ICANNWiki boss applies for 10 gTLDs

A new company run by ICANNWiki founder Raymond King and business partner Peter Brual has applied to ICANN for 10 new generic top level domains.
Top Level Design has applied for: .blog, .llc, .group, .wiki, .gay, .art, .style, .design, .ink, and .photography.
The company is entering contention sets on most of those, but I believe it’s the first .wiki bid announced to date.
It’s also the only portfolio player so far to announce that it’s using CentralNIC, best known for pseudo-gTLDs such as uk.com, as its back-end registry provider.
The company said the venture “will not interfere with the presentation or neutrality of ICANNWiki.com”.

Key-Systems has 31 gTLD clients, offers digital archery services

Key-Systems has become the third company to announce it is providing new gTLD applicants with a chance to possibly increase their chances of success with digital archery.
The service costs €15,000 ($18,800) if the company gets your application into ICANN’s first evaluation batch.
Almost as an aside, the company also revealed in a press release today that its KSRegistry back-end service is the named registry services provider for 31 gTLD applications.
Digital archery services are also being offered by Pool.com and Digital Archery Experts.
Today, Digital Archery Experts announced that it will split the cost of its service between clients if it winds up shooting arrows on behalf of multiple applicants in the same contention set.

Demand Media applies for 26 gTLDs, partners with Donuts on 107 more

Demand Media, owner of eNom, has applied to ICANN for 26 new generic top-level domains, and may acquire rights in 107 more if applications submitted by Donuts are approved.
The company has not yet revealed which strings it’s going for.
Donuts said last week that it’s applying for 307 gTLDs with Demand Media as its back-end provider, but it seems that Demand will not have ownership rights in 200 of those.
The deal with Donuts, which was founded by eNom alum, is a “strategic relationship”, according to a press release.

Neustar gets 358 back-end contracts, beating Verisign

Neustar has revealed that it is contracted to supply registry services for 358 new generic top-level domain applications.
Given the over 1,900 applications ICANN has received, the deals give the .biz/.us manager roughly 19% of the new gTLD back-end market.
It’s more than Verisign, which announced last month that it’s named on 220 applications. Afilias is now the only one of the big incumbent gTLD registry service providers yet to disclose its magic number.
Neustar was pretty aggressive about recruiting dot-brand applicants from the outset, announcing a $10,000 entry-level offering just a few days after ICANN approved the gTLD program a year ago.
The company also confirmed today that it’s behind the official .nyc bid, and that it has applied for .neustar.

Schilling applies for “scores” of new gTLDs

Domaining icon Frank Schilling’s new venture, Uniregistry, has applied for “scores” of new generic top-level domains, “most” of which he expects to be contested.
Schilling won’t say exactly how many or which strings Uniregistry is pursuing, but he did reveal that while he is not going for .web, he will be in contention with Google for .lol.
“It’s closer to TLDH than Donuts,” Schilling told DI in an interview this evening, referring to the announcements of Top Level Domain Holdings’ 68 and Donuts’ 307 applications.
I’m guessing it’s around the 40 to 50 mark.
Despite the portfolio and Schilling’s history in domain investing, Uniregistry isn’t what you might call a “domainer” play.
The company doesn’t plan on keeping whole swathes of premium real estate for itself or for auction, Schilling said. Nor does it intend to rip off trademark owners.
“We’ve seen good TLDs fail with bad business plans,” he said, pointing to premium-priced .tv as an example. “You need to allow other people to profit, to evangelize your space.”
“I’m not going to get as rich from this as some of our registrants,” he said.
Uniregistry only plans to hold back a “handful” of premium names, Schilling said. The rest will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
To avoid creating wastelands of parked domains, the company plans to deploy technical countermeasures to prevent too many domains falling into too few hands.
“The way we’re going stage the landrush it will be very difficult to game it,” he said. “There’ll be significant rate limiting, so you can’t come and take 500 domains in ten milliseconds.”
“What we want to avoid is someone going in and getting 100,000 of the best ones on day one. It’s not fair, and it’s unhealthy for the space.”
Schilling is one of the industry’s most successful domainers. His company, Name Administration, is one of the largest single owners of second-level domain names.
Now Schilling says he’s brought his considerable experience as a domain name registrant Uniregistry’s business model and policies.
The company’s message is that it’s “registrant-centered”.
While that sounds like an easy, glib marketing statement, Schilling is backing it up with some interesting policies.
He’s thinking about a much closer relationship between the registry and the registrant that you’d see in the .com space.
When a second-level domain in a Uniregistry gTLD expires, registrants will get 180 days to claim it back from the registry, possibly even circumventing the registrar.
Uniregistry will even directly alert the registrant that their name is going to expire, a policy that Schilling said has been modeled in part on what Nominet does in the .uk space.
“Registrants have the ability to go to the registry to manage their .co.uk, to transfer the domain, to change certain pieces of information,” he said.
The 180-day policy is designed in part to prevent registrars harvesting their customers most valuable domains when they forget to renew them.
Rogue registrars and registrars competing against their own customers are things that evidently irk Schilling.
“I prefer a system that protects registrants,” he said.
But existing registrars are still the company’s proposed primary channel to market, he said. Uniregistry plans to price its domains in such a way as to give registrars a 50% margin.
“I think there’s enough margin in these strings for registrars to make a great living,” Schilling said.
Schilling hasn’t ruled out an in-house pocket registrar, but said it wouldn’t be created to undercut the regular channel.
The company has hired Internet Systems Consortium, maker of BIND and operator of the F-Root, as its back-end registry provider.
Judging by Uniregistry’s web site, which carries photos of many ISC staff, it’s an unusually close relationship.
I’ll have more on Uniregistry’s plans for Whois and trademark protection in a post later.

Unbelievably, .africa will be contested

The .africa top-level domain may well be unique — the only geographic gTLD to be contested.
DotConnectAfrica, which has been campaigning for .africa for years, has confirmed that it has applied for the string, despite the fact that another bidder has support of the African Union.
DCA chief Sophia Bekele blogged:

because of the history of the DotAfrica gTLD and our experience during the ‘Yes2DotAfrica’ promotional campaign, we anticipate a prolonged process

The AU in February announced that it was providing its support to a .africa application from UniForum, the South African ccTLD registry.
DCA had previously secured what appeared to be a letter of support from an AU official, but it has since been withdrawn.
According to ICANN’s Applicant Guidebook, if you want to run a geographic gTLD representing multiple countries, you need the express support or non-objection of 60% of those countries.
I’m pretty certain DCA doesn’t have this support, but the AU’s membership does include more than 60% of the nations in Africa.
Is DCA applying in order to get a pay-off from the Uniforum bid? It’s possible, but without the required government support its negotiating position appears to be pretty weak.
Expect objections.

Another .corp gTLD bid revealed

A Hong Kong company says it has applied to ICANN for the new top-level domain .corp.
DotCorp Ltd is the second company to say it is going for the string, after Dot Registry LLC.
Unlikely Dot Registry, however, DotCorp plans to sell domains outside of the US. Company secretary Fang Wang said in an email to DI:

According to its policy, DotCorp Limited will provide .CORP for corporations who can be verified legally and appropriately by its local government. It means that corporations all over world could register its name as domain.

Wang added that the recommendations of US secretaries of state have been taken on board in its policy-making.

Donuts applies for 307 (yes, 307) gTLDs

Donuts Inc has finally showed its hand.
The company, which was set up as a portfolio gTLD player by domain industry veterans Paul Stahura, Richard Tindal, Jonathon Nevett and Daniel Schindler, is applying for 307 gTLDs.
Yes, 307. That’s roughly 15% of all the applications ICANN has received.
We were all expecting big plans from Donuts, but I’m not sure many people thought it would go for so many strings.
The company has raised $100 million from Austin Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, TL Ventures, Generation Partners and Stahurricane to fund the ambitious plans.
Demand Media has been chosen to provide the back-end registry.
Donuts has also staffed up with some familiar faces. Former ICANN CFO Kevin Wilson is its new CFO, former Oversee marketing chief Mason Cole has joined as vice president of communications and industry relations.
The company says it has created almost two dozen new rights protection mechanisms for its gTLDs, but that it has an “open internet” philosophy.
“We have resources set aside for handling objections by parties who, for whatever reason, believe only they are equipped to administer a generic term,” Stahura said in a press release.
“The Internet is an engine of information, ideas and commerce, and one that’s not restrictive unnecessarily. Donuts intends to preserve that openness for all users, not operate a ‘by invitation only’ section of the Internet.”
I’m guessing this means there’s going to be fireworks in contention sets such as, say, .music.
The full list of applied-for strings doesn’t seem to be available yet.

Dot Registry applying for four US-only gTLDs

Dot Registry LLC, a new company to the domain name industry, has applied to ICANN for four company-themed gTLDs, saying it has the backing of US secretaries of state.
It’s going for .inc, .corp, .llc and .llp.
CEO Shaul Jolles says the plan is for all four to be restricted to US-registered companies, even though some other countries give their companies the same labels.
“While the extensions do exist in other countries, they do not have definitions similar to the entity classifications in the US,” Jolles said in an email.
“We will not offer registrations to companies not registered in the US,” he said. “We chose this option because we are able to easily verify business entity registration in the US.”
Dot Registry, which is using .us contractor Neustar as its registry services provider, says it has support from various US secretaries of state.
As we blogged in April, the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State wrote to ICANN to express reservations about these types of gTLD strings.
But Delaware Secretary of State Jeffrey Bullock indicated in a separate letter that Dot Registry’s propose regime of restrictions, which would manually match domains to company names, might be acceptable.
I’m still somewhat skeptical about the value of these kind of gTLDs. You can pretty much guarantee plenty of pointless defensive registrations, and the benefits seem fuzzy.
“The benefit of these strings is two-fold,” Jolles said. “For consumers it creates a level of reassurance and the ability to quickly ascertain if a company is legitimate or not.”
“From a company perspective it has simple benefits such as guaranteeing that you receive a domain name that matches your registered business name, increased consumer confidence which increases revenue, and a decreased possibility of business identity theft in a cyber setting,” he said.

Third .app gTLD applicant revealed

A Ukrainian software developer has become the third company to publicly reveal that it has applied for the .app top-level domain.
MacPaw’s main business is developing software for Apple platforms, as the name suggests. It’s formed a new company, Dot App Inc, based in California, to manage the gTLD bid.
The application imagines a very pro-developer space. Domainers, it appears, will not be welcome.
Some policies from its web site:

– Only application developers or publishers will be able to register domain names in this zone
– Misused domains will be analyzed and repurposed if found to violate the Registration policy
– No need to pay a small fortune for a great but squatted .com or .net domain.
– The rights of app creators will be protected in the same way trademark rights are

Top Level Domain Holdings and Directi both last week announced plays for .app among their large portfolios of gTLD applications.
More applicants will no doubt be revealed next week.