Private gTLD auctions really will be private

The first new gTLD auctions to be held by Innovative Auctions is set to take place on Monday, but we won’t know which applicants took part until after the fact.
Innovative, which is managing the auction process designed by Cramton Associates, told DI it might announce the participants next week, after the auctions are over.
Failing that, we’ll have to infer the winners from which applications are subsequently formally withdrawn from contention with ICANN.
The only companies to publicly announce their participation so far are Donuts and Demand Media — which as partners are obviously not in any contention sets with each other — and .Club Domains.
Donuts has previously announced that it would submit 63 applications to auction, but 17 of those probably won’t go ahead because Uniregistry, which doesn’t like the private auction idea, has declined to take part.
Demand Media’s applicant, United TLD Holdco has committed its bids for .fishing, .green, .mom, .rip and .wow to the auction. Unless Uniregistry has changed its mind, the .mom one won’t be happening.
It also seems unlikely many winning bids will be disclosed.
Under the terms designed by Cramton, if only one applicant in an auction decides it wants to keep the outcome private, the other applicants will be contractually bound to keep schtum.
Private auctions will see money flow to losing applicants, some of which will also face ICANN-managed auctions at a later date. They may not want to reveal their wedge by having their pay-off public knowledge.

Chinese geo gTLD bidder drops out of two-way fight

The Chinese government-controlled news agency Xinhua has dropped out of the race for the new gTLD .广东 — the local name of Guangdong, China’s most populous province.
The withdrawal clears a path for the only other applicant for the string, Guangzhou Yu Wei Information Technology, to pass more quickly through the ICANN approval process.
Guangzhou Yu Wei is affiliated with Zodiac Holdings, the Cayman Islands-based portfolio applicant founded by James Seng, but it also has backing from the Guangdong provincial government.
As a formally designated Geographic string, government backing is necessary for approval.
Xinhua had not appeared especially enthusiastic about its bid. Its prioritization number of 1772 means it didn’t bother to participate in ICANN’s lottery last December.
Zodiac, on the other hand, took advantage of the IDN bias in the process and wound up with a priority of 79. It passed Initial Evaluation in early April.
The company filed a Community application, but a Community Priority Evaluation will obviously no longer be required. It intends to restrict .广东 to registrants that can prove a local presence.
Zodiac is using .cn registry CNNIC as its back-end registry provider.

Tiny Tokelau now has the biggest ccTLD in the world

The .tk domain is now the biggest ccTLD in the world, according to the latest stats from Centr.
In its just-published biannual Domainwire Stat Report, Centr says that .tk had 16.7 million registered domains in April, taking the #1 spot in the league table for the first time.
It now out-ranks Germany’s .de (15.4 million), the United Kingdom’s .uk (10.5 million), China’s .cn (7.5 million) and the Netherland’s .nl (5.2 million), despite Tokelau having a population of less than 1,500.
The reason for its success, of course, is that .tk domains are free to register. The ccTLD frequently pops up towards the top of abuse lists for that very reason.
At 54.7%, .tk wasn’t the fastest-growing ccTLD over the six months covered by Centr’s report, however. That honor belongs to .cn, which bounced back from previous declines with an 82.7% growth rate.

.club could be a seven-figure new gTLD auction

It looks like the .club gTLD is heading to auction.
Donuts’ two rival applicants for the string seem to have agreed to the auction designed by Cramton Associates and managed by a new Hong Kong company called Innovative Auctions.
Meanwhile, .Club Domains, LLC said it has raised $3.5 million to participate.
“We are happy to announce the successful raise of 3.5 million dollars for the purpose of acquiring and launching the .CLUB name,” .Club Domains founder Colin Campbell said in a press release.
Merchant Law Group is the third .club applicant. We understand it has also agreed to participate.
It very probably won’t be the only auction coming up in June. Donuts has committed 63 strings to the auction, inviting its contention set rivals to join in.

Domains seized as part of Liberty Reserve money laundering sting

The US government seized five domain names and is going after dozens more as part of its crackdown on Liberty Reserve, a digital currency provider apparently popular with criminals.
The Department of Justice said yesterday that the company was responsible for laundering $6 billion spread across 55 million transactions, “virtually all of which were illegal”.
The service was being used to facilitate fraud and child pornography, among other nasties, according to Justice.
Seven people have been arrested in the US, Spain and Costa Rica and five domain names were seized: libertyreserve.com, exchangezone.com, swiftexchanger.com, moneycentralmarket.com and asianagold.com.
Three are registered with Go Daddy. The main site, libertyreserve.com, is with Swedish registrar AB NameISP and exchangezone.com is with Internet.bs.
But .com registry Verisign handled the seizures, according to a court order published by Justice (pdf).
While Liberty Reserve was based in Costa Rica, there doesn’t appear to be any reason to believe the company’s activities were any more legal there than in the US.
Justice is also seeking the forfeiture of 35 other domain names, mostly .coms, that were allegedly (pdf) being used as “exchanger” sites, where Liberty Reserve users could exchange real money for virtual currency.

Two more new gTLD bids bite the dust

ICANN appears to have formally killed off two new gTLD applications that had asked for subsidized application fees.
The bids for .idn and .ummah both failed to meet the criteria of ICANN’s Applicant Support Program back in March, but were only officially marked as dead over the weekend.
The .ummah application was voluntarily withdrawn by Ummah Digital, while the applicant for .idn (an Indian company called NameShop) unsuccessfully fought the decision.
Nevertheless, NameShop has now been flagged on ICANN’s site with “Did not meet all criteria” for the Applicant Support Program.
We’re taking this as a signal it’s been officially kicked out of the current application round and have updated the DI PRO database accordingly.
As well as failing applicant support, NameShop would have failed the Geographic Names component of its Initial Evaluation because IDN is the reserved three-letter country code for Indonesia.
NameShop had attempted to change its application from .idn to .internet — something that would no doubt have cause a deal of consternation among potential objectors and other applicants.
By flunking the company on the applicant support criteria, ICANN has luckily avoided having to make that difficult call.

Now we’re getting serious: 92 new gTLD bids pass

ICANN has stepped up the pace of its Initial Evaluation results schedule, this evening publishing the results of 92 new gTLD applications.
Applications for the following strings have passed IE this week:

.fishing, .casa, .gop, .home, .love, .budapest, .book, .kiwi, .llc, .iselect, .audible, .wedding, .cpa, .earth, .delivery, .tickets, .msd, .neustar, .ski, .lease, .salon, .monster, .immo, .oldnavy, .pin, .design, .pets, .berlin, .eco, .movistar, .rocher, .graphics, .art, .cam, .health, .wien, .technology, .pioneer, .lancia, .reviews, .grainger, .news, .deals, .mov, .solutions, .genting, .pizza, .smile, .hotmail, .pramerica, .memorial, .music, .icbc, .media, .law, .travelchannel, .akdn, .spot, .game, .wedding, .ltd, .merck, .llc, .tickets, .nyc, .lawyer, .aws, .mrmuscle, .poker, .ltd, .realestate, .fujixerox, .microsoft, .realty, .kim, .chesapeake, .gifts, .flowers, .caravan, .mini, .band, .autos, .afamilycompany, .review, .fashion, .shop, .city, .gallery, .toray, .youtube, .kindle and .now.

There were no failures, neither have there been any withdrawals this week.
This week’s batch is notable for including over a dozen applications with Minds + Machines back-ends, which had been delayed in some cases for over a month.
It also contains the first “corporate identifier” strings to pass.
ICANN’s evaluators have now passed 433 applications and failed three. We’re up to priority number 500 in the publication running order.

Directi gets into the subdomain game

Directi, fresh from relaunching .pw, will shortly start selling third-level domain names under .in.net, mimicking the pseudo-TLD business model most often associated with CentralNic.
The sub-domains will be targeted at the Indian market, with prices expected to be in the sub-$10 range.
Directi is set to launch June 17 with a 42 day “landrush & TM claims service”, apparently merging “premium” name registration with the trademark protection sunrise period.
General availability will begin August 1.
India’s ccTLD is of course .in, and .in.net looks a little bit like it.

Did GMO flunk evaluation on 27 gTLDs? CentralNic takes over the whole lot

Did would-be new gTLD registry services provider GMO Registry fail its ICANN technical evaluations?
The Japanese company has made a deal that will see CentralNic take over the back-end operations for all 27 of the applications it was signed up to service, it has emerged.
In a letter, provided by GMO to ICANN last week as part of its sweeping application change requests, CentralNic says:

CentralNic Ltd has entered into a contract with GMO Registry, Inc. (GMO) to provide backend gTLD registry services for their generic top-level domains.

The letter (pdf) goes on to enumerate the 10 critical technical functions — basically everything from EPP to DNSSEC to registrar management — that CentralNic will be taking over.
The letter seems to have been attached last week to change requests for each of the 27 applications for which the DI PRO database lists GMO as the back-end registry provider.
That list includes big dot-brands such as .toshiba, .sharp and .nissan, generics such as .shop and .mail, and city TLDs including .tokyo and .osaka. Even the original dot-brand, .canon, and GMO’s own .gmo are switching back-ends.
The requested changes certainly seem to explain why GMO has yet to pass any of its Initial Evaluations (as we noted on Twitter a couple weeks back) despite having prioritization numbers as low as 111.
GMO parent GMO Internet may not be widely known outside of Japan, but it’s a pretty big deal. The company had 2012 revenue of about JPY 75 billion ($730 million) and it owns a top-ten registrar, Onamae.
Per ICANN rules, the change request switching the applications to CentralNic back-ends are open for public comment for 30 days.

Two failures among latest 44 new gTLD results

ICANN has released its weekly batch of new gTLD Initial Evaluation results and it includes the program’s second and third failures.
Two dot-brand applications — .olayangroup and .mckinsey, filed by Olayan Investments and McKinsey Holdings — didn’t get passing scores and are now categorized as “Eligible for Extended Evaluation”.
Both — like the only other failure to date, also filed by Olayan — passed the technical evaluation but failed on question 45, which asks the applicant to provide financial statements.
The strings that have passed IE this week are:

.dog, .pharmacy, .sener, .skydrive, .soy, .sport, .grocery, .rightathome, .scjohnson, .jll, .hosting, .americanexpress, .yamaxun, .analytics, .construction, .land, .management, .systems, .surgery, .news, .data, .reisen, .rugby, .theater, .university, .cba, .ads, .how, .chrome, .vanguard, .meo, .lotte, .hughes, .praxi, .uno, .versicherung, .blog, .bmw, .shangrila, .yandex and .bbc

There are now 341 passing applications and three failures.