Exclusive: StarHub confirms dot-brand gTLD bid

Singapore telecommunications firm StarHub will become the fifth company to publicly reveal plans for a “dot-brand” generic top-level domain.
The company, which offers broadband internet, cable TV and mobile telephony and has annual revenue of about $2 billion, is set to announce tomorrow that it will apply to ICANN for .starhub.
It’s the first confirmed dot-brand applicant since ICANN opened the application window January 12. It’s also the first since Neustar announced its own plans last June.
StarHub plans to use the gTLD to enable domain names such as tv.starhub and broadband.starhub.
ARI Registry Services has the contract to run its registry back-end and Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services is its application consultant.
Oliver Chong, assistant vice president of brand and marketing communications at StarHub, said:

We believe the ‘.starhub’ Top-Level Domain will deliver clear marketing and advertising benefits to StarHub, such as improved online brand recall and a more intuitive consumer experience with easy to remember domain names such as ‘mobile.starhub’. We also anticipate potential Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits by operating a more targeted and relevant naming system that is clearly matched with our website content.

To date, only Deloitte, Canon and Hitachi have publicly confirmed corporate dot-brand applications.
Registry services provider Neustar also wants .neustar, but its announcement was a little self-serving so I’m not sure that it “counts”.
We’re also aware of some other likely candidates, such as IBM and Unicef, but most companies are playing their cards pretty close to their chests.
ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis said he hopes the announcement of .starhub will “open the floodgates” for other Asian companies to apply for their own new dot-brand gTLDs.
While it’s a significant revelation – at least likely to drive StarHub’s competitors into action if they’re not already – similar predictions were made when Canon announced its dot-brand bid almost two years ago.
Many registry operators are already predicting as many as 1,000 dot-brand applicants.
I’m not ready to predict a slew of similar announcements just yet, but a confirmed dot-brand bidder will certainly do no harm to registries currently trying to persuade clients to sign on the dotted line.

ARI signs up 21 new gTLD clients

ARI Registry Services says it signed up 21 new generic top-level domain clients in the first week after ICANN opened the program earlier this month.
The majority were dot-brand applicants, ARI said in a press release today. It has found that dot-brands represent about 60% of all the companies expressing interest in a new gTLD.
They all signed contracts between January 12, when ICANN starting taking applications, and January 19, the registry services provider said.
A spokesperson said that ARI expects to name some of its clients “in a matter of weeks”, but it’s not clear whether this will happen before March 29 – the deadline for making your first down-payment with ICANN – when it would be of most marketing use.
In the absence of this specific positive reinforcement of its message, the company today tried some FUD instead.
CEO Adrian Kinderis is quoted:

We have clients that are still undecided about whether they should apply. They have been put off by the negativity that has been surrounding the program. There have been delays and speculation. There is also a misguided perception amongst some that they can wait until the next round to secure their brand or generic category name. My message to those clients is that there is no certainty about when there will be another round. Potential applicants need to understand that if they take a ‘wait and see’ approach, they may miss out all together.

I’m not keen on this kind of fear-based marketing, but Kinderis has a point: the timing of the second-round is currently uncertain. Based on current evidence, I think an optimistic view is 2015.
I cover the subject in some depth on DomainIncite PRO (which you simply must subscribe to, otherwise your house will burn down with all of your cats inside… oh, look, I’m doing it now.)

Verisign to apply for a dozen new gTLDs

Verisign plans to apply to ICANN for about 12 new generic top-level domains, according to the executive in charge of registry services.
“We intend to do about 12. Most of those will be transliterations of .com,” senior vice president Pat Kane said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call yesterday.
This does not mark a significant change of strategy – the company has been open about its intention to apply for internationalized domain name variants of .com for over a year – but I believe it’s the first time it’s put a number on it.
It will be interesting to see which gTLDs – if any – Verisign will go for which are not .com IDNs.
My view is that it would make more sense for the company to apply for potentially high-volume .com competitors, such as .web or .blog. It has the capacity, the channel and the cash.
Smaller niche gTLDs may not be worth the distraction and risk, and would be better suited to dedicated registries that can concentrate on more focused marketing.
In any event, we’re going to see some major consolidation in the new gTLD space four or five years from now, and Verisign could well vacuum up cash-making registries at that time.
CEO Jim Bidzos also said on the call that Verisign has been retained to provide the registry for “several” dot-brand applications, but that it will not see any material revenue until 2013.
The major event for 2012, he noted, is the renewal of the .com Registry Agreement with ICANN, which expires at the end of November.
Verisign is already “engaging” with ICANN on this, Bidzos said.
This contract will be posted for public comment and sent to the US Department of Commerce for approval.
I’m expecting controversy, particularly if the contract continues to allow Verisign to increase prices.
It’s going to be harder for Verisign to argue that it needs the extra cash to invest in its infrastructure if it’s also leveraging that infrastructure to win lucrative dot-brand contracts.

Sedari wins .moscow contract

Registry services start-up Sedari has won a deal to support for an application for the .moscow and .МОСКВА generic top-level domains.
The deal is with the non-profit Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development, which is handling Moscow’s official bid.
It’s Sedari’s first contract with a city gTLD bid, according to the company.
FAITID describes the company as its “strategic international partner”, chosen to help out with the application due to its expertise with all things ICANN.
RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar, is still its key partner in Russia.

One-year .co.uk domains will be more expensive

Single-year .co.uk domain name registrations will cost more per year than multi-year registrations, under plans outlined by .uk registry Nominet today.
The registry announced back in November that it intended to loosen up its registration policies to bring them into line with other top-level domains.
From May 1, a one-year .uk domain will have a registry fee of £3.50 ($5.44). The price of a multi-year registration will stay the same as current two-year pricing, at £2.50 (£3.88) per year.
Previously, registrants acquired .uk domains in two-year blocks.
Under the new policy regime, registrations can be for as little as a year or for as many as 10 years. Renewals can be for multiple years, albeit capped at 10 overall.
There was a worry that the changes could lead to more people buying throwaway, abusive or speculative .uk domains. A higher fee could go a little way to offset that.

ICANN: antitrust law does not apply to us

ICANN says it “does not engage in trade or commerce” and therefore US antitrust laws do not apply to its approval of the .xxx top-level domain, according to court documents.
The organization and .xxx operator ICM Registry yesterday submitted their coordinated responses to the antitrust lawsuit filed by YouPorn owner Manwin Licensing.
ICANN claims it cannot be held liable under antitrust law and ICM has accused Manwin of filing a nuisance lawsuit because it missed its opportunity to secure some premium .xxx domain names.
Manwin sued in November, alleging ICANN and ICM illegally colluded to deliver “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices”.
The company, which runs the largest porn sites on the internet, claims ICANN should have opened the .xxx contract to competitive bidding and that ICM’s sunrise policies amounted to “extortion”.
It wants a California District Court to shut down .xxx entirely.
But ICANN has now argued that Manwin’s antitrust claims cannot possibly apply to it because it is a charitable, public-interest organization:

ICANN cannot, as a matter of law, be liable under the antitrust laws with respect to the conduct alleged in the Complaint because ICANN does not engage in “trade or commerce.”
…
[ICANN] does not sell Internet domain names, it does not register Internet domain names, and it certainly is not an Internet pornographer. ICANN does not make or sell anything, it does not participate in any market, and its Bylaws expressly forbid it from participating in any of the markets referenced in the Complaint.

Its motion to dismiss (pdf) goes on to say that the introduction of .xxx is actually pro-competition, and that Manwin only sued because it is scared of losing market share.

Plaintiffs claim to be upset with the manner in which ICM is operating the new .XXX registry, but since Plaintiffs already operate (by their own admission) some of the most successful pornographic websites on the Internet, websites that will continue to operate irrespective of anything ICM might do, what the Plaintiffs are really complaining of is the potential competition that their websites may face from the operation of .XXX.

ICM Registry makes similar arguments in its motion to dismiss (pdf):

what Plaintiffs are really complaining about is the fact that they lost the opportunity to purchase the least expensive defensive registry options offered by ICM because they missed the deadline

But ICM also says that the lawsuit falls foul California’s laws against so-called SLAPPs (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”), basically nuisance suits designed to suppress speech.
Declarations from CEO Stuart Lawley (pdf) and marketing director Greg Dumas (pdf) detail conversations between Manwin and ICM in the run-up to the gTLD’s approval and launch.
Manwin managing partner Fabian Thylmann offered to invest in ICM in July 2010, but Lawley declined, according to an ICM exhibit (pdf).
By October 2010 these offers had turned to legal threats, according to Dumas’ declaration:

Manwin saw the introduction of the .XXX sTLD as a threat to Manwin’s dominance over the adult Internet industry. At that time, Thylmann said that he would do whatever he could to stop .XXX. Specifically, Thylmann said that if ICANN approved the .XXX sTLD, Manwin would file a lawsuit against ICM to disrupt its ability to conduct business

Shortly after ICANN’s December 2010 meeting in Cartagena concluded with an ambiguous resolution on .xxx’s future, Thylmann rebuffed Dumas’ overtures about the .xxx Founders Program.
He predicted in an email to Dumas that ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee would force ICANN to reject .xxx, adding “the .xxx domain is useless even if it comes to market”, according to an ICM exhibit.
In September 2011, when the .xxx launch was already well underway, Manwin demanded thousands of free premium .xxx domains and a veto over some registry policies, according to Dumas:

Manwin demanded that ICM: allocate a minimum of several thousand .XXX domain names to Manwin free of charge; commit to prevent IFFOR from making any policies that ban or restrict the operation of user-generated content “tube” sites on .XXX domains; grant across-the-board discounts on all .XXX domain registrations; and allow Manwin to operate certain ‘premium’ or high value domain names, such as “tube.xxx,” through a revenue sharing arrangement between Manwin and ICM.

ICM says that these demands were accompanied by legal threats.
The lawsuit and Manwin’s boycott of companies using .xxx domains has harmed ICM’s business, according to the company’s court filings.
The case continues.

M+M wins contract for ‘laptops and lederhosen’ gTLD

Minds + Machines has won governmental approval for its .bayern new gTLD application, according to the company.
The Bavarian state government has said it will back a bid for .bayern from Bayern Connect, which is majority-owned by M+M parent Top Level Domain Holdings, TLDH said today.
According to its press release, M+M will provide the back-end registry services, which strongly suggests that it does not plan to outsource to Neustar on this occasion.
Bayern Connect is not the only company to have announced a .bayern application, however.
Rival applicant PunktBayern, which is backed by United Domains and InterNetX among others, has been public about its plans for a couple of years too. Last year, it selected Afilias to provide its registry back-end.
If the Bavarian government is offering its exclusive support to Bayern Connect, as TLDH now says, it puts a serious question mark over the viability of the PunktBayern bid.
Under ICANN’s rules, any gTLD purporting to represent a state must secure the support or non-objection of the relevant government. Without that support, applications will be rejected.
PunktBayern does have a registered trademark on “.bayern”, however, so the tussle may not be quite over yet.
Bayern is the German name for Bavaria. The state has a population of about 12.5 million and quite a strong sense of its own identity.
It’s often referred to as the land of “laptops and lederhosen” due to a long-running government policy of friendliness to the tech industry.

25 companies register for new gTLDs

ICANN has just announced that 25 companies have registered with its TLD Application System, one week after it opened the application window for its new generic top-level domains program.
This does not necessarily mean that only 25 gTLDs have been applied for. Each TAS account can handle up to 50 applications, according to ICANN.
We already know that one of the signed-up TAS users is Minds + Machines, and it has applied for 20 gTLDs already.
“I can state firmly that one week into the process, the application system for the new domain names is functioning just as it should,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in a press release.
The application window opened January 12 and will close April 12. The deadline for registering with TAS is March 29.
Most registry service providers and other industry observers have predicted 1,000 to 1,500 applications in total, possibly a little more depending how crazy the dot-brand applicants get.
But ICANN isn’t commenting. It stated: “Until [May 1], ICANN will not comment publicly about any specific application, the total number of applications received, or who has submitted applications.”

Another .tel-only registrar accredited

A Chinese firm has become the second company to emerge as a seemingly pure-play .tel registrar.
Unlike most registrars, Beijing Tong Guan Xin Tian Technology Ltd is not approved to sell .com domains. According to ICANN’s records it’s only been accredited in .tel so far.
The company, which does business as Novaltel, even has a .tel domain listed as its official site in ICANN’s registrar directory, which is a first.
Its customer-facing site, at novaltel.com, which I don’t think is fully live yet, is heavy on the .tel branding.
This all makes me wonder whether Telnic, the .tel registry, has another big deal in the works.
At the moment, the reason .tel is a gTLD of roughly 270,000 domains rather than 220,000 is that another pure-play .tel registrar distributed about 50,000 names in one big batch in January 2011.
Unusual as it is, Novaltel is not the first Chinese registrar to devote itself entirely to .tel.
The other is Tong Ji Ming Lian Technology Corporation Ltd, also based in Beijing, which does business as Trename.
Trename is currently responsible for 20% of .tel’s total domains under management, about 55,000 names, according to the most recent official registry reports.
Those domains were registered a year ago as part of a deal Telnic announced with HC International, a business-to-business e-commerce firm also based in China.
That deal is basically the reason that .tel’s overall volumes have not been affected so badly by two years of speculators dropping post-landrush registrations following its 2009 launch.
So does .tel have another spike on the cards?

YouPorn owner acquires fellow .xxx plaintiff

Manwin, the porn company currently suing ICANN and ICM Registry over the .xxx launch, has acquired co-plaintiff Digital Playground.
“To me this deal is no different than the acquisition of Pixar by Disney,” Digital Playground CEO Ali Joone said, according to Xbiz.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While Digital Playground was named as a plaintiff on the .xxx lawsuit, Manwin was clearly the lead. Manwin has also launched a solo Independent Review Process arbitration case against ICANN.
The company is one of the biggest porn producers on the internet, owning YouPorn as well as managing Playboy’s web presence under license.
Manwin claims that ICM’s launch amounted to “extortion”, and that it gave away its lack of respect for the porn industry by selling premium names to domainers including Frank Schilling and Mike Berkens.
ICM’s response to the lawsuit is due later this week.