Directi to relaunch .pw as an open TLD

Directi will soon relaunch .pw, the ccTLD for the tiny Micronesian nation of Palau, as an open pseudo-gTLD.
The official launch of the registry will happen at the ICANN meeting in Toronto next week, according to Directi CEO Bhavin Turakhia, with a sunrise period kicking off in December.
It’s the first TLD for which Directi — an applicant for 30 new gTLDs as well as a top-ten registrar — will act as the registry.
The company will brand the offering around the retroactive acronym “Professional Web”.
Turakhia hopes success will come from a combination of low cost — registry fees are not yet finalized, but will be sub-.com, he said — and the fact that .pw is mostly virgin territory.
“It’s a pretty good pricing model,” he said. “We’re making sure that people have access to desirable names at an affordable cost.”
The company plans to run .pw “exactly like a gTLD”, with standard sunrise, landrush and registration lifecycle policies. It will even adopt the UDRP, Turakhia said.
CentralNic, which already runs subdomain services such as .gb.com and .us.com, has been hired to run the back-end, despite the fact that Directi is using ARI Registry Services for its gTLD bids.
Sunrise is expected to start in early December and run for about 70 days. Landrush will run for a month, starting in February 2013. Pricing has yet to be finalized.
Directi is currently looking for registrars to sell the domains, above and beyond its own network of registrars.
Directi obtained the exclusive license to .pw about four years ago via EnCirca, the registrar that attempted to relaunch .pw under the “Personal Web” slogan in 2004.
The company originally planned to use the second level as a bundled service to tie in with a social networking slash instant messaging product that it was working on, but those plans have changed.
As a result .pw hasn’t been accepting registrations for a while.
Palau is a Pacific island nation with only about 20,000 citizens. As such, .pw doesn’t have a great many legacy registrations.
One such registration is pay.pw, which Directi is using for a payment gateway service.
Turakhia said that six second-level domains have been reserved for Palau’s use: co.pw, ne.pw, or.pw, ed.pw, go.pw and belau.pw. No other two-letter domains will be available.

.cialis and .chatr new gTLD bids dumped

Two more new gTLD applications have been formally withdrawn.
ELi Lilly & Co has dropped its bid for .cialis and Rogers Communications has withdrawn its .chatr application.
Both were dot-brand applications — Cialis is a drug and Chatr is a Canadian wireless company — and neither was contested, though there are four applications for the very similar .chat.
This makes a total of six dead bids, following Google’s withdrawal of .est, .and and .are and German pump-maker KSB withdrew its dot-brand .ksb.
From ICANN’s statements, we know that there’s at least one other bid that is in the process of being withdrawn, but its identity is not yet known.

doMEn uses comedy compo to plug .me domains

doMEN, the .me registry, is marketing .me domain names with a series of comedy videos, presented in the form of a knockout competition and sweepstake.
The three-week “Comedy Cagematch” will see 30-second videos featuring 16 comedians being voted on by internet users. Voting gets you the chance to win a $500 camera.
The campaign has been put together by comedy-focused ad agency RadioFace, which has already produced this video featuring stand-up TJ Miller.

Apparently, if you have a .com you also have to use words like “problopportunity” (which I thought was pretty funny).
The promotion starts on Register.me from October 8. Only Americans and Canadians can enter the sweepstakes.

Worldwide domains up to 240 million

There are now more than 240 million registered domain names on the internet, according to Verisign.
Its latest Domain Name Industry Brief reports that a net of 7.3 million names were added across all TLDs in the second quarter, a 3.1% sequential increase, up 11.9% on Q2 2011.
Verisign’s own .com and .net hit 118.5 million domains by the end of June, up 1.6% sequentially and 7.8% year-over-year. Renewals were at 72.9%, down from 73.9% in Q1.
The company reported that new .com and .net registrations in the period totaled 8.4 million.

ResellerClub sells 11,000 .pro domains in a month

Directi says it sold 11,000 .pro domains via its ResellerClub channel in the first month after it started supporting the TLD.
That’s pretty impressive going, given that the whole of .pro was only about 155,000 domains at the last count, enough to put the registrar into fifth place for .pro domains under management.
ResellerClub’s wholesale price until October 31 is $2.99, with two free email accounts, according to the company.
The surge will prove useful to .pro registry Afilias, which expects to see over 40,000 domains — all of them US Zip codes registered to .pro’s former owner Hostway — drop this month.

ICM files $120m lawsuit over Manwin’s .xxx “boycott”

ICM Registry has counter-sued YouPorn owner Manwin Licensing, looking for at least $120 million in damages, saying the porn giant is using its market power to sideline the .xxx domain.
The company claims that Manwin’s antitrust lawsuit, filed last October, is merely one of several attacks against its business.
The counter-suit alleges that Manwin, after trying and failing to invest in ICM, illegally restrained trade by forcing its business partners not to do business with ICM.
The suit (pdf) reads:

Manwin has utilized its dominance in the adult entertainment industry to encourage the wholesale boycott of the .XXX TLD in the industry in order to destroy any competition tat may arise from the commercialization of .XXX and has secured agreement, either express or implied, by those within the industry that they will not do business with .XXX.

Manwin, for example, “coerced .XXX spokesmodels to end relationships with ICM” and “conditioned contracts with third parties on their non-involvement with the .XXX TLD”, according to ICM.
The counterclaims were filed in a California court on Friday, as the latest stage of the two companies’ ongoing legal battle.
The registry is looking for $40 million in damages for Sherman Act violations, trebled.
Manwin claims ICM and ICANN broke US competition law by setting up the .xxx “monopoly”, which both ICANN and ICM deny.

Goodbye to .co? Nominet ponders releasing second-level .uk domains

Nominet wants to let UK companies register domain names directly under .uk for the first time.
The company today launched a major consultation, seeking industry and internet users’ input on a plan to open up the second level to verified British businesses.
Today’s it’s only possible to register .uk domains at the third level — .co.uk and .org.uk are the most popular suffixes. But if Nominet gets positive feedback, you’d be able to register example.uk instead.
Second-level domains would come with a few catches, however. Nominet says it wants to create a higher-security zone.
They’d be more expensive: £20 per year instead of £2.50.
Registrants would have to be based in the UK, with verifiable contact information, and domains would only start resolving post-verification.
DNSSEC might also be mandatory.
It’s expected that registrants would be prohibited from selling third-level domains in their zones. There could be large numbers of reserved names, such as the names of towns.
There might even be restrictions on which registrars can sell the names.
There are obviously no plans to get rid of .co.uk and the other public suffixes, but over time I can see a movement in that direction.
The exact rules will depend to an extent on the results of the consultation, which can be downloaded here. The deadline for responses is January 7.

Nominet caught using Google Translate on Welsh gTLD site

Welsh internet users have accused Nominet of using Google to translate its .wales and .cymru gTLD sites into Welsh.
According to a Welsh-speaking reader, the majority of the Welsh version Domain For Wales makes “no linguistic sense”.
The site “looks like it has been initially translated using Google Translate, and amended by someone who isn’t that proficient in the language”, the reader said.
While I do not read Welsh, the Nominet site does bear some of the giveaway hallmarks of Google Translate.
If you regularly use Google to translate domain name industry web sites, you’ll know that the software has problems with TLDs, misinterpreting the dot as a period and therefore breaking up sentences.
That seems to be what happened here:

Nid yw eto’n bosibl i gofrestru. Cymru neu. Enw parth cymru gan fod y ceisiadau yn cael eu hystyried gan ICANN.

On the English site, the text is:

It is not yet possible to register a .cymru or .wales domain name as the applications are under consideration by ICANN.

Running a few other English pages through Google Translate also produces the same text as Nominet is using on the Welsh version of the same pages.
Welsh language tech blogger Carl Morris first spotted the errors.
Nominet has applied to ICANN for .wales and .cymru with the blessing of the Welsh and UK governments.
Its selection was initially criticized by some in Wales because Nominet is based in England and has no Welsh presence.
The company has committed to open an office in Wales, hiring Welsh-speaking staff, however.

Directi says Karsten threatened it over .ping gTLD

The golf club maker Karsten has launched an attack on Directi due to their dispute over the new gTLD .ping, following through on threats Directi says the company made last month.
Karsten’s outside counsel, Paul McGrady of Winston & Strawn, filed over 200 comments and a 500-page letter against Direct’s new gTLD applications last night, shortly before the ICANN deadline.
In the comments, McGrady says that Directi should be banned from running any new gTLDs because its affiliated privacy service, PrivacyProtect.org, has lost dozens of UDRP cases.
But Directi said today that the Strawn comments — filed against applications such as .web, .hosting and .app — are just a smokescreen for Karsten’s claim over .ping.
Ping is a brand of golf clubs Karsten sells at ping.com, but Directi plans to use the gTLD in its other, geeky sense, open to all-comers.
Directi says that Karsten told it in an August 8 letter to withdraw the .ping bid or face action. According to Directi, the letter said in part:

Karsten is preparing to post this letter and the attached public comments for each of your applications, not just .ping, prior to the end of the public comment period. Once filed, this letter and the public comments will also be sent to the ICANN Board and Senior Staff. Further, as you know, Karsten may seek relief from the courts, through ICANN’s various processes, and through raising awareness of your activities within the ICANN community generally. Karsten will pursue all appropriate means to ensure that all of your applications are rejected.

Directi said in a statement: “Karsten is our only competitor for the .ping bid and their comment is submitted in bad faith and to further their self-interest.”
CEO Bhavin Turakhia said that PrivacyProtect.org did not own any of the domain names listed in the UDRP cases McGrady cited, it merely acted as the privacy service.
The company removes the privacy protection when UDRPs are filed, he said, but the registrant’s identity is not always listed in the published decision.

Consumer Watchdog slams “outrageous” Google and Amazon keyword gTLD bids

Consumer Watchdog, a California-based consumer rights advocacy group, has attacked Google and Amazon’s new gTLD applications in a letter to an influential senator.
The organization has asked Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, to “thwart” the “outrageous” plans for single-registrant dictionary-word gTLDs.
Google and Amazon have separately applied for dozens of gTLDs — such as .music, .blog and .book — that they would exclusively use to market their own products and services.
Consumer Watchdog said in its letter (pdf):

If these applications are granted, large parts of the Internet would be privatized. It is one thing to own a domain associated with your brand, but it is a huge problem to take control of generic strings. Both Google and Amazon are already dominant players on the Internet. Allowing them further control by buying generic domain strings would threaten the free and open Internet that consumers rely upon. Consumer Watchdog urges you to do all that you can to thwart these outrageous efforts and ensure that the Internet continues its vibrant growth while serving the interests of all of its users.

As we reported yesterday, a number of domain name industry participants are planning to complain to ICANN about these applications on pretty much the same grounds.