dotShabaka Diary — Day 21, Post-delegation

The twenty-first installment of dotShabaka Registry’s journal, charting its progress towards becoming one of the first new gTLDs to go live, written by general manager Yasmin Omer.

Monday 28 October 2013
It’s been five days since we were delegated and I thought it would be timely to provide readers with an update of what’s happened following this monumental occasion.
Tumbleweeds! As far as the program is concerned, we haven’t progressed one iota.
We submitted all the information necessary for Sunrise to ICANN and we still wait. We want to begin immediately and are currently in a holding pattern.
We’ve been doing significant media outreach over the past week and the number one question we keep getting asked is: what’s next and when can I register my شبكة. domain?

Read previous and future diary entries here.

Six more gTLD contracts signed

ICANN signed six more new gTLD Registry Agreements on Friday, bringing the week’s total to eight.
Donuts added .cab, .computer and .support to its rapidly expanding portfolio of generics, while its partner United TLD (Demand Media) added .dance.
GMO Registry, which had teething troubles during Initial Evaluation before switching back-end providers, signed a contract for the Japanese geographic .nagoya.
Finally, Spanish clothing company Punto Fa, S.L., trading as MANGO, got the dot-brand .mango.
ICANN now has 72 new gTLD RAs, the first four of which have gone live.

Three new gTLDs makes it through evaluation

Three new gTLD applications passed either Initial or Extended Evaluation this week, according to ICANN’s latest updates.
MMA IARD, a French insurance company, passed IE for .mma, a dot-brand. It’s an uncontested application, so it seems unlikely that “mixed martial arts” will ever have its own exact-match gTLD.
Boston Consulting Group and I-REGISTRY passed Extended Evaluation on .bcg and .online respectively.
Both had failed IE first time around for failing to provide sufficient financial statements, and both seem to have rectified the problem in EE.
I-REGISTRY’s pass means all four remaining .online applicants are through evaluation and can begin to fight out the contention set among themselves.

ICANN signs contracts for .wang and .democrat

The new gTLD applicants behind .wang and .democract are the latest to sign Registry Agreements with ICANN.
Demand Media’s United TLD is behind .democrat, while .wang was applied for by small Chinese portfolio applicant Zodiac Holdings. Both were uncontested applications.
Both are to be open gTLDs.
For .democrat, Demand expects names to be registered by anyone who identifies themselves as a democrat. There were no objections, and to the best of my knowledge no explicit support, from “Democrat” parties
.wang is a weird one.
It’s the Latin-script transliteration of the Chinese character 网, which means “net”. Zodiac couldn’t apply for the Chinese because it’s a single character, which are not yet allowed under ICANN rules.
I understand that 网 is often used by Chinese speakers to mean “network” or “website”, but I don’t know how commonly the ASCII “wang” is used instead. Seems like a stretch.
It also of course is a common Chinese surname and a juvenile euphemism for “penis”.

TLDH raises $5 million from gTLD auctions

Top Level Domain Holdings made almost $5 million by losing auctions for the .lawyer and .website gTLDs this week, according to the company.
The London-listed company told the markets today that it has added £2.97 million ($4.81 million) to its coffers as a result of the auctions, in which Radix won .website and Donuts won .lawyer.
The number is net of the 4% cut taken by Innovative, which conducted the auctions, and the two $65,000 refunds TLDH will receive from ICANN when it withdraws the applications.
Some portion of the $4.8 million TLDH will have received from Donuts, where .lawyer was a two-horse race.
Radix’s winning bid for .website will have been split evenly between TLDH and Donuts.
At least one of these TLDs seems to have sold for significantly more than the average private auction selling price, which was $1.33 million after the first 14 Innovative auctions.
Innovative has managed auctions for 18 strings, but we don’t know the total price of the latest four.
The .website and .lawyer deals means TLDH now has £10.1 million ($16.3 million) in cash reserves, according to a company press release.
It still has 43 contested applications, however. On a $16 million budget — quite a lot less than some of its portfolio rivals — the company is going to have to make some smart tactical moves to maximize its gTLD portfolio.
“Our strategy remains to best monetise those applications where we see least value so that we can maximise our ability to acquire those names in which we see greatest value,” chairman Fred Krueger said in the press release.
It still has stakes in 25 uncontested gTLDs.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate statements — failing to take into account that .website was a three-way contest — about the average selling price of new gTLDs at auction.

Donuts wins three new gTLD auctions

Donuts has added .lawyer, .fish and .discount to its portfolio of new gTLDs, having won private auctions against its competitors for the strings this week.
It beat Top Level Domain Holdings for .lawyer and WhatBox for .fish and .discount, according to a blog post from Innovative Auctions, which managed the auction.
The winning bids were, as usual, not disclosed. The losing bidders receive most of the cash the winning bidder was willing to pay.
The three auctions were part of a surprisingly small batch that included .website, where Radix beat TLDH yesterday. Innovative says it has settled 18 contention sets to date.
The gTLD strings .discount and .lawyer are still subject to Governmental Advisory Committee “Category 1” advice, meaning the GAC wants them to be regulated for consumer protection reasons.

On day one, Donuts in breach of new gTLD contract

Ooops! Donuts accidentally broke the terms of its first new gTLD Registry Agreement last night, just hours after its first string, .游戏, was delegated to the DNS root.
If you’ve been following the name collisions debate closely, you’ll recall that all new gTLD registries are banned from activating any second-level domains for 120 days after they sign their contracts:

Registry Operator shall not activate any names in the DNS zone for the Registry TLD (except for “NIC”) until at least 120 calendar days after the effective date of this agreement.

For the first four gTLDs to go live, that clock doesn’t stop ticking until November 12.
And yet, last night, Donuts activated donuts.游戏, apparently in violation of its new contractual obligations with ICANN.
The name was live and resolving for at least an hour. Donuts pulled it after we asked a company executive whether it might be a breach of contract.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, and I doubt ICANN needs to take any action.
Chalk it down to the understandable ebullience that naturally accompanies finally getting delegated to the root after such a long and painful evaluation process.
The 120-day rule was also a late amendment to Specification 6 of the RA, added by ICANN just seven days before .游戏 was delegated and over three months after Donuts signed the original contract.
It’s designed to address the potential for collisions between second-level domains in new gTLDs and names used on internal networks that already have working SSL certificates.
The no-activation window was chosen to match the 120-day period that the CA/Browser Forum gives its certificate authority members to revoke clashing certificates.
It seems unlikely donuts.游戏 will have caused any security issues during the brief period it was alive.

First new gTLDs delegated (really!)

ICANN has delegated the first new gTLDs to the DNS root.
All four of the first batch of internationalized domain names appear to be present right now in root zone file:

• .xn--ngbc5azd (شبكة.) — means “.web” in Arabic. Operated by dotShabaka Registry.
• .xn--unup4y (.游戏) — means “.games” in Chinese. Operated by Donuts.
• .xn--80aswg (.сайт) — means “.site” in several Cyrillic languages. Operated by CORE Association.
• .xn--80asehdb (.онлайн) — means “.online” in several Cyrillic languages. Also operated by CORE Association.

Infuriatingly, and appropriately given the glitches that have plagued the program for the last 18 months, the news seems to have been announced unexpectedly by ICANN VP Christine Willett during a webinar that most listeners had been kicked out of due to a technical problem.
The race is now one to see which of the four will be the first to go live with a resolving web site.

Directi’s Radix wins .website gTLD auction

Directi-affiliated TLD registry Radix, has won the private auction for the .website gTLD, according to Radix.
The company beat rival portfolio applicants Donuts and Top Level Domain Holdings to the string, in an auction that was managed by Innovative Auctions, likely one of several going on this week.
There’s no outstanding Governmental Advisory Committee advice or objections to the Radix application, so its path to contracting and eventual delegation should be relatively uncontroversial now.
The price was undisclosed, Innovative’s standard terms.
Directi is in the process of being acquired by Endurance International, owner of Domain.com, which promised Radix up to $62 million to help with its gTLD auctions.

Let’s Learn IDNs!

The eagle-eyed regular DI reader will have noticed earlier today that I published an article claiming the first new gTLD had already gone live. Not only that, it already had a resolving web site!
That was dead wrong. The story lasted about a minute before I yanked it.
I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that the confusion arose because I don’t read a word of Arabic.
I don’t read a character of Arabic either. I don’t even know where one character ends and the next begins. Or, given the way the script functions, where one begins and the next ends.
So I thought today would be an excellent time to launch Let’s Learn IDNs!, an irregular series of posts in which I, with a significant amount of help from new gTLD registries, attempt to explain IDN strings.
I’m guessing there are a large number of readers out there whose eyes, like mine, glaze over whenever they see an IDN.
We can’t tell one Chinese (or Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew…) TLD from another, but it would probably make our professional lives a fair bit easier if we could.
Let’s Learn IDNs! will therefore contain just enough information to help DI’s largely Latin-script-using readers recognize an IDN when they see one.
I’m not going to attempt to teach anyone Greek, but hopefully you’ll be able to come away from the series with a better chance of telling the difference between .新闻 and .八卦.
Which is obviously hugely, hugely important.
(That’s DI’s first joke in Chinese. Thanks.)
The first post, coming later today or tomorrow, will focus on TLD Registry’s .中文网 (“.chinesewebsite”).
If you’re an IDN gTLD registry and I’ve not reached out to you already, feel free to get in touch to find out how to get a Let’s Learn IDNs! post for your own string.