk and .org.uk (or .me.uk etc) domains are owned by different people, the .co.uk gets the free reservation and the .org.uk is locked out for five years.
Where there’s a .org.uk with no matching .co.uk, the .org.uk registrant gets the free reservation, Cowley said.
Domains registered prior to October 28 2013 — when the Nominet board voted on the proposal — will qualify for the free reservation, as will domains registered after that date when there are no colliding third-level domains.
The price for a .uk SLD is to be set at £3.50 for a one-year reg and £2.50 for one year of a multi-year registration. That’s the same as .uk wholesale prices today.
Why do it at all?
While Cowley admitted that .uk registration growth has been slowing recently, something being experienced by many ccTLDs and gTLDs, she said the main reason for the SLD change was demand.
Nominet has done some market research showing only 2% of UK businesses do not want the SLD option in .uk, compared to 72% that do, according to the company.
“People have been saying for some years that it would be good to drop the ‘co’ in .uk,” said Cowley. “It’s clunky. The French and Germans manage to have direct in .fr and .de, so why can’t we do that as well?”

GACmail? Belgium denies .spa gTLD shakedown

The Belgian government has denied claims that the city of Spa tried to shake down new gTLD applicants for money in exchange for not objecting to their .spa applications.
The Belgian Governmental Advisory Committee representative said this afternoon that Belgium was “extremely unhappy” that the “disrespectful allusions” got an airing during a meeting with the ICANN board.
He was responding directly to a question asked during a Sunday session by ICANN director Chris Disspain, who, to be fair, didn’t name either the government or the gTLD. He had said:

I understand there is at least one application, possibly more, where a government or part a government is negotiating with the applicant in respect to receive a financial benefit from the applicant. I’m concerned about that and I wondered if the GAC had a view as to whether such matters were appropriate.

While nobody would talk on the record, asking around the ICANN 48 meeting here in Buenos Aires it became clear that Disspain was referring to Belgium and .spa.
It was not clear whether he was referring to Donuts or to Asia Spa and Wellness Promotion Council, which have both applied for the string.
The string “spa” was not protected by ICANN’s rules on geographic names, but the GAC in April advised ICANN not to approve the applications until governments had more time to reach a decision.
My inference from Disspain’s question was that Belgium was planning to press for a GAC objection to .spa unless its city got paid, which could be perceived as an abuse of power.
Nobody from the GAC answered the question on Sunday, but Belgium today denied that anything inappropriate was going on, saying Disspain’s assertion was “factually incorrect”.
There is a contract between Spa and an applicant, he confirmed, but he said that “no money will flow to the city of Spa”.
“A very small part of the profits of the registry will go to the community served by .spa,” he said.
This side-deal does not appear to be a public document, but the Belgian rep said that it has been circulated to GAC members for transparency purposes.
There are several applicants whose strings appeared on ICANN’s protected geo names list that have been required to get letters of non-objection from various countries.
Tata Group, for example, needed permission from Morocco for .tata, while TUI had to go to Burkina Faso for .tui. Both are the names of provinces in those countries.
It’s not publicly known how these letters of non-objection were obtained, and whether any financial benefit accrued to the government as a result.

Seven more Donuts gTLDs delegated

Donuts had seven new gTLDs added to the DNS root zone today.
The strings are: .diamonds, .tips, .photography, .directory, .kitchen, .enterprises and .today.
The nic.tld domains in each are already resolving, redirecting users to Donuts’ official site at donuts.co.
There are now 31 live new gTLDs, 26 of which belong to Donuts subsidiaries.

TLDH reveals new gTLD launch strategy

Top Level Domain Holdings will announce its go-to-market strategy — including .tv-style premium names pricing and its launch as a registrar — at an event at ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires this evening.
The company, which is involved in 60 new gTLD applications as applicant and 75 as a back-end provider, is also revealing a novel pre-registration clearinghouse that will be open to almost all applicants.
First off, it’s launching Minds + Machines Registrar, an affiliated registrar through which it will sell domain names in its own and third-party TLDs.
Instead of a regular name suggestion tool, it’s got a browsable directory of available names, something that I don’t recall seeing at a registrar before.
Searching “murphy.casa”, I was offered lots of other available domains in the “English Surnames” category, for example.
Until TLDH actually has some live gTLDs, the site will be used to take paid-for pre-registrations, or “Priority Reservations” using a new service that TLDH is calling the Online Priority Enhanced Names database, which painfully forces the acronym “OPEN”.
Pre-registrations in .casa, .horse and .cooking will cost €29.95 ($40), the same as the expected regular annual reg fee. It’s first-come first-served — no auctions — and the fee covers the first year of registration.
If the name they pay for is claimed by a trademark holder during the mandatory Sunrise period, or is on the gTLD’s collisions block-list, registrants get a full refund, TLDH CEO Antony Van Couvering said.
He added that any applicant for a new gTLD that is uncontested and has an open registration policy will be able to plug their gTLDs into the OPEN system.
PeopleBrowsr is already on the system with its uncontested .ceo and .best gTLDs, priced at $99.95.
No other registrars are signed up yet but Van Couvering reckons it might be attractive to registrars that have already taken large amounts of no-fee expressions of interest.
TLDH plans to charge registries and registrars a €1 processing fee (each, so TLDH gets €2) for each pre-registration that is sold through the system.
For “premium” names, the company has decided to adopt the old .tv model of charging high annual fees instead of a high initial fee followed by the standard renewal rate.
Van Couvering said a domain that might have been priced at $100,000 to buy outright might instead be sold for $10,000 a year.
“Because we want to encourage usage, we don’t want to charge a huge upfront fee,” he said. “We’d really like to make premium names available to people who will actually use them.”
Looking at the aforementioned English Surnames category on the new M+M site, I see that jackson.casa will cost somebody €5,179.95 a year, whereas nicholson.casa will cost the basic €29.95.
Two other new gTLDs, .menu and .build, have already revealed variable pricing strategies, albeit slightly different.

.wow has more collisions than any other new gTLD

Amazon, Google or Demand Media are going to have to block over 200,000 strings in .wow, which all three have applied for, due to the risk of name collisions.
That’s tens of thousands of names greater than any other applied-for gTLD string.
Here’s the top 20 gTLDs, ranked by the number of collisions:
[table id=21 /]
The average new gTLD string has 7,346 potential collisions, according to our preliminary analysis of the lists ICANN published for 1,318 strings this morning.
As blogged earlier, 9.8 million unique domain names are to be blocked in total.
Seventeen gTLDs seem to have been provided with empty lists, so will not have to block any domains in order to proceed to delegation with ICANN.

ICANN blocks almost 10 million new gTLD domains

ICANN has asked new gTLD registry operators to block a total of 9.8 million domain names, due to the perceived risk of damage from name collisions.
To put it another way, Verisign has managed to take close to 10 million domain names off the market.
ICANN today delivered second-level domain block-lists for 1,327 new gTLDs. Combined, the number of unique blocked domains is just over 9.8 million, according to DI’s preliminary analysis.
Some of the lists relate to gTLDs that will not be approved because they’re in mutually exclusive contention sets with other strings (for example, .unicorn and .unicom).
Twenty-five unfortunate gTLD applicants did not receive lists, because ICANN said they do not qualify for the block-list-based “Alternate Path to Delegation”.
We’re currently crunching the numbers and will have more information later today, with a bit of luck.

Only two new gTLD bids in Initial Evaluation

Initial Evaluation on the first round of new gTLD applications is almost done, with only two bids now remaining in that stage of the program.
ICANN last night published the delayed IE results for PricewaterhouseCooper’s .pwc and the Better Business Bureau’s .bbb, both of which were passes.
The only two applications remaining in IE are Kosher Marketing Assets’ .kosher and Google’s .search.
The latter is believed to be hung up on technical changes it has made to its bid, to remove the plan to make .search a “dotless” gTLD, which ICANN has banned on stability grounds.
Eight applications are currently in Extended Evaluation, having failed to achieve passing scores during IE.

Why Hansen quit .nyc for .co.com

Ken Hansen has surprised many by resigning from Neustar, where he was general manager of the slam-dunk .nyc new gTLD initiative, to become CEO of .co.com, a new pseudo-TLD registry.
The announcement raises a couple of big questions.
First, why is .co.com being launched as a registry?
The name belongs to domain investor Paul Goldstone. He put it up for sale in March 2012, with broker DomainAdvisors speculating aloud that it would fetch a price in the millions.
We wondered at the time whether CentralNic, whose bread and butter back then (before its interests in new gTLDs became clear) was two-letter country-codes in .com, would swoop to buy it.
We also wondered whether .CO Internet would make an offer, in order to eliminate competition and reduce existing and potential confusion with its own ccTLD, .co.
If either company made an offer, it does not seem to have been accepted.
Goldstone is instead going to try to build a registry around the name, with Hansen as CEO and himself as president. DomainAdvisors founder Gregg McNair is chairman of the new venture.
Second, why on earth would Hansen, who has been leading business development for Neustar’s own .nyc — the forthcoming new gTLD for the city of New York — join an unproven .com subdomain provider?
He tells us that his confidence in .nyc’s prospects has not waned, but that he is one of the owners of the new company.
He said in an email:

Sometimes following the crowd is not the best thing to do in business. New gTLDs have always been about choice from my perspective. I still believe in new gTLDs in general, but there is still a VERY significant market for short recognizable domains ending in .com. We will meet that demand. Not to mention, we can move quickly without waiting on ICANN.

Gaining visibility for a subdomain product can be tricky at the best of times, but with hundred of new generic TLDs coming to market… Hansen, Goldstone and McNair really do have a challenge on their hands.
The new company intends to run sunrise, landrush and “premium” names phases for its launch, which is expected to kick off in the first quarter next year. No word yet on whether it will follow the CentralNic model and also voluntarily incorporate ICANN policies on UDRP, Whois and so forth.